• Hillel Italie reports that Fran Lebowitz has agreed to host this year’s National Book Awards.

• James Hynes argues that the new season of The Wire delivers “a passionate and remarkably detailed and incisive critique of public education in the era of No Child Left Behind.”

• At last. More recovery memoirs.

• The New Yorker in haiku. (Via.)

• Amazon will allow authors to comment on reviews. Maybe Anne Rice brought lots of traffic? (“[Y]ou are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective,” she told her negative reviewers. “Indeed, you aren’t even reading it. You are projecting your own limitations on it.”)

• “Behold,” says an anonymous correspondent, “the novel as Soduko! Actually, someone’s probably already thought of this. And I bet you anything they work at Regan.”

• John Krasinski (of the U.S. version of The Office) will write and direct an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. (Via.)

• The X-rated typeface on a spelling handbook caused a ruckus at an elementary school open house. (Via.)

• “Some people are really obsessed with fonts,” Mr. Maud observed in email. “That,” said PH, “reminds me of this: Behind the Typeface.”

• Suzanne Snider looks at the history of the yellow legal pad. (Via.)

• A reader named Stephan, inspired by the Beha article I mentioned yesterday, reports that Drunken Boat just released an Oulipo issue. “I haven’t quite figured it all out yet,” he says. (Me neither, man. I don’t think there’s that much weed in the world.)