Though others might have sensed madness, a naive Conan O'Brien put his trust in Lipton and agreed to be the subject of an Actors Studio episode that slowly morphed into an interminable audience hostage situation, says a TV Squad member in attendance. Apparently, Lipton's interviewing skills employed both zero preparation and an absolute, comprehensive interrogation technique that would rival a Scientology audit:

"What is your mother's name?" "What is the name of the primary school you attended?" "What did your father do for a living?" These are only a few of the questions that led Conan to crack, "I feel like I'm applying for a credit card." [...]

Maybe it was the fact that Lipton totally has a mancrush on O'Brien that made this interview the longest thing ever. After the first hour, we were just getting to Conan's experiences at Harvard. Around hour two, O'Brien started making desperate jokes about hiding the rest of Lipton's cards. Around hour three, he finished his pitcher of water and downed an entire glass from Lipton's.

It was nearly midnight when Lipton got to his last blue card, and it was actually a little disappointing for me. After spending a good chunk of time talking about and showing clips from Lipton's appearances on Late Night, get got to the juicy stuff: namely Conan's planned takeover of The Tonight Show next year. Conan has been noticeably quiet about the subject, and I was hoping for some dirt. Unfortunately, we didn't get anything more than him saying he was excited and nervous—and that they'd fly Lipton out to L.A. so he could still be on the show.

All in all, when the nearly 4 hour interview was finished, everyone felt drained. Even Conan seemed to be glad it was over.

Sadly, things soon turned grim when Lipton pushed his luck and advanced a Proust questionnaire in overtime. A desperate O'Brien turned the tables by flinging himself on the man, choking him around the neck, and screaming, "If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Because you're almost there, you obsequious pimp!"

• James Lipton holds Conan O'Brien and hundreds of others hostage [TV Squad]

Quite the opposite, said Radcliffe, who explained that it would at least add some inches to his much-scrutinized manhood. Take heart, Dan — at least that shrinkage brings you ever closer to your long-held dream of playing Hermione!

• Inside the Actors Studio [Bravo]

Today we got a glimpse of the comic delivering the episode's customary windy introduction, which comes as close as we've been to a Chappelle performance in years — properly reverential of Lipton's mile-long resume (even the "literary perennial An Exaltation of Larks," a title no one can read with a straight face) while dropping random bursts of profanity and invective when necessary. The only thing that likely would have improved this would have been a Chappelle-esque three-hour wait for Lipton's arrival, followed by a chain-smoking binge of payback from their last tilt in 2005. Or maybe that comes later in the episode. Either way, congrats, Jim! [Bravo]

I made myself a promise that I would not begin this book with the first-person singular pronoun I... and I've already broken that promise four times—five if you count the pronoun myself, which the Oxford American Dictionary defines as "corresponding to I and me." An unpromising sign.

April may be the cruelest month to Eliot, but to me it's the kindest, with the portents of spring, which is crammed with beginnings. Of holidays, I enjoy Memorial Day because it officially begins the pleasant summer season, and dislike Labor Day because it ends it. Thanksgiving is welcome because it begins the Christmas season, of which I confess to being inordinately fond and I'm resistant to the compulsory joy of New Year's Eve, because it ends it.

This affection for beginnings has had a predictable effect on my preferences. Though I should know better than to invite comparison with my betters as I begin my own literary effort, I confess to unbridled admiration for the blunt simplicity of "Call me Ishmael"; the instant dramatic engagement of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"; the authorial certainty of "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way": the ringing challenge of Donne's "Go and catch a falling star/Get with child a mandrake root": the quiet fury of Yeats's "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon can not hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold": the stately opening chords of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, which greet us not with the C-major tonic but with a submediant A minor chord, as if the boat had left the dock without us, and we had no choice but to jump in and swim after it....

I've been a Diana Ross fan since I can remember and Jim has known Ross for longer. His "Inside the Actors Studio" with the singer was a triumph; I figured when I asked someone on his staff to get me tickets that they would actually come from someone on his staff and not the man himself.

He, naturally, scored such fantastic seats and when the first strains of "I'm Coming Out" wafted from the stage, we got the sense that the concert was just being performed for us.

For those of you who missed that episode of Actors Studio, a helpful YouTubian has edited down the installment to just the parts involving Ross cackling like a crazy lady, with patient viewers also rewarded with a context-irrelevant anecdote about the time the former Supremes frontwoman walked down a public street with some citrus squeezed between her thighs. Andy's vital prose renders such background research inessential, however, making us feel as though we were right there, grooving along with Lipton and the boys as the opening notes of "Muscles" reduced the steely-eyed administrator of the Bernard Pivot questionnaire into a weeping, pigtailed, preteen girl.

• Diana Ross and James Lipton [BravoTV.com]