Cafes

What's next for Subway, now that it's surpassed McDonald's and Starbucks in store locations? According to Nation's Restaurant News, it's tackling the ever-popular café culture. Meet the chain's new Subway Cafés: slightly larger outlets designed to be a cross between a sandwich store and a coffee bar, with baked goods, hot and cold espresso drinks, and frozen blended beverages, among other offerings.

The decor, which might include coffee tables, lounge chairs, bookshelves, and a fireplace, mimics the cozy coffeehouse ambiance of — you guessed it — a McCafé or a Starbucks. In addition to his aggressive growth strategy of opening 2,000 new North American locations in 2011, President Fred DeLuca will also add about 10 more Subway Cafés to the franchise's current roster of 15 by the end of this year.

What do you think of the concept? Will tonier seating arrangements make you want to eat at Subway more often?

In the past, the writer's life was often a lush life. Many great American novelists — including Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever — were notorious drunks. In fact, according to an article by Tom Shone in the new issue of More Intelligent Life, five of America's seven Nobel literary laureates were alcoholics:

In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalizations and electroshock therapies.

Rehab wasn't something people did back in the '30s. Neither was recovery-centric memoir writing. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story for Esquire chronicling his struggles, Hemingway told him to cast his "balls into the sea—if you have any balls left."

Ever since rehab went mainstream in the 1960s, Shone observes, the boozing writer stereotype is less typical. Both Cheever and Raymond Carver came out of rehab and kept writing; Stephen King got sober after an intervention. So where have all the overindulgent writers gone?