Important update: My new favorite comment on the ‘literary dealbreakers’ thread begins: “Well, I’m just a high school student, and if I saw a guy at my school reading Vonnegut or who actually read AND liked Catcher in the Rye in English class I would definately want to talk to him.”  Cuteness!  But, like, you’d [...]

It has taken almost exactly four months for a trend piece to make me actively wish I still worked at Gawker. I guess it had to happen sometime. Writing about literary dealbreakers, Rachel Donadio interviews a bunch of snobs whose snobbery I can so totally relate to, and then, on the Paper [...]

Novelist Isabel Allende once downed some ayahuasca (which is, you know, a shamanic South American hallucinogen) so that she could finish a trilogy of adventure books.

“But after forcing down the foul-tasting brew, she was catapulted to a place so dark her husband feared he had ‘lost his wife to [...]

Haha, the tight-pantsed French band that was synergistically inserted into the plot of last night’s episode of The Hills sounds just exactly how you’d expect they’d sound: like if some random dissolutely attractive dudes who had never heard of music were given one afternoon, some instruments, and a few CDs by the Strokes and Duran [...]

In response to my question about when correspondents began to understand their communications to be private, a friend points out that some letters were clearly never intended for publication, that some very private people eventually asked for all their letters back and burned them. Also, that there were two opposing cultures of letter-writing in [...]

Clive Thompson has discovered that having an online presence is like being a celebrity, a little!

“Hirshberg has a blog, which means a couple hundred people — some strangers, some friends — regularly follow his comings and goings, his Facebook updates, his online photo trail. Any time he does something embarrassing or stupid, those people will [...]

#1: White people getting big book deals.  (Specifically, white humor bloggers getting big book deals for their “why didn’t I think of that?” blog ideas.)

#2: I dunno.  Getting mugged?

Stuffwhitepeopledislike.com is available, people. Get on it!