"[P]eople think that I live in this Bavarian castle and sleep upside down in the fucking rafters, and fly around the gantry every night," Ozzy Osbourne told Phoenix editor Lance Gould over the phone a few days ago. Instead, judging from their little tête-à-tête last week about Osbourne's latest autobiography, I Am Ozzy (written with an assist from journalist Chris Ayres), he might have more in common with Frank McCourt and Monty Python than Count Dracula.

^{Happy 201st birthday, EAP.}

Considering that the man was the original architect of the detective story -- that'd be The Murders in the Rue Morgue -- it’s only fitting that we celebrate the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe with a riddle. Which city can rightfully claim the legacy of Poe: Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Boston?

The Phoenix's DAVID BERNSTEIN will be all over your radio dial today, feeding us the inside dope on the Coakley/Brown race. Follow his updates on the TALKING POLITICS blog, on FACEBOOK, and on TWITTER. This morning, Bernstein chatted about TV campaigns, little old ladies in snow, and predicted that Martha Coakley will squeak out a win in today's Senate race election.

In 2009, we got used to seeing angry mobs descend on public forums with vengeance in their hearts. So for anyone who'd been to a town-hall forum on health care, the scene at Boston's Old South Church on January 5 was eerily familiar -- an older audience, larger than you'd expect (the organizers put it at 400-plus), venting its collective spleen at hapless bureaucrats.

From the looks of things, a lot of you folks intend to make 2010 the Year of More Writing. Need a little inspiration to help you battle the blank page? Well, we can't help you with that one -- but maybe these local authors can, as they reveal their thoughts on the writing process, and give us a glimpse of the forces that shaped their work.

What's the nexus between The Diary of Anne Frank and Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking? Both were scooped out of the literary rejection piles by famed Knopf editor Judith Jones and made into worldwide classics. Today, the 85-year-old Jones is working alongside a culinary figure of already-epic proportions -- she's edited and mentored Italian cooking legend Lidia Bastianich throughout the publication of her new cookbook, Lidia Cooks From the Heart of Italy, a collection of unusual recipes from lesser-known regions of Italy.

This week in the Phoenix, Adam Reilly profiles "atheist superstar" Greg Epstein, Harvard's Humanist chaplain and the author of Good Without God: What A Million Nonreligious People Do Believe. What separates Epstein from the best-selling crop of "new atheists" -- The Atlantic's James Parker profiled the Hitchens/Dawkins/Harris crowd for us in 2007 -- is his insistence on defining atheism as a denominational entity with a spiritual, if not holy, mission: "He dreams not of decisively crushing faith," Reilly writes, "but of a future in which the godless and godly cozily co-exist, respecting each other's convictions and even making common cause on issues of mutual concern.

It would be hard to imagine a pair of books about vegetarianism that are quite so different as Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals (which we brought you earlier this month on the podcast) and ALICIA SILVERSTONE's The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet

Someday soon, political strategists will look back on the 2008 presidential campaign the way NASA scientists sigh at the Apollo moon landing -- as an example of a way that fighting a big, idealistic fight demanded a period of intense and disruptive innovation. At least, that's the way DAVID PLOUFFE sees it.

Cory Doctorow opens his mouth, and nerdgasms fall out: at any given moment, he's liable to be spouting off about feral robot dogs, space domes over Disney World, or building a haunted hotel modeled after a Quake level ("I'll open-source this idea," says he). And we'd expect nothing less -- after all, he's one of the superclocking brains behind BoingBoing, that exalted bestiary of sweet-ass geekdom.

One night when Jonathan Safran Foer was 9 years old, his babysitter refused to eat chicken. A confused Foer asked her why, and she blew his mind by explaining that the meat on his dinner plate came from a live animal. "I went from thinking it was the most natural thing to thinking it was the most insane thing," Foer said.

^{Al Gore speaks at Harvard Square's First Parish Church}

Standing before a sea of green-leaning Cambridge liberals (who would later scoff heartily at the suggestion that the average person watches roughly 5 hours of TV per day), Al Gore announced: "My own personal journey on the issue of the climate crisis began here in Cambridge 42 years ago, when I walked into the classroom of Roger Revelle

John Irving writes overwrought, Dickensian novels, and he’s damned proud of it. The New England-born author spent much of his reading at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday night defending himself against imaginary criticisms of his work — criticisms that were remarkably similar to the New York Times’ review of Irving’s new book, Last Night in Twisted River