- Birnbaum Alert (x2): He talks with Rick Moody and pulls a Glenn Gould and interviews himself.
- Novelist Philip Hensher is not happy with the British Royal Opera’s staging of Ballo in Maschera. It seems that the performers were rehearsing in blackface. Hensher’s full thoughts can be found here. The Royal Opera has stopped wearing blackface. (On a somewhat related note, Harold Ramis has turned dark.)
- I didn’t know this, but apparently Anne Rice’s sudden conversion was because of a diabetic coma.
- Kurt Anderson + Catherine Zeta-Jones = Recipe for Disaster?
- Some recent words on Republicans from Z.Z. Packer.
- Utopian literature: a dying breed?
- This season’s hot motif: deaths of the rich and famous?
- The latest angle for a blogging article: bloggers as major political players. What next? A Masonic handshake?
- Jeremy Mercer gets the Newsweek treatment.
- Lynn Johnson’s “For Better or For Worse,” the only comic strip that has featured characters growing up in real time (and dared to tackle homosexuality) , is ending next year. (via Komickcast)
- Sam and Jim Go to Hollywood (via Splinters)
- The George Plimpton Project: Click George to Enter.
- Romeo and Juliet: told in emoticons.
For Better or Worse isn’t the “only’ comic strip to have characters grow up, it is “one of the only”. Frank King’s classic and long running Gasoline Alley (now being reprinted by Drawn and Quarterly) was the first to do such. The character Skeezix started out as a orphaned baby and grew up to become a father through the course of the strip.