Lawrence v. Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional
The true story of the case that helped change the legal landscape for gay rights in the U.S.:
“The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his decisive majority opinion, it was even about the physical dimension of love: ‘When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.’ The opinion used the word ‘relationship’ eleven times.
“That is the story that Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, seeks to untell in his important new book, Flagrant Conduct (Norton), a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really got to know, and back again through centuries of laws criminalizing ‘unnatural’ sexual activity. What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex?”
Tony Judt: A Final Victory
Judt’s widow Jennifer Homans reflects on her husband’s life and the making of his last book:
“I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal, from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010, and during it Tony managed against all human odds to write three books. The last, following Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet, was Thinking the Twentieth Century, based on conversations with Timothy Snyder. He started work on the book soon after he was diagnosed; within months he was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, but he kept working nonetheless. He and Tim finished the book a month before he died. It accompanied his illness; it was part of his illness, and part of his dying.”
Those Fabulous Confabs
How the TED conference exploded in popularity—spawning a host of competitors, copycats and aspiring TED talkers:
“Until recently, the universal self-actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who upload webcammed soliloquies about whatever and title them things like ‘My TED Talk.’ There’s now even a genre of meta–TED Talks. For a TEDActive talk in 2010, Sebastian Wernicke, a statistician, crunched the data of extant TED Talks to reverse-engineer both the best- and worst-possible talks. Elements common to the most popular TED Talks, he determined good-humoredly, included using certain words (‘coffee,’ ‘happiness’), feeling free to ‘fake intellectual capacity and just say et cetera et cetera,’ and growing your hair long. He created an app, the TEDPAD, a kind of TED-omatic that can generate ‘amazing and really bad’ TED Talks.”
No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart
For years, doctors attempted to create artificial hearts that mimicked the real heart—using methods that recreate blood pumping. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier instead developed a continuous-flow device that has worked on calves and some humans, including patient Rahel Elmer Reger:
“The little quilted backpack held two lithium-ion batteries and the HeartMate II’s computerized controller, which are connected by cable through a hole in Reger’s side. Needless to say, she has never left her backpack on a bus. ‘My cousin once disconnected me, though, by mistake,’ she said. ‘I was showing her how to change the battery. She disconnected one, and then—I was distracted for a second—the other. I yelled, “You can’t do that!” and then passed out. The device blares at you. She reconnected it, and I came back. I was probably out for 10 seconds. She was completely freaked out.'”
Chow vs. Chow: The Story of an Epic New York City Food Fight
A New York Chinese restaurant loses a former member of its kitchen staff—who then opens his own, very similar restaurant. Inside the legal battle:
“In essence, the suit claimed, they’d tried to become Mr Chow—the Invasion of the Body Snatchers of haute Chinese cuisine. ‘They want to not just clone me, they want to take the whole thing,’ Mr. Chow testified on the stand, sporting his trademark owlish glasses and a bespoke Hermés suit. ‘They want to wipe me—just replace me completely, including my personal identity.'”
With My Little Eye
Has political satire in Russia turned Vladimir Putin into a national joke?
“Putin, who says that he does not use the internet, seemed unaware that much of the fear that he generated in his first decade in power has evaporated in the past year. Provoked by allegedly falsified results in the December Duma elections, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest against Putin’s decision to stand for a third presidential term in the election of 4th March. (He purported to stand aside in 2008 in taking the role of Prime Minister.) If he had been more connected with Russia’s fast-growing online culture, he would have known that by comparing the protestors’ white ribbons to condoms (as he did in the same phone-in), and metaphorically inviting his opponents to come to him to be hypnotised, suffocated and consumed, he was only offering himself up to the ridicule of the satirists who have played such a large role in the nation’s sudden political change of mood.”
Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn’t Die
Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars:
“Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers contribute content along with other users free of charge—and then pay extra to make their messages more prominent. The centerpiece of Twitter’s plans, what Costolo calls ‘the atomic unit of our ad strategy,’ is the ‘promoted tweet,’ a message from an advertiser that appears near the top of a user’s feed. Advertisers pay only when a user ‘engages’ with the tweet—retweets it, say, or clicks on a link. The more people click on an ad, the more the ad appears. Twitter executives trumpet an engagement rate of 3 percent to 5 percent, compared with less than 0.5 percent for normal banner ads.”
Lost Cat
(Not single-page) A writer recalls the disappearance of her adopted cat, and links the event to other experiences of loss in her life.
“Six months after Gattino disappeared my husband and I were sitting in a restaurant having dinner with some people he had recently met, including an intellectual writer we both admired. The writer had considered buying the house we were living in and he wanted to know how we liked it. I said it was nice but it had been partly spoiled for me by the loss of our cat. I told him the story and he said, ‘Oh, that was your trauma, was it?’
“I said yes. Yes, it was a trauma.
“You could say he was unkind. You could say I was silly. You could say he was priggish. You could say I was weak.”
The Rage Machine
A 2010 profile on the big media dreams of Andrew Breitbart, who died early Thursday morning at age 43:
“Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. ‘He’s a Marxist,’ Breitbart says of Obama. ‘His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.'”
Africa’s Dirty Wars
Africa is changing—but when it comes to conflict, the battles are smaller, messier and not necessarily driven by a specific purpose:
“This is the story of conflict in Africa these days. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, and harder to define. The style of warfare has shifted dramatically since the liberation wars of the 1960s and 1970s (Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau), the cold-war wars of the 1980s (Angola, Mozambique), and the large-scale killings of the 1990s (Somalia, Congo, Rwanda, Liberia). Today the continent is plagued by countless nasty little wars, which in many ways aren’t really wars at all. There are no front lines, no battlefields, no clear conflict zones, and no distinctions between combatants and civilians, which is why the kind of massacre that happened near Niangara is sadly common.”
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