Interview Roundup: Mister Garfield Got Shot Down

• Lisa Selin Davis (who read at the excellent Brooklyn indie shop BookCourt last night), spoke to Gothamist about her debut novel, Belly, which "grew out of my studies in urban planning and environmental psychology, two graduate degrees I didn't finish," but is a lot more gripping than that particular sound bite makes it seem. The organizers of the First Fiction Tour think so, too: Davis has been invited to take part in a seven-city reading series this October.

• Robert Birnbaum gets into it with Sarah Vowell, and there's more about James Garfield than you've seen in any other interview this year! "Pretty much every time Lincoln used a hanky there is a plaque for it," Vowell observes. "But Garfield... he was only president a few weeks. So he didn't really get to do that much. That's one reason. And there were problems and dramas. And it was a relatively undramatic period. Which is another reason we don't learn much about it." As always with Birnbaum, there's plenty, plenty more where that came from...

• The UK and US editors of Cosmopolitan, Kate White and Sam Baker, both have new murder mysteries out, so my friend Emily Gordon talked to them for Newsday.

• George Gilder lets little girls fight his battles for him. OK, now that I've roped you in with the snarky half-truthful lead, check out this Boston Globe profile, focusing on how every time the godfather of the digital economy tries to get out of the "intelligent design (ID)" debate, they pull him back in. He likes the theory--which rejects "the belief that the universe is a purely material phenomenon that can be reduced to physical and chemical laws"--not because he's particularly religious, but because it matches what he sees in information theory. Of course, his protests of reluctance might carry a little more weight if he wasn't the cofounder of the ID-touting Discovery Institute. (For a backgrounder on the subject, try Evan Ratliff's Wired article, "The Crusade Against Evolution." As it happens, Gilder wrote a defense of ID in that same issue.)