To Scott McLemee who will receive the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing at the National Book Critics Circle's annual award ceremony on Thursday.

Via Patrick Belton of Oxblog and the Yale Daily News comes word that Jon Butler, who has chaired both history and American Studies and holds an appointment in Religious Studies at the university, has been named Dean of the Graduate School at Yale. [Someobservers (scroll down) see the appointment as a function of the university's unrelenting opposition to unionizing its graduate instructors.] Gad! To think that I once touched the hem of his garment ...

And congratulations to a reader from the University of Tulsa, who was the 25,000th person to touch the hem of Cliopatria's garment ...