Gently Simmer

A decade before Matt Groening created The Simpsons, he debuted his first comic, Life in Hell, at a record store in Los Angeles. The strip kept running for thirty-five years, even after The Simpsons brought its creator international fame. He decided to end it earlier this year, and his fans (including Alison Bechdel) are paying tribute.

Missed the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend? The paper has some great short pieces on the panels that took place, including this one on an event called “Whimsical Visions, ” in which rising star Etgar Keret imagined Wikipedia as written by future squids.

Chris Rose laments the erosion of his former employer, New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, in the pages of Oxford American’s New South Journalism issue. Meanwhile, James Pogue discusses the art of fact-checking, which he says “has recently become a voguish topic among the New Yorker-reading and NPR-listening set.” This is of course to say nothing of the London Review of Books-reading set across the pond as well, much less the Onion-reading set located far and wide.