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He was only 21 years old when we first met in 2012, but I saw Ned Russin as a peer from our first conversation. Ned was insanely creative, enthusiastic, and well-versed enough in hardcore history to be called scholarly about it; when GQ asked him to talk about his vintage hardcore t-shirt collection a few years later, it was obvious that Ned was more excited to talk about Beyond and Judge than he was to talk to America’s premier men’s fashion magazine.

[Clears throat] Are you one of those people who come December 26th is like, “Holiday cheer? It’s a wrap.” If so, I know your type. It’s always somewhat disorienting waking up on December 26th and entering the limbo between the holidays. With that in mind, I’m not sure discussions of holiday films are allowed for at least another ten or so months, but perhaps you’ll indulge me on this. See, yesterday afternoon I set out to do the same thing I’ve been doing every year on or around Christmas for the last 18 years: watching the Christmas classic, The Family Stone.

Trees serve as a powerful metaphor for various phenomena, especially those that unfold across time. Evolution can be represented as a phylogenetic tree, where the root is a common ancestor and the branches and leaves are its descendants. Conversely, if you consider a given person as the root and their ancestor lineages as the branches, you get a genealogical tree. (If the roots are instead being gnawed on by Níðhöggr, the horrific dragon that eats the corpses of the people sent to hell, then you might be dealing with Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse mythology that supports the earth and the heavens.

Short items, a few scooplets, a good one-liner or two, that’s what my kind of column is made of, and as my tribute to Mr. Winchell, I hope to keep three-dot journalism alive in a business that considers it hopelessly out of date. Hell, so am I, dot-dot-dot. You won’t find many young journalists writing three-dot columns these days. For one thing, it’s too much work. — Herb Caen explaining three-dot journalism in a 1985 column

"To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill, O may it all my pow'rs engage to do my Master's will!"--A Charge to Keep As I noted in a Facebook post earlier this afternoon, I am still processing the news that my Morehouse College classmate and Frat Brother Don Cheatham has passed away after a long and valiant fight against cancer. Don was 51 years old… As I often write, anytime that anyone in my age range transitions, it reminds me, quite starkly, that we all have a day of reckoning coming soon.

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here. Thanks! A version of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033), and is reproduced here with permission. On January 23, the legal world lost one of its greatest minds when Professor Charles Fried of Harvard Law School passed away at 88.

In the fall of 2021, I made one of my first trips into the post-vaccine world that was just starting to open up again. I traveled to the small town of Guilford, Connecticut, to meet someone I had spent hours on the phone with during quarantine: David Knapp. Many of you know Knapp as a legendary gay scouter who fought for more than 20 years for acceptance in the organization he loved.

It’s a nice, small brownstone with ornate gates on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just two blocks from Central Park. A young Tom Cruise used to live in the building, as did Robert Downey Jr., when he was with Sarah Jessica Parker. But the front stoop at 50 W. 86th St. holds a tragic memory. The sax player King Curtis bought this eight-apartment building in 1971, just after he got off a tour with Aretha Franklin.

Hello, Something a little different today… a new obsession to tell you about. Last year, I declared myself to be in my Katherine Center Era upon discovering the author’s back catalog of closed-door romances filled with strong, quirky heroines. After reading my first (THE BODYGUARD), I commented that these books felt like the kind of 90’s romcom Meg Ryan would star in. So, it’s ironic (poetic?) that I have officially entered my Nora Ephron Era and am in full obsession mode with the writer/director who created those 90’s romcoms Meg Ryan actually did star in.