Vox Sentences: You wanted it. You asked for it. It’s … Romney 2016

1. Romney 3.0

Mitt Romney works the crowd in Alaska this past November. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

• Mitt Romney told another senior Republican he will "almost certainly" run for president again.

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, and Karen Tumulty]

• His case for himself: he came close to winning against an incumbent president when the economy was good, and 2016's conditions will be more favorable.

  [Slate / John Dickerson]

• Romney called Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to shore up his support.

  [National Journal / Lauren Fox]

• Also reached out to: his former running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH).

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, and Karen Tumulty]

• Why he might win the nomination: he hasn't alienated the base like Jeb Bush has.

  [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]

• Why he might not: the primary electorate only accepted him grudgingly in 2012 and has better options now.

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• Romney reportedly wants to make fighting poverty a central theme in his campaign.

  [Politico / Maggie Haberman and James Hohmann]

• One big winner of an expanding primary field: GOP political consultants.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• If Romney won, he'd be the first failed nominee to win in a second attempt since Richard Nixon, who was the first since Grover Cleveland.

  [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]

• But Hubert Humphrey's failed 1972 Democratic primary bid, four years after Nixon beat him, might be the better historical precedent.

  [Andrei Cherny]

• Remember Romney's gaffe about the 47 percent of Americans not paying federal income taxes? It's down to 40 percent.

  [Washington Post / Max Ehrenfreund]

2. Risen in the clear

New York Times reporter James Risen. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• New York Times reporter James Risen will not be forced to reveal his confidential sources in federal court.

  [NYT / Matt Apuzzo]

• The case concerns Risen's 2006 book State of War, which reported on Operation Merlin, a botched CIA attempt to provide Iran with faulty nuclear weapons plan.

  [The Guardian / James Risen]

• The plans were supposed to be subtly flawed so as to slow the Iranians down, but they might actually have accelerated the Iranians' progress toward a bomb.

• Former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling is facing charges for being Risen's source on the operation.

  [Politico / Josh Gerstein]

• In 2008, Risen was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury that was looking into the leak.

  [NYT / Philip Shenon]

• He got another grand jury subpoena in 2010, and a third subpoena in 2011 for testimony at Sterling's trial.

  [The Nation / Norman Solomon and Marcy Wheeler]

• Risen fought the third subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

  [NYT / Adam Liptak]

• But ultimately, the Justice Department opted not to call Risen. Executing the subpoena could have sent him to prison for contempt of court for refusing to testify.

3. Misc.

• When people hear and tell stories while getting brainscanned, the brains of the storyteller and the listener light up similarly.

  [Aeon / Elizabeth Svoboda]

• Akira Kurosawa's 100 favorite movies, one per director (the biggest surprise to me: the River Phoenix movie Running on Empty).

  [OpenCulture / Jonathan Crow]

• The case for letting 16-year-olds vote.

  [Bloomberg View / Jonathan Bernstein]

• Can philosophy of language make sense of the sentence, "Fuck the haters"?

  [Strong Language / James Harbeck]

4. Verbatim

• "Jerry Brown will almost certainly never be president of the United States, a fact that disappoints no one so much as Jerry Brown himself."

  [LA Times / Mark Barabak]

• "The failure of most vampire literature is that the authors can’t successfully imagine what it’s like to be 300 years old."

  [Anne Rice to The Atlantic / Peter Nowak]

• "There would not be a next time if we fucked this record up."

  [Carrie Brownstein to Pitchfork / Jessica Hopper]

• "I want to tell you that a headache made me overdose on pain medication once, and all I remember was lurching up my lunch at the student health clinic in Carbondale, Illinois, and a beautiful nurse patting my back because I was crying at the same time, crying and lurching, crying and lurching, because the pain didn’t go away, the one in my head, the one pulsating like a heart about to explode."

  [River Teeth / Ira Sukrungruang]