With her usual vacuous brio, Sarah Palin has seized another news cycle, using an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network to attack the Obama administration for failing to do, well, something she’d vaguely like to be done about the political crisis in Egypt. The half-term former Alaska governor assailed White House diplomacy hands for withholding reliable information about the nature of the protests and for their inability to clearly telegraph the next moves the United States will pursue in the suddenly unstable Middle East. The potential risks, she warned, are dire indeed. Washington urgently needs to determine just “who it will be that fills now the void in [...]

Chuck Klosterman's last book, from October, has an attack on the use of the exclamation point as a marker of irony. It's making the rounds today online, since someone is reading it. Klosterman's opinion: It's "idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure." Klosterman is talking overall about the rhetorical practices of feigned ignorance, distancing in general and also about the most convenient punctuation markers to make things clear to the reader-though he believes these markers make things ever more unclear. At least, he approvingly quotes Fitzgerald as against exclamation points. Let's look at some recent history!