Sam Lipsyte, the author of Home Land, whose new book is The Ask, and Ceridwen Morris, whose latest is From the Hips, were interviewed by Emily Gould. Cooking the Books is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier!

At last glance, 284 of you had signed up for our inexplicable March Madness bracketpalooza. Tipoff for the tournament proper-play-in game MY ASS-occurs at 12:20, so if you’re one of those procrastinatory types who figures, “Oh, I’ll get to it eventually,” you should get to it now. We’d hate for you to be left out of all the, I don’t know, fun? Yeah, let’s go with fun. Anyway, do it up!

Good FUCKING Lord. I just spent the better part of two hours removing some dickserrating virus from my poor computer. You can IMAGINE how pleased I am right now. It was some sort of pox on humanity called Antivirus which installs itself through Adobe or something and requires an intensive series of maneuvers to remove, none of which I’m remotely qualified to perform. And let’s not even mention the shame of infection. (Yes, here is where you Mac people can laugh at me. I am happy for you that your shiny, expensive machines are so rare that evil people will not even bother creating viruses for them.) Anyway, I need your help.

This computer (I call him ‘Putey) is OLD. Like, seriously ancient. I’ve had it since before I was at Gawker, which was a million years ago. It’s filthy, it runs extremely slowly, if you have more than two applications going at a time it wheezes and grunts like an old man trying to get up from a park bench, etc. But I love it, and cannot yet bear to part with it, particularly since I lack the funds to procure a replacement. I repeatedly and naively assure myself that soon there will be money and I will purchase a new, lightning-fast machine which tells me how great I am and automatically searches for bear videos without prompting. Until that day comes, however, it’s me and ‘Putey, tapping out words like we have done since time immemorial. So I have a question: What anti-virus protection do you use?

Bear in mind that I am not prone to viruses. This is actually the first one I’ve ever really been affected by, and for a man who watches as many Estonian fellatio videos as I do (I’m sorry if you are offended on behalf of your own ethnicity, but trust me, no one does it better than the talented Tallinnese) that’s pretty remarkable. More importantly, bear in mind that I am POOR, and if I’m going to get a new computer soon anyway (please God please God please) I’d prefer to use something that is priced competitively, i.e. free. I just downloaded Spybot, which seems to have cured me of the testicle-crushing affliction that caused this morning’s problems, but if you know of something better, I’m all ears. Or, to put it in regular blogese, What do you think about free virus protection software? Tell us in the comments!

“Bernard Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence in North Carolina for running a fraud scheme that cost investors billions of dollars, was physically assaulted by another inmate in December, according to three people familiar with the matter…. The former inmate said the dispute centered on money the assailant thought he was owed by Mr. Madoff…. Mr. Madoff spends free time in the prison library on the weekends and often watches movies, including ‘Lethal Weapon,’ according to the former inmate. He said he chatted with the admitted Ponzi schemer on Saturdays in the library and asked for financial advice: ‘He gave me ideas on my index funds.’ Mr. Madoff advised him to diversify.”

There have been four reports of possible mountain lion sightings in densely populated central New Jersey over the past week. People are alarmed. Helicopters have been on the hunt. A motion-sensitive camera has been trained on a deer carcass set up in the woods as bait. Police are skeptical. Mountain lions have been extinct in the Northeast nearly a century. “We’re not out chasing a mountain lion nor do we believe there is a mountain lion,” said Manalapan police captain Chris Marsala. But I don’t think this is about a curly-haired student filming himself masturbating in classrooms at Brookdale Community College.

Choire Sicha: Dear Paul Ford: Why did you quit Harper’s this week?

Paul Ford: I am leaving to pursue other opportunities. Not a euphemism! I’m working primarily with Activate, which is the amazing new-media/technology convergence consulting micro-megacorporation that sprung fully formed from the heads of Anil Dash and Michael Wolf, and also with Predicate, which is a powerhouse content strategy consultancy operated by Jeffrey MacIntyre. Both are working with me so that I can mention them in the Awl, so now I can invoice.

I’ve been at Harper’s for five years. It’s very weird to be outside. Everyone has MacBooks. People use nouns as verbs. Someone wrote that they were going to f/u with me the other day, which concerned me, and someone else said that they looked forward to calendaring a meeting. Can I learn this strange new bird-language? I don’t know. I’m planning to ride my bike to Newark soon, outside of bedbug range, and hit up the thrift stores so that I can have some emergency suits. Let’s hope someone with size-54 shoulders recently died. Also I want to start my blog up again. The most important thing any person can do in this world is get back to their blog. In my opinion.

Choire: Are rats sinking a deserted ship? [Jennifer Szalai, a senior editor, who handled reviews, also quit this week.] No wait, you know what I mean.

Paul: The rats are smoking a little too much, trying to figure out how why they can’t get the layout to work in InDesign. Some rats are going, most rats are staying. Like everywhere. Here are some fun rat facts: NYC’s vaudeville union was called the White Rats. I once wrote something about ratproofing my apartment: The most common rat name is Slim. Rats can legally vote in Louisiana.

Choire: Are you a rat? Or will you be “consulting” with your former employer?

Paul: You think I don’t see your little insinuating quote marks? I’m still an editor, dammit. You can’t slip things like that past me! I will not be “’consulting’,” I will be CONSULTING.

This has been very amiable and kind of sad for everyone involved, except for the people who have secretly hated me for years. I plan to pop back in before too long and finish up the re-code of the site in Django and make it easier for editors to work on the site through a web interface, and basically make everything go okay. I’ll have a relationship of some kind with the magazine until I’m an old web coot telling young people about how we edited our HTML by hand rather than having our digital sex pony avatars do it for us in our Farmbooks. Which is basically me now talking to anyone younger than 27.

You know what happened, really and without irony? I had an opportunity to be an editor at Harper’s, to edit pieces for the magazine. It was something I expected to really want. I had wonderful editors to learn from. I did a little of it for print and a lot for the web. I wasn’t bad at it, even. Not great, but not bad. I could have been a respected editor instead of a huge nerd. But all the editing in the world can’t compare to building little websites and mangling text and writing things and messing around in spreadsheets and figuring out what’s wrong with comments. I wake up thinking about how all the pieces fit together and I want to do more of it and with lots of people. I plan to be scared and exhausted most of the time. So far that’s working.

Choire: What is your favorite Alex Chilton video, song or tale?

Paul: My favorite tale is from Our Band Could Be Your Life, when he shut down Gibby Haynes’s rampage through the Netherlands:

Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. “BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!! [Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers] screamed, eyes flashing in delirious anticpation of forthcoming violence. But the man was totally unfazed.

“I’m Alex Chilton,” the man answered calmly.

Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and gestured at them as if to say, “Take anything you want.”

How was your St. Patrick’s Day? “Police say two bank robbery suspects, including one dressed in a green leprechaun costume, have been shot dead after a St. Patrick’s Day chase and shootout with police in Tennessee.”

Brandon Holley “once dispatched what she calls ‘crazy photographers and insane stylists’ to Aruba and commissioned lengthy articles from investigative journalists. Now, she spends much of her time trying to figure out ways to get Shine’s visitors to contribute their own unvarnished thoughts on the site by blogging and posting reader comments.” So clearly it’s not just the editors-in-chief who lost their jobs; dozens or hundreds went down with each one as well. But the former editors, transformed to work-at-home slipper-wearers, they sure do make a better story pitch at a newspaper.

I do not know why there are like 222 entries in our Awl NCAA bracket-fest. I THOUGHT YOU WERE ALL HOMOS? This sort of maybe changes in my mind what I should be covering here? Like, less Tom Ford, more Tom Petty? (Or sure, Tom Brady, obvs.) So: LESS TINA BROWN, MORE TIKI BARBER MAYBE?

Recently, in New York City, a woman lost one of the diamond stones from her betrothal ring. It measured 4 carats. “I wake up in cold sweats dreaming that I’m going to lose my ring — and the funny thing is, I did,” she told a local paper about the status symbol. Funny thing! The shiny stone, a symbol of her worth, was later found, however, by a watchful man. Now she can retire to privacy of her home, ring intact.