A close friend of the suicide wife of RFK Jr. says: "She had cause. She was used up and tossed away by Bobby. That was awful."

"She was deeply troubled, abusing alcohol and prescription meds."

"She had grown up with the Kennedy family, having been Kerry’s best friend since they were teenagers,” the friend said.

The marriage broke down amid reports of her addiction and rumors of his involvement with other women.

“She knew Bobby her whole life, and now he rejected her. Tragic.”

They found her body hanging in the barn. She left a note.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jay takes up the theme Another Death in the Kennedy War on Women.

"Race, Tragedy and Outrage Collide After a Shot in Florida" is a very deliberate effort by the NYT...

... to restore balance and rationality to the story of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. It ends:

In the days and weeks to come, Trayvon Martin would be remembered as an easygoing young man who had simply gone to the store for some candy and a drink. And George Zimmerman would go into hiding, amid hundreds of death threats against him and his family. Both would become rhetorical devices in the heated, never-ending national disagreements about race and guns.

All that lay ahead. For now, the neighborhood watch coordinator stood under the bright sun that had replaced the previous night’s obscuring rain and told his side of a two-sided story about standing ground, and losing it.

Both would become rhetorical devices in the heated, never-ending national disagreements about race and guns....

Thanks to the NYT for stepping back and observing that rather than operating as a participant in the use and exploitation of these 2 unfortunate men.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jay says:

NYU student emails her outrage about being forced to do an ethnography of Occupy Wall Street...

... and now it's in the news, which is full of insinuations about her mental health.

More — including all the email — here:

Sara Ackerman’s beef with NYU started over an assignment that involved going down to Zuccotti Park and writing an ethnography on the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Sara says she refused to go down because of ethical disagreements and concerns about “the criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people” that were there. She requested an alternative assignment, but wasn’t granted one by CAS Dean Kalb until, she had already gone down to OWS “with two other young girls, who are quite attractive and thin, and don’t look particularly physically fit enough to take on a potential predator, rapist, paranoid schizophrenic, etc” and felt like she “escaped an extremely dangerous — and even, life threatening — situation.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Jay said...

Ackerman sent seven very long e-mails and a total of 4,000 words to everyone in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis

Gee, what could go wrong?

Here's an idea for an "alternative assignment": do a "social and cultural analysis" of the 4,000 words of email. If we're doing "ethnography," step back and see the larger picture of the 5-foot-1-inch, 105-pound female forced by her elders into a rough city milieu. She's an interesting object of ethnography as she resists being an ethnographer to people she feels intimidated by. And whatever happened to feminist analysis? There is formal equality when all students receive the same assignment, but in a more subtle understanding of equality, there is discrimination against tiny women.