"Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, last week dropped most of the 46 cases against pro-Palestinian demonstrators charged..."

"... in the April 30 siege of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University because prosecutors had little proof that the cases would stand up at trial. There was limited video footage of what took place inside the campus building.... The protesters wore masks and covered security cameras, preventing prosecutors from identifying those who had barricaded the doors and smashed chairs, desks and windows during the 17-hour occupation.... For similar reasons, prosecutors also dismissed charges against nine of the 22 students and staff members at City College who were arrested inside a campus building and charged with burglary during a protest that took place on the same night as the arrests at Hamilton Hall."

The NYT reports.

"Representative Jerrold Nadler, also a Democrat and the longest-serving Jewish member of the House of Representatives, said he had 'the uttermost faith in D.A. Bragg.'"

AND: What deep emotions stirred within Nadler that caused him to... utter... the strange word "uttermost"? My instinct was to regard it as not a word at all, but a whiffed attempt at "utmost." But I looked it up, and it's a word. The OED has it used by Hobbes ("From the uttermost parts of the Earth") and Milton ("To the uttermost convex Of this great Round") and Shelley ("From the corners uttermost Of the bounds of English coast") and Wordsworth ("A voice of uttermost joy") and Ruskin ("To speak with uttermost truth of expression") and Carlyle ("His accounts lie all ready, correct in black-on-white to the uttermost farthing"). Yes, I can answer my question "What deep emotions...?" The answer: the urge to bullshit.

"Commit great poems to heart, starting with those by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Recite them aloud on solitary walks."

"Recite them aloud on solitary walks. Compose dirty limericks in your head. Read more for pleasure, less for purpose. Read, immediately, Marguerite Yourcenar’s 'Memoirs of Hadrian.' Imitate the writers or artists you most admire; you’ll find your own voice and style in all the ways your imitation falls short. Don’t post self-indulgent glam shots of yourself on Instagram, and please stop photographing your damn meals... Make only enough money so that you don’t have to think about it much.... Never join a cause if you aren’t fully familiar with the argument against it. Heed the words of Rabbi Hillel: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' Or woman...."

Says Bret Stephens, recounting what he said in a commencement address, in a conversation with Gail Collins, in the NYT.

Collins reacts: "That’s pretty damn good.... But I’m not going to go so far as to suggest student protesting is a bad or silly idea." Yeah, I guess students are never fully familiar with the argument against their cause.

"We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss..."

"... staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed."

Writes Anne Lamott, in "Age is giving me the two best gifts: Softness and illumination" (WaPo).

The pastor's remark calls to mind Percy Shelley's "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats":

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife....

As for Snagglepuss... I'm old enough to get the reference, and I thought it would be easy to find a YouTube clip of the ham-actor lion on stage overdoing a death scene. I began to suspect that YouTube was censoring death. I don't know. I did find this collection of bad actors dying:

ADDED: Maybe Snagglepuss is an up-to-date reference. I see that he was reenvisioned in 2018 by DC Comics as a gay playwright in "The Snagglepuss Chronicles: The Need to Enter Stage Right":

"Under a policy called 'Slant' (Sit up, Lean forward, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head and Track the speaker), the students, aged 11 and 12, were barred from looking away."

"When a digital bell beeped (traditional clocks are 'not precise enough,' the principal said) the students walked quickly and silently to the cafeteria in a single line. There they yelled a poem — 'Ozymandias,' by Percy Bysshe Shelley — in unison, then ate for 13 minutes as they discussed that day’s mandatory lunch topic: how to survive a superintelligent killer snail.... Leon, 13, said that initially he did not want to go to the school, 'but now I am thankful I went because otherwise I wouldn’t be as smart as I am now.'..."

From "'You Can Hear a Pin Drop': The Rise of Super Strict Schools in England/Inspired by the academic success of schools like the Michaela secondary school in northwest London, some principals are introducing tight controls on students’ behavior" (NYT). 

***

Re "Ozymandias": Here's the full text of the poem, here's the relevant episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," and here's the recitation the poem in one of my favorite movies, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (the scene is a traveling theatrical production in the Old West):

It gives new meaning to the phrase "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith."

"Vatican police have broken up a gay orgy at the home of the secretary to one of Pope Francis’s key advisers, it has been claimed. The flat belonged to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or Holy Office, which is in charge of tackling sexual abuse amongst the clergy...."

The oldest meaning of the word "congregation" — according to the OED — is "The action of congregating or collecting in one body or mass."

To elevate you after that awfulness, here's a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley ("Summer and Winter" 1829) that uses the word "congregates" to refer to the collecting together of clouds:

It was a bright and cheerful afternoon,
Towards the end of the sunny month of June,
When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon--and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.
All things rejoiced beneath the sun; the weeds,
The river, and the cornfields, and the reeds;
The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze,
And the firm foliage of the larger trees.

It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when,
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold:
Alas, then, for the homeless beggar old!

"Smitten by his love."

"The cross of Christ invites us also to allow ourselves to be smitten by his love, teaching us always to always look upon others with mercy and tenderness," said Pope Francis, in Brazil. I don't think he was speaking English. But... smitten.

It's just the past participle of "smite," which is a strange old word that we associate with God striking someone dead. We think of it used comically, affecting an old-time locution.