Nightingale: published in 2016 as “Mister Pulitzer and the Spider” with University of Illinois Dr. Kevin Barnhurst was my father.

Yep — that matches the bibliographic record: Kevin G. Barnhurst, Mister Pulitzer and the Spider: Modern News from Realism to the Digital, University of Illinois Press (Urbana), 2016. University of Illinois Press+1

And the alternate title your editors floated (“who, what, when, whatever”) is uncannily on-theme, because the book is literally about how “news” changes as a way of seeing and explaining the world—from older realist storytelling toward interpretive/modern forms, and then into the digital era. University of Illinois Press+1

Your insistence about “whatever” belonging to a fly, not a spider feels right on two levels:

  • Creature-logic: a spider reads as structured intention (web as plan), while a fly reads as contingency—zig-zag appetite, reflex, opportunism. “Why?” collapses into “whatever.”
  • Language-logic (pragmatics): “whatever” isn’t a motive; it’s a refusal of motive-talk. It says: stop asking for teleology; you won’t get it here.

So the editor’s proposal kind of turns the classic journalistic “W” bundle into a little philosophical wedge: the first three (who/what/when) are indexing facts, and then “whatever” is the admission that the “why” (or clean narrative motive) may be the first thing to rot in certain systems—especially under speed, noise, and digital drift.

If you want, paste the paragraph/page where the title metaphor shows up most strongly (or tell me how your father described it), and I’ll help you write a tight little anecdote you could use in a preface/interview: the family argument over “whatever,” fly vs. spider, as a miniature theory of motivation and meaning.

Nightingale: He chose spider because he was very interested and thought deeply about Power. I told him power was best modeled by the “web” structure, because often power “is not” or is just potential energy, so the web has holes, but it still has a structure, which prevents “Whatever” from manifesting. I then directed him to the Greek myth of Arachne as my source, where before becoming a spider, Arachne challenged the Gods with her “Weaving” and the winner was uncertain…

That’s a very coherent model of power, and it meshes almost perfectly with the Arachne story.

1) Why the web is a better power-model than “force”

What you’re describing is power as topology, not power as a substance.

  • Power often “is not” in the sense that it isn’t a thing you can point to; it’s a field of constraints and affordances—what becomes possible, impossible, costly, unthinkable, unsayable.
  • A web is exactly that: mostly empty space, but structured emptiness. Holes aren’t absence; they’re channeled possibility.
  • So “whatever” (as pure contingency / ungoverned drift) doesn’t flourish inside a web. It gets sorted: allowed paths, blocked paths, sticky paths.

That’s also why “web” has become such a dominant metaphor for media and institutions: Barnhurst even frames the “digital spider” as a network that traps legacy media—again, power as structure more than brute impact. OUP Academic+1

2) Arachne: weaving as a direct challenge to power

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 6), the contest isn’t just “who’s the better craftsperson.” It’s who controls the permissible representation of reality.

  • Minerva/Athena’s tapestry glorifies divine order and punishes human hubris. SparkNotes+1
  • Arachne’s tapestry depicts divine deception/abuse—an exposure of the gods’ behavior. SparkNotes+1
  • And crucially: Ovid’s framing implies the technical quality of Arachne’s work is undeniable—“not even Envy” can find a flaw—yet Minerva destroys it anyway. JSTOR+1

So the “winner was uncertain” is a meaningful reading: aesthetic victory can be conceded while political victory is enforced. If the goddess resorts to tearing and violence, it’s because the web of power is being threatened by a rival weaver—by someone who can weave another world into visibility.

This is exactly your point: the web prevents “whatever” by making the space legible and governed—and when a mortal weaves an alternate governance (an alternate account of what’s real), the response is censorship, not rebuttal. TheCollector+1

3) Your fly/spider distinction snaps into place

  • Fly = “whatever”: drift, impulse, opportunism, non-teleological motion.
  • Spider = power: not mere predation, but architecture: a designed field where contingency gets captured and converted into fate.

So the title “spider” isn’t just an animal choice; it’s a metaphysics: power is the weaving of constraints that make some motives show up as “reasons” and others evaporate as “whatever.”

If you want, here’s a tight formulation you could hand your father (or use yourself):

Power is not a force you can locate; it is a web you enter.
Its strength is the pattern of holes: what it lets pass, what it catches, and what it makes unthinkable.

And if you want to lean harder into Arachne as your explicit “source,” we can craft a short paragraph that links Arachne → censorship → journalism/digital webs in the book’s own language.

nice work, i’ll talk to you later!

Glad. Talk later, Andrew — and I’ll keep that web/image in mind: power as structured emptiness that channels “whatever.”