Pick of the day: Good writing everywhere

Good writing is everywhere. Isn’t that what we’re to understand? That new forms of communication lead to new outlets of expression, and so twitter is its own form of haiku, and Facebook status updates are the Victorian diaries of the new millennium. Maybe, maybe not. (Perhaps Bronte and Austen would not have been so keen to share the minutia of their everyday lives…or would they?) But a well-turned phrase is a well-turned phrase, whether it’s guarded in dusty leather-bound volumes tucked deep in the university stacks, or in the self-aggrandizing, hyperlinked, retweeted, RSSed upchuck of social media (this blog excluded, of course). And so Story Lab brings you, from deep in the heart of Internet commerce, the Best Ebay Advertisement Ever, an ad so good it is bad -- and so bad it is, in a word, sublime. Read it and weep.