(This week’s Time comes with a mini-essay by me about Harry Potter and What It All Means. Because this Potter fellow just isn’t getting his due in the press — damn that biased, death-eating MSM! The slot for the piece in the mag is fairly short, so I’m going to post the unedited, extended-play version [...]

In the journalism trade — which I intermittently practice — revealing the boring making-of details behind a product is known as “making sausages.” It’s a Bismarck thing, yo. Once you’ve read this Q&A with Conan O’Brien, the TV equivalent can henceforth be known as “flipping pool cues:”