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What is The Shallot: Layers of Truth?

→ If The Onion is the nation’s sharpest parody, The Shallot: Layers of Truth is its small-town cousin: equally pungent, sometimes tear-inducing, but grown in Hudson terroir. → It’s “making space” for parody, lampoon, and political send-up. Think exaggerations that expose the earnest follies and hypocrices of local politics, and a steady reminder that humor is often the best disinfectant. → Why the name? The Onion was already taken, plus shallots are subtler, but cut deep just the same. Onions are blunt and democratic, while shallots are bourgeois, refined, Continental, and slyly sharper in reputation.

The Shallot is signed by “Benjamin Irving”, or more often his ghost, in honor of the two Americans who perfected the art of telling the truth sideways.

• Benjamin Franklin, the most prolific satirist among the Founders, ran his civic arguments through invented characters like Silence Dogood and Poor Richard, knowing a fictional narrator could say what a public man could not.
• Washington Irving, writing from Sunnyside, gave the instrument a home: his 1809 "A History of New York," published under the imaginary Diedrich Knickerbocker, is the founding document of American local satire, with the Hudson River running through every page.
• Benjamin Irving belongs to both lineages. Shared facts. Different opinions.

~ We use bright blue text in these articles to indicate real fact, not satire.

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Artwork, visual inspiration and many concepts drawn from The Economist and The Free Press, publications Hudson Common Sense has subscribed to at premium level for as long as we could; the work appears here honorifically and is not monetized. Full Disclaimers, Ts and Cs. We recommend you subscribe to The Economist, The Free Press, and Gossips of Rivertown.