I tried uniformly applying a variety of “systems” — note cards, wall-sized outlines, all kinds of things. Color-coding and cross-referencing may or may not have been involved. I may or may not own a triple hole-punch. Ultimately, though, I felt I was spending more time playing reporter/writer than being reporter/writer—the systems search, I realized, was a form of procrastination. Here’s what I do now, and it’s very basic: Bring the scraps back to the nest, arrange them chronologically, develop a timeline that shows everything more clearly, and then build out from there, hewing to that backbone yet following each thread to its known end. That’s just an organizing principle, [...]

Oh, just announced: there is going to be a book stemming from our longest-running feature, Dave Bry's Public Apology! Grand Central, the fun group at Hachette, will be publishing. Soon you can feel all the shame, awkwardness and hilarity in one convenient place.

Lil Wayne was released from Rikers Island this morning. He'll now head to Las Vegas, where he'll apparently join his protege Drake on stage Saturday night, and then to Miami, for the traditional welcome home party at a strip club Sunday night. According to Mack Maine, another rapper on Wayne's Young Money label, the crew plans to "just treat him like a king, like the royalty that he is and make him feel like we really missed him and welcome him back to the family, basically."