This Week's Hot Reads
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
This week: A reporter's journey to overcome a troubled childhood, a new collection of stories from Sherman Alexie, America's favorite hero gets a new biography, a civil rights tale of delayed justice, and a man's efforts to predict the future.
Do Women Rape?
Marcia Clark, the former L.A. district attorney who prosecuted the O.J. Simpson murder case, has since served a regular legal television commentator. She has written a bestselling book, Without a Doubt, served as a columnist for Justice Magazine and is finishing her debut crime novel.
O.J.'s former prosecutor says the so-called Sunday School murder case is unlike anything California's legal community has ever seen-and the defendant's likely defense won't work.
The Mystery of Melissa Huckaby
Demian Bulwa is a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he has been covering the death of Sandra Cantu. Find his work at demianbulwa.blogspot.com
A grieving town struggles to understand an unthinkable crime-could a local Bible teacher really have raped and killed her daughter's playmate?
It's a case so sad, and senseless, that it's gripped the nation. On March 27, eight-year-old Sandra Cantu did not return to her family's mobile home from a play date, sparking a massive search for the little girl. Last week, her body was found stuffed into a black suitcase at the bottom of an irrigation pond, still clad in a "Hello Kitty" T-shirt. Then yesterday, officials charged the 28-year-old mother of Cantu's friend, Sunday-school teacher Melissa Huckaby, with murder-and rape.
Ashleigh Banfield's 'Disorder in the Court'
TruTV's Ashleigh Banfield shows one of the nation's more unusual courtroom escapes in a segment from her show "Disorder in the Court."
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's Chief Investigative Reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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