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This piece is reprinted from Travel + Leisure.

“The Last, Best Hope for Conservatives: Gingrich says that’s him. Then why is Santorum riding high?” by John Dickerson. After winning Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesota, John Dickerson says that Rick Santorum is a conservative voter’s best hope to beat Mitt Romney to the nomination. And he says Santorum is “the lonely warrior who has triumphed without playing a soundtrack of self-regard, without the ready millions of Gingrich's gambling-magnate patron, and despite more derision from the elite media than Gingrich has faced.”

The man who would be U.S. senator is running late. Just 15 minutes or so. Nobody’s panicking. Richard Mourdock just refused to take a taxi from Reagan National Airport, and his arrival at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) depends on the whims of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. “He’s cheap!” says Diane Hubbard, Mourdock’s grassroots director. “This is how he is. It’s one of the reasons I work for him.”

After a backlash from Catholics, President Obama on Friday softened his stance on contraceptive coverage in health insurance plans for the employees of religiously affiliated universities and hospitals. Have prohibitions on birth control always been part of Christian dogma?

Such is the power of Freaks and Geeks that, even though I was in my early 30s when it first aired, its young cast feels to me a decade later like people I knew and loved in high school. There’s an absurd rush of “Hey, I knew them when!” pride whenever one of the kids from that show finds a measure of success in his or her career. Unfortunately, the “hims” have found a lot more of that success than the “hers.”The entire male “freak” contingent (James Franco, Jason Segel, Seth Rogen) has gone on to stardom and the creative freedom that comes with it, while the equally talented female freaks, Busy Phillips and Linda Cardellini, have kept working without ever quite getting the chance to bust out that they deserve. (The “geeks” would require another column entirely: I for one will not rest until Martin Starr, Samm Levine, and John Francis Daly all headline their own comedies in the same programming block.)

In the July/August 2001 issue of the late, great magazine Lingua Franca, James Ryerson published an enthralling article about an anonymous benefactor who was paying professors huge sums of money to review a strange 60-page philosophical manuscript. Slate editor David Plotz talked about “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician” on this week’s Political Gabfest, citing it as one of his favorite magazine articles of all time. Ryerson gave Slate permission to republish the story in full. 

Here are this week's top must-read stories from #MuckReads, ProPublica's ongoing collection of the best watchdog journalism. Anyone can contribute by tweeting a link to a story and just including the hashtag #MuckReads or by sending an email to MuckReads@ProPublica.org. The best submissions are selected by ProPublica's editors and reporters and then featured on the website and @ProPublica.

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Rick Santorum, the GOP presidential candidate from Pennsylvania, is known—as you’ve probably heard by now—for wearing a sweater vest. That sweater vest now has its own Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube video, and fundraising campaign. The vest is everybody’s favorite fun fact about Santorum—but nobody seems to agree on what it’s actually doing for the politician (besides, perhaps, helping him to associate some new search terms with his blighted name). The range of responses to Santorum’s knitwear has been wide. Scarlett Johansson, who just declared the vest “so sad,” associates the look with her father. Griffin Perry, son of Rick Perry, tweeted that the vest reminded him of infamous sweater-vest-wearing football coach Jim Tressel. The Hartford Courant declared, perhaps prematurely, that Santorum had single-handedly transitioned the sweater vest from a neutral political status to a “right-wing vestment.” The New York Times positions the vest as grandfatherly; the LA Times prefers “avuncular.” Meanwhile, the Boston Herald went out on a limb and accused Santorum of “looking like a McDonald’s trainee.”

When Google announced impending changes to its privacy policy, users and the media alike were focused on one thing: the inability to opt-out, short of deleting your account. Though Congress keeps pushing Google for more clarification, many users have grumpily acknowledged the Gmail notifications and moved to new privacy concerns like an iPhone app that copied and uploaded users' contacts.

For his new book, Show Dog: The Charmed Life and Trying Times of a Near-Perfect Purebred, Josh Dean spent more than a year following Jack, a champion Australian Shepherd. What follows is an excerpt from the book, adapted from a chapter on the world of show-dog backers. Also see our Magnum Photos gallery on dog shows.

Also see our Magnum Photos gallery on dog shows.

Until last fall, a 25-year-old Seattle man named Andrew was happily committed to Mars Hill Church, one of America’s fastest-growing megachurches with more than 5,000 members. He volunteered weekly for security duty at his branch of the church, joined a Bible study group, and had recently become engaged to the daughter of a church elder. Then he made a mistake that found him cast out: He cheated on his fiancee with a community college classmate. The fury over Andrew’s experience—and his decision to publicize the church’s internal disciplinary procedures—has led to accusations by other Christians that one of the most powerful evangelical voices in the country, Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll, employs a cultlike leadership style. Now, for the first time, Mars Hill is speaking out in response to its former member’s charges.

Comic Book Men (AMC, Sundays at 10 p.m. ET), a reality show about a crew of perfectly nice geeks, boasts competent production values. Thus, it is jarring to see Kevin Smith's name attached. As Sam Adams wrote in a recent Slate piece, Smith "once said he wasn’t particularly interested in how his films looked." The director of Clerks and Chasing Amy is, in purely cinematic terms, an auteur without a vision.

In the Feb. 9 “Moneybox,” Matthew Yglesias misspelled the last name of Chipotle founder Steve Ells.

With Rampart, the Israeli director Oren Moverman shifts into an idiom that’s more likely to appeal to American audiences than the quiet, downbeat social realism of his first film, The Messenger (2009). The partly-true story of a very bad cop brought down by the LAPD corruption scandals of the late ’90s, Rampart is much louder, jazzier, and more directorially show-offy than The Messenger (and, in part for those reasons, not nearly as good a movie). But at times this gritty, intermittently gripping police drama feels like a follow-up to The Messenger—not just because of the thematic overlap (both films deal with grief, substance abuse, and self-destructive masculinity), but because Rampart’s main character, the cynical, drug-abusing cop played by Woody Harrelson, might be the long-lost twin of the alcoholic Army captain Harrelson played in the earlier Moverman film.

At CPAC in 2011, Newt Gingrich took the stage to the stirring sound of Survivor's 1980’s rock anthem "Eye of the Tiger." He walked deliberately through the crowd. Here was Caesar returning from the wars. Tomorrow Gingrich will speak again at the same gathering, but the conservative who most deserves the dramatic, fist-pumping greeting is his presidential rival Rick Santorum: the lonely warrior who has triumphed without playing a soundtrack of self-regard, without the ready millions of Gingrich's gambling-magnate patron, and despite more derision from the elite media than Gingrich has faced. 

One of the most remarked-upon aspects of the first round of Prop 8 litigation, that concluded this week with a 2-1 defeat for the initiative at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, was the weakness of the case against gay marriage. As Andrew Cohen explained at the time, at every turn Judge Vaughn Walker, who presided over the trial, expressed frustration at the fact that the opponents of gay marriage either had no case or couldn’t be bothered to make one. Arguing for the gay marriage ban, seasoned attorney Charles Cooper called only two witnesses (the plaintiffs called 17), one of whom was not deemed qualified to testify as an expert. As Cooper finally explained in his closing argument, "Your honor, you don't have to have evidence for this. … You only need to go back to your chambers and pull down any dictionary or book that defines marriage," Cooper told the judge. "You won't find it had anything to do with homosexuality."