If You Can't Stand the Heat...

Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of Post Style section writer Mark Leibovich. You're doing a profile of White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who is, to say the least, not one of the more colorful characters in contemporary Washington. Your hopes can't be too high when you go to interview him. But then he goes off on an apparently endless riff about how, using a memory technique developed by a 16th century Jesuit priest, he keeps a virtually paperless office by filing all the information he needs in his mental "kitchen." Trust me, journalistic gifts like this don't come around every day.