Unabomber Trial Dissatisfying

Two big, macabre, largely forgotten news stories came lurching out of oblivion together this week. The F.B.I. confirmed that it is looking into the possible involvement of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in the 1982 Tylenol poisonings in and around Chicago. The poisonings, an unsolved crime and not previously connected to Kaczynski, killed seven people, caused a national panic, and brought tamper-proof packaging to over-the-counter drugs. (In a court filing, he wrote, “I have never even possessed” the poison in question.) I covered Kaczynski's 1998 trial, in which he pleaded guilty to sixteen bombings that killed three people and injured twenty-three, for The New Yorker.