Edith Windsor, Ariel Levy, Louis Menand, Eric Schlosser: All May Not Be Lost. Intelligence Survives.

Two extraordinary stories appear in this week's New Yorker.  In some ways, they are connected only by the binding of the magazine and by the superb writing, but they are connected into the insight they provide into a supremely dysfunctional democracy which is ruled, not by intelligence, but by groupthink.

The first story, by Ariel Levy,  is about the selection of Edie Windsor as the ideal plaintiff to challenge the Defense of Marriage Act, and the legal/social/psychological/cultural/political strategies integral to the presentation of that case to the Court, in particular to Antonin Scalia's court.

Ariel Levy

The second is a book, Command and Control  by  Eric Schlosser,  reviewed by Louis Menand about the occurrence of near catastrophes with nuclear weapons: among many were one in which  the Russians came within minutes of launching an all out attack against the USA because the Norwegians innocently launched a rocket with a weather satellite, and another,  in which a 19 year old repairman dropped a wrench socket down a shaft which nearly caused an explosion of a nuclear missile,   which would have leveled the entire state of Arkansas. These are but two of thousands of near catastrophes, some of which are recounted in what sounds like a must read/must not read book.

Eric Schlosser

Windsor and Spyer 

The story of Edie Windsor and the lawyer who selected her case is astonishing on many levels: 1. The description of Windsor's ardor for her spouse, the physical joy and intensity of their relationship, even as her spouse declined physically with multiple sclerosis  2. The portrait of what that disease does to a person 3. The oblique portrayal of true devotion on the part of one human being in behalf of another 4. The history of oppression of gays in America--there was a time it was illegal to have homosexual sex, and illegal to even dance in an erotic way with a member of your own gender. The whole story of the police riot at the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village.  5. The elucidation about how Supreme Court cases in some instances are waged not as legal arguments, but as arguments about what the prevailing values of the nation are and ought to be.

This is an astonishing issue of a consistently high quality magazine. 
There is much talk about continuing education, and much marketing by universities to attract dollars from aging populations, but the institutions of the New Yorker, the New York Times and Public Television constitute a fifth estate of not so much of  intelligentsia,  as of reason.

It is a fragile estate, but an essential one.