This is the way David Boies conducts himself when the battle is at its hottest, when losses are mounting and the enemy is preparing for the kill: he sits upright with his gold-framed reading glasses halfway down his nose, a pen and document in hand, while his paralegal, only a few feet away, performs a circus act involving two cell phones, a briefcase and an importunate reporter. Boies' pen makes sharply slanting scratches on a critical legal brief--just one stone ...

In the basement of a Cape Cod on a suburban street in northern New Jersey, a teenage boy turns to a friend and asks impatiently, "What did you get? I'll give you some of this"--indicating a bottle of Ritalin stuffed into the front pocket of his backpack--"for some of that painkiller." As a rap song plays just loud enough not to disturb the neighbors, his friend eyes the bottle suspiciously. "Is this generic, or is it the good stuff?" he ...

I woke up this morning to discover that, despite my best efforts, I was still only married to my job. I had spent part of the night in Greenwich Village with the crowds outside the Stonewall Inn celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York state. I proposed to several passersby but every single one laughed. The thumping of "Y.M.C.A." on an adjacent boombox killed any possibility of romance. I had wandered down from a party about ...

In New York County Surrogate's Court, the last will and testament of Marilyn Monroe was filed for probate, showing that for all her troubled personal life, her business affairs seemed in extraordinarily good order. Unencumbered by the debts, tax claims and pending lawsuits so common to Hollywood's money minters, the value of her estate was listed "in excess of $500,000," a legalism often meaning much more. She left $100,000 in trust for her mentally ill mother, $50,000 to her onetime ...

More than a quarter-century after the glaring headlines, former State Department Official Alger Hiss finally found the answer last week to a much disputed mystery in one of the most celebrated spy cases of the cold war era. On being denounced in 1948 as a Communist, Hiss filed a libel suit against his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, who thereupon dug out some evidence that a relative had hidden for him in an abandoned dumbwaiter in New York City. As he later told it in his book Witness, ...

In a barebones basement office in Buffalo, New York, Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her miniscule staff of the education reform advocacy group, Buffalo ReformED, are against incredible odds. In less than a week they are trying to get a controversial law through the New York State Legislature that is known as the Parent Trigger. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents at any persistently failing school ...

It was evening rush hour in New York City. 42nd St. was packed, and I was hoping I would make the bus. His voice came out of the crowd. "Take that rag off!" Huh? In my four months of working in New York, that was a first. Actually, that was a first in the seven years since I started wearing a hijab. A lot of people turned to look at me as he shouted those words. I don't know exactly what I was ...

To see the conflict and our part in it as a tragedy without villains, war crimes without criminals, lies without liars, espouses and promulgates a view of process, roles and motives that is not only grossly mistaken but which underwrites deceits that have served a succession of Presidents. —Daniel Ellsberg THE issues were momentous, the situation unprecedented. The most massive leak of secret documents in U.S. history had suddenly exposed the sensitive inner processes whereby the Johnson Administration ...

Democrats are in a grumpy mood, and with good reason. A big special-election victory in upstate New York quickly sagged into a disastrous media frenzy over Democratic Congressman–Internet lothario Anthony Weiner's spectacular success in becoming the Twittersphere's most obvious twit. To make matters worse, a brand-new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows President Obama actually losing to Mitt Romney among registered voters, in a tight 49 contest. The race is close because next year both Obama and the Republican ...

The slopes of the Rockies beckoned for spring skiing. The airfare seemed reasonable enough on short notice: New York City to Denver for $386 round-trip. But United wasn't finished trying to pry money out of me. At the self-service check-in kiosk, I was offered a chance to upgrade to Economy Plus for $40. Did I have bags to check? The first was $25, the second $45. Did I want to shortcut the security line and board early with the swells, ...