The greatest essayist of the last 30 years, Joan Didion, exhumes the corpse of the Schiavo case in this profoundly disturbing piece for the NY Review of Books. Naturally, this is classic Didion territory: a national dispute in which the real argument is replaced by hysterical, sentimental, and beside-the-point cant on both sides, and in which the fate (and, crucially, the presumptive desires) of a woman are duelled over by her husband and her parents, while the woman herself is all-too-literally mute. If anyone in the world is better quipped to parse the moral grayness of this particular episode, it’s got to be Dame Joan, who, despite being very old, seems to have lost none of her intellectual energy, or the peculiarities of craft (note the rhetorical repetition of “passing exposure” on p. 4 with the “casually exposed” on p. 15) that make her such a giant.