Retired Lt. Col. Linda Campbell hopes the Supreme Court gives adequate notice of when it will hand down its rulings on same-sex marriage so she can snag a seat on a plane in time to be back in Washington for the historic decision. “I just have to be there. This means everything to me,” she says. “It’s the whole focus of my life. I don’t have Nancy anymore, I just have our marriage.”

After battling the U.S. military for almost a year, Campbell won a waiver for her deceased partner to be buried in a national cemetery, the first ever for a same-sex spouse, and she is looking to the Supreme Court to extend the right to others. She traveled to Washington, D.C. and stood in line in the cold to get just three minutes inside the court during last month’s oral arguments on marriage equality so she could lend her support—and demonstrate by her presence how much is at stake for people who for too long have had to settle for the watered-down version of marriage memorably dubbed “skim milk marriage” by Justice Ginsberg. 

Last week, Rutgers University fired its mercurial basketball coach after he was videotaped “shoving, grabbing and throwing balls at players in practice and using gay slurs,” according to ESPN. Under pressure from school administrators, Rutgers’ athletic director, who had previously defended the coach’s behavior, resigned. It was an appropriate response: violent oafs should be fired from their university jobs for violent, oafish behavior.

On the same day ESPN broadcast the Rutgers tape, The New York Post reported that Kathy Boudin, a professor at Columbia University, was named the 2013 Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. In 1984, Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, a violent, oafish association of upper-class “revolutionaries,” pled guilty to second-degree murder in association with the infamous 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack, New York. Babbling in the language of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, Boudin assisted in ending the life of three people, including Waverly Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack police force, and left nine children fatherless. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. In 2003, Boudin was released; by 2008 she had landed a coveted teaching position at an Ivy League university.

It’s a strange experience to get a call from a reporter asking for confirmation that you died a few months ago—when you're alive and well.

That call alerted me to the fact that my Facebook photos had been lifted to create a fictional character by the name of Lennay Kekua. If that name rings a bell, it’s because Lennay was said to be the girlfriend of Manti Te’o, the Heisman Trophy runner-up from Notre Dame. She never existed, but the impact on my life has been all too real.

What if we could stop aggressive behavior with a smile?

Researchers at the University of Bristol found that people prone to violence tend to view those around them as angry, too—thus provoking more violence. But the vicious cycle can potentially be broken if the first group is able to see happiness in others’ expressions. 

On Saturday morning, Secretary of State John Kerry telephoned the parents of a 25-year-old Foreign Service officer who had been so uncommonly upbeat and manifestly idealistic amid pervasive gloom and cynicism when she helped coordinate his visit to Afghanistan two weeks before.

Anne Smedinghoff had seemed to embody the spirit of America at its very best, and she had been determined to venture out and demonstrate a greatness of heart even as our military withdrawal was making that continually more dangerous.

Kerry was now calling to tell Tom and Mary Beth Smedinghoff that their brave and buoyant daughter had been killed by a bomb-laden vehicle while she was riding in a convoy to deliver donated schoolbooks in Zabul province.

Cablegate: Part II?

WikiLeaks released on Monday a search engine that allows readers to scour through a trove of more than 1.7 million diplomatic cables. Branded the "Kissinger Cables," they run from 1973-1976 and focus on the tenure of controversial Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The searchable database, dubbed "PlusD" (#PlusD on Twitter), also contains the 250,000 diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks released in November 2010, known collectively as "Cablegate."

America’s urban landscape is changing, but in ways not always predicted or much admired by our media, planners, and pundits. The real trend-setters of the future—judged by both population and job growth—are not in the oft-praised great “legacy” cities like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, but a crop of newer, more sprawling urban regions primarily located in the Sun Belt and, surprisingly, the resurgent Great Plains.

While Gotham and the Windy City have experienced modest growth and significant net domestic out-migration, burgeoning if often disdained urban regions such as Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Charlotte, and Oklahoma City have expanded rapidly. These low-density, car-dominated, heavily suburbanized areas with small central cores likely represent the next wave of great American cities.

“What would Ronald Reagan do?”—the crucial question Republican true believers endlessly ask themselves—is finally being brought to bear on same-sex marriage, courtesy of two of the 40th president’s children.

Patti Davis, the conservative icon’s daughter with former first lady Nancy Reagan, insists her father, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2004 at age 93, would definitely have supported the right of gays and lesbians to sanctify committed relationships with officially recognized marriage vows.