McSweeney's is so precious and annoying. I can't bring myself to read it. You're not alone in this.

I don't really get the Pound/Whitman thing either, but I'm not as familiar with their poetry as I should be.

The second one is a play on words. It is a list (Liszt) of famous Franzes. Including "Franz with benefits," ho ho ho.

Imagine Calvin Coolidge's more famous quotes as Twitter creations with popular hashtags.

You're my kinda guy LT!

Oh jeez middleclasstool, Liszt. Okay. thx.

Yeah I got the gist of the Coolidge thing but if we were to uncompress those two relationship ones what's she saying? Like in a sentence, e.g. "men who say X are Y" or "when I said X I meant Y" or whtaever.

McSweeney's is so precious and annoying.

Look! At! Me! Look! At! How! QUIRKY! I! Am!

McSweeney's is occasionally funny. But most of the time, it reminds me of people who give off strained, fake laughs at public events -- not because remark X by the speaker was objectively that funny, but because laughing shows that you are in on the joke, and therefore cool.

Yes, I'll agree with you that McSweeney's is awfully precious and tries to hard, but about 10% of the time I see something there that is so damn funny that it makes me keep coming back. Although I used to check in daily, now I just go there every few weeks and rifle through looking for the gems. Often the gag isn't very funny, but the rhythm of the words is almost poetic, which I kind of like.

Yeah. I'm not anti-McSweeney's at all. The reason I was getting annoyed is that I usually find the lists fun, and a few times I've them absolutely hilarious (1. Tweets from the Roman Senate during Cicero's first oration against Catiline, 2. Entries from the Index of First Lines in Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009 Taken as a True/False Quiz. 3. Footnotes, Endnotes and Parentheticals that cost me marks on my thesis 4. Categories I'd be sure on are you smarter than a fifth grader — not to mention, your best guy friend is me) so felt weird that their last couple sets of updates left me wondering WTF not in a "this isn't funny" way but in a "what did you just say?" way.

But yeah maybe it's an age thing. It's like, 'alright, you read Thomas Hobbes and you want to relate him to your hangover. I get it. I'm done reading Hobbes. I'm done with binge drinking. What else is up.' (in fact, one of their 'some reasons we might reject your submission' explicitly states: "Your submission concerned life in college.")

Now and then I'll go on a McSweeney's binge and enjoy clicking and giggling out loud for half an hour or so. The rest of the time I just sort of roll my eyes at it.