Top 10 Stories of 2012

Wow. In Cultural Weekly’s first full year of publication (we began in our current format in June, 2011), with thanks to you, our growth has been tremendous.
The online world has its own terminology. Individual readers are called “uniques,” which means we don’t count you more than once, even if you come back again and again. Cultural Weekly has had 65,000 of you unique readers since January 1 of this year.
You have visited here from more than 50 nations; the top dozen countries of our readers are the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, New Zealand, France, Italy, Brazil, Israel and Mexico.
What have you been reading? Here are the Top 10 stories of 2012, based on how many reads they received. You are an amazing, eclectic group of people!
10. “Why are artists embarrassed about getting money, but Jamie Dimon isn’t?” I asked earlier this year. We should keep asking this question.
9 and 8. Our first-ever writing contest. Here’s the winning entry by Rhonda Talbot, and here are the contest rules and the original story by Neil LaBute that got the ball rolling.
7. “Szymborska,” a poem by Jack Grapes in memory of a fellow poet. If a poem can get 180 comments, there is hope for all of us.
6. Artist Sol LeWitt’s advice, “Do something, do anything!” as an animated short. (The image above is from the video.)
5. Charles Bukowski’s poem, “The Laughing Heart.”
4. How did the Sundance movies perform? I answered that question with the Sundance Scorecard, which proved especially popular with people movie execs at the festival this year. I’ll be writing more about indie movies next year, too.
3. Professor Dennis Baron’s satiric diagnosis of what goes on in the brains of people who care about grammar. A few people sent emails wondering if he was kidding. He was.
2. Playwright and philosopher John Steppling’s mediation on Lars von Trier.
1. To sum it all up, no one does it better than Neil Gaiman. The most-read, or shall we say, most-watched piece of the year: Neil Gaiman’s 10 Rules for Creative Work.
We’ll have one more edition this year, which we’ll post next week. Then we’ll catch up on our sleep until January, and do it all over again.
By the way, if you’re reading this on our publication date, Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012, and you’re in Los Angeles, I hope you’ll come to our gathering tonight. It will be wonderful to meet you, and for you to meet each other. Details here.

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