• Rick Perlstein does the “By the Book” Q&A with the New York Times. Among the revelations? Why he's disappointed in Obama, who he reads online, what great authors are overrated, and when his long history of conservatism is ending. 
• Also from the New York Times Book Review: the next book I'm reading.
• See also: this.
• The LA Weekly's film critic Amy Nicholson looks at “Forrest Gump,” 20 years later. I particularly like “... fitting for a movie with nothing to say.” And the ending of the piece.
• My latest review for The Seattle Times is up: the French-language giallo homage “The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears.” If you just looked askance at the title, right, then it's probably not for you. Or me. 
• Joe Posnanski wonders whether the KC Royals' Alex Gordon is an MVP candidate. By traditional methods, no. By WAR? Yes. Then he wonders whether all of us, and not just neoconservatives, are relying too much on WAR.
• My man Alex Pareene has finally left the awfulish Salon.com, and has been doing some guest-blogging over at my man Andrew Sullivan's site. Here he gives us his take on Takes: the short, quick bits on the Thing We're All Talking About that even serious sites do now. 
• You hear about online journalist Nydia Tisdale being arrested for videotaping a GOP event? Even some Republicans were disgusted.
• Jill LePore, in a must-read piece, on the three photographs that haunted her this summer. 
• Controversy over the meaning of ISIS and what is a caliphate. Glenn Beck muddies the waters, Dave Weigel clears them.
• Via the American Book Review: the 100 best last lines from novels. It makes me nostalgic for a time when people cared about this kind of thing. Or maybe it makes me nostalgic for people who care about this kind of thing.  
• Speaking of: Brainpickings gives us Werner Herzog's advice to filmmakers and all creative people. Essentially: travel, learn languages, read great literature, experience life, hold onto what you experience. Basically everything that isn't much encouraged in our current culture.
• John Oliver mocks his YouTube commenters. It's brillent. No mention of slithy toves.

Angry over the movie version of his novel, author Winston Groom wrote a sequel in which Forrest loses his fortune, creates New Coke and crashes the Exxon Valdez. “Shockingly,” Nicholson writes, “it was never green-lit.”