A week before Thanksgiving a mysterious package arrived for me at work. A festive green card was taped to the top and little foodie oil spots dotted the cardboard sides. One thing was certain: the box was heavy with something yummy inside. Harvey, the messenger who brought it up to me, watched eagerly as I opened the box on the spot (He wanted see if his guess of chocolate cake was right — apparently, the messenger center had a bet going). Lo and behold, a beautiful batch of two dozen chocolate chip cookies to celebrate my first acquisition: Cara & Phoebe’s Quarter-Life Kitchen. 

Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine are the creators of Big Girls, Small Kitchen, the food blog that had our mouths watering for months before the pair came in to pitch their book. We were inspired by their sophisticated take on childhood classics like Pesto Mac ‘n Cheese and Pancakes with Pomegranates. Cara and Phoebe’s book will tell the story of their friendship (they’ve been cooking together since a middle school bake-off) complete with recipes and a foreword by Ina Garten. 

We’re super excited about this book — and so are our stomachs. What else can I say? It was love at first bite. 

p.s. Check out the recipes for Cara and Phoebe’s scrumptious book deal cookies. We chomped through those babies in less than two days and I don’t think the janitor was too happy about all the crumbs we left behind…

If you want to be amused in the kitchen while you are stuffing your bird this year, I highly recommend listening to the This American Life Poultry Slam.  Gobble google.

All over the internet, HarperStudio chefs present and future are there to help you get ready for Thanksgiving.

See GET COOKING author Mollie Katzen’s simple and delicious ideas here.

And she’s answering questions on Cookstr here.

Emeril Lagasse was taking questions live on Sirius Radio, and his hints can be found here.

And the chefs at Food52, whose cookbook we’re partnering to publish next year, have a Thanksgiving 911 as well as great recipes that are currently in competition to be in the book.Good luck in the kitchen, and Happy Thanksgiving!

I love conferences — doesn’t matter if I’m attending, speaking, or mingling — I’ve never met a conference I didn’t like. Often times I don’t even fully realize all that I’ve learned until months later when the experience has had time to marinate.

Last week I attended the web 2.0 Expo in New York at the Javits Center. It was my second year attending, and it’s definitely high on my list of favorites. Almost all of the speakers I saw were inspiring, enlightening, and entertaining (one was hilarious). The vibe was great; no shortage of interesting people to mingle with. According to the program, the theme of the conference was “The Power of Less.” Think Google; think Twitter; think simple, clean, stripped down and lean.

I’m going to attempt to list the highlights below, for me, day by day:

Day 1 – Alistair Croll and Sean Power set the bar very high on day one for the rest of the conference with their full day workshop on “Communilytics.” I didn’t start out in their session, but after watching the twitter stream all morning, I jumped in there after lunch and they did not disappoint. Their slide show is chock full of useful info.

Day 2 – I saw a lot of great speakers day two, including Tara Hunt, Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, and Chris Brogan. Best discovery that day was Caterina Fake’s new site, Hunch. Most profound hour spent was at the end of the day with Jeff Jarvis. He spoke about the world going BETA, why that’s a good thing, and what that means, industry by industry. The subject of his talk might develop into his next book, which I can’t wait to read. His weekly podcast, This Week In Google, is a bevy of good info and insight where he talks about a lot of the same themes and issues.

Day 3 – There were many highlights Day 3. Loved the Launch Pad (startups pitched their ideas to the crowd); Gina Trapani explaining Google Wave was a must if you are as confused by Wave as I am. Session on Security, Identity & Liability in Social Media blew my mind with issues I had never even considered (and still don’t want to) But the highlight of all highlights was most definitely Baratunde Thurston. I’m not even going to attempt describe it. His talk, “There’s a #Hashtag for That,” is a must watch:

Day 4 – Most thought provoking speakers to me were Ching-Yung Lin talking about “What’s a Friend Worth?” and Genevieve Bell discussing what to do about people who aren’t on the internet (can you imagine?).

How do you “properly” publish a posthumous work? This is something we talked a lot about with regard to WHO IS MARK TWAIN? and it’s a question David Gates takes on in his clear-eyed review of “The Original of Laura,” Nabokov’s eagerly anticipated novel in fragments. Here, Gates points out the slightly exaggerated claims made in the introduction:

The younger Nabokov’s introduction claims that “despite its incompleteness,” “The Original of Laura” is “unprecedented in structure and style.” Brian Boyd recently made a similar claim to The Wall Street Journal: “The opening few words just blew me away. There’s a kind of narrative device that he’s never used before and that I don’t think anybody else has ever used before.” I just can’t see the evidence. The absence of a plot — what we have here is all setup for unknown events to come — indicates that we don’t know what structure Nabokov had in mind. So, in fact, does his son’s implicit invitation to reshuffle the cards. And what’s the unique narrative device in those opening words? “Her husband, she answered, was a writer, too — at least, after a fashion.” Does Boyd mean the device of beginning a novel in medias res, with a character answering a question we don’t get to hear? Virginia Woolf did the same thing in the first sentence of “To the Lighthouse.”

Even Nabokov, it seems, needs a sales pitch. But hey, can you blame them for trying? (That’s a serious question.)

Check the WSJ’s gallery of redesigned Nabokov backlist titles including covers by Chip Kidd and Carin Goldberg. Amazing:

Through the magic of Twitter I discovered @Leah_Albert and the amazing Stacy Monk and her inspiring organization Epic Change.

Stacy you make magic happen and inspire me every day.

In Nurse Theresa Brown’s latest post on The New York Times Well blog, she makes a striking comparison between our health care system and Shirley Jackson‘s “The Lottery.” What happens if you’re unlucky enough to draw the short straw in the health care lottery? Click through to read the rest of the powerful post.

Abigail Uhteg documented her summer internship at the Women’s Studio Workshop with a video of 3,000 photos she took over the course of printing, binding, and signing 35 editions of her book, The Complex of All of These. It took two months from making her own paper to letting the ink dry on her signature. Abigail explains the process in some of the photos here.