In this week’s episode of the TED Radio Hour, Scott Fraser, Daniel Kahneman, and I talk about human memory.

I’m honored to have received two pieces of good news this month. I was awarded a 2013 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a finalist for the Livingston Award for national reporting, for my New Yorker piece “Utopian for Beginners.”

Subscribers to my Quarterly.co mailings should have received their latest package this week, a pair of “lying-down spectacles.” From my letter to subscribers:

The enclosed prism spectacles allow you to maintain your neck at a comfortable angle, while directing your eyes downward to the book in your hands. Sure, these glasses may be an outsized solution to one of life’s very minor annoyances, but that’s why I’ve grown so fond of them. We should embrace ridiculous solutions to life’s problems, if only because they make life less ordinary. At the very least, I think you will find that you will now be able to fall asleep while reading twice as fast.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been in the Congolese rainforest, almost completely incommunicado thanks to a finicky satellite phone. While I was away, my first ever segment for NPR’s Radiolab aired, as part of an episode devoted to the subject of speed.

It’s about one of the world’s longest running science experiments, underway at the University of Queensland in Australia since 1927.

If, after listening to the piece, you’re interested in becoming a “pitch drop junkie” yourself, you can do so here. The ninth drop is expected to fall sometime in the next year. Will you be watching live?

Each week the Daily Beast interviews a different author about his or her writing habits, for a series called “How I Write.” I talked about my favorite underwear, superstitions, and my morning routine. A couple answers below.

Describe your writing routine, including any unusual rituals associated with the writing process, if you have them.

I have a woodshop in my garage. If I’ve made good progress in the morning, I’ll reward myself by going out back to spend an hour making sawdust, before returning to work for the afternoon. Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood. If you can’t envision the entire journey that a plank of wood will take on its way to becoming something finished, you will make uncorrectable mistakes. With writing, each step of creation justifies the one that comes before. With woodworking, each step has to justify the one that comes after. On a good day, I’ve had a chance to exercise both kinds of reasoning.

Tell us a funny story related to a book tour or book event.

I was standing by the door, about to go on stage at Elliott Bay in Seattle, when a young couple got out of their seats and frantically rushed out past me. On her way out the door, the woman whispered to me, “Sorry, you lost out to Sacks.” I thought to myself, “Yeah, no hard feelings, if Oliver Sacks were in town, I’d probably choose to see him over me, too.” But, as I was walking up to the podium, it suddenly hit me. It wasn’t Sacks I’d lost out to. That’s the wonderful thing about Seattle: in New York, a horny couple would never have the common courtesy to explain to you why they were leaving your book reading.

Read the rest of the interview at the Daily Beast.