1) David Remnick's interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman, originally in BlackBook;

2) Audio: Tad Friend talks to On the Media's Xeni Jardin about fast cars, and not the Tracey Chapman kind;

3) Only tangentially related to The New Yorker (although, as I try to prove daily, everything is, really): this funny response from "coyotelibrarian" to a Chronicle of Higher Education story about the sinister side of the website Rate My Professors:

Fun with RMP

Rate My Professor (RMP) has needlessly become a source of anxiety for many instructors. If you’re unhappy with your RMP ratings, then make up some of your own!

After all, a disgruntled student could load your profile with multiple bad reviews, so it’s clearly unfair to have anything important depend on these ratings. Rather than worry about RMP, have some fun with it.

Of course, if you’re not comfortable making up comments out of thin air, borrow some from colleagues at other schools substituting your name for theirs. Thus:

“Prof. [Your Name Here] is a legend. It was an honor to have her as an instructor" [Borrowed from Joyce Carol Oates’ RMP profile]

“If you miss Prof. [YNH’s] class, you’d do well to open a vein. There’s no one on earth who shoots straighter, digs deeper, and years later, I still feel her influence daily. Get your act together, and take her courses." [Borrowed from Camille Paglia’s profile]

"Prof. [YNH’s] seminar is an experience more than a class. It’s intense and relatively easy if you remember to agree with him. Worth taking just to be in the presence of such a large intellect (and ego)." [Borrowed from Harold Bloom’s profile]

So reward yourself — you deserve it! (and if you don’t deserve it, you probably need it more than those who do.)