Haven't had enough fun at the expense of Chancellor Michelle Rhee's "Braveheart" Education Next story? Head over to D.C. Wire, where Bill Turque makes a medieval jab at the profile and its over-the-top lead image:

"The accompanying story by June Kronholz is, as the picture suggests, almost uniformly admiring. Although it doesn't address what happened to the real Braveheart, Scottish rebel William Wallace, who was hanged, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered in 1305 for rising up against the British crown."

Read More "Michelle Rhee: Not the Real Braveheart" »

There is nothing new under the sun, and I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty certain I'm the guy who invented the exclamation-point lede (EPL). It started with a piecelet Jule Banville and I wrote about coffee tables for oddly shaped rooms for last year's best-of issue; not totally thrilled with this foray into service journalism I wrote a lede I was sure would get killed by someone smarter than me. But then everyone here liked the EPL! And started to use it! And then we mostly got over the (rather poor) joke.

And today, I was reading Time, and I see Lev Grossman is using the EPL:

Humans! They do like their words. Studies--by scientists who stuck recording devices on them and then counted--suggest that they speak some 16,000 words a day.

It's a good review. And now I wonder whether I invented anything at all--I can't imagine Grossman's scouring our blog archives for narrative devices. Did I tap into an ambient meme? I'm totally gonna have to change a line on my résumé if I'm wrong about this.