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?”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 5, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,496 words)

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.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 1, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,908 words)

The Big Reveal

The Book of Revelation is the Bible’s “Hollywood ending”—but author Elaine Pagels’ new book explores what the author originally intended:

“Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the ‘Left Behind’ books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 27, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,942 words)

Stone Mattress

[Fiction] A woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her past:

“At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.

“Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not anymore. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 19, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,043 words)

The Plagiarist’s Tale

How Quentin Rowan (aka Q.R. Markham) went from aspiring writer to serial plagiarist—and how everything unraveled after the publication of his spy novel, Assassin of Secrets:

“By then, the mystery about whether Rowan was, so to speak, an authentic plagiarist had been solved. Two days earlier, he’d sent a series of apologetic e-mails to Jeremy Duns, who posted them on his blog. ‘I just wanted to make the best ’60s spy novel I could,’ Rowan wrote, adding that he was not ‘playing a prank.’ He signed off, ‘Gosh I wish I could do it all over.’ He was picking up the odds and ends of his life. Little, Brown asked that he pay back his advance—fifteen thousand dollars, for two books—and reimburse the company for the book’s production costs. He was no longer welcome at the bookstore. He’d been about to move in with his girlfriend, a lawyer, but she broke up with him, and he was planning to move to Seattle. Rowan said that for the past fifteen years he had been dreading being discovered as a plagiarist—“Lots of waking up in the middle of the night and looking in the mirror.” Now he seemed dazed. ‘I couldn’t really envision it, to be honest,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t envision what it would entail, except humiliation.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 13, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,177 words)

Three Trials for Murder

Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy:

“That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had poured lighter fluid into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stoked a bonfire for at least five hours. Had he burned evidence? Hennis did go voluntarily to the police station, but Bittle told me that this was a tactic regularly employed by a certain class of criminal. ‘Why do people rob banks? They think that others didn’t know how to do it right. That was Tim Hennis’s attitude: “You can’t get me. I am smarter than you are.” ‘”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 14, 2011
Length: 35 minutes (8,792 words)

The Story of a Suicide

On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident:

“An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computer’s usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30.”

Author: Ian Parker
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 30, 2012
Length: 50 minutes (12,741 words)

The Fourth State of Matter

Personal recollection of a life about to be transformed, from one day to the next:

“In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 24, 1996
Length: 28 minutes (7,204 words)

The Caging of America

Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate:

“The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a ‘carceral state,’ in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 23, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,469 words)

The Obama Memos

A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process:

“One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didn’t get her way. ‘At the proposed funding levels,’ Clinton wrote, ‘we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy.'”

Author: Ryan Lizza
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 23, 2012
Length: 44 minutes (11,245 words)