The New Yorker Festival is coming up! It's Lollapalooza for the urban intelligentsia. Tickets go on sale today at noon, and if you don't buy them immediately then forget seeing the good stuff. A guide to the good stuff, below.

Friday, October 16

"Paired readings" with New Yorker writers. It has a wine-snob connotation that will go over well! At 7, try Daniyal Mueenuddin and Salman Rushdie. At 9:30, Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead. Count the stereotypical Brooklyn writer types in the crowd and report back to us!

Or better yet, skip both those things and go see Roger Angell, Adam Gopnik, Ariel Levy, Mark Singer, and Judith Thurman standing up on a stage and telling "stories about life at the magazine." Narcissistically alluring! I hope Roger Angell tells the one about when an argument over the literary merits of baseball vs. boxing led him into a fistfight with AJ Liebling, after which Angell ended up in the hospital with irreversible brain damage. Or did we just make that up? Show up and find out!

Saturday, October 16

At 10 a.m., Ariel Levy interviews Rachel Maddow. That is brutally early, so it better be good and full of bawdy discussion of lesbianism. Also at 10: A panel featuring our favorite human calculator Nate Silver, and another one about advertising featuring Steve Stoute. If you guys got together I bet you could make some money.

At 1 p.m., Malcolm Gladwell gives a talk on "The Curious Case of Michael Vick." In fact there was nothing curious about his case at all. Sounds unbearable(-ly intriguing! Send us a report of the five biggest Gladwellian leaps of credulity.)

At 4, an interview of Tyler Perry. How does he come up with so many similar characters? Ask him!

Go have dinner, then at 10 p.m. the theater nerds can go see Tilda Swinton talk to Hilton Als, and the music nerds can go see Steve Earle, and the real music nerds can just follow Sasha Frere-Jones from event to event all day, glancing at him bashfully from beneath their iPods.

Sunday, October 17

Foodies can walk around with Calvin Trillin and eat dim sum. Highbrow alcoholics go drink beer at noon with Burkhard Bilger who btw picks like the best story topics of anyone. There's a whole slew of New Yorker writers talking about themselves and their work. Take your pick. (I bet they love this shit. Can we get a festival, over here? Unfair and classist.)

Noon: Photography with Platon. Fashiony!

At 4 p.m. they close things out with "Shouts & Murmurs Live," featuring Woody Allen, Simon Rich, George Saunders, and a host of other people who—we're guessing—are funny writers but are not, in fact, master stand-up comedians. Skip this and go see whatever's happening at Upright Citizens Brigade. It costs like five bucks and will probably be funnier.

Hope you didn't read all the way to the end of this and miss your chance to buy tickets. That would suck.