From the Sunday New York Times, which I read on my Kindle this week, and am thoroughly enjoying:

Puzzle-solving may be unproductive “in that Calvinist, get-in-the-crops sort of way,” but that’s part of the appeal. “There is, I think, something decadent about flaunting our mortality that way; about saying, by implication, look at me, I believe I have so much time on earth that I’m going to spend the next hour doing the acrostic in the Sunday Times Magazine. But what would be the point of a pleasure that wasn’t a little bit decadent?”

via Up Front – Michael Cunningham – NYTimes.com.