Sara Paretsky, Writer

As many of you know, I love espresso. My preferred drink is the cortado. Wherever I travel, my first concern is finding a good coffee bar nearby. For my taste, the best espresso in North America is at Zibetto's on 6th Avenue, between 57th and 56th.
It's a hole in the wall, sandwiched between a nail salon and a bicycle rental shop.
I have my own pretty good quality home machine, but I never produce the rich syrupy espresso or the perfect foam that Zibetto makes. On a recent trip, I asked the man behind the counter if he would give me a lesson.
"I could come in at 5 when you're setting up," I wheedled.
He gave me a look - the look of a New Yorker who thought he was beyond being shocked, disgusted or offended by anything someone could say to him, only to find that I had tested his outer limits.
"It is not possible to teach you." was all he said.
I still paid for my drink, and still go back every trip.
But I began to imagine myself as a billionaire, able to indulge my slightest whim. I would offer to pay Zibetto a vast fortune to move his shop to Chicago, perhaps next door to me. But he is a proud man, wedded to New York City. He refuses to move.
So then I imagined my billionaire self digging up and moving the entire west side of 6th between 57 & 56th - the indie pharmacy, the nails, the bikes, the souvenir shop - to my neighborhood.
But then I thought, Zibetto is a proud man, he will trash his shop before he will make espresso on demand in a strange city.
So I have come up with a solution, not ideal, but workable. My staff flies me in my private jet to New York every morning. My helicopter is waiting when we land. We hover over 6th Avenue while one of my staff is lowered to the street where he buys my cortado. I relax in my chopper, sipping my drink, oblivious to how much annoyance the chopper blades and noise are causing everyone else - I'm a billionaire. Does anyone else count?
And then I fly back to Chicago to go on with my day.
(As you can see, I am dedicating too much of my imagination to espresso, not enough to writing my next book)
The first photo in this set is Zibetto's cortado on the plastic wicker table they have set up on the curb. The others are from random coffee bars around the world

I've written 1898 words of a new VI novel - only 108,102 to go! Zoë Cruickshank, the young journalist whom VI met in PAY DIRT, is in Chicago - she's won a fellowship at Northwestern University's journalism school. I'm calling this the Hildy Johnson fellowship, but wanted to check with readers - off the top of your head, without google or ai, does the name mean anything to you?

Nicole Hollander, the fierce funny feminist cartoonist, died last week.Her Sylvia cartoons helped me survive many of the hard stressors the world throws at us - when we became friends I was incredibly honored. With Ann Christophersen from Women & Children, we went to Washington in 2004 for the March for Women's Lives - the two photos here were at that march.

Nicole actually used something I said for one of her strips. We were having lunch one day during Janet Reno's confirmation hearings.* It came out that Reno's mother had wrestled alligators for a living. I casually said to Nicole that if your mother wrestled alligators, there's nothing you couldn't do with your life. She used that in the attached strip, which I have kept taped to my wall for the past 33 years.

Nicole's passing has created a disturbance in the force. If you want to hear her in her own voice, check out Pamela Beere Briggs' documentary, FUNNY LADIES.
https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/funny-ladies-portrait-women-cartoonists

*1993, to be Clinton's Attorney-General. Remember when someone had to be qualified to be in the cabinet? Remember when a woman cabinet officer was a rarity?)

Does anyone know a person named Ruby Hamburg? I just got a delivery of a complete set of Beverly Cleary books, addressed to her but sent to my address. If I can't find her they are all going to go into my little free library but I'd love to get them to her if someone knows her 

A while back, the NY Times posted an article on dogs who were super learners of human words. Today's Science Times did an update on the number of people who'd written in that their dogs were super learners. The article said people feel about their dogs as if they were Lake Woebegon kids - all way above average.

My own dogs were always much smarter than me: they knew what they wanted and how to get it. I still have trouble knowing what I even want in any given situation, let alone how to get it (except for the 1st and 4th Amendments, I want them so bad, but I don't know how to get them!)

When I read today's story, it reminded me of an exchange I once had with a woman at a U of Chicago physics event. My husband was on the faculty there. Social events kind of dripped with Nobel Laureates.

We were at a reception for one visitor who'd been anointed with Swedish holy water and I got to talking with his wife, Rose, as I'll call her, who had a standard poodle. We chatted for a bit about our dogs, and then I said I'd love to set up a playdate for my Golden with her poodle. Rose said, "Oh, no. My dog is so smart he'd run rings around your dog and it wouldn't be fun for either of them."

I was used to having faculty spouses use their children as pawns in the one-up-personship stakes - they were so much smarter/richer/more successful blah blah than my stepsons - but this was the first time I'd been subjected to one-up-dogship. I said feebly that I thought they would sniff butts and roll in rotting leaves. Rose looked at me with hauteur then turned her back on me. We never spoke again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/science/pets-dogs-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.clA.lG21.w30CKEvBWrY2&smid=url-share

It's National Library Week. Let's celebrate in the raucous way of readers and writers - by going to our favorite library, finding a good book and curling up in a corner to read, pausing only to thank the librarians for choosing a career that puts them in the crosshairs of people like Ron DeSantis, Mary Miller or Greg Abbot. Then, back to whatever wonderful book we've found. I have so many libraries to choose from - but my neighborhood library is U/Chicago's Regenstein library. Here I am during lockdown, sitting outside forlornly with my girl, Chiara, like the Little Match Girl, longing to be inside where all the books are. The last photo in the sequence shows me inside the American Library in Paris, where I was privileged to give a reading some years back.

Emma Thompson sums up in a few pithy words everything I feel about using AI as a writer

The Himalayan Writing Retreat 12K likes, 265 comments. "The advent of AI and the plight of the Writer- explained by "

Last year, 2,452 books were banned somewhere in the United States.

Local school and library boards are driving most of these actions, but now the MAGA government thinks they need national help. Rep. Mary Miller has introduced a bill (HR 7661) that would allow the federal government to take over banning books from libraries – and deny financial support to libraries that don’t comply.

Ms. Miller likes to quote Hi**er as an authority on how we need to “to win the hearts and minds of our children.” Is this really the person we want deciding what our children read?

PLEASE visit https://action.everylibrary.org/hr7661 now to urge your representative to vote against this bill.

I went last night to hear a lecture on reading and writing by Liyun Li, whose reading and writing are themselves extraordinary. Li came to the lecture hall, she said, wondering about the appropriateness of lecturing on the mundane when we were in a countdown to see if the US president would drop nuclear weapons on Iran. Just before Li started speaking, the moderator told us about the last-minute ceasefire. We were relieved, but also exhausted from a week of living with that strain.

That is the nature of my writing life today - balancing the need to write with the jaw-dropping horrors around us. How to find my way into story at times like this is the question I am constantly struggling to answer.

Li has her own answer. She says the best writing demands "precision and clarity." She teaches writing at Princeton, and prunes excess adjectives and adverbs from her students' work as she does from her own.

In my early books, my husband kept telling me I was using too many adverbs. He was right, but it took me a long time to see what he meant. It's the Bauhaus school mantra applied to writing: less is more. Show, don't tell. The fewer modifiers to a verb, the more the verb will conjure the reader's own reaction to an experience on the page.

There's a point, though, where this seems to become inhuman. Human lives are messy and sloppy and we also have to embrace the mess and the slop. Anyway, enough theory - that's a lovely place to dwell to avoid the sloppy messiness of conjuring VI Warshawski's world.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/17/author-yiyun-li-on-the-suicide-of-both-her-sons

It's Passover, it's Easter. In the middle of all the horrors big and small, I hope we can stop, take a breath - enjoy the sunshine that in Chicago feels like a miracle after days of relentless rain - gain comfort from and give it to the people we love. Spaceship Earth is so small and fragile - thank you to the Artemis crew for letting us see it anew from afar. Our own lives are fragile. Let's handle each other with care.

Every year for the last 35 years, my friends and I have gathered for a seder that celebrates women's voices and strengths. Here we are this year, dressed up as the 10 plagues. In our seder, after recounting the Biblical plagues, we enumerate the plagues in our world today, and pledge with each other to do our best to end them.

We the People did this! I believe that we will save the constitution and the republic.

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