Eric Shear

Geraldine Tyler, the 94-year-old Minneapolis woman at the center of next month’s argument before the Supreme Court.

The first spectator arrived at midnight. He brought a sleeping bag and an umbrella, then waited outside the Supreme Court all night while it drizzled on and offOther spectators arrived between 2 and 6 a.m. By the time I arrived at the Supreme Court around 9:00 a.m., there was a line of people down the block, waiting in the cold.

When environmentalists celebrate the 50-year impact of the Clean Water Act, they talk about what the law means for animals and plant life. The CWA, they say, has helped fish, birds, and turtles thrive in America’s waterways.

Last July, two climate activists glued their hands to the 540-year-old Botticelli painting Primavera at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. The painting, which depicts mythical figures in a green garden, is one of the most studied and praised in Western Civilization. It is thought to be an allegory about the abundance of nature.

In the late 1970s, two sociologists asked: Where had all the 1960s radical activists—the countercultural voices who clamored for a revolution—ended up in the seventies?

“Somebody must have slandered Josef K.,” Franz Kafka writes in the opening line of The Trial, “for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Josef K. spends the novel in a futile (and ultimately fatal) quest to learn from a mindless bureaucracy what his supposed crime is and how he can prove his innocence. At one point, a priest tells Josef K., “It is not necessary to accept everything as true. One must only accept it as necessary.” The Environmental Protection Agency has adopted this same stance in the case of Sackett v. EPA, which has now spanned 15 years and gone to the Supreme Court twice, most recently in October.

The House of Diamond Lake was estimated to be worth between $3 million and $4 million. It was nestled on the shore with other multimillion-dollar houses in the postcard-perfect Michigan setting. “Diamond is a very appropriate name for this beautiful lake,” one visitor to the area reports on TripAdvisor. “The water is crystal clear and sparkles when the sunlight dances on its surface. Water sports and fishing are a constant presence. You will see sailboats whenever the wind picks up a bit.” It’s no wonder Cass County officials were so excited.

They were trapped. David Tibbitts’ debilitating stroke in 2018 left him confined to a wheelchair. Stephanie, his wife, was having trouble moving David around the narrow hallways of their cramped 1930s-era home on the California coast.

“I walked into Stuyvesant High School and I thought I was in Chinatown,” Milady Baez, then-deputy chancellor of the Department of Education in New York City, complained to colleagues at a 2018 meeting.

It was the late 1860s, and the city of New Orleans had a gruesome problem: Animal intestines clogged the city’s water pipes.

The 12 Gods of Ancient Greece were vengeful and petty.

Occasionally, Theresa Vondra gets a client who has the wrong idea about her massage business.