News Wrapped in Overlapping Circles

By Andy — 2026-10-17 — Literary News

The news doesn't slow down. It just piles up.

Simple overlapping circles that somehow capture what's happening in books and culture better than a thousand earnest paragraphs.

This week's batch connects Anne Carson to humor. Kelly Clarkson to something about voice memos being fun—a detail that lands because it's so specific, something you'd never think to diagram until you see it. The Nobel Prize circles back to Sally Rooney. Texting lives there too. And then there's the White House, which in 2026 apparently has literary news attached to it.

One diagram had to be rewritten at the last second.

That's the real story, honestly. The news moves so fast that a joke assembled on Tuesday is obsolete by Wednesday evening. Folta doesn't complain about it—he just notes it like someone describing the weather. The pieces shift. You adjust. Move on.

It's a format that works because it doesn't pretend to be comprehensive. A Venn diagram can't hold everything, and Folta doesn't try. He captures the intersections—the places where literary culture and whatever else is happening collide or overlap or sit awkwardly beside each other. That's all the news ever really is anyway, more or less. Things happening, some of them connected, most of them not.

For a reader drowning in the week's literary headlines, diagrams feel kinder than analysis.

Source: "James Folta is a writer and the managing editor of Points in Case. He co-writes the weekly Newsletter of Humorous Writing." —