* Elena “I refuse to recuse” Kagan: the SC justice who argued for Obamacare as solicitor general but sits to declare its consitutionality.
* Words that went viral: #1 of a series, “guys,” for people of any age and gender or role (place?) in society.
* Convenient classification: There are two kinds of people men, those who wear their hats at the dinner table, out or at home, not at a picnic or beach, and those who do not.
Bonus:
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Times Lit Supplement 3/9/12 (subscription required):
* His Mother Night is his “funniest” book, says reviewer Thomas Meaney.
* Writing as he did when he did about WW2, he “faced the shibboleth of the Good War” as in the novels and books by Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Andy Rooney. Not so the grim accounts by Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Tim O’Brien et al.
* Post-Slaughterhouse Five, in which he reached his apogee, he catered to semi-cultists, gave into “posturizing,” says Meaney, who sells him persuasively as a world-class ironist, never deviating in his accounts of the horrors of war, slipping into a “sentimental bog,” as O’Brien does in The Things They Carried.
He did that after Slaughterhouse, when “he began to recycle his gimmicks and [his] sardonic shell started to crack.”
As V. would say, so it goes.
Blithe Spirit 