Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

FT defends London, one of the greatest cities in the world www.ft.com/content/dd79...

Belated professional news! Highly recommend joining a company right before Christmas party season, it's a surprisingly effective way to get to know people. www.nytco.com/press/new-hi...

It's a minor element to the Walliams stuff but I like to hope that this will finally put the kibosh on only commissioning children's books from celebrities because that's the best way to get them to sell but I doubt it will. It's a small coda to all this but that's one of my absolute pet hates.

Oh to be in the HarperCollins Slack right now

Every time there's a breaking story about a celeb's treatment of women, everyone in the book world asks, "Is it finally Walliams?" Well, it finally is.

Hard no to this: French publisher Harlequin has told translators that their work will now be done by AI. They can ‘revise’ AI translations at much lower rate. It’s a subsidiary of Harper Collins so treat this as a test for rollout elsewhere

Joy Williams and humanity's ultimate failure, by Neel Mukherjee

French publishing house Harlequin decided to use AI translation instead of human translations. All their freelance translators (some of whom had been working with Harlequin for +30y!!!) were told they would no longer receive work from Harlequin

It is, imo, outrageous that The Greatest Store in the World, the best kids Christmas film, is not on iPlayer. Will the BBC not embrace true British heritage?!

Good morning! This week's theme is Christmas 🎄🎅 ------ 'Rainy Camden Lock' by Jonathan Stewardson jonathanstewardson.com 👤: @jonathanstewardson.bsky.social

The Upper St Christmas lights are the nicest in London but no one tell the tour buses

Breaking News: Nick Reiner, Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner’s son, has been arrested after the couple were found stabbed to death on Sunday.

Devastating. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/m...

Absolutely devastated by the news about Rob Reiner. By all accounts a good man, and an incredible director. I wouldn't be who I am without his run of '80s classics - and his wife Michelle shaped those because their love story fundamentally changed When Harry Met Sally, for the better.

Choosing to focus, on hearing the news of Rob Reiner's passing, to remember this moment where he was so overcome with joy and laughter that he - the director of the movie - was one of many people banished from the set in order to finish filming.

Snow, Louis Macniece.

An active shooter alert was issued at Brown University, according to a post on the university’s website.

I post a carol a day every Advent. Here’s the entire list from the last five-and-a-half years. All killer, no stocking filler. You may get a kick out of it, perhaps. open.spotify.com/playlist/5sD...

I am about a year late to this but Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre is a beautiful piece of theatre. So clever in the way they stage plays within a play. And the stagecraft is remarkable.

Lol, has this man ever interacted with a single Gujarati

Finally a piece in the Times about the British Library! It echoes many of the points I raised a few weeks ago, including why policymakers and the media have paid so little attention to it www.thetimes.com/article/ff7a...

Those Winter Sundays, Robert Hayden

Elizabeth Bishop's 'All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful'

I've been up at 5am every Monday for the last three weeks to try and book a driving test for May. There are often 20k people in the queue ahead of me. Really cannot overstate how bad it is.

I'm seeing a lot of people cheerfully declare that the Netflix deal means CNN won't go to the Ellisons and....I'm really not sure that's what's happening. Reads more like Netflix wants the studio and streaming assets and CNN and other linear products will be spun off to another buyer.

Blathnaid Healy moving to publishing is a WILD loss to journalism but I am so excited to see where this goes www.thebookseller.com/news/eoin-pu...

I see a lot of polite debate about immigration to the UK that completely ignores the fact that some folks aren't upset about immigration levels today. No, they're furious about the existence of ethnic minority Brits.

I hope someone draws this wonderful story about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and the power of the arts to help us see things differently, to the attention of our Education Secretary. Do read it, it will lift your spirits.

At this point I'm assuming the latest Kiran Desai book is on every end of year books list www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/b...

I love that The New Yorker dedicated space to the serious reconsideration of this one poem (a beaut too) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

'There's a certain Slant of light', Emily Dickinson. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45723/...

Strikingly lovely, melancholy piece on growing up as a British Muslim and still becoming enchanted with Salman Rushdie's genius www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

This play. This passage. Simply the best ever – or at lesst most succinct – defence and justification for the very idea of Civilisation ever written. This is why we’re here. Because of what this means. And because someone can put it into words like this. open.substack.com/pub/benjamin...

A story Stoppard told several times, in several places:

I will read anything Capote wrote about his itinerant, lonely childhood and the moments of joy he found within it (thinly veiled as fiction) www.penguin.co.uk/discover/art...

London and environs - come along!

There are a few jobs going here at the NYT in London, so I'm threading these links for folks who are interested. It's a great place to work. Please pass these on to any journo friends you know. www.nytco.com/careers/job-...

Radhika Jones did some truly excellent work at Vanity Fair and I hope she gets another big, serious gig soon.

I could spend all day looking at this. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/b...

Intriguing look at the business (and the inconvenience) behind the impeccables homes you see in TV dramas www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/r...

If you want any of my books, including the upcoming new edition of John Cleland's Fanny Hill with an intro by me and a conversation between Stoya and me, now's an excellent time to shop because @unnamedpress.bsky.social is offering a sweet holiday deal.

. . . from his ‘A Garage in Co. Cork’:

My feed is a mix of Americans up late and reading Lizza and Brits waking up early to watch the cricket. I have realised that my true tribe is somehow in the overlap.

Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) has won the National Book Award for Fiction! Read more here: buff.ly/bRP0dCT

Re that Vanity Fair piece.... a lot of writers think Joan Didion was successful because of the images in her work (the yellow silk hanging from the windows, the smell of jasmine) and the famous photos of the Corvette. But Didion writes with unsparing precision and her work has a brutal streak.

Did not realise that the folks at St. John had taken over the old LRB cake shop but I'm so pleased that they did

Yup it is.

'Spring and Fall' by Gerard Manley Hopkins