There was a lot of misleading rhetoric about the Supremes' decision yesterday on Internet library filtering.

The law, which won on a 6-3 vote, is not absolute. Adults can ask to have the filters disabled. If libraries don't on request, they can be sued.

And that is how to fight this law. If you demand a disabling, and it's not given, you sue. Let 1,000 lawsuits bloom, and the law's impact will be negated. Because the law is so broadly written, so poorly written, with no explicit standards, specifically so it could passe constitutional muster.

It reminds me of Orson Scott Card's old saw about prayer in schools. "If it's strong enough to do good, it will do harm. If it's weak enough not to do harm, it can't possibly do any good."

So it is with this. If you believe the law is wrong, fight it. You have the power.

Filed at 8:25 a.m. ET

ATLANTA (AP) -- Lester Maddox, the restaurateur who became a symbol of segregationist defiance and then Georgia governor in a fluke election, died Wednesday, family members said. He was 87.

Maddox, who had battled cancer since 1983, cracked two ribs when he fell about 10 days ago at an assisted living home where he was recovering from intestinal surgery. He later developed pneumonia and was placed in an Atlanta hospice where he died, the family said.

``Gov. Maddox had the unique ability to connect with everyday Georgians regardless of their background or station in life,'' Gov. Sonny Perdue said in a statement. ``Georgians have lost more than a former governor. We have lost a devoted family man, a dedicated public servant and a prominent citizen who loved this state and her people.''

Maddox became famous in the 1960s when he closed and then sold his Pickrick fried chicken restaurant in Atlanta rather than serve blacks. But fears of racial strife during his 1967-71 governorship proved unfounded when Maddox pursued a policy of relative moderation on race.

Photography has not been good to these men. Their lives were nearly destroyed by mug shots, perp shots or ordinary snapshots. So once their ordeals were over, why in the world did they consent to having their pictures taken by the photographer Taryn Simon and displayed at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center?

"Taryn Simon: The Innocents" is an exhibition of large-scale, color photographs of men convicted of and jailed for crimes they did not commit (rape in most cases) and later (many years later in most cases) exculpated by DNA evidence. For most of the photographs Ms. Simon posed each man at the scene of the arrest, the scene of the crime, the scene of misidentification or the scene of the alibi.

This seems odd. You would think they would do anything to avoid a camera, especially one that links them again with the crimes. The preface of Ms. Simon's book "The Innocents" (Umbrage), which accompanies the exhibition, reports some hair-raising stories of wrongful identification.

DuSable is believed to have been the first non-Indian settler of Chicago, this city's William Penn or Peter Minuit. But even in the Chicago Historical Society's archives, people say they cannot be certain whether he really is the city's sole, true founder. Or when and where he was born. Or how he spelled his name. Or what he looked like.

And in a city that loves its history and has decided finally to give Du- Sable his due, by erecting a sculpture and etching his story in stone, this is a problem.

Most people agree that DuSable, a black man who spoke many languages, moved here and opened a trading post on the river's swampy north bank in the late 1700's, decades before Chicago was incorporated in 1833. There is little, though, in the way of written records, pictures and letters to flesh out DuSable's life. But the bare bones have been enough to make him a symbol, especially among black Chicagoans, who have been fighting since the 1920's to win him recognition as an emblem for the city and its diverse history.

bercrombie & Fitch, the trendy retailer for the college set, has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle an investigation in which the State of California accused it of illegally requiring employees to buy and wear its clothes.

California officials said Abercrombie had violated a state law that says that if a company requires workers to wear certain clothes the employer, not the employee, has to pay for those clothes.

WASHINGTON

What a cunning man Clarence Thomas is.

He knew that he could not make a powerful legal argument against racial preferences, given the fact that he got into Yale Law School and got picked for the Supreme Court thanks to his race.

So he made a powerful psychological argument against what the British call "positive discrimination," known here as affirmative action.

Justice Thomas's dissent in the 5-4 decision preserving affirmative action in university admissions has persuaded me that affirmative action is not the way to go.

The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received.

It's poignant, really. It makes him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race.

Other justices rely on clerks and legal footnotes to help with their opinions; Justice Thomas relies on his id, turning an opinion on race into a therapeutic outburst.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

I say "truths," however, and not "truth," as the other side of information's new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily.

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I've seen it said that because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we don't have to. I like to think there's some truth in that. But the ground of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath the most scrupulously imagined situations. Dystopias are no more real than utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either ? except, in the case of dystopias, in the relative and ordinarily tragic sense of life in some extremely unfortunate place.

This is not to say that Orwell failed in any way, but rather that he succeeded. "1984" remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.

We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.

Along those lines, I fully expect that 90% of the comments I get to this post will come from white men, most of whom will want to tell me just how hard they had it, how their dominant status never bought them anything, how women and men face the same challenges, the same problems, yada yada yada. I?m not accusing those men of lies or hypocrisy. I believe that many of them are genuinely committed to gender equality, and that they believe that they?re ?gender blind? in their interactions with others. But like me taking my safe, suburban school for granted, they?re taking their male-dominated work environments for granted.

…Considering the decisions with another technique known as singular value decomposition, Dr. Sirovich has also found considerably less diversity than might be expected.

It would take nine dimensions for a mathematician to describe the voting patterns of the nine uncorrelated justices. But Dr. Sirovich has found that just two dimensions are needed to describe almost all the decisions of the Rehnquist court.

Although his refusal to draw any political implications from his analysis may disappoint some people, the neutrality of the approach is what makes it appealing to political and legal scholars.

"People typically come up with a single dimension, readily interpretable as a left-right point of view," said Jeffrey Segal, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "He comes up with two dimensions but doesn't label them."

Dr. Yochai Benkler of the New York University Law School said the analysis was important, because instead of starting from some theory about the politics of the court, Dr. Sirovich had used a purely mathematical analysis, yet one whose results fit with common sense observation.

"What you see here is not someone trying to prove a point, but someone who has said, `Beyond the stories, this is the math of how people behave and how they ally,' " Professor Benkler said. "And the interesting thing here is the fit between the mathematical observation and the widely held intuition about the politics of adjudication."

So, why would someone submit such a poor example of reasoning about racism when he is capable of better? To be very careful, I suspect. Response to substantive remarks about racism are likely to be quite different than those to pabulum like that in this entry, especially in the blogosphere, where any real attention to racism results in jeremiads of denial.

Some thespians herald William Marshall as one of the greatest Othellos of the 20th Century. Children of the 1980s laughed with him as the King of Cartoons on "Pee-Wee's Playhouse." And most Americans remember him as Blacula in the 1972 film.

But to Mr. Marshall, the hallmark of his career was bringing the lives of historical black leaders to stage and screen.

He was marked by "his devotion and interest in the presentation of great black leaders of the past," said Anita Rutzky, a longtime teacher and friend of Mr. Marshall. "He wanted the world to hear them because they weren't in the textbooks."

Mr. Marshall, 78, a renowned Shakespearean and film actor, died Wednesday, June 11, of Alzheimer's disease in a Los Angeles nursing facility.

He was known for his wide-ranging acting talent and vocal abilities to match. Having played Othello numerous times, from New York's Shakespeare in the Park to the jazz adaptation, "Catch My Soul," Mr. Marshall was called "the best Othello of our time" by The London Sunday Times.

Mr. Marshall fought against the blaxploitation films of the 1960s and '70s and brought more positive black characters and historical figures to the theater.

When producers of "Blacula" offered him the title role, "he thought they were joking," said his companion of 45 years, Sylvia Jarrico. "He didn't want to play this victimized ordinary fellow." Mr. Marshall re-created the character as an African prince on a mission to end the slave trade.

In 1973, he told the Chicago Tribune he was disturbed by the state of black theater and was dedicating his career to portraying "the really heroic history of my people."

He performed a one-man PBS broadcast of abolitionist Frederick Douglass during the 1980s and later adapted the act to stage, performing it across the country for over a decade.

"That was the theme of his work," Jarrico said.

Mr. Marshall was born in Gary, and received a bachelor's degree from Governors State University. In 1945, Mr. Marshall left Chicago for New York, eventually settling in Los Angeles in 1966.

Mr. Marshall returned to the Chicago area many times to perform and give guest lectures to drama students. He produced and performed "As Adam Early in the Morning," a theater adaptation of poetry and literature at ETA Creative Arts Foundation during the 1970s. He also starred in the 1980 production of "An Enemy of the People" at the Goodman Theater.

He appeared on television shows including "The Jeffersons" and "Star Trek."

Mr. Marshall was honored by ETA in 1992 as one of the "Epic Men of the 20th Century."

"He was an icon, a cultural icon," said Abena Joan Brown, co-founder and president of ETA. "You can't make a greater impact than that."

In addition to his companion, Mr. Marshall is survived by three sons Claude, Malcolm, and Tariq; a daughter, Gina Loring; and a grandchild.
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