The bookish Thai rights lawyer who challenged the king

The deafening cheer for Anon Nampa at Thailand’s biggest demonstration in years underlined the bookish human rights lawyer’s emergence at the forefront of a youth protest movement with his taboo-breaking call for reforms to the monarchy. “He looks quite harmless,” Rangsiman Rome, a former activist who is now an opposition member of parliament, But once he gets the microphone and gets on stage or starts working, he becomes a different, serious person.” Although the protest movement has no single leader, Anon’s Aug. 3 call for curbs on the power of the monarchy shook Thai politics in a way not known in…