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Woohoo! I've been published!

By laelaps on October 30, 2007.

Yesterday I wrote about an absolutely horrible opinion piece that appeared in the Rutgers newspaper The Daily Targum, the author suggesting that those he deemed stupid deserved to die. Although I gave a detailed response on this blog, I wanted to address the Rutgers community as a whole and I shot off an editorial reply to the paper. I didn't hear back from the Targum editors so I wasn't sure whether my piece would run or not (especially since I was critical of the editorial board for not checking Pironciak's piece), but lo and behold, it's been published. There's little in my response that I did not say before, but I'm definitely proud to have my response taken seriously and I hope that it proves to be enlightening (although I know I can't compete with the crossword).

A note about the article; As regular readers of this blog know I have a style that incorporates long sentences and so some of my prose was cut up to fit the journalistic taste of the editors. This is especially apparent in the last paragraph, so if I seems like I'm speaking in fragments it's because some of the periods in the published piece should really be commas. Oh well, at least it made it to print!

Tags
Shameless Plug
debate
editorial
evolution
natural selection
op-ed
reply
Rutgers

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Nicely done.

(Copy editor's note: check out the different definitions of "callus" and "callous.")

Thanks for the compliments, everyone! I wonder if Pironciak will reply as well, but I think his position is essentially indefensible (a correction/retraction would be nice, though).

Chezjake; The editors of the Targum saw fit to alter some of my prose, hacking some of my longer sentences into two and changing the spelling of a few words. I used "callous" in my letter, but it was changed by the editors for print. I was not told that I was being published or contacted by the staff, so I had no way to correct any mistakes they created from my original draft. Good eye, though, and thanks for calling me on it.

Just this past weekend while passing through the toiletries section of the supermarket I noticed a packet labelled "Callous Removal Cream". I'm guessing it refuses to take off the band-aid slowly, it just rips it off and tells you to quit blubbering.