Daily Blague

Tickets to The New Yorker Festival events toward the end of next month. They went on sale at noon, and it took four minutes of back-and-forth redialing to get through to TicketMaster. Each order had to be processed separately, so after we were done with Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith for Friday night, 23 September, I skipped over Malcolm Gladwell at ten the next morning and asked for Rufus Wainwright - an interview, not a concert - on Saturday night. Then we did Malcolm Gladwell, who will speak about precociousness. With all the extra fees, it cost a bundle, but I'm psyched. The New Yorker Festival is as close as the United States gets to la rentrée littéraire.