A smiling crocodile

From Crooked Timber, a holiday meditation by Henry Farrell:

And as a St. Patrick’s Day present, a lengthy article on Ireland, written by an American journalist, which (a) hasn’t a hint of stories about fairy rings and the Little People, and (b) actually gets things right. Patrick Radden Keefe’s story on Gerry Adams and the murder of Jean McConville does an excellent job at summarizing multiple perspectives on a complex story, while making it clear which of those perspectives is most believable. And this, on Gerry Adam’s Twitter account:

Adams is now sixty-six and a grandfather, and his evolution into an approachable grandee has found its surreal culmination on Twitter. He intersperses studiously boring tweets about small-bore political issues with a barrage of cat pictures and encomiums to sudsy baths, rubber duckies, and Teddy bears. (“I do love Teddy bears,” he told theBBC. “I have a large collection of Teddy bears.”) One characteristic tweet, from last January: “Dreamt I was eating Cream Eggs. Woke up this morn. Pillow & beard covered in chocolate & cream thingymebob.” The Irish writer Damien Owens has likened all this to “Charles Manson showing you his collection of tea cosies.”