"Work as Play... disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun."

From the David Foster Wallace essay "The Nature of Fun." (The entire essay appears in the collection "Both Flesh and Not: Ess...

David Foster Wallace's essays "could have done with a little judicious pruning."

I laugh out loud at that notion, expressed by Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the new collection "Both Flesh and Not." Meade asks me w...

"Important fact: This letter was to his first wife."

Key comment in a comments thread about a contract Kurt Vonnegut made with his pregnant wife in January 1947. The contract comes from this ...

When Antonin Scalia met David Foster Wallace.

"As co-Snoots, we got along very well...."

"But, has anyone else been as creeped-out on this blog, as I've been lately?"

Says Jay Vogt , off topic, in the "Science of sitting" post. He continues: Over the past two days, we been presented with posts on...

"21. This Otter. This otter is disappointed that you never finished Infinite Jest."

From a list of 33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed In You .

"An Ex Blogs. Is it O.K. to Watch?"

This is one of those NYT "Modern Love" columns , and it ranks #3 on the NYT "most e-mailed" list. A woman discovers and ...

David Foster Wallace's marginalia-filled self-help books.

Maria Bustillos got access and reports in great detail. That Wallace even had a copy of Bradshaw On: The Family came as a great surprise ...

"He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops."

"Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving...

Palpatinian tranche.

I've been reading and listening to people talk for over a half century, so it's really weird to have to look up 2 words in 2 hours. ...

"What Would David Foster Wallace Make of McCain 2008?"

Ugh. Does everything have to tie back to the campaign? (Yes, I know Wallace wrote an essay about following around the McCain campaign in ...

Dear God.

David Foster Wallace has killed himself. Hanged himself! Terrible. Horrible. ADDED:

Listening to presidential talk — is Barack Obama what we want to hear now?

"And the truth is that we've got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the to...

But what about all that snow?

Flight alert just received via airport WiFi: NW 247 February 25 ON TIME departs DTW at 7:26 pm arrives MSN 7:41 pm Gate 4 Okay. I'm taki...

Which Supreme Court Justice went on a nude cruise?

The Chief Justice has launched an investigation to get to the... uh... to figure out exactly which Justice that San Francisco Chronicle tra...

"Kind of a nasty problem for an audiobook: where do the footnotes go?"

Says David Foster Wallace at the beginning of his reading of "Consider the Lobster" (which I've been listening to). The NYT ha...

David Foster Wallace.

I can't say I've read much of his fiction, but I love David Foster Wallace for his nonfiction essays. One of my favorite books is ...

Things to read/watch.

Arriving in the mail today is the April issue of The Atlantic , with two stories on the cover that look really interesting: an article abou...

What's in the Times Arts section today?

1. A Princeton student (Kathleen L. Milkman) gets a big article, with a big picture of herself, all about her senior thesis, on the first p...