The Nation

Gun-control advocate Robin Kelly's election to Congress may be the start of a broader shift in the political landscape. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.)

The Senate’s defeat of common sense gun reforms made Wednesday a dark day—for sensible legislation, and for American democracy. The failure of an already-watered down background check compromise (55 senators backed reform; 45 sided with the NRA) revealed stunning political cowardice. And it illuminated once again the ugly fault lines of our corroded democracy—from the power of special and moneyed interests, to the stranglehold of small state bias (consider North Dakota, whose Democratic and Republican senators both sided with the NRA: the state gets one-fiftieth of our senators, despite having just over one five-hundredth of our population).

Earlier this week, a solver posted this question in a public forum: “I haven’t been doing the Nation puzzle for that long. What is the significance of the ellipsis at the end and beginning of consecutive clues?” It’s a great question, and an example of the kind of thing that can become so transparent to experienced solvers and constructors that we lose sight of the possibility for confusion.

The short answer is that the ellipsis is there purely to help the surface of the clues read in a natural way. The premise is that two clues joined by an ellipsis can be construed as a single sentence or phrase, reading right across the clue boundary. But that’s only on the surface, mind you—when it comes to solving, each clue stands alone and yields its own answer.

As constructors, we find that we resort to ellipses under two conditions: opportunity and necessity. Sometimes we join two clues together simply because we can—when the workings of random chance lead to consecutive clues that either share a subject matter or have syntax that goes well in combination.

The documentary The Invisible War profiles survivors like Ariana Klay, who was raped in the Marines. (Courtesy of The Invisible War).

"So, what's it like to be sitting in a room with so many people who have been sexually assaulted?" My friend was asking because yesterday, I spoke at the Service Women's Action Network conference, the Truth and Justice Summit on Military Sexual Trauma. I scoffed grimly and texted him back: "Look around the room you're in now, and ask yourself the same question."

As Glenn Greenwald and others have written, this week is a time for checking racial stereotypes. Elsewhere from the Boston Marathon, as this week's Nation intern roundup indicates, world-turning questions abound. What is Africa? Who was (is) Jesus? How human are animals? And what is this journalistic "view from nowhere"?

— Alleen Brown focuses on education.