"Adam and Eve aren't going to sue us."

Many are mourning the demise of Weekly World News -- the tabloid paper that didn't bother trying to convince you of semi-plausible things about celebrities, instead going straight for the "Vampires realize that the blood of tuna fish suits their macabre nutritional requirements as effectively as human blood" vein of news-gathering. (This was an actual quote I found on the WWN web site, which will continue to entertain us even though the last hard copy of the legendary paper is now gracing check-out racks at supermarkets everywhere.)

The New York Times focused on the WWN's religious coverage over the years and came away with quite an entertaining and thoughtful piece:

Weekly World News held a kind of funhouse mirror up to much popular American belief. Without meaning to, it offered a far more effective critique of the nation's religious literalism than anything the so-called New Atheism, burdened by its obvious animosity, has served up.

The tabloid's writers matter-of-factly exaggerated literalism's demand for factual detail to the point of parody: God's exact height and hair color, the soul's exact weight, the exact distance to heaven and hell and, as those excavated skeletons of Adam and Eve indicate, the exact location of the Garden of Eden — about 40 miles south of Denver.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)