Two comments (one with a thoughtfully provided image of the poked painting “Le Rêve”) on the whole hole-in-the-Picasso incident that Nick Paumgarten wrote a Talk about this week. (Later: Gawker wonders who spilled the beans.)

In the Times today, Sarah Lyall reports on the state of British kids’ school lunches, a nice counterpart to that excellent recent story about the saintly chef’s odyssey to make cafeteria lunches healthier. Know why there are no specifics in that stentence? Because I can’t find the piece anywhere, not on Greg.org, not through Google, not on the New Yorker website, and not in The Complete New Yorker, since I don’t have the new updated Disk One (or the pricey but magically light and functional—I tested it at the festival—hard drive) yet. I feel blue.

…Otherwise, it was stand-up comedy all the way. Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Lane, Mark Singer even - all of these men can take to the stage whenever they please. Mr Shteyngart won’t even have to work out a routine. The chunk of Absurdistan that he read was a great deal funnier than it had been on the page. Mr Lane could not have talked faster, but his paean to Ava Gardner forced him speak overtime. (It was almost embarrassing: we were confronted with a man who seemed prepared to throw his life away for an actress’s smile.) Mr Saunders read some forthcoming stuff that I can’t wait to have entire.
 
The demographic shifts were interesting: heavily under-thirty five for the novelists, Mr Gladwell, and Mr Ashbery; heavily retired for Mr Trillin (in conversation with Mr Singer). Without making a point of doing so, Mr Trillin’s conversation ranged over the history of The New Yorker, the staff of which he joined the year after I started reading it. He had keen things to say about journalism, and how very protected from its rush New Yorker writers used to be. Afterward, at lunch, I chewed over what he’d said, and came to see that this relatively new feature, the New Yorker Festival, has taken the venerable magazine one step closer to an institute of higher learning. Students of The New Yorker University scuttled across the campus of Manhattan in pursuit not so much of edification as of the kind of solidarity that the best universities’ students feel.