• The Believer: The Washington Post profiles Dave Eggers and his muse, Sudanese "lost boy" Valentino Achak Deng about their biography-as-novel, What Is the What. As unlikely as it sounds, the two were brought together by a nonprofit organizer who bought Eggers's memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in an airport because, "The title was just hilarious." Read a sample of an earlier version here.

• Who let dad on the computer?: Slate (and the Washington Post's) Michael Kinsley checked out the Internet over the long weekend and discovered that "The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals." (In other words, it's all about me.) To prove his old-school bona fides, the Slate founder calls back to this New Yorker cartoon from July 1993, six months after the launch of NCSA's Mosaic Web Browser.

• Source watch: The Supreme Court is allowing Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a federal prosecutor in Chicago, to proceed with an investigation into two New York Times reporters' phone records. Judith Miller and Philip Shenon reported on Islamic charities in the U.S.