Monday, Monday links:

As Blog About Town (winner [actually co-winner; thanks for the modest correction!], by the way, of Emily Richards’ own recent contest) reports, Carl Gable has conquered caption contest #40 with “Well, that was abominable.” Well done! It’s a good time to bow to the other contestants, including Boston’s Lou Rubino (“I think the Manhattan skyline is getting suspicious”), whom the Globe profiled as he waited for the results. The paper notes that Boston has been a winner’s town, and the winners are enjoying their sparkly status:

Now, music librarian Andrew Wilson of Ayer has a standing offer to write for a greeting card company. Fifth-grade teacher Miriam Steinberg of Cambridge gets congratulated by her students’ parents. Sarah Bell, a fund-raising assistant, has strangers recognize her name months after it appeared in the magazine.

”My friend’s uncle was joking I should just go around captioning things in the house,” said Bell, 23, of Cambridge.

”People who are die-hard New Yorker readers thought it was really great,” she said. ”It was just fun to see someone they knew win. Like my grandmother. But people didn’t look at me like I was any smarter. My friends probably know better.”

In The New Republic, Helen Vendler reviews the new Elizabeth Bishop collection, edited by Alice Quinn. Brace yourself.

Inside Higher Education responds to the Kenyon kontroversy about gender-biased admissions, and to Katha Pollitt’s retort in her Nation blog (I can’t bear to type “The Notion”).

Last but certainly not least, Laurie Abraham, writing in Elle, takes a long look at feminish du jour Caitlin Flanagan:

For many women of my acquaintance, reading essayist Caitlin Flanagan is like deciding to take a walk through the woods in the fall during hunting season. The colors are so gorgeous, they call to you. The pungent smell of the literary terrain is reassuringly familiar. Really, what could hurt you in here, in this forest of glittering words? Still, you’re alert, watching for strange movements, threatening forms. After writing a series of controversial pieces in The Atlantic Monthly, Flanagan was tapped to cover family life for The New Yorker, and the essay that arrived in a recent issue is about P. L. Travers, the deceased author of Mary Poppins. What could be more delightful? More good fun? It’s the kind of tale that Flanagan’s father, a highly regarded novelist, professor of Irish literature, and New York Review of Books intellectual, excelled at: “potted biographies,” as one admiring reviewer described the pieces in Thomas Flanagan’s posthumous collection There You Are, “rich in detail, telling of Eugene O’Neill’s fascination with the sea, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s love of Keats….”

Yet each step further into the dimming light is more halting. Irish poet Seamus Heaney said that though his friend Tom wielded a rhetorical sword, “it would be wrong to ascribe murderousness to the blade.” His daughter may be a different story. Mary Poppins was a nanny, after all, and Caitlin Flanagan on nannies—is that the sound of crunching leaves?

“I read the article she wrote in The Atlantic, and I just felt crucified,” says the best-selling novelist Jennifer Weiner, referring to Flanagan’s most infamous piece, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement.” In it, she argues that professional women have entered the workforce on the backs of poor immigrant nannies and that the children of these lawyers and doctors and executives love their nannies more than they do their own mothers: “To con oneself into thinking that the person who provides daily physical care to a child is not the one he is going to love in a singular and primal way—a way obviously designed by nature herself to cleave child to mother and vice versa—is to ignore one of the most fundamental truths of childhood.” Weiner had just hired someone to care for her infant daughter 20 hours a week.

Oh, here it comes. Get ready to throw yourself to the ground, girls, press your face into the wetness. Continued.

From the Washington Post obituary of Robert W. Miller, NCI cancer researcher:

Joseph F. Fraumeni Jr., a colleague at the National Cancer Institute, said Dr. Miller was known for his sense of humor, his storytelling and his clear, concise writing style.

When interviewing researchers for positions in Japan, Dr. Miller wrote in his essay, he found a question that would predict whether an interviewee would adapt to Japanese life: “Do you like the New Yorker magazine?” Those who did, he concluded, were good prospects.

In the late 1950s, Dr. Miller published a short “Talk of the Town” article in the New Yorker about a woman donating her body to science. He was paid $25.

New Yorker cartoonist Emily Richards has a proposition for you:

If you’re wearing clean underwear, you shouldn’t have any objections to government guys looking up your skirt. Why should they have to go to some judge and ask permission to look up your skirt? Especially if it’s to save the country from terrorists?

Umm…what?

Any better, fashion-centric wiretapping analogies you’ve got for us would be greatly appreciated. So…..CONTEST ALERT! Please submit your fashion related constitutional law wiretapping analogy by midnight on Friday. The winning entry will see his or her analogy illustrated and lauded on this very site over the weekend.

For illumination and some truly gorgeous drawings, see Richards’ blog What to Wear This Very Second.

I’m finally reading In Cold Blood and, of course, it’s fantastic. From the Calcutta Telegraph:

Capote the film invites one to imagine a time when writers achieved the kind of fame and notoriety that is today associated with pop culture personalities. More importantly, Truman was a natural born self-promoter who paved the way for the cult of celebrity that is omnipresent today.

His fame cut across all categories, from high to low culture, from literary seriousness to high society frivolity. His name was a constant in newspapers, magazines and TV shows. When he walked around Manhattan, truck drivers would affectionately call to him — “Hey, Truman, how are ya ?” — and long distance telephone operators would know who he was the instant he picked up the phone.

Are there any writers alive who’d be recognized that way? Maybe Stephen King, in Maine, but no one else that I can think of. The first time I saw Capote I met a guy in the theater from Kansas, a screenwriter, who’d met Capote at a college reading and said Philip Seymour Hoffman had channeled him eerily well. Do you think the Clutter house in the movie is fancy enough? I had no idea they were so prosperous; now that I’m reading the book it makes much more sense that Perry Smith and Dick Hickock had picked out Herb Clutter as a goldmine. Also, as I’m sure you know, many people at The New Yorker weren’t happy about the depiction of Mr. Shawn, which is indeed startlingly vampiric. David Denby’s representative note of protest was adamant enough to be repeated in the short listing for the film, in which Denby observes that Shawn “is pictured, bizarrely, as hungry for the bloody details of the crime.”

The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World has an elegant look back at the Clutter killings on the 40th anniversary of In Cold Blood, with profiles, old and new photos (including two photos of Perry Smith’s paintings), and the original Journal-World coverage of the investigation. Especially interesting is an interview with Bobby Rupp, Nancy Clutter’s high school boyfriend, who once trekked three miles in a snowstorm to give her his Christmas present. What a guy. He hadn’t liked Capote much, apparently, and hasn’t spoken much about that time; this is a good look into his life since.