The Voyeur's Motel

Let's talk about Gay Talese. When asked last week to name female journalists he admired, he balked, then doubled-down. Not using Twitter, or any social media, a New York Times piece reported that Talese was unaware of the controversy his words inspired until informed a few days later. After that reporting, the New York Times Public Editor responded to the Time's executive editor Dean Baquet talking smack about the very artice.

Then, deputy editor of the Washington Post's Outlook section, Marisa Bellack, published a piece saying she was Talese's teaching assistant, but quit due to his sexism.

All this in the same week that the New Yorker published Talese's first long article in years. It raises so many isseus that the Post came back to Taleseland to question the ethics of it.

Once you finish investigating the planets colliding in orbit around the article's author, you may have time to turn to the article itself, which is an absolute doozy.

I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.

The Reckoning

Pamela Colloff offers a long look at Claire Wilson, a victim of the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas, and how that tragic day affected her life.

On the list of those killed, she located the name of her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman. Her gaze fell on Tom’s picture, in which he sat in the formal pose of all mid-century yearbook photos, smiling broadly, his tie tucked into his V-neck sweater. Claire stared into his eyes, tracing the contours of his face. Holding the magazine in her hands, she felt some reassurance that what she had witnessed on campus that day had actually happened.

‘He Brutalized For You’

Michael Kruse looks at the odd friendship, and mentorship, between McCarthy sideman Roy Cohn, and a young Donald Trump.

Over a 13-year-period, ending shortly before Cohn’s death in 1986, Cohn brought his say-anything, win-at-all-costs style to all of Trump’s most notable legal and business deals. Interviews with people who knew both men at the time say the relationship ran deeper than that—that Cohn’s philosophy shaped the real estate mogul’s worldview and the belligerent public persona visible in Trump’s presidential campaign.