Thursday at the Links

Haunting dioramas of the life of a 1930s Jewish family in Poland.

The O'Floinn has up a jaunty pre-history of the Crusades. This is kind of big-picture connect-the-dots synthesis that makes history come alive.

How E.B. White spun Charlotte's Web.

The Paris Review provides an invaluable service with Sleep Aid: "a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain". Tonight's installment: “History of Sumach Tanning in England, Degradation of the Manufacture of Leather, and History of the Reform Movement,” the first chapter of Leather for Libraries, a 1905 book by E. Windham Hulme.

Combining the finest number-crunching with a finger on the pulse of pop culture, the Wall Street Journal surpasses itself with a report on the most bro-fessional schools in America.

There is no standard definition for what makes a person a “bro,” but you generally know one when you see one. They are mostly male students from the East Coast who join fraternities, gravitate to majors in finance and can tell you exactly how many beers they “crushed” last night. They like to wear bow ties in a sort of neo-Preppy way, but oddly, also tank tops. They’ve seen every episode of “Entourage” five times and like to address each other as bro, broski or brofessor. 

This year, many schools in the Sweet 16 have strong “brotastic” reputations. A stroll across their campuses might reveal, for instance, four shades of salmon-colored shorts, six styles of boat shoes and several impromptu lacrosse games. So with our brackets hopelessly busted, the Journal decided to focus on figuring out which of these schools is, in fact, the bro-iest. 

To do this, we turned to six advanced bro-metrics: the popularity of fraternity and sorority life on campus; how many graduates end up in finance and consulting; if the school is well-regarded for its parties; the success of its lacrosse team (a sport populated by a subspecies of “lax bros”); the number of bro-centric items sold in the campus store; and the proximity of a J. Crew.

Brandon just returned from Italy with a fine assortment of photos. Here's a post about his trip to Rome which made me sigh for the Eternal City. 

ADDED: Don't know how I could have possibly forgotten to include this, but here: Cabinet Battle #1 from Hamilton, unrapped, performed at the White House.