verysimple

Just to concur with maxineofarc - civil as well as criminal lawsuits have statutes of limitations - there are ostensibly valid reasons for this - that you don't want people waiting 40 years to bring a lawsuit that was perfectly capable of being brought within a year or two of the original action - it leaves a sword of damocles hanging over the head of the potential respondent for way too long in many cases. But in the case of THESE cases, the SOL is just way too short - in many states it's "maturity plus [some short of time]". So people who were molested as kids only have a few years after they become adults to bring cases, and often they're not in the legal/financial/psychological place to do that, particularly when you're looking down the barrel of something like the institutional pressure of the Church (or a school - in NYC, we've got some pretty bad prvate school cases getting exposed now, and I think there's a move to also change the SOL after the Horace Mann situation and another recent case that just came out) On another note - when I watched this over the weekend, I could swear that Deep Throat was captioned - were you watching screeners?

Me too. I had the same reaction after reading the book. We're left wondering what's the focus of the story. Is it the miracle of the HeLa cells? That Henrietta's family was cheated? There seemed to be two stories to tell, and the one about Henrietta's family ended up being much more compelling than the story of those miraculous cells. Why couldn't Skloot or one of those scientists do a better job explaining the science to Henrietta's family? It's ridiculous for Deborah to be led to believe that her mother could be cloned, and understandable that she'd be frightened and anxious -- even for a minute. It looks like she came to terms with it and found some joy in her mother's continued existence, even if it was in a form that could only be seen under a microscope. But yeah, Oprah was amazing. So was everyone else in the Lacks family. seriously - listen to the radiolab episode that I linked to. Skloot specifically talks about the fact that when the lab techs came to take more of the Lacks' blood, or Deborah would try to find out what happened, the techs would talk about "cloning" and make references to things like Dolly the sheep - so she literally jumped to the (not completely crazy) conclusion that they had cloned her mother. It's not that they were stupid, but they weren't geneticists or scientists, and you had a bunch of scary scientists who spouted a bunch of technical jargon at them instead of sitting down and actually trying to EXPLAIN things in a language that a layperson would understand. Skloot was the first person to come along who took the time to actually understand what they needed, and not just treat them like more lab rats. I say this as a lawyer who knows too many people like this in my own profession - there are people who are more interested in showing off how "smart" they are by using a lot of technical, specialized, professional jargon than by actually helping others.

Having now watched it, I too which they had done it as a miniseries - there was so much more to the story that could have been dug into. but Oprah was amazing. For those interested, Radiolab re-posted it's original story on Henrietta Lacks, produced a few years ago with Rebecca Skloot - the original story was done when she was still writing the book, so it was basically a preview of everything that was to come. But if you haven't listened to it, you'll be interested to know that they use a lot of the recordings Rebecca made on her journeys with Deborah Lacks - re-listening this weekend, I was genuinely surprised at how similar at least some of the recordings were to what ended up in the movie. It was a really good companion piece to the movie. http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-extra-henrietta-lacks/

I'm so glad Oprah is getting back into acting. She's so great, and I still think about how she was such a revelation in The Color Purple, in a role that required her to have zero vanity, but then she became OPRAH! to the point where you couldn't really forget that it was her. I had also been wondering why every ad I had seen had Oprah's face plastered on it, despite it being (ostensibly) the story of Henrietta. This write-up helps me understand that a bit better - that it's not *just* a marketing gimmick because, well, OPRAH!

Judge Judy and Milan are real judges in small claims court. not really - Someone like "Judge Judy" was a judge at one point, but when she got the show, she retired from being an actual judge and she is officially an arbitrator. those court shows are actually, from a legal perspective, arbitration proceedings, not court proceedings, which is why they have so few procedural standards and can't be appealed. Also, a little secret? the main reason people agree to go on those shows is that everyone gets paid an appearance fee, and the show pays the judgments, not the "litigants". so your dispute may be real, but you basically get out of the consequences of your actions by performing for the cameras for 15 minutes.

Can someone please explain how a crackpot cult that believes in aliens got granted tax exempt church status? [Lawyer hat] From a purely legal perspective, courts try not to get into the business of evaulating the tenets of particular faiths - that pesky first amendment prohibits it. It's only when those tenets come into conflict with *other* fundamental rights* that they're required to balance them (aka - the right to be free from racial discrimination) - this is why, say, Bob Jones University could be threatened with loss of its tax exempt status for being racist. But that's a really narrow set of circumstances. *fundamental rights are not what "you or I" would think of as fundamental, but in this case, a specific set of rights defined by the constitution as interpreted by the supreme court. Generally, most (but not all!) of the rights set forth in the bill of rights are considered fundamental, and have been determined to be applicable to the state via the 14th amendment [/lawyer hat] From a less-legalistic perspective, scientologists basically blackmailed the IRS via operation snow white.

@sarah d. bunting - I will admit to actually crying when I read this: http://ny.racked.com/2015/7/28/9055841/trash-and-vaudeville-closed. I remember thinking St. Marks was just the coolest when I was in HS/college. One time I was actually down there with my dad of all people, and he looks around and goes "wait a minute, I used to hang out at the Electric Circus down here". And then he went exploring and discovered that where the EC used to be had turned into a drug rehab center. That was (a) the first time I realized that my dad was actually much cooler than my giant nerd-self when he was young and (b) a really depressing sign of the times. and @txhorns79 - hah! but I mis-spent my college years in buffalo, and have actually never been to the 90210 zip code.

Of all the 90s fashion hashed out here, the frothy party dress paired with Doc Martens boots is the look that puzzles me most. I wasn't so much with the bodycon clothing, but doc martens and a-line dresses were pretty much half my wardrobe in college, in Buffalo, in the early 90s. The other half was over-sized mens carpenter pants and...doc martens. I also went through a courtney love phase, where I wore a lot of slip-dresses as clothes. usually with a sweater on top because...Buffalo. I had a fabulous pair of burgundy (not oxblood, these were a darker, more purplier color) 10 hole docs that I wore to death that I bought at Trash and Vaudeville in NYC before they sold docs everywhere. God I miss those boots.

When I heard her say Inwood, I actually thought she was referring to the one in Manhattan, which would make a bit more sense from a "tough girl" perspective, but didn't really make sense from the rest of the conversation about taking the train. maybe the writers have no idea what they're talking about and are confusing the two?

There's already a built-in perv factor - apparently he's been trolling for (ahem) high school girls on top of everything else (http://gawker.com/here-s-a-video-of-pharma-creep-martin-shkreli-flirting-1748338016).

Also, Weller Sr. is Jay O. Sanders. Well, now I'm stuck watching this thing. Jay and my stepmom have been friends since high school, and he's apparently the nicest guy on earth. So we watch everything he's in. When I saw him pop up at the end of the episode, I basically groaned with acknowledgment that I'm never getting away from this show now.

I'm through episode 10. The only thing that's got me annoyed and taken me "out of the story" is the thing that always gets screwed up on TV - lawyers. Because I'm a lawyer it all pinged my "they're getting this all wrong" radar - and they got NONE of the Trusts and Estates stuff right. - Meg handling her dad's estate, when she's a beneficiary of the estate, is like, the biggest no-no there is. Like, the first thing you learn in Trusts and Estates class in law school big. - Someone changing their will within a YEAR of their death is prima facie grounds for getting it thrown out if someone wants to challenge it, which Meg, being the super-smart lawyer they claim she is would know, so why she's even bothering with this scheme.... - wills need to be witnessed/notarized/etc. (there's actually an exception to this for handwritten wills written on the back of a napkin! but stuff drafted by a lawyer? must be notarized and witnessed) That stuff all really annoyed me. It's the classic "we need legal machinations to make people look evil/shady/underhanded or move the plot in a direction but we understand nothing about how the actual law works", and it ALWAYS serves to take me out of the story. Especially since so much of this particular thread has been entirely unnecessary to the overall plot. The rest of it's been great though.

I just find it hysterical that this whole thing got started by what was basically a joke during the nerdist interview of Gillian Anderson. They basically wanted to see how far a rumor-tweet of a rebooted x-files could get, and that seems to be what sparked the whole idea. Either that, or it was in the works beforehand, and Anderson used the nerdist guys to gin up publicity in a totally genius way.

Speaking of reenactments, it totally took me out of it when they had a sparkly new 2010s-era metro north train pulling into the train station in Katonah. As someone who was still riding those janky patchwork 1970s trains well into the 2000s (and they still run on parts of the line from Southeast up to Wassaic, trust me), I don't understand why they couldn't strive for some era-appropriate realism there.