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Republicans are doing something quite strange at the moment. They are in the process of choosing a candidate whom hardly any of them actually likes. Though Mitt Romney won the Florida primary handily yesterday, just 51 percent of those who voted for him said in an exit poll they were satisfied to have him as their party’s nominee. Most of the others said they’d prefer the choice of someone who isn’t currently running. Romney isn’t so much winning the Republican nomination as having it default to him for lack of any compelling alternative.

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A video of an adorable snoring dormouse, deep in hibernation, has gone viral this week. English dormice sleep from October to April, and animals as diverse as squirrels, lemurs, and bears all hibernate for stretches of time during the year. Do hibernating animals wake up to go to the bathroom?

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Newt Gingrich promised Florida voters the moon and he crashed to earth. Mitt Romney won the crucial state big with 46 percent of the vote, beating Gingrich by 14 points. In Brevard County, where Gingrich’s pledge to build a lunar colony might have wooed voters who worked in the space industry, Romney won by 7 points.

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Perhaps it should have occurred to me years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I fully realized that everybody hates something about their computer keyboard. I was in the company of several family members and friends, and had just mistyped my Gmail password for the 458^th time in calendar 2011. I knew straightaway what had gone wrong—caps lock was depressed by accident—but instead of simply taking my lumps and re-entering my password, I vented: “Is there anything on the computer keyboard more annoying than the caps lock key?” 

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Earlier this year, divorcee Dominique Browning published an essay in the New York Times positing a gender gap in the talent for living alone. She and her single female neighbors, she wrote, relish the freedom to eat at odd hours and monopolize the bed, while men are indifferent to these perks. Nesting at home, she went on to assert, women feel safe. “Men,” though, “are hard-wired to feel danger all the time … Being alone feels dangerous to a man.”

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Shortly after President Obama announced the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan last June, government auditors released the latest in a series of reports describing the theft and diversion of billions of dollars in U.S. aid and contract payments. What’s worse, the report noted that some of the funds were trickling down into the hands of the Taliban and other insurgents. Aid that was meant to boost Afghan incomes and promote peace were being turned on U.S. forces themselves, and making it all the more likely that America’s good intentions would leave violence and conflict in their wake.

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Last Thursday, a bus pulled up outside an Orlando office plaza and disgorged 30 Texas technologists reporting for duty at Newt Gingrich’s Central Florida headquarters. Their leader, a 32-year old online marketer named Michael Hendrix, had contacted Gingrich’s campaign before he left Dallas to tell them about his project. No one on the campaign ever responded to his message, but Hendrix headed to Florida with his entourage anyway.  When they arrived at the office, Hendrix introduced himself to Ron Janssen, a longtime Republican Party official working as Gingrich’s Orange County co-chair. Janssen was busy printing out walk lists—rosters of targeted voters and addresses— that could be given to the canvassers being dispatched to dense Republican precincts, and he didn’t have much time to hear about Hendrix’s work.  So Hendrix introduced himself to some of the volunteers and started telling them about it.

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Reviewing books is often a good way to feel like a puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. And sometimes, when you find yourself the lone grump before a buzz juggernaut, you can feel like a crazy, puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. That’s about where I sit after finishing Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child (Reagan Arthur Books), a novel already popular in Europe, a novel the Christian Science Monitor and Oprah tellme to watch for in 2012, and a novel of which one enthusiastic blurber was moved to say: "If Willa Cather and Gabriel García Márquez had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it."

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Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Erin Belieu read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate’s Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

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Last August, 16-year-old Lori Brownell passed out while head-banging at a concert. A month later, she lost consciousness again at her school’s homecoming dance in upstate Corinth, N.Y. Brownell says her doctors put her on Celexa, but she only developed more symptoms, including involuntary twitching and clapping. In videos she posted to YouTube, Brownell flutters her fingers, touches her hair, snorts through her nose and throat, and shouts “Hey, hey, hey,” seemingly without control. On Christmas Eve, doctors diagnosed her with Tourette’s Syndrome. Now, however, her symptoms have another name: conversion disorder, or mass hysteria.

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