Watermelon season has arrived, the sweetest time of year.

A politics expert explains that because three Secret Service agents got drunk in Amsterdam, President Obama now faces "the worst thing that can happen to a president": a negative narrative about his perceived competence. This may harm his ability to "improve his overall job approval numbers."

Writerly power-couple Tom Jenks (former fiction editor at Esquire, GQ and Scribner's), and novelist Carol Edgarian (Rise of the Euphrates), are profiled by the SF Chronicle about their literary-online magazine, Narrative. It has "selections from writer friends such as Jane Smiley, Tobias Wolff and Joyce Carol Oates;" its goal is "to connect more readers to more literary writers." It is literally subtitled "The Future of Reading." (The future of reading still involves Joyce Carol Oates and the Internet?) Sixty-five people volunteer for Narrative without pay, including big shots like Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon press, a poetry publisher. So why exactly is the future of literary writing online?