The Story of the Kitty Genovese Story

Nicholas Lemann looks at the implications of the media’s coverage of the Kitty Genovese story:

An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in the morning on Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens. The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 10, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,347 words)

Desert Storm: Harry Reid and Sharron Angle square off in Nevada

Harry Reid is the most powerful man in the Senate. Can the far right bring him down?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 25, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,629 words)