With two little words, author Amy Wallace, childhood vaccination proponent Dr. Paul Offit, and Wired's editorial staff gave those who disagreed with the magazine's recent feature, "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All," a hook upon which to hang a lawsuit—and gave every other news organ in the country another reason to step quietly back from the vaccination debate. "She lies," Offit said of vaccine "safety advocate" Barbara Loe Fisher. Now Fisher wants him to pay.

When my first child was born in 2001, nonvaccinating parents seemed relatively rare. By the time my youngest was born five years later, I was defending my decision to vaccinate him on schedule to crunchier parents while second-guessing myself, and that's thanks, at least in part, to the advocacy of Barbara Loe Fisher and her National Vaccine Information Center. Whooping cough seemed a distant and minimal possibility, whereas the chemical concoction the pediatrician planned to shoot into my baby's plump thigh was bubbling around in the hypodermic for anyone to see—plus, it was clearly going to make him scream. The shot represented immediate pain and unknowable risks, while not vaccinating was what good parents did—the ones with the vegan diets, the wooden toys, and the cloth diapers. It couldn't hurt (nobody ever gets the mumps any more). It might help (the government and pharmaceutical companies have been wrong about what's safe before, right?). And it was nobody's business but ours.

Last fall's article in Wired represented the flip side of that argument and was an indirect result of Loe's success at getting her position heard. Our collective protection against diptheria, rubella, and such requires "herd immunity," which in turn depends on herd action—and in recent years, enough members of the Western human herd have been free-riding on the rest of us that the whole system may be at risk. Writer Amy Wallace let her subject, Dr. Paul Offit, make the case that vaccines don't just protect the individually vaccinated, they protect us all—adults whose immunity has worn off, kids unvaccinated for legitimate reasons like egg allergies, or those for whom the vaccination wasn't, for one reason or another, effective. In other words, if an unvaccinated kid gets the measles, he could be fine (what with that healthy vegan diet and all), but the grandmother he coughed on in the grocery store and his classmate whose shot didn't take correctly might be toast.

But in making that argument, Dr. Offit allowed his frustration with a primary advocate of vaccine caution (to say the least) to get the better of him. "She lies," he said of Fisher, and those two words gave Ms. Fisher (and her attorney, a speaker against "mandatory vaccinations" at a recent autism event) an opening. They're suing Wired, Condé Nast, Dr. Offit, and Amy Wallace for a million dollars. Ironically, in context, the words were actually something of a compliment: "Barbara Fisher inflames people against me. And wrongly. I'm in this for the same reason she is. I care about kids," Dr. Offit went on.

That context—and the fact that Ms. Fisher is a public figure, generally expected to take stuff like this on the chin—makes it unlikely that she'll be successful in her suit. But what she may succeed in doing is turning other magazines off her topic of choice, and that doesn't do anyone any good. Ms. Fisher says she's not anti-vaccine, but rather for "informed and voluntary vaccination." If that's true, Ms. Fisher (and her lawyer, who claims to have "maintained an abiding conviction to achieve full First Amendment protection for the freedoms of speech and press") should simply let Dr. Offit be heard. An "informed" decision about childhood vaccinations should include a read of the Wired piece and of any and all other information Dr. Offit, Ms. Fisher, and others can get out there. Vaccines are safe and effective, but they're that way in part because of the advocacy of Ms. Fisher and those like her. Silence, in this case, serves no one.

It's difficult to write about the life of Casey Johnson, the 30-year-old Johnson & Johnson heiress who was found dead yesterday, without being accused of speaking ill of the dead. Gawker did a good, sober job of summarizing Johnson's three decades. Here are some salient facts: a one-time cohort of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie who said turning down a chance to appear on the reality show The Simple Life was a huge mistake, Johnson was most recently engaged to bisexual reality star Tila Tequila. Johnson's adopted daughter, Ava, is currently living with Johnson's mother, allegedly because Johnson couldn't get clean. Johnson incited many bar brawls in the poshest watering holes of Los Angeles and New York. She publicly battled her aunt in the pages of Vanity Fair over a man in 2006. A Jezebel post claims that the tabloid coverage of Johnson's death sensationalized Johnson's newfound lesbianism. Tabloids sensationalize everything, that's their job, and they didn't really have to try very hard to make Johnson's behavior sound outrageous—in ways that had nothing to do with her sexuality.

Johnson's death follows an ancient and tragic script—lots of people with too much money and a narcissistic bent meet a similar demise. Of course, it doesn't make her death any less sad for the people who knew her. The most chilling part of that Vanity Fair article is when Johnson discusses her legacy:

It’s so boring to do nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried it. It’s, like, how many days a week can you actually go shopping? You get burned out. And you feel like shit. You think, What have I ever done to alter this world? What will people say? "Oh, she had a lot of shoes"?

Perhaps her death also signifies the true end of the Hilton brand of way-too-wealthy vapidity, which has been on the decline for years.

Photograph of Casey Johnson by Noel Vasquez/Getty Images.

Tags: casey johnson, casey johnson death, paris hilton, socialites, tila tequila

Another snippet on Justice Sonia Sotomayor's record in criminal cases when she was an appeals court judge on the Second Circuit:

Her appellate record in opinions she wrote, as the New Yorker reports based on analysis by University of Texas law professor Stefanie Lindquist, is 81 percent pro-government and 19 percent pro-defendant. I asked Lindquist to run the numbers on the other judges in the Second Circuit, and in a random sample from 1998 to 2002, their votes were 60 percent pro-government to 33 percent pro-defendant (the remainder fell somewhere between the two sides). So on a court where the majority of judges were appointed by Democratic presidents, Sotomayor tilts to the right on criminal justice matters. Which suggests she may sometimes part company from her liberal-moderate colleagues on the Supreme Court in criminal cases, too. For a much more detailed analysis of her votes compared to the rest of the Second Circuit, check out this Brennan Center link.

And then there's this from Senator Leahy's staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee, looking at all her criminal appeals votes (as opposed to just the opinions she wrote): She "affirmed criminal convictions 92 percent of the time and reversed convictions only 2 percent of the time." No comparison to her Democratic-appointee colleagues, but when she was on a panel with two Republicans, she agreed with them in  these cases 97 percent of the time.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor

From Australia comes yet more proof of why women should never get married. Apparently, marriage makes you chunky, finds one important study. Add that to the list of ills catalogued in Ariel Levy’s New Yorker review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book on marriage this week. Married women are more likely to get depressed, fail in their careers, and even die violent deaths at the hands of their husbands. “Marriage is an anachronism,” Levy writes, a relic from the time when people had to “establish kinships for purposes of defense.”

There is, of course, a part of me that wants to connect to my freshman self, sitting on someone’s bed and going on about marriage as a pointless institution and a stupid piece of paper, etc. But life experience has taught me better. For one thing, the statistics are slippery. Unmarried women, for example, are also unhappier than unmarried men. Evangelical women married in the hidebound, pre-feminist mode are the happiest of all. The more freedom women gain in marriage, the less happy they are. Even the weight-gain difference the study found was only four pounds. Honestly, would you trade a lifetime of love for four pounds?

Recently, I reread Herb Stein’s old Slate essay, “Watching the Couples Go By.” He wrote it just after his wife died, and it makes me cry every time. It’s a simple economic analysis of why a wife is the most valuable thing in a man’s life. Here is an even simpler breakdown from Blake Bailey, written just after Hurricane Katrina.

Mornings are bad, to be sure: that first minute after you wake up, and you remember all over again that you're broke and everything is gone and your poor old cat is dead; but there, too, is your wife's warm haunch, right where you left it.

Photograph of wedding rings by Spike Mafford/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: ariel levy, Elizabeth Gilbert, Marriage and weight gain, marriage fat

Working moms, whenever you are feeling harried, put upon, overwhelmed, just remember that Rahm Emanuel and his brothers do everything you do and more! Better! In her Daily Beast story today about the Jewish Kennedys, Rebecca Dana paints a portrait of three patriarchs whose devotion to their nine collective children has stolen nothing from their own ambitions. Rahm is famously doting, with pictures of his three children everywhere. Nearly every profile of him ends with him running off to a soccer practice or a family vacation. The children are an admirable bunch, racking up not just fellowships and awards but doing heaps of good works all over the globe. They grew up not watching television. Rahm, in fact, is a spokesman for work-life balance:

Rahm touted his paternal instincts as a way of recruiting Democratic congressional candidates, most famously in the case of Heath Shuler, the former Washington Redskins quarterback who had qualms about running for office because he had young children. Back in 2006, for two weeks Rahm called Shuler every time he spent time with his own kids: “Heath, we’re going to soccer practice, then a recital.” “Heath, I think I’m going to eat lunch with my kids today.” And so on. Shuler relented and is now the congressman for North Carolina’s 11th District.

Tags: Emanuel children, Rahm Emanuel