
The Lottery – Shirley Jackson (1948)
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson depicts a small village's annual lottery event. As the villagers gather in the square, children play and collect stones, while adults engage in quiet conversation. The story explores themes of tradition and community as the lottery unfolds.
- ▪The lottery takes place in a small village with about three hundred residents.
- ▪Children gather first, collecting stones while adults engage in conversation.
- ▪Mr. Summers conducts the lottery, using a black box that symbolizes tradition.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The New Yorker |
| Canonical URL | https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 23:49:52 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T00:02:03.496Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T00:02:03.496Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hELBQURLOEK3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
FictionThe LotteryBy Shirley JacksonJune 19, 1948Photograph by Garrett GroveSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyAudio: Read by A. M. Homes.|||The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.The…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The New Yorker.