Featuring cops, badass women ... and Hugh Hefner.
 | By Honor Jones Cover Stories Editor |
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Pagan Kennedy is one of my favorite writers. Thanks to her, I once got to put the headline “The Tampon of the Future” on the cover of the Sunday Review section. She writes a lot about innovation; “how we dream up things that change the world” is the subtitle of one of her books. And she’s obsessed with the dreamers — the people who ask the questions no one else is asking. |
Questions like: Why wasn’t rape treated like other violent crimes? And why were police officers more interested in the length of a rape victim’s skirt than in the DNA evidence on it? |
This week Pagan wrote about a woman named Martha Goddard who asked those questions when no one else would. She came up with the idea for the first rape kit to collect evidence, revolutionizing sexual assault forensics, though she barely got credit for it at the time and has been almost entirely forgotten since. |
It took Pagan six months just to track Martha Goddard down. Her story begins in 1972 Chicago, at a time when rape was treated like an unavoidable fact of life — “some sort of natural disaster, no different from the arctic winds that could kill you if you wandered out in the winter without a coat.” Her story ends along the red cliffs of Arizona, but I don’t want to give too much away. |
This is an Op-Ed in the form of a detective story, featuring good cops, bad cops (OK, mostly bad cops), badass women and even a cameo by Hugh Hefner. |
That’s one of the reasons we decided to run it much longer than the normal Op-Ed — it’s about 8,000 words. I’m responsible for cover stories and other deep dives in the Opinion section, and I’m planning to experiment with a few extra-long stories this year, because one of the many takeaways from reading Pagan is that it’s good to try new things. Big ideas “emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs,” she wrote a few years ago in an essay about the science of serendipity. I’m hoping we won’t have too many spills or failures, to be honest — but I’d love to hear from you about what you think of the pieces. |
You can always reach out to us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com with comments or ideas. If you put “feedback for Honor” in your email subject line, I’ll see it. |
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