Use your commute, part 2

"Commuters' Body Heat to Warm Office"

"I know what they're going to say"

What I could hear of the boss's conversation with the phone company.

Shout out punch lines?

"In some offices, workers coordinate their midday Web-watching schedules, the better to shout out punch lines to one another across rows of desks. Some people gravitate to sites where they can reliably find Webcasts of a certain length — say, a three-minute political wrap-up — to minimize both their mouse clicks and the sandwich crumbs that wind up in the keyboard." —New York Times

'Ghost' writer

Usually, the literati who turn up in Sunday's "The City" section of the NY Times are writing guest essays about their charming (or wretched) metropolitan lives, but Ed Park wound up as a profile subject when his role as the publisher of the New-York Ghost newsletter was officially revealed. Each issue of the zine, containing "an assortment of stream-of-consciousness prose, whimsical poems, dream transcripts and archival illustrations," is sent to subscribers by e-mail as a PDF file. If sample articles like "One-Word Review: Hilarious" feel a bit McSweeney's, perhaps that's to be expected: One of Park's many current gigs is on the editorial staff of The Believer. (His first novel, Personal Days, is due from Random House next May.)
—Galleycat, Nov. 26, 2007