“I already had a kind of Don Quixote set up in mind. And so I was like, Wouldn’t it be funny if Arthur was the sort of Sancho Panza in this? I’ll just barely touch on it and see where it goes. And I thought he needs someone totally full of himself to shake him […]

Peter Orner has some dangerous habits — like reading at traffic lights. He talks with Mark Athitakis about the life of an unusually enthusiastic reader and his new book “Am I Alone Here”?

Many standup comedians have made the amusing joke/observation that us creative humans in the Western world don’t hesitate to remake movies or songs but we never remake books. The most famous variation on the gag—after expressing that sentiment, the comedian mentions that they’re writing a word-for-word remake of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. […]

It’s easy to celebrate smart people—detectives who figure out mysteries just by observing clues, evil geniuses who devise horrific ways of ending the world and the sullen brainiacs who defeat them, anyone who figures out how to game the system and come out on top. But let’s put aside the hero-worship, because we all know that in […]