The Times, the Washington Post, (and, to a smaller degree, the Daily News) have published extreme close-ups on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan today. Here are some fun facts for your Kagan-related cocktail party chitchat:

  • Kagan used to smoke cigarettes and cigars, was coxswain for a women's crew team at Oxford, and played a lot of softball.
  • She grew up Stuy Town, and then, as a teen, in a "comfortable, but not fancy" apartment on West End Avenue. (Here's the floorplan.)
  • She seems to have always had her eye on the Supreme Court, even posing in a judge's robe and holding a gavel for a photo in her Hunter College High School yearbook, and quoting Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter.
  • As Dean of Harvard Law School, she made a stand on the military's anti-gay policy, and put free tampons in the ladies’ rooms.
  • Eliot Spitzer was a friend when she attended Princeton, Jeffrey Toobin (The New Yorker) was a friend at Harvard, and Barack Obama her friend at the University of Chicago.
  • For her senior college thesis, she examined the decline of socialism in New York in the 20th century.
  • Her father is a lawyer, her late mother an elementary school teacher.
  • She has never been married.

That last detail has contributed to speculation that Kagan is a closeted homosexual, and when a CBS blogger called her the "first openly gay justice," the Obama administration pressured the news organization to retract the story. Kagan remains tight lipped on her personal life, and much of her political views are opaque when it comes to issues such as gay marriage. But Maggie Gallagher at the National Review finds the Human Rights Campaign's endorsement of Kagan telling, writing, "A vote for Elena Kagan is a vote for finding a constitutional right to gay marriage that will overturn marriage laws in every state."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal sniffs around Kagan's old neighborhood, getting choice quotes from those who knew her when. Martin Flaherty, a professor at Fordham Law School and Upper West Side resident, says don't let Kagan's former zip code fool you: "It's not like she's an old left-wing beret-wearing Gauloises-smoking Upper West Side liberal lawyer. She's been very careful and moderate throughout her entire career."

If confirmed, Kagan would boost NYC's representation on the Supreme Court; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, Justice Sonia Sotomayor spent part of her childhood in public housing in the Bronx, and Justice Antonin Scalia grew up in Queens. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Bloomberg said, "Well, the only thing I found disappointing is the pressure is now on me to talk to the president and make sure that the next appointee after her comes from Staten Island."