Photos of New York in the '40s, by Stanley Kubrick: bit.ly/yNXKbG

Are you prepared for what the night will bring?

Two lovely tributes to Szymborska: @thehighsign (slate.me/wYHncL) and Gopnik (nyr.kr/wsIvvy).

"Somebody behind you, watching your back." And if you are the president, that someone is Joe Biden, eating mints on national TV.

Calvin Trillin asks: what's your ACI? slate.me/x6TFfE

Can't shake the sense Caitlin Flanagan's long, interesting, odd piece on Didion's appeal only to women mostly shows Flanagan doesn't get men

Caffe Trieste, San Francisco: "That's true! You could start a v.c. firm that funds, like, movies."

This week in Slate, I wrote about how Tintin--the character--helped give birth to the modern blockbuster. slate.me/t2Mqtv

Season's greetings, from on top of my childhood thinking hill. twitter.com/nathanheller/s…

The world's second greatest obituary. tgr.ph/vgtXgH

Anna Wintour on Christopher Hitchens and his ideal of "the ruined table": slate.me/tKkCdC

RIP Christopher Hitchens. Slate memories from his editor, @junethomas (slate.me/uVffo3), and from @jacobwe (slate.me/uap52L).

John Updike's childhood house for sale. This is the one in town. I would hold out for the farm. bit.ly/vfdgqS

Just having a chance to read @PGourevitch's masterly Sarkozy portrait. "The trouble comes when a politician gets numb to humiliation . . ."

The awesome Wyatt Mason profiles Ai WeiWei: gq.com/news-politics/…

Couple of aspiring TV writers, one table over. She: "I'm saying that by the time I'm 35, I won't have anything left to say."

Slate's roundup of the best books of 2011: slate.me/ufovW6

This week I wrote on a serious topic: Christmas carols. Where they come from, where they're going, why we sing them. slate.me/vDvHKl

This week in Puzzling Magazine Ads of Yore (two pages): bit.ly/vJ1xft

Warm-cold Sundays like this always put me in mind of the Bay Area. Today the poem that took me back was Hass' "Spring": bit.ly/rsywiC