George Ameal Wilson, Friendly Conversation.

• Today in poetry as panhandling: Rowan McCabe pitches himself as “the world’s first door-to-door poet.” (An insult to the many lyrically inclined encyclopedia salesmen who once roamed this earth.) McCabe is based in the UK and will likely never make it to the U.S., where poets are routinely shot. But maybe you’d like to pay him a visit: “McCabe is more usually found on the streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, writing bespoke verse for whoever happens to answer the buzzer when he calls. He’s penned poems about birds and love and parenting; one to remember a couple’s first date, another for someone’s dog. He composed the piece ‘To Amy, Sitting Her Final Policing Exam’ for a future constable and Gospel for a woman he nicknamed ‘Agnostic Ana.’ ”

• The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is host to one of the biggest races in America, which means that its parking lot is, at least one day a year, a very good place to sell shit. And what shit it is, as John Paul Rollert discovered on his trip to the Indy 500: “Among the more ingenious entrepreneurs were Kyle and Scott, two men I discovered lugging enormous duffle-bags stuffed with homemade t-shirts. Kyle wore one featuring the disembodied heads of Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and an uninspired pun involving suck. Scott, however, wore the shirt that elicited endless commentary from all who passed. It read simply: DONALD FUCKIN’ TRUMP. With its ambiguous modifier—does it mark enthusiasm, amazement, horror?—the shirt was a hot item among race fans, which was a good thing for the itinerant salesman, as between the two shirts, they had 2,700 to sell. While Kyle attended a car-full of boys trying to resolve whether to buy one shirt for $20 or take the two-fer deal at $35, I asked Scott why he thought people were so drawn to the shirts. He shrugged. ‘They like cuss words,’ he said.”

• In which The New Yorker’s present editor boasts of his predecessor’s predecessor’s predecessor, some guy named William Shawn: “Shawn sent a memo to Matthew Josephson telling him that his profile of William Knudsen, a leader of the automobile industry, was ‘a stunning piece of historical reporting.’ Then he wrote that he was appending ‘a few questions.’ There were 178 … J. D. Salinger called him ‘the most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors.’ Beneath the modesty, however, was a steely tactical will. Harold Brodkey suggested that Shawn combined the qualities of Napoléon Bonaparte and Saint Francis of Assisi.”

• In which Karan Mahajan comes to America and learns that we all pretend to be bosom buddies for no apparent reason: “American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won’t violate one another’s privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other’s backgrounds. The opposite is true of Indians. At least three people I’ve sat next to on planes to and from India have asked me, within minutes, how much I earn as a writer (only to turn away in disappointment when I tell them). In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship; in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.”

• Twitter deletes inactive accounts after a certain period of time, which means that Prince, David Bowie, and other recently deceased celebrity users will have their tweets vanished forever. Sonia Weiser asks: “Should famous artists’ social-media profiles be saved? Archiving their digital materials would follow the tradition of old-school paper archives, the ones that are responsible for maintaining collections like hundreds of Emily Dickinson’s letters, notes from Mary Shelley that show her succumbing to a brain tumor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s working drafts and photographs. If journals, sketchbooks, letters, and scribbled-on napkins are venerated and kept for insights into great minds, there seems to be a case that tweets should be held onto, too … Archivists now have the challenge of working through the kinks of determining digital material’s place among artists’ greater estates and settling on a feed’s value.”