Congratulations, Edward Koren, on earning the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts! Here’s more. And good news—Bruce Eric Kaplan has a graphic novel out, Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell, which I would love to see.

Noted earlier, but the magazine is “quietly” building up its YouTube account. Subscribe today; I did! And watch Dan Baum’s New Orleans videos. The musical ones will make you want to dance.

Ted Genoways at VQR notes that Paul Muldoon can be added to the list of non-American poetry editors in America.

ZP at I Hate The New Yorker (a witty title, considering), whom I was delighted to finally meet last week, has views on the Style and Food issues.

In case you missed it yesterday, Garry Kasparov will be a candidate for the 2008 Russian presidential election. Don’t miss David Remnick’s audio interview with Kasparov! I enjoy reading Remnick on Russia—the subject seems so keenly dear to him, which is understandable, since he lived there as the Washington Post’s correspondent. I wonder if he had the Russia bug before he moved; I seem to remember from Lenin’s Tomb that because his wife’s family was originally from there, it was already an interest, but this could be wrong. I got Russia fever the moment I got on the Aeroflot to Moscow two years ago. (There’s a new jet in town, by the way.) The country seems to become an altered state of mind for some people, a romantic virus, a pair of glasses you can never take off, and I can’t wait to go back there.

And if you see some posts in coming weeks that look kinda grizzled to you, they are! They’re drafts I never published over the past three years, but I wanted to share them with you regardless of “timeliness” (a dubious criterion in this enterprise, don’t you think?). Look for the grizzlies, and don’t play dead or scramble up a tree—embrace them.