The moment I saw this, my first thought was: Why would a guy like Danny Ocean be in East Haven, Connecticut? And why does the shot of him leaving the bank and strolling through the center of town, then dumping his flowers into the trash so he can rush back to his wife, Tess, show a quaint, charming, subtly-decorated New England town which bears no resemblance to East Haven, Connecticut? He’s not in any East Haven I’ve ever seen; he’s in Guilford. He’s in Litchfield. He’s somewhere in Connecticut, sure -- but it sure as hell isn’t East Haven.
I've discussed this with people who are more capable of nuanced thought than I. My original theory was, "Whoever wrote the movie (George Nolfi) thinks that all of Connecticut is like Westport, and has no idea that East Haven is just this blue collar town where rich people do not go to retire, where art curators are not going to redecorate their beach house and quibble with the housepainters about how much brown to add to the white paint." That it was a mistake borne out of ignorance of the true cultural geography of Connecticut.

But a cooler head suggests that perhaps the explanation is more complicated but also more mundane: that the screenwriter knew what he was doing when he wrote "East Haven, Connecticut," but that the director (Steven Soderbergh) didn't know what was envisioned by Nolfi when he went to film, and so, that segment of the movie wound up being the stereotypical "Connecticut" that people are used to in Hollywood product (with the exception of Mystic Pizza, which does a pretty good job of depicting working class life in Mystic -- at least, it LOOKS like Mystic, and not Westport. Or Guilford). The cooler head suggests that perhaps a town like East Haven would actually be an excellent place for Danny Ocean to hide out: claiming he’s a retired high school basketball coach, he’d have a chance to just blend into the community.

But here's what I'm having fun thinking about now: how lots of people who watch that movie from now on will see that little line of text -- East Haven, Connecticut -- and it's gonna mean something different now because of this hullabaloo with the mayor and tacos and the cops who've been harassing the Latinos who've been making East Haven their homes for the last 20 odd years.

When you factor in Ocean’s pseudonym, which he takes on to blend in to the charming little community of East Haven, is Diaz, the whole thing just becomes more comical. Wrong ethnic group to pick, it seems, if you're trying to sketch a character who's just trying to blend in. But maybe someone knew this would be a problem. When Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) asks Ocean, “How’s East Haven?” Ocean doesn’t skip a beat. “Sucks,” he says. So perhaps the screenwriter knew something about the real East Haven after all?

I am a sucker for bloopers -- you know, the gag reels they tack onto DVDs as “extras” off the main menu -- and it seems to me that more than ever, those opening scenes of “Ocean’s Twelve” are just one giant blooper. Mr. and Mrs. Diaz, you really picked the wrong place to go if you were trying to escape the attention of local police. Fortunately, in your cases, though, it was just a movie.

In 2002 I was given a membership as a gift, and it changed my life. A few years after that, I joined the board of the Library, and my life changed again -- I gained a mission. I am an evangelist for the Institute Library.

At a dinner party in the fall of 2008 I met Will Baker, a local bookman. Our casual conversation about bookselling led me to ask him if he ever went to the Institute Library. He hadn't heard of it. I said, "Oh, you need go -- let me take you some day on your lunch break."

I took Will to see the Library the following week, as I recall, and it was, I gather, love at first sight. Shortly after that, Will left his position at the William Reese Company and enrolled in a library science program, a move that I found slightly confounding, but also understood: he had a mission, too. For various school assignments, Will threw himself into projects relating to or benefitting the Library. He built its first website -- a lovely, elegant little thing -- and conducted a survey of its members which was full of information that was interesting, surprising, and valuable -- and which would never have been undertaken by anyone on the Library's staff or board. The scale of effort Will put into these projects was simply beyond any one of us: these were labors of love, not merely assignments done to fulfill a degree requirement.

In January of 2011, the Board voted to install William C. Baker as the first Executive Director of the Young Men's Institute Library. A superior bookman -- by which I mean widely read, knowledgeable, and seemingly a Hoover for all information book-related -- Will moved to New Haven a few years ago and has thrown himself into becoming one of those social-lightning-rod types you read about in Malcolm Gladwell essays. I had heard of Will, myself, for years before I actually met him. On becoming acquainted with him, I learned that we knew at least a dozen of the same people. He's done volunteer work for New Haven Reads and at Christ Church New Haven; he has talked at length with at least 75% of the people he's ever laid eyes on, as far as I can tell; if he were interested in political office, he'd be a force to watch, but as it is, he's a bookman, and so he's just.... amazing.

Some folks are whip smart, and some folks are genuinely nice, and some folks are energetic and full of interesting ideas, but very few people combine all of these qualities. Will combines all of these qualities and adds a lot more to the mix; fortunately for the Institute Library, he's directing his love and energy toward the Library now, officially and full-time. The Library's hours have expanded: it is now open not just ten hours a week, but six days a week (M-F, 10-6; Saturday, with volunteer staff, 10-3). With Will at the helm, the Library will be developing new programming; re-working acquisitions policies; and, frankly, God knows what else. The guy's got a list of plans longer than my arm.

I know it's been hard for people to appreciate the Library in recent years because its hours were so choppy and difficult to work with. But now, the hours are longer. The place is open and right in the middle of a very buzz-y neighborhood (Chapel Street near Church -- there's a lot happening there); and there's wireless internet. You can go up and browse the shelves of books and borrow a stack of obscure 1930s thrillers or you can just sit and read for a bit and then amble off on your way. Either way, you are welcome to come by. Membership to the Library is still a humble $25 per year (and can be purchased with plastic for the first time if you go to www.institutelibrary.org).

I fell in love with the Institute Library when I saw they had almost every old book by Patrick Dennis on the shelf. Just sitting there. Waiting for me. I imagine that people who read the New Haven Review would have some similar experience on first browsing the stacks. On first walking in. The Institute Library is a beautiful time machine; a librarian walked in, one recent Saturday, and said to me in wonder, "It's a museum of what a library used to be." And it is.... except it's not a museum. It's the real deal. An old-fashioned membership library.

I predict you can fall in love with it too, and then, knocked silly with joy, you can leave the library and go have freshly made square doughnuts at the Orangeside Luncheonette around the corner. Really, a near-perfect morning.

I scrolled through the list of current articles and noticed a piece by Caitlin Flanagan, and clicked on it eagerly. As I settled in to read it, fork in hand, I shook my head and asked "Why am I doing this to myself? It's just going to make me crazy." But I had to read it.

Caitlin Flanagan is on a mental list I have of writers who I read whenever I can, even though they make me crazy. I've got a little list of such writers. Half the time -- more than half the time -- what they write turns me into a raving loony, pissed about their lack of critical thinking, their shitty writing skills, or some other massive flaw in their work; and yet I read every word I can find by these people. Why is this? Why is this? Why do I do this to myself? It's a form of masochism, right? But why?

And am I the only person who does this?

Flanagan is a writer who seems to inspire this reaction in lots of people, so I can't be alone. I mean, she makes people crazy, but she's still earning a living as a writer. I don't think anyone disputes that she's entertaining; she's got lots of clever sentences, and she seldom sounds simply moronic. But nuanced thinking may not be her strong suit, shall we say. I read her and while I'm laughing at some zinger she's come up with, I often think, "Well, no, that's not really true." And I wind up frustrated with the piece as a whole, even as I agree with several points, or even the thrust of the article overall. Even if I think she's got a good idea, I inevitably feel it's not well argued (which is comical, coming from me, because I am probably the least lucid or organized thinker in my zip code). When someone like me thinks a piece isn't well thought out, you've got problems.

But this phenomenon of "I hate you/I love you/When's your next book coming out" happens to me with fiction writers as well. Over the years, based on my affection for one writer, I've been led to the works of other authors who I've been told, or who I suspect, will quench my never-to-be satisfied thirst for another book by my beloved (ok, it's Laurie Colwin, I admit it). So over time I have read numerous novels that I opened hopefully, but have left me just angry that I wasted my time. Books by Maemeve Medwed -- who are the people who really think these are great? Because I just can't get into them; novels by Cathleen Schine, who I ought to love, but who I just.... don't; Meghan Daum. Oh, Meghan Daum. Her first book of essays made me insane: it was so good, so good, and she was so likeable in so many ways, but I just wanted to smack her on the head and tell her to shape up. I approached her novel The Quality of Life Report with apprehension, knowing on the one hand that it would almost certainly suck, but positive that I would devour it in maybe one and a half sittings. I was right on the money. Why did I do this to myself? I could have been reading something I actually enjoyed; instead, I forced myself to read this novel that held no surprises, no phrase that stuck in my head forever after (not true with My Misspent Youth, a collection of pieces that rings in my head all the time). I received her book about house hunting for my birthday last year and was so excited to read it, even as I knew it would disappoint -- and my suspicions were fulfilled. I opened it immediately and couldn't stop reading but in the end I was left feeling like I hadn't read anything at all.

It's very frustrating.

There's a test I have, though, which is, Do you keep your copies of the books by these people, or do you get rid of them (or never even buy them in the first place, but just borrow them from the library).

Cathleen Schine, I've kept one novel (last year's The Three Weissmans of Westport). There are no Medwed books on my shelves.

I'm keeping all my Meghan Daum.

Why do I read writers whose works I know I won't like? It's not like I'm getting paid to read these things (usually). I keep hoping for the next Veronica Geng, Laurie Colwin, James Thurber, or Patrick Dennis. I'm not looking for cosmic enlightenment, folks; just some solid light entertainment. I guess I'll just have to let you know when I find it, and in the meantime, re-read some Betty MacDonald. She's good on a cold winter day.

So we made such a list. We asked ourselves, we asked our friends. There is nothing scientific about this list. They are in alphabetical order. Some are in fact over 40 years old, but not by much. There are more than 20 of them. We did not all agree on all of them; some of us have substantial conflicts of interest with some of them. We hope you will meet some people you had not heard of. We hope you will seek out their writing. (Nota bene: much of the research for this list was done by our fabulous intern, and rising literary star, Jeremy Lent.)

There are hyperlinks here, but you have to hunt for them with your little mousie. Make it a fun game.

• Rachel Aviv is a freelance journalist and is currently a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for mental health journalism with the Carter Center. She’s written for the New York Times about off-beat educational topics, such as the death of Braille and naked parties at elite American colleges. In one of her greatest piece, she wrote about Toastmasters for The Believer.

• Eula Biss teaches and writes at Northwestern University, and she is the founding editor of Essay Press, which publishes long-form essays. After college, Biss taught in the New York City public school system before beginning to write essays and books. Her collection of prose poems, The Balloonist, was published in 2002. Notes from No Man’s Land (2009) is a book of essays about race and racial identity in America, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• Tom Bissell (b. 1974) began writing after a bout of depression cut short his stint with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan. After his return, Bissell worked as an editor for Henry Holt before going on to write travel journalism and books. The Father of All Things (2007) is Bissell’s account of his father’s military tour in Vietnam and a recent father-son return trip to the country. In 2003, Bissell co-authored Speak, Commentary, a book of fake commentaries on science fiction films. (The supposed commentators include Noam Chomsky, Ann Coulter and Dick Cheney.) Most recently, Bissell wrote about his more sedentary pursuits in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010).

• Dan Chiasson has published three collections of poetry and has been the poetry editor for The Paris Review. In 2007, he published One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, a collection of essays on the pros and cons of autobiographical material in modern American poetry. He frequently reviews for The New York Review of Books. Chiasson teaches poetry workshops and courses on American poetry at Wellesley College.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates (b. 1975) is a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly, where he writes about politics, race and pop culture. He also writes a popular blog at TheAtlantic.com. Coates dropped out of college after a rough ride through the Baltimore public school system, but he was hired by Time in 2005. In 2009, Coates published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood about his father’s complicated role in his childhood.

• Joshua Cohen (b. 1980) is the author of six novels and story collections. Most recently, he published Witz (2010), a novel about an imagined future in which only one Jew remains alive on earth and yet Jewish culture is all the rage. Cohen also wrote A Heaven of Others (2008), a novel about the afterlife of a Jewish boy killed by a Palestinian child. Cohen also writes a regular column for Tablet Magazine about literature in translation. The majority of his personal webpage is written in Latin.

• John D’Agata’s (b.1974) most recent work is About a Mountain (2010), a book-length investigative piece about the U.S. government’s thwarted plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas. D’Agata also published Halls of Fame (2003), a collection of essays. The eponymous essay explores America’s nearly 3,000 halls of fame, including one dedicated to shuffleboard players. In 2009, D’Agata edited the anthology Origins of the Essay, which begins with prose selections from Sumerian and Akkadian writers in 1500 BCE, then approaches the modern era by way of Petrarch, Bacon, Swift and Woolf. D’Agata currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

• Jason Fagone (31 years old) is a freelance journalist living in Philadelphia. He writes about science, sports and culture for GQ, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Slate and other magazines. In February 2010, he published an investigative piece in GQ about a 2008 Philadelphia shooting, possibly perpetrated by former Colts wide receiver Marvin Harrison. As a result of Fagone’s reporting, the Philadelphia D.A. began reinvestigating the case. In 2006, Fagone published his first book, Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream, which chronicled his journeys to 27 eating contests.

• Keith Gessen (b. 1975) is one of the founding editors of n+1, a twice-yearly journal started in 2004 that publishes articles on politics, literature and culture. Gessen has also written book reviews for magazines like New York and Slate. Gessen was born in the USSR, and although his family moved to the U.S. when he was six, some of his writing has focused on Russia. That includes a 2004 article in Atlantic Monthly about the caretakers of Lenin’s tomb and a 2005 English translation of Voices From Chernobyl, an account of the nuclear disaster by the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. In 2008, Gessen published his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, a tale of three recent college graduates, each struggling to make a life as a writer.

• Joshua Glenn (who is 42!) is the cofounder of HiLobrow, where he describes himself as a “freelance writer, editor, and cultural semiotics analyst for international brands.” The blog has various contributors who write everything from fiction to posts about web technology and, of course, cultural semiotics. Glenn was an editor and columnist for the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section. In 2007, he co-edited the anthology Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance, a collection of first-person essays about favorite objects. In 2008, he co-wrote The Idler’s Glossary, a listing of the etymology of hundreds of words and phrases used to describe people in various states of not working.

• Chuck Klosterman (b. 1972) worked as a journalist in North Dakota and Ohio before moving to New York City in 2002. Since then, he’s written freelance articles for the New York Times Magazine, The Believer and Esquire, among other publications. Some of his freelance work focuses on sports: Klosterman contributes to ESPN.com’s Page 2, which published his week-long blog during the 2006 Super Bowl. Perhaps best known for his nonfiction books, Klosterman has published six books since 2001. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (2003) is a collection of humorous essays on such topics as MTV’s The Real World, Billy Joel and the computer game The Sims. In 2010, Klosterman released HYPERtheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations, a card game involving unusual conversation-starters. His greatest work remains his first, the memoir Fargo Rock City.

• Brendan Koerner is a contributing editor for Wired, where he writes the monthly “Mr. Know-It-All” column, responding to reader queries about 21st century ethical issues in technology, medicine, video gaming, etc. Koerner also writes feature articles for Wired, covering topics like the continuing enigma of Alcoholics Anonymous, a fungus that’s threatening crops across Africa and the Middle East and the possibility that Facebook and Twitter help their users be more productive. In 2008, Koerner published Now the Hell Will Start, a biography of an African American soldier in WWII sent to help build a supply road between India and China.

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus is an American-born writer who lives in Berlin. We have no idea how old he is, but we think he is young; he writes young, and we mean that in a good way. He has contributed articles to Village Voice, The Nation, and Harper’s, among other publications. In 2008, Lewis-Kraus wrote an article for Harper’s called “The Last Book Party: Publishing drinks to a life after death,” a first-person report from the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair and a consideration of publishing’s future. The piece spawned a lot of talk. And that was because the piece was very, very good. He wrote this too.

• Dayo Olopade is currently a political reporter for the online news site The Daily Beast. She began her professional writing career at The New Republic, where she covered the 2008 presidential primaries and election. Olopade is also a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation. Her fellowship duties include reporting on the effect of disruptive technologies on human development, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. In June 2010, Olopade published an article in Foreign Policy about Apple’s troubling non-presence in Nigeria and surrounding countries.

• David Orr is a writer and lawyer living in Ithaca, New York. During law school at Yale, Orr began writing about poetry for various publications. In 2008, he wrote the article “The Politics of Poetry” for The Poetry Foundation, in which he used a comment made at an Ohio rally for Hilary Clinton (“[Obama’s] a poet, not a fighter”) to discuss the misconception that politics and poetry don’t mix. He has the virtue of making people mad. Orr also writes the column “On Poetry” for The New York Times Book Review.

• David Samuels (b.1967) is older than 40, but we included him anyway. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s, where he’s written about such topics as Super Bowl XL, America’s nuclear-testing program and Woodstock 1999 (an attempted revival of the 1969 rock festival). He writes for a lot of other magazines. In 2008, Samuels published The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Imposter James Hogue, about a 28 year-old convicted thief who successfully passed himself off to Princeton admissions as a 16 year-old cowboy and self-taught orphan. At the same time, he published a collection of his work, Only Love Can Break Your Heart.

• Kelefa Sanneh has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2008. Prior to that, he was the pop-music critic for The New York Times, beginning in 2002. His article “The Rap Against Rockism,” which appeared in the Times in 2004, discusses a perhaps-ungrounded set of prejudices held by many “old school” rock fans. Sanneh’s New Yorker articles have included profiles of lesser-known pop-culture figures and a report on Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (led by embattled pastor Jeremiah Wright). Sanneh’s work has appeared in the yearly anthology Da Capo Best Music Writing in 2002, 2005 and 2007.

• Samantha Shapiro is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and has also written for Slate, Mother Jones, Wired, and others. Many of Shapiro’s articles deal with religion: for instance, an obituary of “Reverend Ike,” a New York preacher who spearheaded the “power of positive thinking” gospel; a 2006 speech by the outgoing chancellor of the New York Jewish Theological Seminary that ruffled many Jewish feathers; a first-person account of how her atheist-leaning nephew finally got bar-mitzvahed. Here is a recent piece.

• Jake Silverstein (b. 1975) was named editor of Texas Monthly in 2008. After college and graduate work in English, Silverstein moved to Marfa, Texas, and began writing for the Big Bend Sentinel. Then, he embarked on a freelance writing career, roaming Texas and Mexico in search of magazine stories. The details of that search are chronicled in Nothing Happened and Then It Did (2010), Silverstein’s first book. In 2007, Silverstein won the PEN/USA Journalism Award for a Harper’s article about a deathly automobile road race in Mexico.

• Lizzie Skurnick is a critic, poet, essayist, blogger and author. She regularly contributes book reviews to The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has published her poems in The Iowa Review and The New Haven Review (among others), and in 2005, she released a collection called Check-In. Since 2003, Skurnick has maintained the blog Old Hag, to which she posts book reviews and her thoughts about various literary and journalistic matters. And if that weren’t enough, Skurnick has published ten teen novels, including some in the Sweet Valley High series. She writes a weekly column about teen lit for Jezebel.com, and in 2009, she published Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

• Zadie Smith (b. 1975) is crazy famous, deserves to be, and soon will start writing the New Books column for Harper’s. If you only know her novels, check out her collection of essays.

• Touré (b. 1971) is a music writer, novelist and TV personality. Since 1997, he’s been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, where he’s published cover stories on such hip-hop artists as Alicia Keys, 50 Cent and Jay-Z. He has released two collections of his magazine writing, as well as Soul City (2004), a magical-realist novel about a mayoral election in an imagined utopia of African-American culture. Touré is also the host of two music programs on Fuse TV.

• Lindy West is the film editor for The Stranger, a weekly arts and culture newspaper in Seattle. She also makes a lot of noise online, both through her blog (posted on both TheStranger.com and Telegraph.co.uk) and on Twitter. On her blog, West’s bio says that she writes about “film, popular culture, lady stuff, animal attacks, and amusing garbage she finds on the ground.” Her film reviews are first-person, humorous and highly opinionated. She wrote this bit of awesomeness about Sex and the City 2. We have no idea how old she is.