The new iPhone rec­og­nizes, and auto­mat­i­cally cap­i­tal­izes, the acronym “NYRB.” Its a charm­ingly fussy idio­syn­crasy, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the fact that the soft­ware is still sure you mean “it’s” every time you type “its.”

Two of the four major net­works and NPR get the same treat­ment–ABC and FOX lose out for obvi­ous rea­sons–but other organs of the haute bour­geoisie don’t fare so well. In fact sev­eral get down­graded: “nyt” becomes “nut,” “lrb” changes to “orb” or “leg,” depend­ing, and, my per­sonal favorite (how­ever inac­cu­rate), “tnr” trans­mutes itself into “TNT.”

In lieu of orig­i­nal thought, a few items of pos­si­ble interest:

+ John Conroy is back! But he’s on WBEZ now instead of writ­ing for the Chicago Reader. (This is not exactly news, but a story today–not up yet on the WBEZ web­site–reminded me to men­tion it.)

+ Emily Wilson (the clas­si­cist, not the poet) reviews John Tipton’s Ajax: “He suc­ceeds bril­liantly at cre­at­ing a living, con­tem­po­rary Sopho­cles. His ver­sion is a chill­ing mirror.” (The original’s in The Nation, but trapped behind a paywall.)

+ Marty Riker inter­views the Flood fel­lows: “Just for the record, I was not, in fact, an angry young man. Con­fused and obnox­ious, but not really angry.”

+ Auf­gabe’s edi­tors undo “Numbers Trouble”: “Should we be thank­ful or irri­tated that the draft is gendered?”

+ Danielle Allen speaks for her­self on the Obama Muslim smear: “Worse than mud.”

+ Kent John­son is still not sure about “A True Account of Talk­ing to the Sun at Fire Island”: “‘It is a real mys­tery, that poem.’”

1/ From Michelle Cottle’s “External Flame,” at The New Repub­lic this week:

[T]his alliance may be an even shrewder move for [Car­o­line] Kennedy Schloss­berg than for [Barack] Obama. It’s been 45 years since the fall of Camelot, and the family brand has begun to fade. A grow­ing por­tion of the elec­torate was born after the deaths of John and Bobby and has a tough time relat­ing to the Kennedy fix­a­tion of its elders. Under such con­di­tions, what’s a com­mit­ted cus­to­dian of the family legacy to do? Hitch her clan’s wagon to the hottest polit­i­cal star in decades. With a little luck, even as that old Camelot magic rubs off on Obama, the candidate’s energy and rel­e­vance will help sus­tain the Kennedy brand for a little longer.

2/ From my Feb­ru­ary Chicago Tri­bune arti­cle (PDF) on the Kennedy Obama endorsements:

The Kennedy name is the gold stan­dard in Demo­c­ra­tic pol­i­tics, and it will remain so as long as John Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion is a part of living memory. But the youngest people to vote for him in 1960 are 68 today, and seven out of eight Amer­i­cans are too young to remem­ber him as any­thing more than a his­tor­i­cal figure, no more or less real than Roo­sevelt, Lin­coln or Jefferson.

Edward Kennedy him­self is 75. Besides his son, no third-​generation Kennedy holds national office.

And thus, when Kennedy said Obama would not be trapped by the pat­terns of the past, it might not be because he was com­i­cally or trag­i­cally unaware of his own or his family’s posi­tion. It might be exactly the oppo­site: Per­haps he was too aware of that posi­tion. If that’s the case, then last week’s endorse­ments should be seen as an acknowl­edg­ment of just how frag­ile the pat­terns of the past can be.

By mid­night Tues­day [i.e. Feb­ru­ary 5], after more than 20 states have weighed in on the Obama-​Clinton race, we’ll have a better sense of how the Kennedy cal­cu­lus affects the elec­tion in the
short run….

But in the long run, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the endorse­ments do as much to help the Kennedys as they do to help Obama. Cast­ing Obama in the Kennedy mold offers him author­ity, but it also offers the Kennedys a future, a way to keep the mys­tique alive.

QUICK UPDATE (7/1): Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me.

Lured by the open­ing ref­er­ence to Leo Strauss, I unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally man­aged to make it through William Kristol’s extra­or­di­nary Times column this morn­ing. Here’s how it begins:

Half a cen­tury ago the philoso­pher Leo Strauss remarked that the pas­sage in which the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence pro­claims its self-​evident truths “has fre­quently been quoted, but, by its weight and its ele­va­tion, it is made immune to the degrad­ing effects of the exces­sive famil­iar­ity which breeds con­tempt and of misuse which breeds disgust.”

What’s extra­or­di­nary about the column is that Kris­tol doesn’t misuse Strauss. Most people who cite that quo­ta­tion from Nat­ural Right and His­tory cite it as evi­dence of Strauss’s good­will toward Amer­i­can democ­racy. But of course it’s noth­ing of the kind; in fact it’s the open­ing salvo in a long, dense, and often decep­tive attack on the philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of democ­racy itself.

Which is why I found it fairly amaz­ing to see Kris­tol follow the Strauss­ian line through to its nasty anti-​democratic end, right there in the Op-​Ed pages of the New York Times: