A day late, but still cool. Seamus Heaney, World's Most Famous Irish Poet,* reads "The Thought-Fox," by Ted Hughes, as well as his own poem, "Postscript."

M.I.T. announced its admission decisions at a moment that its applicants, of all people, would appreciate.

Does John Calipari, a former New England hero for leading UMass to the Final Four, in 1996, deserve a spot in the Hall of Fame for skeevy coaches? Now at Kentucky, a tournament favorite this year, Calipari does have some remarkable achievements under his belt, as the Globe magazine's Charles P. Pierce, writing in Slate, observes:

[I]n 1996, a 35-2 University of Massachusetts team coached by John Calipari made it all the way to the Final Four. A year later, because of a tangled scandal involving Marcus Camby, jewelry, and hookers, the NCAA stripped UMass of its tournament victories, forced the school to pay back $151,617 in tournament revenues, and expunged the team's accomplishments from the official record book. Then, in 2008, a 38-2 Memphis team coached by John Calipari made it all the way to the championship game. A year later, because of a tangled scandal involving papier-mâché SAT scores, the NCAA stripped Memphis of its tournament victories, forced the school to pay back more than $500,000 in tournament revenues, and expunged the team's accomplishments from the official record book.

This is awe-inspiring. Two schools, at different times and in different places, both with their greatest seasons erased from the record books, and both of them coached by the same guy. None of college basketball's other historic buccaneers ever pulled this off.

For his sins, Calipari now oversees one of the most storied basketball programs in the NCAA. Can you say "ethical blindspot," baby?  Photo: Andy Lyons, Getty Images

From Harvard University Press's new "Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry," edited by Wes Davis, the opening lines of "Irish Poets Open Up Your Eyes," by Patrick Kavanaugh (1904-1967):

In a recent lecture to the Royal Philharmonic Society, at London's Wigmore hall, the New Yorker's classical-music critic, Alex Ross, discussed an issue that vexes people who want to broaden the appeal of classical music: the "to-clap-or-not-to-clap" controversy. Modern audiences are expected to wait until the performers have completed all the movements, or sections, of a piece before expressing their approval. This can feel highly unnatural: some movements end with such brio that they "demand applause, even beg for it." And Mozart and his contemporaries expected raucous reactions not only after each movement but while the musicians played.

I dream of the concert hall becoming a more vital, unpredictable environment, fully in thrall to the composers who mapped our musical landscapes and the performers who populate them. The great paradox of modern musical life, whether in the classical or pop arena, is that we both worship our idols and, in a way, straitjacket them. We consign them to cruelly specific roles: a certain rock band is expected to loosen us up, a certain composer is expected to ennoble us. Ah, Mozart; yeah, rock and roll. But what if a rock band wants to make us think and a composer wants to make us dance? Music should be a place where our expectations are shattered.

Who's the more powerful arbiter of style: Anna Wintour or the University of Chicago Press? The artist Caitlin Phillips, founder of Rebound Designs, in Washington, DC, riffs on the double meaning of style with her Chicago Manual of Style book purse, fashioned out of an actual copy of the 14th edition of the academic bible, familiar to anyone who's had to write a thesis. It goes for $155, and of this writing there was one left at the craftsy online store Etsy.

Jennifer Michael Hecht's new post on exorcising gym guilt--"Gyms and Poets"--takes longer to get going than her (superb) anti-suicide manifesto, which Ideas adapted and published. But it is full of wisdom, and non-linearity is part of Hecht's writerly charm.

The "first step down the rabbit hole," she writes, "is to be so ever-lovin concerned about longevity. Next is to believe that food and exercise are what is different between those people over there, where no one dropped dead, and these people here, where Fred did."

Then she pulls out a dog-eared copy of "Discipline and Punish": "With training from Foucault and Freud, who both told me that bold claims sometimes actually mean their direct opposite, I came to believe, for instance, that gyms are occupying precisely the role they did in Ancient Sparta and in Fascist Germany. Being obsessed with bodies is actually a pretty rare thing in human history and we're in lousy company."

Finally, the "takeaway" (aimed at poets but easily universalized):

"Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow." (Note: Link fixed.)

"Can it be a coincidence that J. D. Salinger died the same day the iPad was introduced?"

Did you find the last book you read to have been compelling, poignant, and lyrical--in short, a tour de force? Then you may have what it takes to write book reviews.

Kieran Healy, of Crooked Timber, goes on Chatroulette, the new video chat service that hooks the user up with random partners, looking for some hot literary action. After much frustration--"oh come on you look like a grad student. don't hold out on me" "no, i'm 35." "exactly, a grad student."-- he finds someone willing to play his kinky game: Show me your books.

Edward Tufte, an emeritus professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has agreed to serve on the federal Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. The panel's job, as Tufte puts it on a brief note on his website, is to "track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds." He writes: "I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something."

President Obama surely hopes the images Tufte produces will have little in common--financially or politically--with one he made famous, calling it "probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn": Charles Joseph Minard's depiction of the losses Napoleon suffered during his 1812 invasion of, and retreat from, Russia.

I feel as though a fresh descriptive literary term, beyond irony or sarcasm, needs to be invented for this Linda Greenhouse post about Justice Clarence Thomas's views on "cruel and unusual punishment."

While posting yesterday about the National Magazine Award nominations for Boston Review and Technology Review, I neglected to mention that the Globe's own Neil Swidey is up for an award in the reporting category. The nomination is for the unputdownable two-part series, "Trapped Under the Sea," published in August, about a deadly accident that struck workers building a sewer tunnel deep below the ocean's surface, in Boston Harbor. A taste:

Satire: "Leaping Off the Page: The Future of Type." (Which answers, tongue deep in cheek, the question: How will print publications respond to the "Avatar" challenge?)

First they came for Google Voice, banning it from the iPhone app store. Then they cracked down on apps that made use of erotic, titillating content (with a curious exception for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and, apparently, Playboy). Now Apple seems to be trying to dictate the content of mainstream German publications, which occasionally publish cheesecake photos to spice up their sober reportage. Editors of the magazine Bild went "ballistic," Gizmodo reports, when Apple asked it to remove or alter a photograph of a topless woman from a pdf version of Bild that was available via an app.

Two Boston-based publications were nominated this week for National Magazine Awards in the prestigious (and honorable) public-service category: Boston Review and M.I.T.'s Technology Review.

Boston Review got the nod for a harrowing piece by Tom Barry, titled "A Death in Texas," which looked at the growing phenomenon of public-private prisons--invariably placed in the middle of nowhere-- that house so-called criminal aliens. Its opening paragraph:

County Clerk Dianne Florez noticed it first. Plumes of smoke were rising outside the small West Texas town of Pecos. "The prison is burning again," she announced.

"Sokwanele" means "enough is enough" in a certain Bantu dialect. It is also the name of a Zimbabwean pro-democracy website whose bloggers last year published accounts of atrocities by Robert Mugabe's regime and posted Election Day updates describing voter intimidation and apparent ballot stuffing. You can visit Sokwanele's "terror album" and see photographs: of a hospitalized 70-year-old woman who'd been beaten and thrown on her cooking fire (she later died, the site says); of firebombed homes; of people with deep wounds carved into their backs. You can find detailed, frequently updated maps describing regional violence and other incidents. You will be confronted with gruesome news, starkly captioned: "Joshua Bakacheza's Body Found."

From Nick Paumgarten's superb piece on downhill skiing and the Olympics [abstract only], in the latest New Yorker:

Skiing may be as well chronicled a leisure pastime as any, but it has not attracted much scrutiny from academics.

I am not sure that this is a great tragedy. But Paumgarten goes on to cite "The Culture and Sport of Skiing from Antiquity to World War II," a book by E. John B. Allen, a professor emeritus at Plymouth State University, who places the sport in the context of other "invented traditions." French nationalists, for example, in the wake of the embarrassing defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, promoted alpine skiing--at the time hardly known in France--as a way to promote virility among supposedly coddled young male elites. The French alpine-advocates imported Scandinavian teachers to get the sport off the ground. "The same thing was going on in the other Alpine countries," Paumgarten writes, drawing on Allen. "Military initiatives turned into recreational sport and social amusement." Scandinavians themselves were more drawn to what we call cross-country skiing, but in the hothouse atmosphere of nationalist-tinged athletic competition, alpine skiing began to take off.

One line of continuity, in skiing, from the late 19th century to today: sexism. Paumgarten writes that doctors a century ago were convinced that "the female organism" was too fragile for ski jumping. Amazingly, the current president of the International Ski Federation holds the same view: He has "speculated that jumping could harm a woman's uterus, and subsequently reiterated that it 'seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.'"

Jonathan Raban's conceit is somewhat strained: He attended the recent tea-party convention, in Nashville, not as a reporter but as a member. ("Most of us were political novices ... ") He claims his libertarian streak and suspicion of government-surveillance programs qualified him for the movement. Yeah, right. But the British-born travel writer offers a more nuanced portrayal of tea-party members than have other reporters. He takes comfort in seeing attendees sit on their hands when "birthers" (people who think President Obama is a foreigner and perhaps a Manchurian-style surrogate) give impassioned speeches. "My first thought was, 'This guy's a liberal plant,'" says one woman. "I thought we came here to talk about taxes and government spending and national defense." And from within, he reports, the movement is far less coherent, more fractured, than it may seem from the outside:

It's one thing for pro-life evangelicals and secular libertarians to march shoulder to shoulder behind banners saying "Kill the Bill!" and "Oust the Marxist Usurper!" or displaying a portrait of Obama rouged up and kohled to look like Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman movie Dark Knight. It's quite another to coop up the same people for three days in a hotel, where they must talk to each other through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the march on D.C., there were T-shirts proclaiming "I am John Galt" and "Atlas Has Shrugged" alongside others that said "Obama Spends--Jesus Saves" or had the legend "Yes, He Did" beneath a picture of Christ on the cross. At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand's gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest.

Reformers often lament that the U.S. Senate grants disproportionate power to small-population states. But what if seats were apportioned not by geography but by income? Annie Lowrey, an assistant editor at Foreign Policy magazine, gave that thought experiment a whirl recently, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post: "Imagine a chamber," she wrote, "… with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on."

Under such a scenario, 8 senators--the same number, of course, who now represent California, Texas, New York, and Florida-- would represent Americans with zero income (!). Sixteen would represent the interests of those making less than $10,000 a year. Meanwhile, 34 would represent the broad, middle-income band of $30,000-to-$80,000. The senate is often called a millionaire's club, a reference to the wealth of current members, but, in Lowrey's restructured senate, millionaires, as an interest group, would not even receive a full complement of two politicians. At best, they'd get one. (Lowery proposes Michael Bloomberg for the thankless role.) Might battles over bank regulation and health care take on a different cast if the upper house looked like this?

Incidentally, if senators represented racial and ethnic groups, white women would have the most clout, responsible for electing 37-- even though, in all of U.S. history, only 38 women have held the title of U.S. Senator.

(Hat tip: Caleb Crain)