- Little Richard at the 1988 Grammys
- “Interestingness = Novelty + Importance” and other simple writing advice from The Atlantic‘s David Thompson
- “When the Taliban offers you—a pregnant, unmarried woman—safe haven, you know your situation is messed up.“
- One of my best pandemic decisions: a subscription to cooking magazine Milk Street
- Tales of the manuscript thief:
Someone, or possibly a cartel of someones, was impersonating influential figures in the publishing industry to get access to unpublished manuscripts. They would pretend to be a heavyweight literary agent, say, or an editor, and would send convincing-looking emails to publishers asking that they send on the soon-to-be released novels of an array of writers, some famous and some not. Sometimes they’d approach the writers themselves. They’d make such underhand moves as changing a letter or two in their email address (e.g. @randornhouse.com instead of @randomhouse.com), using great sneakiness and considerable amounts of time and energy to do – what? To read a book slightly earlier than everyone else did.
