The Lottery

What Hacker News says

1. bearseascapeJan 2026
   A parody of a fictional New Yorker article, in which journalist Isaac Chotiner grills the administrator from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" about the civic benefits of ritual stoning.
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2. kthejoker2May 2021
   > A stone hit her on the side of the head.

   Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"

   I always loved that the first one waa anonymous, disembodied, as if no one (or everyone all at once) threw it.

   I always wondered about the type of person who could start such a thing.

   Later, when I read Granovetter's theory on behavior thresholds, it suddenly made sense that there are thousands - millions - of people just itching for a reason to throw a stone.

   There is always someone with a riot threshold of zero.

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3. aerovistaeMar 2021
   > So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing.

   I found this interesting, because it seemed unbelievable to me that an app could be able to tell good writing from bad writing in a reliable or useful way.

   So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, and is widely taught in American high schools.) The excerpts I pasted were almost universally painted red: bad writing, "very hard to read."

   Then I took excerpts of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, another celebrated English-language short story in a very different writing style. Red and yellow all over.

   Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him to try Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator -- red and yellow all over.

   Lastly, for the sake of variety, I decided to try something simple and put in large swaths of one of the original Winnie the Pooh books. Finally, something it was mostly okay with! But only the dialogue. Anytime the author dared to write any description, red all over.

   Seriously, don't use this tool.

   Edited perspective from comment replies to mine: the app is largely okay with Hemingway, which makes sense as its main intent is to make your writing like Hemingway's. Also, if it is largely intended to be for business writing, then it makes sense that it would react poorly to literary writing. Both good points!

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4. xrdJul 2020
   I had a vague idea that I had read Shirley Jackson's The Lottery from this list. I checked it out and I do recall it, and it was really shocking to read. Apparently subscribers of The New Yorker, where it was first serialized, cancelled their subscriptions in disgust. Early cancel culture.
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5. idlewordsFeb 2019
   Shirley Jackson's Lottery.
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