New Yorker

Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest in 1984, when she was twenty-two. Their son was born the next year. Two years after that, Bob disappeared from their lives, seemingly without a trace. In this piece for The New Yorker, Lauren Collins investigates who Bob Lambert really was: a British police officer part of a massive undercover operation, whose officers— known as “deep swimmers,”—spent years surveilling different radical groups.

Joshua Rothman on Virginia Woolf’s “abstract, inner sense of privacy,” and the importance of privacy to artists.

Susan Orlean on the television show “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” and its then 22 year old star, Melissa Joan Hart:

I grew up in the sixties and seventies, under the spell of the old television show “Bewitched.” I saw every episode, and I loved them all. But lately I have been watching the television show “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” and I have come to regret that I was fifteen in the “Bewitched” years rather than now. Samantha Stephens, the witch on “Bewitched,” was a high-strung, self-doubting, cringing pre-feminist, who tidied her house and suppressed her magical powers and her intellect to mollify her wanky husband, Darrin. Sabrina, on the other hand, is a modern girl. She is independent, spunky, friendly with boys but not obsequious toward them, moderately athletic, unabashedly sentimental, and assertive in the way that only girls who have grown up taking feminism for granted are able to be. “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” is shown Fridays at nine o’clock on ABC, and this year the network also broadcasts a rerun on Fridays at eight. The nine-o’clock “Sabrina” is watched by more young women, teens, and little kids than any other television program in that time slot, and both the eight-o’clock and the nine-o’clock episodes rank in the top-ten shows among all kids. For many millions of people, the embodiment of modern girlhood is Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Rafael Perez’s testimony on police misconduct ignited the biggest scandal in the history of the L.A.P.D. But was it the real story?

Eventually, Perez implicated about seventy officers in wrongdoing, and the questions he raised about police procedure cast the city’s criminal-justice system into a state of tumult. More than a hundred convictions were thrown out, and thousands more are still being investigated. The city attorney’s office estimated the potential cost of settling civil suits touched off by the Rampart scandal at a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. A city councilman, Joel Wachs, said that it “may well be the worst man-made disaster this city has ever faced.” The Rampart scandal finally broke the L.A.P.D. in a way that even the Rodney King beating, in 1991, and its bloody aftermath had not, forcing the city to accept a federal role in overseeing the police department’s operation. Yet in the view of the lead investigator, Detective Brian Tyndall, members of the task-force team investigating Rampart have come to believe that Rafael Perez is not just a rogue cop who had decided to come clean but a brilliant manipulator who may have misdirected their inquiry. “He’s a convict,” Tyndall says. “He’s a perjurer. He’s a dope dealer. So we don’t believe a word he says.”

The Biologist Who Took On Syngenta, and Their Campaign to Discredit Him:

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

Steven Brigham’s abortion clinics keep being sanctioned for offering substandard care. Why is he still in business?

Brigham began placing ads for abortion services in the Yellow Pages. The ads drew a steady stream of pregnant women to his office—and a steady stream of protesters, armed with placards and bullhorns. The commotion escalated, eventually prompting the owners of the building to petition a judge for a temporary injunction against the protesters; after the request was denied, they successfully obtained an injunction against Brigham, who, they claimed, had misrepresented the nature of his medical practice. The controversy attracted extended scrutiny in the local press. One morning, Brigham later recalled, he glanced at the front page of the Reading Eagle and spotted a story, below the fold, about a minor international development: the implosion of the Soviet Union. Above it was yet another story about the turmoil outside his clinic.

On being young and transgender:

“At thirteen, Skylar was browsing at Barnes & Noble and came across the young-adult novel ‘Parrotfish,’ by Ellen Wittlinger, which, along with books like ‘Luna’ and ‘I Am J,’ is a touchstone for trans kids. ‘Parrotfish’ is the story of Grady—born Angela—who realizes by page 9 that ‘inside the body of this strange, never-quite-right girl hid the soul of a typical, average ordinary boy.’ Skylar had a flash of recognition; a few months later, after a bout of Internet research, he told Melissa and Chip that he was trans.

“Skylar wanted to take testosterone right away—he wanted facial hair and a deeper voice and a more masculine frame. Melissa and Chip were receptive, but needed time to consider the ramifications. Melissa said, ‘To his credit, Skylar’s been amazingly patient with allowing Chip and me to internalize this and to get up to speed on it. You know, the whole idea of testosterone—there are permanent physiological changes that occur. So you want to be sure. And, while Skylar himself was sure, he was, after all, fourteen.'”

[Fiction] A woman visits her mother and brother at a family farm on Thanksgiving:

“Their mother has put a feather in her hair for the holiday, her ‘Indian headdress.’ She can’t stand it that her son is a pothead and sometimes she’ll get a look, as if she’s trying not to cry just thinking about it. She’s a very good actress. She stares at Clem. She is drunk. They all are. Beatrice’s mother can make her bottom jaw tremble so slightly that the movement is barely perceptible. She looks just like Clem—dark hair, red skin, and papery lips. She stares at him with her mouth wide open, waiting for him to feel guilty. Beatrice looks away. It is extremely difficult for Beatrice to think of her mother as someone with thoughts and desires, with plans and schemes, as someone who, quite possibly, keeps a Rimmed Rod vibrator in her bedside drawer, the way Beatrice does, as someone who might dream about a tremendous ice cube, the size of a sofa, melting in the middle of a hot desert, and wake up having absolutely no idea what the dream means—someone just like Beatrice.”

The making of the boy and girl groups that are leading the international K-pop explosion:

“Lee founded S.M. in 1989. His first success was a Korean singer and hip-hop dancer named Hyun Jin-young, whose album came out in 1990. But, just as Jin-young was on the verge of stardom, he was arrested for drugs. Russell writes that Lee was ‘devastated’ by this misfortune, and that the experience taught him the value of complete control over his artists: ‘He could not go through the endless promoting and developing a new artist only to have it crash and burn around him.’

“In effect, Lee combined his ambitions as a music impresario with his training as an engineer to create the blueprint for what became the K-pop idol assembly line. His stars would be made, not born, according to a sophisticated system of artistic development that would make the star factory that Berry Gordy created at Motown look like a mom-and-pop operation. Lee called his system ‘cultural technology.’ In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, ‘I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when S.M. decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.’ He went on, ‘S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.'”

The early days of the political consulting business—starting with Upton Sinclair’s failed run for California governor in the 1930s and the opposition work of Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter:

“Whitaker and Baxter weren’t just inventing new techniques; they were writing a rule book. Never lobby; woo voters instead. ‘Our conception of practical politics is that if you have a sound enough case to convince the folks back home, you don’t have to buttonhole the Senator,’ Baxter explained. Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one. Once, when fighting an attempt to recall the mayor of San Francisco, Whitaker and Baxter waged a campaign against the Faceless Man—the idea was Baxter’s—who might end up replacing him. Baxter drew a picture, on a tablecloth, of a fat man with a cigar poking out from beneath a face hidden by a hat, and then had him plastered on billboards all over the city, with the question ‘Who’s Behind the Recall?’ Pretend that you are the Voice of the People. Whitaker and Baxter bought radio ads, sponsored by ‘the Citizens Committee Against the Recall,’ in which an ominous voice said, ‘The real issue is whether the City Hall is to be turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to an unholy alliance fronting for a faceless man.’ (The recall was defeated.) Attack, attack, attack. Whitaker said, ‘You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win!'”