Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 20, 2009
New Yorker promo: Part 3
Vic Fleming
It all started when Bill James, author of the widely read and enjoyed “View from the Cheap seats” column in The Daily Record (you guys in Chattanooga, who do not get Bill’s column in your paper, should log onto www.dailyrecord.us and read it there!) accused me of being intellectual in this column.
As much of a chuckle as I got from that notion, I decided to embrace and run with it two weeks ago. That resolve led me to the closest item to me that I consider intellectual, The New Yorker magazine, which I love and think is the best bargain on the market for anyone, especially lawyers who read too much case law and too many legal periodicals.
There are items in the New Yorker with legal content. I have used several over the years to supplement the classic readings in the Law & Literature seminar that I teach at the Bowen School of Law. Among those are:
“Up and Then Down” (4/21/08) by Nick Paumgarten, an account of a lawsuit filed by a guy who was stuck, alone, in a elevator 30 floors off the ground, for 41 hours before anyone noticed. The article is not so much about the litigation but about the experience. A great education about the history and development of the elevator industry lies embedded in the text;
“East Side Story” (2/25/08) by Larissa MacFarquhar, a current bio-piece on lawyer-writer Louis Auchincloss. This piece complements an Auchincloss short story, “The Senior Partner’s Ghost”;
“Free Radicals” (2/11/08), a short story by Alice Munro, about a 62-year-old widow who encounters an uninvited visitor into her home. There are parallels to Susan Glaspell’s 1917 short story, “A Jury of Her Peers”;
“The Bribe,” by Peter J. Boyer, a comprehensive write-up of how a Mississippi legal giant came crashing down amid charges that he attempted to bribe a judge;
“Letter from Poland – True Crime” (2/11/08) by David Grann, a non-fiction piece that one of my students once mistook for fiction. It tells the story of a cold case in Poland, which a crafty police detective was able to crack. The defendant was convicted of murder, based largely on evidence gleaned from a novel that he wrote about a similar murder; and
“The Water Cure” (2/25/08) by Paul Kramer, a look-back to 1902, when American soldiers were charged with torturing Filipinos during the Spanish-American War. The method of torture? You guessed it from the title, didn’t you?
One more fact about The New Yorker: Every week the last page is devoted to a Cartoon Caption Contest, which is exactly what the title implies. A brand-new cartoon, drawing only, from one of the regular cartoonists, is presented. Readers are encouraged to write a caption and submit it.
The staff narrows the entries to the top three, which are then voted on by the readers themselves. So, that last page each week actually shows three cartoons: This week’s, without a caption; last week’s, with the winning caption; and week before last’s, with three captions.
Where cartoons are concerned, it doesn’t get any better than that!
End of intellectual digression, which has lasted three weeks. Next week, we’ll get back to the same old drivel as before.
© 2009 Vic Fleming
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