In case you missed this, my friend Conor Clarke, of The Atlantic, ran into Chas Freeman on D.C.’s 42 bus yesterday. That is the exact same line I take to work! (Personal vow: I will get to the office earlier, thus increasing the chances I will run into workaholic famous people on the bus, instead of slacker bloggers.) Conor reports:

Charles Freeman plunked down across from me. He was reading an old paperback copy of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, and looking more like a high school English teacher than an existential threat to the state of Israel.

I introduced myself and told him I was sorry that he resigned. He recoiled only slightly when I mentioned I worked for the Atlantic, then smiled broadly. “Shit happens.” He added a little wistfully: “I wasn’t so eager to go back to the government, anyway.”

I asked him what he thought of his critics. “I don’t pay much attention to the blogosphere. But I did read Jim Fallows. Fallows actually seemed to have read what I said.”

The woman next to me suddenly pieced it together. “Now I know who you are!” She hesitated for a second. “I still disagree with you.” Others on the bus started to look confused, even a little worried.

Freeman smiled again, and laughed. “I guess now I’m a notorious personality.” He went back to reading his novel. A few stops later, he got off the bus.

He was reading The Thorn Birds? There is little that endears me more to a person than a taste for pulpy popular novels of past decades. Sigh…

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.