Emily writes:

You can’t always get what you want, as this extra-chilly December is teaching us so ruthlessly. Sometimes, though, you can still post on your nearly four-year-old blog. Yes, four this very month! Happy birthday month to us!

Five things I admired today:

1. From Inquirer.net (“the official news website of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippine’s most widely circulated broadsheet”), a reminiscence by Corazon P. Ong whose headline says it well: “I wrote E.B. White and he wrote back.”

“Joe, no!” he said. “(A), we’re not sanguine. Or blithe. We think about it all the time. There are meetings about it all the time. We’re each thinking about this. Constantly. The quesiton that Ken asked was ‘Do your magazines have a future and are they in any way different than newspapers? I think magazines that mean something are going to find a way to have a future. … Sanguine or blithe about it? That’s not the way to describe it, Joe.”

God bless you, David Remnick. That is exactly what it is like. And magazines will find a future. We won’t go down so easy!

4. Speaking of people with a sense of humor and diverse musical tastes, here’s LP Cover Lover.

5. Hillary Chute—whose Art Spiegelman interview we’re featuring all week on Print’s website—interviewed the radiant and irrepressible Lynda Barry for the current issue of The Believer. Buy the issue; get a taste of the interview here. I was so happy, amidst the doldrums of fall, to witness Barry and Matt Groening being delirious together during the most recent New Yorker Festival. The magic of some occasions really does make up for the bad times.