From news bulletins from The Chronicle of Higher Education for Monday, July 3. MAGAZINES & JOURNALS A glance at the summer issue of "DoubleTake": Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant's twilight friendship Rachel Cohen, a writer, offers a glimpse into the sometimes competitive, sometimes bittersweet friendship between the irascible Mark Twain and the stoic Ulysses S. Grant. The two men's relationship began when Twain was brought to the Oval Office to meet the then-president. Twain -- nervously cracking jokes until the war hero cracked a smile -- later said of the encounter, "I got away under the smoke of my volley." The closer bond grew years later, when the two kept each other's company, simultaneously failed in their sundry respective business ventures, and dealt with their fame. But the relationship was marked by a tendency on Twain's part to mock Grant during toasts and speeches. Twain, gloating after one such prank during Grant's failed reelection campaign in 1879, wrote to a friend, "I shook him up like dynamite. ... I knew I could lick him. ... My truths had wracked all the bones of his body apart." Though Grant had laughed along with the rest of the audience during the roast, the insults were surely not lost on him or the public, and Twain probably later "suffered the insomniac twinges of having humiliated a friend in public," notes Ms. Cohen. Grant's election loss, combined with an inoperable tumor in his throat and bankruptcy, perhaps further galvanized Twain into helping his ailing friend land a lucrative publishing contract for his autobiography (finished just two weeks before the former president's death) and for eulogizing Grant in Twain's own memoirs. Writes Ms. Cohen, "In the long summer before Grant died, they were just two friends, writing. ... [I]n the writing, they rescued each other." The article is not available online, but more information about the magazine may be found at its World Wide Web site, at http://www.duke.edu/doubletake/ Shelley Fisher Fishkin University of Texas