Adam Mansbach

If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.

Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.

One of the pleasures of getting older and making a living the way you want to is that your social circle becomes rarified, and the people who enter have been vetted.

My daughter is a very adventurous eater. I'm not the guy who sits around lamenting that all my kid will eat it is Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. With my kid, it's more a capricious and whimsical decision-making.

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.

I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.

The goal has been not to get pigeonholed. I like working in different genres. I'm gonna try to be entertaining and funny and do my usual thing.

Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor... I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.

To be a white kid into hip-hop meant you'd sought it out and you practiced the art. Which meant dedication and diligence, as well as removing yourself at least occasionally from your own comfort zone and circumstances, and from people who looked like you.

Look closely, and you can see where the grooves of a record widen, indicating a sparseness that can only be a bass solo, or grow denser to accommodate a cresting density of sound.

Sometimes, it's best to let the kids take control - and it's never too early to instill positive eating habits or self-confidence in the kitchen.