"Democrats hailed Mr. Cuomo's aggressive gun-control push..."

"... citing it as an example of a muscular brand of politics that the governor has made his signature in two years in office. He has be...

"A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags..."

"... twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it...

"Oxygen Media has pulled the plug on 'All My Babies' Mamas,' a reality special... about a musician who has fathered 11 children with 10 different mothers."

The conceived the show. They gave it life. Then they walked away. ADDED: Rush Limbaugh riffs on the O Media decision: It's not gonna air...

"I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

It means something that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "pig" instead of "pork." I think about how George Harrison sang abou...

"Rehearsals sap my pep... tell me what I have to do and I'll do it."

Said the actress Clara Bow (in 1929), who did it like this: ... in "Kittens" (1926). And this: ... in "Wings" (1927), w...

"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream." Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose...

Obama's inauguration poet "tackles 'the intersection of his cultural identities as a Cuban-American gay man.'"

The poet is Richard Blanco, the verb "tackles" comes from Politico , and the quote within the quote is in the Presidential Inaugur...

Hope and change... into a clown costume.

Paul Krugman responds to the pushback he's received on "the trillion-dollar-coin thing": There seem to be two kinds of objecti...

"Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes."

The most interesting thing about today's "Gatsby" sentence is the use of plunged for the action of the hands into the pocket...

"They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."

I decided to pluck something from Chapter 1 for today's entry in the "Great Gatsby" project . I randomly selected the sentenc...

Yes, yes, I know, fiscal cliff jumped back from.

We'd gone off, we were told yesterday, but somehow, from mid-air, we scrambled back. We were Wile E. Coyote out off the cliff, suspended...

"Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season..."

"... suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chif...

"Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York..."

"... every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves." I warned you I was going to d...

"Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television’s answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles?"

"When you cruise around the country for your show 'Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,' rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places ...

Scenery chewing in the Theater of Outrage over Wayne LaPierre's unremarkable news conference.

Read the transcript of what LaPierre said , if you haven't already, so you know what the purveyors of outrage are characterizing for the...

Dana Loesch sues to escape from the "indentured servitude" that is Breitbart.com.

"The internal disputes roiling the website founded by the late conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart broke out into the open Friday...

"'Candyass Blogger' Update: Free Speech Absolutists Who Banned Mr. Althouse UPDATE: 'These Are Historical Dildos.'"

I wasn't going to wade into the Loomis lunacy, but that headline caught my eye. I won't even try to summarize the post, by Robert ...

"Sopranos! In the OED!"

Researching "midget," in the comments to this post , I find one of the illustrative quotes is from a 1998 "Sopranos" scr...

The m-word!

"You know, everybody knows what the N-word is. We don't say the N-word. We refer to that word as the N-word. I had never heard of t...

"Cornball brother."

There's a current controversy about some ESPN commentator musing over whether RG3 is a "cornball brother." "My question,...