A grown man who is currently reenacting the Battle of Trenton on Twitter thinks he could be president in 2012.

Did you know that shameful loser ex-congressman Newt Gingrich is the future of the GOP? It's true! We read it in a Matt Bai piece, so surely Newt will be as successful as Mark Warner.

• We met John Fitzgerald Page, and learned about him, and even got emailed by him! Some day we will be married to him!
  

Globe-trotting taker of conclusions from anecdotes (and New York Times columnist) Thomas Friedman has been to some (four) college campuses! There he has seen that the kids of today are doing the good work, that they travel the world building hospitals abroad and snuggling babies with AIDS and just generally building a wonderful future—"in record numbers," whatever numbers those might be. None of these colleges were in New York, by the way—you selfish, future-hating children of N.Y.U.! This trip comforted him: "One of the things I feared most after 9/11—that my daughters would not be able to travel the world with the same carefree attitude my wife and I did at their age—has not come to pass." You know, funny, that did not even rate on my list of greatest fears after 9/11! Was more worried about the smoke getting in the windows through the wet towels, and the Team America world war that followed, but yeah, carefree attitudes for tourists sounds nice too.

Architect Lebbeus Woods on his 1999 drawing of a dammed and dug-out Lower Manhattan: "Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren't tall enough—we've got to go higher! Of course, he wasn't interested at all in their height—more in their plan relationship.... New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it's a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale." [BLDGBLOG]

A question: "I'm teaching a lit class soon and would like to incorporate some short stories/poems about 9/11. Please help me with a reading list!" Answers are running 2 to 1 in favor, somehow, of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." [Ask Metafilter]