“I didn’t realize who my father was. So it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. I wasn’t there believing that I was receiving genius from on high. My father was my father.”

Inside the Quidditch World Cup.

A profile of Maurice Sendak.

On “Poor Hartley,” the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The author of Truly Tasteless Jokes unmasks herself.

A profile of the eccentric Gene Weingarten, the only person to twice win the Pulitzer for feature writing.

On a Victorian-era murder case, and the novel it inspired.

A profile of Robert Caro, who’s been working on a biography on Lyndon Johnson for nearly 40 years.

Teaching Emily Dickinson at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida.

A literary exploration of Obama’s voice.

This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoken words on the page with considerable misgivings . . . indeed, what follows can be considered an interview conducted with himself, by himself.