NEWSBYANDREW MARANTZ

Wes Moore is a former Rhodes scholar, White House Fellow and investment banker. The other Wes Moore is in prison.

The Other Wes Moore, a new book by the former Moore about the latter, shows how two lives can start similarly and end up tragically different. Moore's book is nonfiction, but the premise is almost Dickensian. Both Moores were born in the same poor neighborhood in Baltimore. Both are African-American. Both were raised by single mothers. As teenagers, both grew disillusioned with school and acted out. From there, one Moore's life got better and the other's got worse. One Moore was sent to military school and found discipline; the other got sucked into the drug trade. The other Moore was involved in a robbery gone awry, a cop wound up dead and now the other Moore is serving a life sentence.

The book's message is clear and compelling, and the reviews are mostly positive. But I don't think I'll read it because someone else already wrote it — superlatively well, I should add — in 1984. John Edgar Wideman, the second African-American to receive a Rhodes Scholarship, is one of America's most revered novelists. His first foray into nonfiction was Brothers and Keepers, a masterful book, equal parts memoir and biography. It told the divergent stories of the author and his brother, Robby, a casualty of the drug trade who ends up — that's right — serving a life sentence in prison after a botched robbery ends in a shooting. Wideman's premise was similar to Moore's but even better suited to his point. Rather than relying on the name gimmick, Wideman wrote about his own brother, a man he loved and with whom he shared both DNA and a childhood.

Ten-day Vipassana meditation courses are taught all over the world, from golden stupas in Burma to farms in Massachusetts. All courses follow the same rules: payment is by donation only; men and women are segregated; no talking; no writing; no eye contact; no eating after noon. All you're allowed to do, really, is sit silently and observe the way your breath feels as it leaves your nostrils.

Sound like prison? If so, you're more right than you know.

In 2002, two trained Vipassana instructors taught a 10-day course in Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Alabama. All 20 inmates were given special dispensation to sleep on the floor of the gym, where the course was held. The only Vipassana course at Donaldson was identical to the other courses around the world, except for the guards — who also learned to meditate — and the camera crew.

The Dhamma Brothers, a documentary about the 10-day course, was released in 2007 and is now being aired on public television across the U.S.

"I spent eight and a half years on death row, and this was harder," a convicted murderer named Grady Bankhead says in the film.

Since the documentary's plot — 20 men sitting silently in a dimly lit room — does not make for easy viewing, the filmmakers also interviewed prison administrators, Vipassana instructors and the meditating inmates themselves. In a regrettable move, the filmmakers asked the inmates to recount their offenses and filmed blurry crime reenactments. The intent was to dramatize the horrendous memories in the prisoners' minds, but the effect was more like watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

As Matt Kelley wrote last week, and as any American with a pot prescription knows, marijuana laws in this country are far from cut and dry. Medical marijuana is legal in 14 states, but "legal" is defined differently from state to state, from county to county, and sometimes even from day to day. No matter what states say, marijuana is still illegal under federal law, and there is intense debate about whether state law can trump federal law in this case.

Case in point: Last year the University of Montana punished a disabled student for growing marijuana in his dorm room. Medical marijuana is legal in Montana, and the student had a state-issued card allowing him to grow pot for personal use, but the university insisted: no drugs on campus. Though they have not revised this policy, they have since allowed medical marijuana users to opt out of university housing. "We're not unsympathetic to the medical conditions of these people, but we don't have the authority to do anything about it," said David Aronofsky, UM chief legal counsel, told the Missoulian: "State medical marijuana laws can't override the federal laws."

Aronofsky's interpretation is debatable, of course; many legal scholars argue that state laws can override federal ones. In fact, though President Obama has literally laughed at the prospect of legalizing marijuana at the federal level, Attorney General Eric Holder has stated that his office will not bother states that choose to legalize the drug for medical purposes. (The DEA still slips up and raids dispensaries occasionally, but they've gotten better.) Though the legal debate over the supremacy of state law may never be resolved, this is as close as we can get in practice: as long as the relevant federal agencies agree not to contradict a given state law, that state law has more or less trumped federal law.

So where does that leave the University of Montana?

High school stoners need many things (spice grinders, chill parents, more Pop-Tarts). But one thing they do not need is another good reason to be paranoid.

Just ask parents of Harriton High School student Blake Robbins, who claim the school spied on their son via webcam. How did it happen? Well, in Pennsylvania's wealthy Lower Merion School District, some 1,800 students were issued school-owned Apple laptops. And now, the school admits that the laptops came equipped with tracking software that allowed school officials to take still photos of whatever was in the scope of the webcam. The school maintains that the software was used 42 times in the past two years with the sole purpose of tracking down lost or stolen laptops. Robbins, though, says an assistant principal attempted to discipline him for selling drugs, based on webcam photos of him popping pills -- which Robbins claims were actually just Mike and Ikes.

Now, Robbins' parents have sued, and the FBI is investigating the case. In the meantime, a few questions. First of all, if the school was really interested only in tracking stolen laptops, why didn't they install a location monitor instead of webcam-hacking software? Or make the students pay a deposit? Or not give public school students expensive laptops in the first place?

Also, if they wanted the software to act as an anti-theft deterrent, then they should have told students it was installed. The use agreement included some vague language about "monitoring," but it failed to say "Big Brother can see you."

Dear Obama,

WTF, dude? I thought we had an understanding. I've been defending you to all my lefty friends; every time they start in with "He's not doing enough on Burma" or "He's weak on gay rights," I say, "Look, he has a master plan. Be patient." Then you go and nominate Michele Leonhart to be head of the DEA? What gives? How am I supposed to defend that??

Leonhart is a Bush appointee who opposes the decriminalization of medical marijuana. In 1989, being against medical marijuana would have been an unfortunate but understandable position. In 2010, it is no longer acceptable. We know pot is safe and has medical benefits. We've been over all this a million times. The list of people who support medical marijuana decriminalization includes 80% of Americans (aka your constituents), a vast majority of Democrats (aka the people who voted you into office), and a presidential candidate named Barack Obama. I can only think of two explanations for this. One: you might be trying to pick someone Republicans will like, in order to have an easy confirmation hearing. I know you just went through a nail-biter with Bernanke and it would be nice to cruise through a confirmation hearing for a change. But guess what? THE REPUBLICANS DON'T LIKE ANYTHING. Correction: they like the opposite of what you do. So stop pandering to them, OK? Pander to us for a change.

The second explanation is that maybe you just aren't as liberal as we hoped you were. In fact, I know you're not. In fairness to you, you never really claimed to be. You warned in your book that you serve as "a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." And as I wrote in my last post, I know you want to play to the center and be a New Democrat, and I do think that's admirable. But dude, holding back medical marijuana? That's not being a New Democrat; that's being an old Republican.

Yours Sincerely,

Andrew Marantz

Looks like 9/11 suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (pictured here modeling the world's least flattering neckline) will not be tried in Manhattan. Yesterday, Chris Cassidy argued that this wasn't such a big deal. But I'm worried -- partly because courthouses are important symbols, and partly because this is one more in a string of capitulations by the Obama administration.

All terrorists -- sorry, alleged terrorists -- should be tried in criminal court. The good reasons for this have been expounded many times by folks more eloquent than myself. Despite reactionary rants that a due process trial would somehow allow Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to slip out a window and kill us all in our sleep, no one really thinks KSM will get off on the Twinkie defense. He's going away for a long time. Still, how we convict him is of great symbolic importance -- and "symbolic," here, should by no means undercut "importance." After all, perhaps the most important function of criminal justice is its symbolic power -- retribution, reconciliation, catharsis. But that's a deeper discussion than we have time for.

A KSM trial in the Lower Manhattan Southern District courthouse would have sent a lot of the right messages. But Mayor Mike Bloomberg revoked his support, claiming courthouse security would cost too much, and once again, the Obama administration has shied away from political conflict and is now scrambling to find another venue.

My knee-jerk impulse was to call this cowardly. But I will heed Obama's call and refrain from oversimplification. I do understand the argument against a Manhattan trial; the area would have to be secured, after all, and if that would really cost $250 million per year, that does sound like an impractical use of resources.

Still, it seems like the Obama administration is falling into a worrisome pattern: stake out controversial position, receive political fire, defend position at first, take more fire, then retract and run for cover.

Kevin Singer, currently serving a life sentence in Wisconsin, has been a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast "since childhood," says the New York Times. Prison authorities confiscated Singer's hand-written D&D paraphernalia and forbade Singer from playing his favorite role-playing game on the grounds that it might lead to gang activity. In a ruling Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected Singer's claim that the D&D ban violated his First and 14th Amendment rights.

Both legal and gaming blogs pounced on the story, and readers responded in droves. At last count, the post at Above the Law, which included prurient confessions and a distasteful sexual assault joke, garnered 73 comments; the Gizmodo post had 208.

Now, the argument that Singer's nerdy hobby is a threat to prison security is too patently absurd for me to refute here. Do a lap around the blogosphere and you'll read lots of predictable but fun jokes pointing out how unlikely it is that D&D would cause breakouts of violence.

But beyond the quirky particulars of this case, what is the news here? That prisons arbitrarily curtail the rights of inmates? Well, duh. What headlines should we look for in tomorrow's NYT? "Drunk Person Makes Regrettable Decision"? "Economy Bad"?