New Yorker letters: a batch you can buy!
Sublimely ridiculous scene: Family Guy.

The New Yorker Conference has been blazing all day!
Able Martin is on it—I’m closing away.

Walt Kelly in Madison, posing with Pogo;
Crazed MFA humor—Shouts & Murmurs take note.

That last, loosely rhymed item refers to a piece by Tom Hopkins, who has concocted something for everyone—wailing fiction writers, gnashing poets, and everyone in between.

And thanks to the all-seeing B.K. for the Pogo and eBay links above. Anyone have $995 they can lend me? If yes, after I read all the letters in this batch (“In one, Harold Ross declines the suggestion for a feature on Washington affairs, but suggests writing for other departments; ‘You could put a lot of things in there with a slight sarcastic touch’”), I think they should be given a proper home with their true friends in the New York Public Library, where they will be loved, enfolded in calm, cool boxes, and available to visit whenever we begin to miss them.

Salon’s Carol Lloyd considers the portion of Jill Lepore’s recent piece “Just the Facts, Ma’am” that addresses the often divergent reading tastes of women and men.

I once went on a date with a man who insisted, indignantly, that men did too read novels (of course, I didn’t claim that no men read novels—that would be absurd coming from someone whose father has a yearly Pride and Prejudice bacchanal—only that the men I know tend to prefer nonfiction), and called his best friend from the car (he had a car, which was strange in itself) to gather further irrefutable evidence of this truth. Anyway, he was vindicated, but I didn’t much like his pugilistic need (coincidentally, he was a lawyer) to be right on every point he brought up. So, that was the beginning and end of our romance, and that is more history than literature.

Benjamin Chambers writes:

Sorry, no lurid news about your favorite New Yorker authors getting into (or out of) rehab. But there’s plenty of news, and I’m here to spread the wealth.

Take your pick: you can check out this Richard Ford sampler; rumors that a new T. Coraghessan Boyle story, “The Lie,” will soon be appearing in your copy of The New Yorker; a short piece on the pleasures of reading Mollie Panter-Downes, who covered WWII for TNY; or this pleasantly addled dual review of Salman Rushdie’s “The Shelter of the World” (from the January 25, 2008 issue) and a Bollywood movie about the same characters.

The editors of the good-looking blog More Intelligent Life have picked James Wood as one of their favorite book critics; my erudite former employer Ron Rosenbaum also gets the nod, and commenters grump about the exclusion of John Updike.

On their corresponding film-critic list, Anthony Lane gets the honor of the first spot. David Denby would be on my list, as would Salon’s superlative Stephanie Zacharek, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Charles Taylor, Gene Seymour, and The Nation’s prizewinning Stuart Klawans.

Also, Kevin Zacher has been shooting some cool photos of parkour people

In the Washington Post, Katha Pollitt handily dismantles Charlotte Allen’s recent piece about dumb broads, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” And the editorial philosophy behind it, too.

And Ben Yagoda, who’s written books about (among other things) both New Yorker history and wily parts of speech and is therefore permanently OK in my book, asks in Slate, “But is it such a terrible thing that so many lying memoirists have been exposed? On the contrary: It’s evidence that the system works.” And he continues (internal link is mine): “In the wake of the Frey and now the Jones scandals, there’s been hand-wringing about the need for fact-checking—or lie-detector tests or something!—at publishing houses. But you’re never going to stop people from making stuff up.”