As the Chelsea hotel transitions from "a wide-open playground to a sleek, exclusive fortress for big money," Peter Conrad reviews Sherill Tippins' Inside the Dream Palace and traces the storied artists' residence from its idealistic roots to its demise.

The maps that shaped the texts of Le Guin, Faulkner, and Thoreau, and the writers who crafted one-liners and speeches for Obama, Clinton, and Gore

What did the websites for The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, the Kenyon Review and The Atlantic look like in the late '90s?

Persona poems about Friday Night Lights' Tim Riggins, Maya Angelou on "Oprah Oprah Oprah," and Bill Murray's apocryphal legacy

What would Joyce Carol Oates ask Joyce Carol Oates?

Teach old dogs new tricks, literally. Prize creative collaboration. And eat fewer cheeseburgers.

At The New York Times, David Streitfeld profiles a few online businesses that track e-reader data, from Amazon and Barnes & Noble down to Scribd and Oyster. One of the article's focuses? How authors might use such data to inform their writing decisions.

"The letter E was born in the late 8th century BC in Athens, Greece," writes Joshua David Stein in his obituary for the fifth letter of the alphabet. Pay your respects, writers.

What Christmas special is George Saunders likely watching? "I used to love those Charlie Brown specials...I think if you are writing about life in our time, one way you can tell that story is that there are a bunch of people in our country desperately trying not to be forced down into that territory of humiliation."

"My soul is a windowless facade." In a Poetry Fundation article about C.S. Lewis' ill-fated poetry efforts, Laura Mallonee writes that Lewis and friends once tried to prank T.S. Eliot with a mock-Modernist poem.

Moore's suggestions for what was eventually named the Ford Edsel included the Ford Silver Sword, Hurricane Hirundo, the Resilient Bullet, the Ford Fabergé, Mongoose Civique, and Turcotinga

"The key to a toddy, according to Faulkner, is that the sugar must be dissolved into a small amount of water before the whiskey is added"

"As brilliant an essayist as she was, talking brilliantly was almost as significant a part of her job." Mark O'Connell reviews Sontag's 1978 Rolling Stone interview, now available in full

"Until West Virginia adopted daylight saving time on a statewide basis in 1963 the 35-mile run between Steubenville, Ohio, and Moundsville, W. Va., traversed seven different local time standards."

Mark Twain is said to've used the board to receive poems for Emily Grant Hutchings' book, while James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was "Ouija-inspired and dictated."

Dig into The Letters Page, essays about abandoning tenure, and our plans for our 40th anniversary. You didn't forget our anniversary, did you?

Does Morrissey's brand new autobiography deserve classic status? "I am not sure anyone is an entirely reliable narrator of his own life but Morrissey seems, at least, to have a comprehension of what makes him both so fascinating as an artist and difficult as a human being."

"Combined, Christie and I make more money than our friend who has been working as an engineer at Boeing for a few years and Christie's friend who is a five-year accountant in Dallas, Texas." Not that we should all rush into the dino-erotica genre...

"I don't have a computer. I don't have an Internet. I don't have the e-mail. I don't have any of that shit."

Among other things, an ursine protagonist ponders gender expectations and the quality of his sex life alongside forest companions like Entitled Fox and Self-Righteous Hawk