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Ashley Ellis’s misdemeanor arrest turned into a death sentence. Her crime: “careless and negligent operation of a motor vehicle.” Less than two days after entering a Vermont prison on a 30-day sentence, she died from the careless and negligent operation of a privatized for-profit prison healthcare system. Her death shows what can, and does, happen across the country when states outsource prisoner medical services: states cut corners on monitoring, and contractors skimp on care. Ellis’ death “is a pretty blatant and obvious and extreme case of gross negligence,” says Seth Lipschutz, supervising attorney at the Vermont Defenders office. “We figured out in a day that they killed her.” —“Death by Privatization: For-profit prison healthcare system implicated in death of inmate,” Terry J. Allen, In These Times

A lot of terms were used to describe seventy-one-year-old former U.S. congressman Charlie Wilson when he represented deep East Texas on Capitol Hill from 1973 to 1996, and “hero” was not typically among them. “Hopeless alcoholic” was. So too was “pussy hound.” And the occasional, less colorful term, like “self-serving” or “vindictive.” He was reputed to be a hard-drinking, coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, lightweight lawmaker, a water carrier for the timber industry, and worst of all, a pork barrel liberal. As he’ll cheerfully point out, not all those descriptions were intended as compliments. Though folks back home always loved him, up in D.C. there were plenty of people who considered him a joke, more notable for the good-looking women he squired around the world on the federal dime than any law he ever authored or sponsored. When he retired, eight years ago, mention of Good Time Charlie Wilson in the history books looked to be relegated to a humorous (hopefully) footnote, his most significant achievement being that those same “personal qualities,” to use the term loosely, that inspired investigations by the House Ethics Committee at least three known times—for cocaine use in 1983, writing hot checks to the House bank in 1992, and making illegal personal loans from his campaign account in 1995—were practically celebrated behind the Pine Curtain, where, beginning in 1960, he was elected to public office eighteen times—three to the Texas House, three to the Texas Senate, and twelve to the Congress. That, plus the fact that he gave utterance to the most stupefying, yet somehow non-suicidal, political quote this side of former Louisiana governor Edwin “Fast Eddie” Edwards’s famous “live boy, dead girl” crack. In a 1988 Ms. Magazine piece by Molly Ivins, he provided the following justification for the hiring practices that had earned his secretarial staff the nickname Charlie’s Angels: “You can teach ’em to type, but you can’t teach ’em how to grow tits.” —“The Rehabilitation of Charlie Wilson: From booze-guzzling, skirt-chasing, check-kiting Congressman to American hero in–you guessed–twelve steps,” John Spong, Texas Monthly

Like most people, I would rather be someone else. The prose this other self would write would be sharp and coiled, deadly like a snake; not all soggy and attenuated like a garden hose, spritzing dewily, indiscriminately, over thorns and flowers. But it seems one can’t just choose to be a snake. Temperament, sensibility, culture—all come into play. To be Jewish, for instance, is to incline, from Eden onward, less toward the snake than the snake victim. Most of us, with the notable exception of Isaac Babel, lack that cold equipment, that steely, scrupulous will to violence seen in writers like Flannery O’Connor, John Hawkes, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy, and other Catholic rednecks. So the matter is not uncomplicated. Then too, given that any investigation of our personal linguistic patterns will inevitably be conducted within the confines of those patterns, there’s bound to be a certain maze-like, funhouse-mirror effect of not being able to see beyond the freakishly elongated reflection of our own heads. —“Going to the Tigers: Notes on Middle Style,” Robert Cohen, The Believer

A recording of Hunter S. Thompson demonstrating the importance of the universal remote: