Opinion | Where, In This Senate Circus, Is Ketanji Brown Jackson?

Also in The Post, Sebastian Mallaby pushed back at defeatism and doubts about the U.S. dollar by taking a whack at China’s currency and noting: “A standing credit line in renminbi is the financial equivalent of fluency in Esperanto.” (Christopher Dodson, Montville, N.J.)

In The Times, Maureen Dowd presented this haunting appraisal of the challenge that the Russian president poses to his American counterpart: “It is a horrible position Biden is in, dealing with an irrational, soulless fiend with over 4,000 nukes who thinks he can glue the Soviet empire back together with the blood of innocents.” (Eve Dravecky, Huntsville, Ala., and Barbara Sloan, Conway, S.C., among others.)

Lily Burana charted the recovery of her mental health: “Eventually, I found I function and feel best with daily Lexapro, extended-release Adderall and the occasional Klonopin for intense spikes of anxiety. I cling to these pills like the lifeline they are, traveling with my meds in a tote bag clutched over my shoulder, pills rattling in their plastic amber bottles, marking each step like psychopharmacological maracas.” (Rik Jones, Santa Cruz, Calif.)

And Brent Katz fashioned this curiosity-piquing opening for an article about a jazz luminary’s peculiar pet practices: “Sometimes, at Charles Mingus’s apartment, you would have to wait outside the bathroom as a cat finished using the toilet.” (Cathy Meyer, Oakland, Calif.)

In The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz noted how wrestling with a new language late in life can separate you not only from other people but also “from your own articulate self.” She continued: “We are as much made of words as we are of flesh and blood. Personality dissolves in an unfamiliar language like a sugar cube dropped into a cup of tea; estrangement from a mother tongue can be as painful as estrangement from an actual mother.” (Amy Brown, Wilmington, Del., and Jean Sandhofer, Suffield, Conn.)

And Nick Paumgarten visited Latitude Margaritaville, a Florida retirement community for lovers of Jimmy Buffett’s music, and pondered Buffett’s career trajectory: “It is impressive, in that American way, how Buffett steered from there to here — from struggling singer-songwriter whom no one ever called the next Bob Dylan to surefire arena act and hospitality conglomerateur. A poor man’s Gordon Lightfoot grows into a drinking man’s Martha Stewart, hardly having to change his tune.” (Philip Schuyler, Seattle)

And in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Ed O’Loughlin had this to say about mourning the dead: “The first echo is always the loudest. So we say our big goodbye at the grave side, or the crematorium, and let the universe take it from there. There’s no way to track that energy’s flight. But there is something eternal in what we say and feel for them. Everyone who was here, will always have been here. Everyone who was loved will have been loved forever. There is permanence in that, a ghost in the grammar.” (Lenie Ott, Toronto)