After Jacqueline Woodson accepted the National Book Award in young people's literature for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming last night, host Daniel Handler shared a "joke" about her with the audience: she's allergic to watermelon. Get it? Because she's black. You can feel the tension in the room through your screen.

When distributor Publisher's Group West declared bankruptcy last winter, it set off a chain of events that have caused big shakeups in independent publishing. The latest potential casualty is McSweeney's, which announced via its "internet tendency" that they've "lost about $130,000—actual earnings that were simply erased," a loss they've just begun to feel particularly keenly. They've got a solution in mind, but being ultra-relatable lovably bumbling English majors, they're not certain it'll work: "We are not business masterminds," they admit. We'll say: their "groundbreaking business-saving plan" includes an Ebay auction of "rare" items like 8 issues of DVD-journal Wholphin "signed/doodled on" by catalog-heir director Spike Jonze. Snap 'em up, kids, or else maybe we won't have McSweeney's to kick around anymore. You'll not only be helping a great and important literary enterprise, you'll be keeping Daniel Handler from having another crisis of conscience.

Daniel Handler, better known as author Lemony Snicket, has a lot more money than you do, probably. And even though he gives some away, it's never enough: