Hunched over my keyboard, I'm haunted by anecdotes of faster writers. Christopher Hitchens composing a Slate column in 20 minutes—after a chemo session, after a "full" dinner party, late on a Sunday night. The infamously productive Trollope, who used customized paper! "He had a note pad that had been indexed to indicate intervals of 250 words," William F. Buckley told the Paris Review. "He would force himself to write 250 words per 15 minutes. Now, if at the end of 15 minutes he hadn't reached one of those little marks on his page, he would write faster." Buckley himself was a legend of speed—writing a complete book review in crosstown cabs and the like...

The latest young pianist from China to excite classical music audiences and earn raves from critics is the 24-year-old Yuja Wang, a distinctive artist with a comprehensive technique. That Ms. Wang is already a musician of consequence was made clear this year when Deutsche Grammophon released her first recording with an orchestra: performances of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Second Piano Concerto with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The conductor is Claudio Abbado, no less, a towering maestro who is extremely discriminating in his choice of collaborators. Mr. Wang's virtuosity is stunning. But is that so unusual these days? Not really...

Ahead of Iowa's straw poll this weekend, eight GOP candidates attacked each other in the second debate of the primary season. Daily Beast contributors weigh in on the winners, the losers -- and the elephants who weren't in the room...

Down 600 points one day, up 400 points the next, down another 500 points a day later, then up another 400 points the day after that — yes, the Dow Jones industrial average is back in the news. Charles Dowdevised the index in 1896 to give investors a snapshot of the performance of big manufacturing stocks (and of the U.S. economy) each day. The Dow still has an antique feel to it, but as a metaphor for the stock market, it remains unsurpassed: endlessly cited, parsed, followed, predicted — and misunderstood...

This will read like a confession: John Chambers, the chairman of Standard and Poor's sovereign debt committee, which downgraded the nation's credit rating—pitching global markets into panic and roiling the political battle in Washington—has been my friend for many years. We were classmates at Grinnell College, in Iowa, in the 1970s, both English majors—hyperstimulated juveniles competitively wringing obscure meanings out of Chaucer and Eliot and then bruising one another in debates carried over from the classroom to the student union...

The Library of Congress will announce on Wednesday that Philip Levine, best known for his big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit, is to be the next poet laureate, succeeding W. S. Merwin. He was selected from a long list of nominees by James Billington, the librarian of Congress, who said on Monday, “I find him an extraordinary discovery because he introduced me to a whole new world I hadn’t connected to in poetry before.”...

The Ames Straw Poll is a delightful fraud, an amiable hoax, that most people in Iowa don’t care about, but the national media eat up because the event seems so charmingly “Iowan.”

To its credit, there is no man behind the curtain. Its fraudulence is open and above board: It is organized bribery on a grand scale...

Here’s one possible narrative of how and why Monday’s Dow Jones industrial average went on a harrowing toboggan ride into a tree: The market was still freaked out over Friday’s S&P downgrade, which in turn was influenced by the refusal of congressional Republicans to consider even the teensiest of tax hikes in the debt-ceiling sweepstakes—which in turn was the absolute edict of a powerful yet unelected Washington operative who chirpily answers his cell phone: “Grover G. Norquist!”...

In mid-January, newly installed as the GOP House majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor rose to the podium inside a spacious hotel ballroom to deliver a message to his troops, including the 87 newcomers who had given the party control of the House....

Del Casher has done a lot of impressive things with his guitar over the last 50 years. He has performed with Gene Autry, Lawrence Welk, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He’s appeared, strumming, in movies with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. He’s been a featured player on dozens of film and TV soundtracks. But there is one accomplishment that Mr. Casher, now 73, wishes more people knew about: his role in the invention of the wah-wah pedal...