The Sacramento Bee gets into the auctorial interview game and talks with Jane Smiley about how selling the film rights to A Thousand Acres has allowed her to write about horses. Smiley will be working on The Roan Tetrology through 2006. An early galley of the first book, My Kingdom for a Horse, features a 24-page monologue on why every American should own one.

Novelist E.L. Doctorow was booed at Columbia University while delivering a commencement speech attacking Bush. Financier George Soros offered a similar anti-Bush speech at Hofstra, but was not booed.

The New Yorker: “After directing the driver to East Seventy-second Street, she said she wanted to make it clear that, while she loves her bloggers, and has faith in them, it can be difficult to get them to be productive. ‘They all have day jobs,’ she pointed out. Writing anything longer than a blog post is a commitment they don’t always seem up for.”

Graham has a spiffy new layout, with a decided Kottke influence. But thanks to the colors, his integration of remaindered link content is something a lot easier to follow after a few beers. Which reminds me: the plan is to tinker with WordPress for the soon-to-emerge Wrestling an Alligator production blog. If all goes well, then I may switch over to WordPress for Reluctant. This comes at a time when I was planning a major overhaul of this place anyway. For anyone else looking for a smooth MT to WP transition, here’s the skinny.