The Wrong Way to Fight the Opioid Crisis
People struggling with addiction who share a lethal dose of drugs are being prosecuted as killers.
Double Jeopardy
Examining a system that allows judges to override a jury that decides to spare a defendant from the death penalty.
Bones of Contention
Inside the fight over a 24-foot-long Mongolian dinosaur skeleton, and efforts to crack down on the black market for fossils:
“As the bidding opened, at eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, Robert Painter, an attorney from Houston, stood up, a BlackBerry in his hand. Painter is six feet three and forty-two, with dark hair, rimless eyeglasses, and a deep voice. ‘I hate to interrupt this,’ he told the room. ‘But I have the judge on the phone.’ The previous day, Carlos Cortez—a state district judge in Dallas, where Heritage has its headquarters—had signed a temporary restraining order forbidding the company to auction the T. bataar, on the ground that the dinosaur was believed to have been stolen from Mongolia. The judge, defied, was not pleased.”
Longreads Best of 2012: Paige Williams
Paige Williams is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose stories have been anthologized in five Best American volumes. She teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and edits Nieman Storyboard.
‘We Thought the Sun Would Always Shine on Our Lives’
The writer reflects on a 1987 tragedy that forever changed the lives of the sisters of Ole Miss’s Chi Omega sorority:
“In my mother’s house I keep a packet of newspaper stories, yellowed relics. And when I look at them I feel no time has passed. I am back in the Chi O house, living in the room above the front door, listening to girls come and go, drifting off for a nap as Lynn strums ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ on her guitar, as Michelle practices piano in the parlor off the front hall, as Chandler and Fig and Bryan and the other houseboys banter in baritone while setting up the dining room for dinner. I see Robin and Margaret lined up for the lunchtime salad bar minutes before they leave for Highway 6. And Margaret tucking her keys in her hiding place in the foyer, because she’d be right back.”