Showtime has stopped its adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity. Taffy Brodesser-Akner talks to him about birds, why people dislike him, what’s next, and his Toyota Camry. “‘Camry is a good car,’ he said. Camry is his first-ever new car. He’d been wary of getting a hybrid because as a young man, he learned to tinker with cars, and a hybrid scared him for the lack of understandable machinery beneath the hood; it’s just a black box, really. But cars have changed so much in recent decades that any new one is unrecognizable to him under the hood anyway.”

William H. Pritchard on Donald Hall’s “mischievous warmth.”