Never write for free. As a five-year-old child in Russia, Gary Shteyngart was paid in cheese while writing the novel Lenin and His Magical Goose. His grandmother would give him a slice of cheese for each chapter he completed, and he’s been compensated for his work ever since. It was onstage at Kahn Auditorium that the author of the memoir Little Failure and the novels Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan woefully told the crowd that Random House insists paying him with cold, hard cash. If only he could return to a simpler time. —Brianna Wellen

There are four new two-letter words in the 2014 edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary:”te,” “da,” “gi,” and “po.” None of those appear in Stephin Merritt’s book 101 Two-Letter Words, but he didn’t sound terribly worried about the omission at “Words With Friends,” a conversation with the Magnetic Fields front man led by Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! host Peter Sagal. For each word, Merritt wrote one four-line poem—all of them illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast—and he included a lot of mnemonics for jogging the memories of stumped players of Scrabble and Words With Friends, for whom he wrote the book. Allowing his I’m-awkward-deal-with-it persona to really shine, Merritt told a story about divulging at a party that the most embarrassing dream he ever had involved raping a 12-year-old boy against a wall while wearing a sari. At a bit of a loss, Sagal responded, appropriately enough, with a two-letter word: “So . . . “ —Gwynedd Stuart

folks in the humanities need to do a better job of talking up the value of what they teach, said Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, who sat down to converse with former Brown University president Ruth Simmons about “The Future of Higher Ed.” Roth found ample occasion to refer to his own new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, which surveys what Benjamin Franklin and an array of other thinkers throughout history have had to say on the subject. Turns out criticism of higher education is nothing new, and neither Roth nor Simmons are buying into the most dire current predictions for it. Simmons, who overcame poverty and discrimination to become the first black president of an Ivy League school, says the public should “get real” about costs and be willing to spend on “education rather than consumption.” “Nobody’s complaining,” she said, “about the cost of automobiles.” —Deanna Isaacs