Over here, Colson Whitehead profiles original gangster and Love and Consequences memoirist Margaret B. Jones, who was revealed to be a non-ethnic fiction writer named Margaret Seltzer:

But here I am, following her lead and diving under a table. Clutching my Mr. Pibb, I look into the street and see the slowing car, the window rolling down. Even a pampered upper-middle-class journalist like me knows what that means: Drive-by.

The seconds pass. I gaze into Margaret B. Jones’s flinty Cherokee eyes, and I’m calmed by what I see there. They’re eyes that say, “I’ll take care of you.” After what seems like an eternity, the gray Volvo rounds the corner and is gone.

“Reflex,” she says as we resume our lunch on the patio of Paco’s Chick ’n Waffle in Compton. “You never really get out of the game. When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way. There ain’t no getting out, homey. I saw that guy behind the wheel and thought, He looks like a Shark, I better duck.”

And over here, there’s news that three authors—Arthur Phillips, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Jane Smiley—are writing branded fiction that features a Lexus in some major way for Lexus Magazine. Phillips, after his debut novel Prague, proved to be a pretty big hack anyway, and Sittenfeld, after her heavily biographical debut novel Prep, was probably going to disappear, but I wish that there was some way for me to retroactively remove the recommends star that I put on Jane Smiley’s reading last week.