"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."

One commenter brings the discussion back into the current millennium: "I don't want Rhee to be beheaded, I just want her to resign."

Since Rhee took office in 2007, it's become quite trendy to follow the fiery Chancellor around for awhile and then write a breathless profile about her crusade to fix D.C.'s schools. C'mon, Education Next, all the cool kids are doing it. For interested readers, here's a sampling:

September 2007: "Can Michelle Rhee Save DC Schools?" Washingtonian.com.

October 2007: "A hard road to hoe: teaching poor children." The Economist.

August 2008: "An Unlikely Gambler." Newsweek.

November 2008: "Rhee Tackles Classroom Challenge." TIME.

November 2008: "The Lightning Rod." The Atlantic.

January 2009: "Is Michelle Rhee the new face of education reform?" Christian Science Monitor.

March 2009: "Education's Ground Zero." Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times.

(Note: Most of them are "almost uniformly admiring.")

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.