Weekend Reading: Clinton's Body Man, Lapham on Mortality, and More: The New Yorker The New Republic's latest cover story, "Scandal at Clinton Inc.," by Alec MacGillis, is a rare piece that will satisfy Beltway wonks while engrossing everyone else. Its subject is Doug Band, who began a White House career as Bill Clinton's body man - "the all-purpose aide who carried the bags, provided the pen, watched the clock, kept the cigars close, and ensured the Diet Cokes were always chilled" - before masterminding Clinton's more recent "transformation into a philanthropist-king." MacGillis pieces together a case study in shrewd opportunism, which reveals much about how Washington works. On the Web site of the Poetry Foundation, Ruth Graham profiles a different sort of behind-the-scenes figure: James Leippert, a.k.a. Ronald Latimer, "a deeply and deliberately mysterious man" who published significant works by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, among other famous poets, when he was in his twenties. An air of fakery surrounds Leippert, whose episodic traipsing brings to mind the world's Clark Rockefellers. But there's an important difference: his true identity seems unformed, not hidden. It's not every day that one sees the byline "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg" - in this case at the top of the Supreme Court Justice's new essay for Politico, about her admiration of Sandra Day O'Connor. Jeffrey Toobin has also touched on this topic, in his Profile of Ginsburg from earlier this year. The piece contains some affecting details, from O'Connor passing Ginsburg a kind note as she read her first opinion to O'Connor shooting hoops (missing the first, making the second) with the U.S. women's basketball team, and it evokes values that Ginsberg herself holds in high esteem: collegiality, understated directness, unflappability. There is another underlying point that Ginsburg makes by quoting a line O'Connor once spoke in a production of Shakespeare's "Henry V." "Hap'ly," she writes, "a woman's voice may do some good." A final weekend-reading option, from the new "Death" issue of Lapham's Quarterly, is an essay on mortality by Lewis Lapham. It isn't available on the publication's Web site, but you can find it, in slightly adapted form, on the site of Mother Jones. He begins wryly: "At the age of 78 I know I won't be skipping out on the appointment." Rooting the piece in his own sense of aging raises the stakes - his words have volume and resonance. "Plants and animals become the stuff of human beings, the stuff of human beings food for fish," he writes. Men die not because they are sick but because they are alive.