Sneak Peek: Tasty Previews of the New Yorker Festival

Martin Schneider writes:
I see that the New Yorker Festival blog has posted a few blind items pertaining to the featured personalities who will be appearing at the 2009 Festival in October. Here they are:

Which author said that her most famous short story took twice as long to write as a novel “because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men”?

Which young movie actor pretended to have different accents—”Italian, Russian, Irish”—when he worked at a McDonald’s drive-thru?

This creator of an Emmy Award-winning drama was once a contestant on “Jeopardy!” (Answer in the form of a question, please.)

Any guesses? I figured out a couple of them, but I’d like to hear what you think. We’re hearing that there’ll be several more of these blind posts before the schedule is announced in September. Exciting!