John Podhoretz, it should be noted, is one of the all-time Regressions to the Mean, up there with the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, and the Cuomos. Rotten luck for Midge and Norman.

I used to think the indispensable quality of a professional critic was taste; but now I am sure it is enthusiasm, which Terry, as Brookhiser pointed out in his obituary, had more of than any critic I have ever known. The critic gluts himself on art, most of it necessarily pretty bad. This exposes him to the twin dangers of scorning everything, like John Simon, or praising a lot of schlock, like most everyone else. Terry, despite his alarmingly prolific reviewing right up to the end, managed to do neither. Nothing could jade his iron palate.

He was also exceptionally generous to my own writing despite having nothing whatever to gain, and I will always be deeply grateful to him for that.

Incidentally, to answer a question upthread, he was triple-vaxxed, as he often noted on his Twitter feed. However, he was certainly not lacking in comorbidities.

In The Brother from Another Planet (1984) there is a black street magician performing on the #2 as it pulls in to 96th Street. He announces, “And for my next trick… I’m gonna make all the white people disappear!”

You omitted my favorite, "mentally defective", which dominated all challengers around 1915 and continued to lead the field well into the 1960s.

The Russian Tradition by Tibor Szamuely. Begins with the Mongols, ends shortly before the Revolution. Witty, readable, and reasonably short. The best book I know for understanding the background of Bolshevism, and the one book to read on Russia if you’re reading only one.

Thomas Wolfe writing on top of a refrigerator is more than a rumor. I remember a photograph from A. Scott Berg's biography of Maxwell Perkins showing him doing exactly that.

Free verse, insofar as it is verse, does not discard rules; instead it inverts them. Real free verse — The Snow Man by Stevens or To A Dead Journalist by Williams are distinguished examples — is characterized by a systematic avoidance of iambs, which are the normal pattern of English speech. Bad free verse inevitably contains large undigestable chunks of iambs, like lumps in the mashed potatoes.

Hopkins, incidentally, did not write free verse. He wrote ordinary English verse, though with more substitutions than usual, that was hobbled by his home-grown metrical theories and occasionally rescued by his excellent ear. Whitman generally wrote prose.

Then how do you explain the consistent scores in the no-college group? The new people going to college are coming from somewhere. Wouldn’t you expect that the new people going to college would skim off the cream from the former non-collegians?

In fairness to Lithwick, her column merely channels the dissent of Ginsburg, who may be a left ideologue on this matter but is certainly no idiot.

Let's rephrase your question: "Who could get herself appointed to the Supreme Court without understanding [admitting?] that there is a fundamental contradiction in both theory and practice between abolishing disparate impact discrimination and abolishing disparate treatment discrimination?" Ruth Bader Ginsburg for starters, and several other people too.

"They say history is written by the winners, but I say that history is written by the history-writers."

Or as I prefer to put it: History is written by the whiners.

Health Panjandrum?

Give Andy of I, Ectomorph a little credit here; the man’s on your blogroll after all:

http://iectomorph.blogspot.com/2006/12/changing-world-one-book-at-time.html

Much obliged, although I wish you guys would learn how to spell my name. One L — like first year law students.

Aristotle said that, if there is a god, the one thing that could be said with certainty about him is that he would not take the smallest interest in human affairs. This is not a position in which the modern theist could take much comfort.