Ranting, The Bat Segundo Show and Dave Itzkoff ..

Correspondent: Dave, you’re not looking terribly indignant, but how are you doing? 
Itzkoff: I have nothing to be angry about. 
Correspondent: Really? 
Itzkoff: But the day is young. 
Correspondent: The day is young? 
Itzkoff: I mean, it’s only 11 AM. It’s a Tuesday. 
Correspondent: How much rage do you typically go through in a 24 hour period? 
Itzkoff: Actually, it can be a lot. It really depends on my morning commute. I take the subway. That is definitely a source of a lot of ire and provocation, depending upon how crowded or empty my train.

Full mp4 here too.

And an older but pretty funny article "by" Jane Smiley by Edward Champion on the same blog here.  Excerpt:

Back in the late 1990s, I wrote a 1,672-page novel about horse racing. Though I portrayed an array of upper-class characters and still remain more than a bit mystified by the thoughts and sentiments of the working class, it was easy for me — indeed, perhaps easier — to declare to all of my rich friends in Napa that I was a good liberal, and to always point to my work in defense of this claim. My fiction always informed my readers just how much I cared. I adored Latinos because I adored my Latino apprentice-jockey’s jaunty buttocks. And sometimes, I’d even drag out the Sybian just after pounding out a chapter. It was the only way for me to understand how not to be white, how not to be upper-class, how not to be a humorless twit.
To demonstrate my commitment to multiculturalism, I wrote a lengthy chapter describing how my character’s brown buttocks bounced atop a horse’s brown buttocks.