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John Podhoretz in the New York Post on Nora Ephron Podhoretz eulegizes Nora Ephron in the pages of the Post, where she got her start. "Ephron, who died last night at the age of 71, may have been the quintessential Manhattanite of her time. The island was her muse, and she its great romanticizer," he writes. "When the world began to think of New York City as a crime-riddled sewer, Ephron cast a glorious glow over it and kept the glow going until the city could restore the glow to itself." Podhoretz traces her successful rise and concludes with the "six word memoir" she wrote that sums up her happy ending mariage to husband Nicholas Pileggi: "Secret of life: Marry an Italian."
George Will in The Washington Post on the Supreme Court and juvenile sentencing Will addresses the Supreme Court's recent decision that mandatory life sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment, and describes the court's grappling with originalism in a nation where punishments were much more severe when the founders drafted their laws. The conservative dissent noted that because so many states have mandatory sentencing laws, the punishment may be cruel, but it isn't yet unusual. "It is, however, to be hoped that the case the court decided Monday might prompt changes in social thinking that will give other cruel punishments, such as protracted solitary confinement, the infrequency requisite for making them sufficiently unusual as to be unconstitutional," he writes.