Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero.

Here’s another person I really liked interviewing.

Cyclops: the Worst Leader (an interview)

doctordisaster:

So, you’re a teacher at a school where mutant kids can learn to control their powers. What tricks do you use to keep your powers under control?

I don’t. I have a special pair of glasses that does it for me.

[awkward pause]

Without them, I am helpless and blind.

Well, designing them must have taken considerable ingenui—

I didn’t design them. The Professor did.

Oh. Well, that was kind of him. He also asked you to lead his team of mutant superheroes, the X-men, from their inception. What qualities led him to trust you to lead at such a young age?

I am a natural leader.

Er, yes. How so?

I am very good at leadership.

But what aspects of leadership?

The part where I am the leader of the team.

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We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

The part of me that wants to eat pork and not stone people just switches on and cheers for the blitzing linebacker.

To put the issue in a contemporary framework, it’s one thing to say that somebody other than Jay-Z wrote “The Blueprint”; it’s another to say that this clandestine Jay-Z wrote “The Blueprint” in 1961. You can’t write a hip-hop masterpiece before hip-hop has been invented. And you can’t write “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” until English secular comedy has come into existence.

“Most near-future fictions are boring,” he told me. “It’s always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.”

There are exclusives and then...

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: AFP IS THE FIRST NEWS AGENCY TO TRANSMIT PHOTO OF DEAD MOAMER KADHAFI

In this supremely tender work of memory, Didion is paradoxically insistent that as long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish.

The Four Corners link is my favorite part

I’d handicap the damned thing, but you all can probably do that yourself by now. Mitt will go into the Four Corners early, as he will in every public setting from now until somebody actually casts a vote that matters. Rick Perry will try to grope his way close enough to second place so that the money he can raise can propel him into it. He will also struggle vainly with dependent clauses and perhaps turn an ankle. Newt will act like he’s already emperor and Santorum will talk like a retired pope. God knows what Bachmann will say, but I, for one, hope she gets into the Spanish American War tax again.

Oh boy

“My parents are well off financially, but I’m better off culturally.”

“One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk.”

The 'iPad Machine'?

“It was quiet,” DaMarcus Beasley recalled. “And then Klinsmann went over to the iPad machine and turned on the music. That’s the kind of coach he is. He’s very cool. He’s fun.”