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One of the nice things about having a book review site like this one is occasionally exchanging email with authors. When you write to an author, chances are good they will eventually write back. For example, Susan Orlean just sent me the nicest note saying she was sorry, but she had no record of the street addresses of the places she wrote about in her book Saturday Night. And from time to time I get email from the hard-working website speed expert Andy King...

His latest effort, on www.optimizationweek.com, is a comparison of the website loadtimes of presidential candidates' websites. Carol Moseley Braun has the fastest-loading website, but Al Sharpton (Dave Winer's candidate for the "who is the candidate you would have most liked to smoke marijuana with?" question) has the site that gives content fastest. Check out the chart, the page loads instantly, just as you might expect from someone who has written a book on how to speed up websites. It turns out they all need a lot of work.