Now I Know More by Dan Lewis Read Free Book Online

mid-1960s, though, that wasn’t the case. It was not uncommon for people to open their mailboxes to find something they wouldn’t want their twelve-year-old son to see (even if he really wanted to see it). In the latter part of that decade, the federal government passed a law (39 U.S.C. § 3008 if you’d like to look it up) aiming to help. The new rule: if you received “any pandering advertisement which offers for sale matter which the addressee in his sole discretion believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative,” you could ask your post office to issue a “prohibitory order”—that is, the Postal Service could make the sender stop sending that stuff to you.
    By the early 1980s, the law had been through the legal system and come out perfectly fine, despite a challenge claiming that it violated the senders’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. So when Larry Flint, the publisher of Hustler magazine, started sending his nudie mags to all 535 members of Congress—free and unsolicited—in late 1983, many congressmen asked the post office for prohibitory orders. By October of the following year, 264 of those congressional offices had demanded, via the post office, that their free subscriptions be halted.
    Flint stopped, under the advice of counsel, and then sued.
    His argument was a First Amendment one, but ultimately it didn’t rest on freedom of speech. The First Amendment also guarantees, among other things, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Flint argued that he was trying to lead members of Congress to a revelation, opening their eyes to the world around them. As he told The Hill magazine in 2011, “Moses freed the Jews, Lincoln freed the slaves, and I just wanted to free all the neurotics.”
    The court agreed.
    So every month, each member of Congress receives a plain manila envelope in the mail containing a few dozen pages of satire, political commentary, and naked women. Most offices file the magazines immediately into the recycling bin. But as one congressional staffer anonymously told National Journal , some magazines have been put to a different, arguably better use:
    For a while, the interns, after their initial shock and befuddlement, were directed to save the Hustlers . We eventually gave a coworker the whole year’s supply for Secret Santa and then she would mail them to her boyfriend in Iraq. Certainly one of the least-heralded ways the office supported our troops.
    But yeah, most just throw them out.
    BONUS FACT
    Larry Flint is no stranger to the courtroom, often litigating First Amendment issues. But his most famous legal battle, Keeton v. Hustler , was about the inner workings of the legal system (personal jurisdiction, if your vocabulary includes legal terms of art). He lost and wasn’t very happy about it. After losing the case, he temporarily found himself in contempt of court, for, while still in the Supreme Court building and within earshot of the Justices, dropping an f-bomb, calling the eight male Justices a choice word, and referring to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as a token (highly offensive word that starts with the letter “c”). Charges were dropped shortly thereafter.

NEITHER RAIN NOR SLEET NOR 140,000 POTHOLES
THE TOUGH ROAD TO BECOMING A POSTAL TRUCK
    In the United States, people drive on the right side of the road. To make driving and turning easier, the driver usually sits on the left side of the car, placing him or her closer to the center of traffic. There is, however, one notable exception to that latter rule. Mail carriers, in most cases, sit in the right side of their mail trucks—they have to be on the curb side of the vehicle in order to reach mailboxes without having to exit. This feature alone makes mail trucks unique among American motor vehicles. But the differences don’t stop there. The white box-shaped trucks you see slowly tootling around the