It’s been years since I thought about — really thought about — “Doonesbury,” Garry Trudeau’s Russian novel of a comic strip, in which dozens of characters loop in and out of one another’s orbits, sketching a portrait of their times. I was, for many years, a devoted reader, but somewhere in the 1990s my attention began to drift. Mostly, I suppose, this has to do with the contempt of familiarity; with 40 years’ of strips (more than 14,000 of them) in circulation, “Doonesbury” seems to have been with us always, a staple of the newspaper comics page, no longer new or surprising, as easy to take for granted as reruns of “Peanuts” or “B.C.”

Bing Crosby slept here. And here. And here too. We're talking three former Crosby properties, for sale.

The flu activity level in South Carolina rose from “sporadic” to “local” in early December, reflecting a slight rise in the number of cases in coastal areas.