Write By Me

Let’s consider the three championship Spurs teams in this century. The 2003 team had as one of its main cogs the irrepressible, unpredictable Stephen Jackson, who during the championship run made turnover after turnover — yet more than made up for it by sinking stone-cold three after stone-cold three. Some might think that Jackson is the last player that the demanding Gregg Popovich would want on his roster. Yet this season Popovich welcomed back Captain Jack, who is now a nine-year-older version of what he was in 2003. True, Pop likes brains. But he also likes cojones.

- Jack McCallum

While some believe that talks of a zombie apocalypse belong in a sci-fi novel, recent incidents have raised concerns for some conspiracy theorists who believe that an actual zombie attack may be imminent.

- Brittney R. Villalva

During the writing of the conspectus of my fiction, I have realized that some of the assumptions I made years ago were entirely fanciful. I only mention them here because I suspect that other writers, especially young ones, entertain one form or another of the same odd notions — that there can be a kind of immortality in publishing and that once one has gotten into print it is forever. This is magical thinking, and even if it is literally true that when a book is out there it stays there (no matter how modestly), it does not follow that the author stays there with it. I am surprised at how little connection I feel with books I wrote 10 years ago (let alone 50). I recognize bits of idiolect and see some technical moves that I approve of (even if I wish I’d managed them a little more gracefully). But they aren’t me. For one thing, I’ve changed and they haven’t. They are the work of a younger man who no longer exists. If there were an afterlife, I suppose the connection between the biography and the enduring spirit would dwindle in the same way. I am proud of some of the books (Anagrams, ABCD, Lives of the Saints, Turkish Delights, Alice at 80, and a couple of others), but that pride is embittered because they deserve to be much better known. On the other hand, I find myself slightly pained by the other books, because they should either have been better or should never have been written. But there is no blame either way, for our paths have long since diverged. And as with children, one must learn to let go.

- David R. Slavitt

Thirty-one metal crosses in a little clearing in the woods mark a mystery.

The crosses, situated inside cable fence that measures 38 feet by 51 feet, were planted in 1996, after a former superintendent discovered the old graveyard in disarray and grown over. Trees had fallen on concrete crosses that had been placed in the 1960s. Workers discarded those in the woods and planted the new metal crosses in rows based on depressions in the ground where they thought boys were buried.

- Ben Montgomery

Justin Bieber is now 18 years old. And when you’re a teen superstar who has just turned 18, there are really only two options for where you can go next: You can mature into a “real” artist, or you can swan-dive straight onto the pop-cultural scrap heap with all the other reality stars and drug addicts. A small cottage industry has been erected around Bieber to make sure he doesn’t choose Door No. 2, and so the rebranding of a more grown-up Justin Bieber has begun. There’s the new album, out this month, called Believe, which is stacked with ready-made dance-floor singles. There’s a new haircut (no more stupid bangs). And then there’s me. To commemorate the birth of Bieber 2.0, GQ asked me to fly out to Los Angeles and make a man out of him. Never mind that Bieber has already made more money and been offered a finer selection of quality tail than you or I ever will. The goal was explicit: Get Bieber to experience some kind of rite of manhood.

To that end, we proposed to his people any number of insane ideas: drinking, smoking, drinking, going to a titty bar, gambling, drinking, shooting things, drinking, etc. We assumed most of them would be rejected but that perhaps one might slip through the cracks, hopefully the drinking. I told everyone I knew that I had been handed the precious mission of turning Justin Bieber into a gin-swilling, donkey-punching man of the world.

- Drew Magary

Some people pass up rides on the other elevators to ride with Betty. For most of her tenure, the Lions lost at a historic rate. The juxtaposition struck me: anger in the seats, frustration on the sideline, snark in the press box, desolation on the streets … and in the elevator, this little older woman saying, “Welcome to the Happy Elevator! You gotta step on with a smile!”

- Mike Rosenberg

Eventually John Tortorella, the Rangers’ coach, strides in and takes a seat at a blue-draped table in front of a blue-and-silver Stanley Cup backdrop. He sits there and glares, daring someone to speak up and get his head bitten off. With his impatient expression, sweptback hair, barbered goatee and long, hawkish face, he looks like a Venetian doge, unhappy about the latest tax reports and getting ready to order some executions.

- Charles McGrath

You’ll need a trunk full of cash to park here.

The city’s first million-dollar parking space is on the market.

The private garage at 66 E. 11th St. costs six times more than the national-average price of a single-family home.

- Annie Karni

Walter headed to the field behind the Pearl Police Department, where he had been working since 2009, to play catch with 8-year-old Bryce Terwilliger, who had just started Little League. By the end of the session, Bryce, whose father Shawn served as a fellow criminal investigator with Walter, was equipped with an arm-friendly, knuckle-curve combo.

By noon the next day, Mike Walter would be dead.

- Chris Strauss

Bonus:

My plate of bucatini came out, and I started eating it. A tap on my shoulder, and I turned around. “Can I buy you a martini?” he said. “I consider myself an expert in the martini.”

Now, I hate martinis, and never drink them. “Absolutely,” I said.

“Victor,” he said, and then gestured toward his own drink and then to me. “Like this.”

Victor began making the martini under steady scrutiny. The man with the bright teeth began shaking his head, and then said, with sudden vehemence, “Victor, shake the fuck out of it.”

Victor began shaking the cocktail extravagantly over his shoulder, like someone who’d been ordered to dance in a movie western. There was a martini glass set before me, with particles of ice sliding down the sides. Victor poured the martini from the shaker, and it was still slightly effervescent.

“What do you think?” the man with the bright teeth said.

“It’s the best martini I’ve ever had,” I said with perfect honesty.

He nodded. “That’s because he shook the fuck out of it,” he said.

- Tom Junod

The shrine that was set up at the street corner where Rodrigo Rosenberg died is now deserted. Pilgrims no longer come to leave notes or flowers. When I visited the shrine, the wooden cross was tilted and defaced. Beside it, half buried in dirt, was a discarded banner. Scraping away the mud, I could see the fragment of a story: “Rodrigo Rosenberg, National Hero.”

- David Grann

It’s okay, as a journalist, to feel sentimental about journalism—to feel that it’s important, vital. It is, after all, the truth, regardless of what the market thinks. But it’s also impossible to live in America and watch what’s happening to the media without realizing that sentiment is one hell of a powerful drug. The problem with Milton Rock and Anthony Clifton isn’t that they don’t care; it’s that they care just enough to be paralyzed—to lean back and do nothing and watch their papers, their brands, their properties, bleed. What the weeklies need is some sort of creative destruction, owners who are thinking clearly and not taking hits from the nostalgia crack pipe. They need the kind of people who don’t exist in the Philadelphia media anymore: men and women who don’t give a fuck.

- Jason Fagone 

Bulger took his cut from the bank job and told his hairdresser girlfriend, Jacqui McAuliffe, they were going to Florida, where they stayed at high-end hotels. McAuliffe, three years older than Bulger, looked like Jayne Mansfield and had done some modeling. She was the first of a string of beautiful blondes, first Teresa Stanley, then simultaneously, Catherine Greig, who would be his companions, even on the run, over the next half-century.

- The Boston Globe

Within a few weeks Greasley and Rosa were conducting their affair in broad daylight and virtually under the noses of the German guards – snatching meetings for trysts in the camp workshops and wherever else they could find. But at the end of a year, just as he was realising how much he cared for Rosa, Greasley was transferred to Freiwaldau, an annex of Auschwitz, some 40 miles away.

- The Daily Telegraph

Five times he voids his bladder. Five urinations over a little more than two hours. The bathroom is at the other end of the hotel suite. From the moment he excuses himself to the one where he sits back down again to talk about his movies, Bruce Willis stares into the palm of his hand, texting someone. This pattern inadvertently becomes the structure of the afternoon, as the subject changes every time he returns. It’s fair to think the act of excusing himself, of having a pee, might be masking his opportunity to communicate with his wife, the model Emma Heming, who is out-to-here pregnant at this moment.

- Tom Chiarella

A policeman for more than 40 years, Eaton is dogged, antipolitical and rule-bound. And at age 60, he has the energy of a man half his age. His monthly itinerary is a checkerboard of international takeoffs and landings. When he sleeps is unclear. With a mustache that runs long and wide and out-of-date, Eaton resembles Wyatt Earp, the one man who could establish justice on the range. “I quite would have liked that,” Eaton says. “There are a lot of people that need shooting on the edge of the corral.”

- Brett Forrest 

The naked cannibal was not the Rudy Eugene his classmates knew.

- South Florida Sun-Sentinel

But for some reason, workmen never got around to disconnecting the electricity. For the next 62 years the illuminated tubing was hidden within the wall. Meieran estimates that the neon tube has racked up more than $17,000 in electrical bills.

- Bob Pool

If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs.

- Vincent Mulchrone

Months passed, and Elizabeth did some research on nudist resorts. She warmed to the idea. One weekend, the couple zipped over to Palm Springs, checked into the resort, hurried to their room and took off all their clothes. They stared at each other for some time, working up the nerve.

Then they strode into the sun.

- Ashley Powers

There was something utterly gorgeous about what Salberg did. Much of it indeed was the aesthetics of the catch. Baseball, a game of straight-line running, rarely offers situations in which the human form can put itself on display. When a fly ball rocketed toward Salberg in left field, he started to run, 10 desperate steps, until he reached the comically low fence at Lower Columbia College’s home park in Longview, Wash. Then it happened: his legs springing and his right arm extending like he was Inspector Gadget, his hand squeezing the ball so improbably, his entire body clearing the fence, all 165 pounds of him crashing down with multiple Gs of force, head over heels, literally and figuratively, and in love with what just happened.

-  Jeff Passan

If you’ve never seen the hammer throw up close, especially during a New England winter, the most arresting part of every heave is the conclusion: how hardened earth erupts when the metal comet splits the ground. Weighing nearly nine pounds with a four-foot wire tail, the stainless-steel ball is menacing enough that airports ban it from carry-on luggage. And on a brisk February morning in Williamstown, Mass., every toss by Keelin Godsey offers further proof of its violence.

- Sports Illustrated

Still, there is no going back. The future of the news business is online and I suspect it will come out just fine — as long as all involved can resist the ultimate temptation: becoming a “click whore.” For the uninitiated, that is anyone or any entity that will post any darn thing that draws lots of page views, or “clicks.” The problem here is not just the sort of “news” that is put online to chase clicks, it is the important news that is left out.

Sure, any fool can get a lot of page views by running photos of cute kittens, funny dogs, hot cheerleaders and bosomy models in bikinis. It might bring in a lot of money. It might be read all over.

But it would not be a newspaper.

- David Horsey 

Bonus: 

This is a cautionary tale. It is about deference to authority, and denial, and the human cost of privileging an institution above people. According to Oklahoma law, anyone having “reason to believe” that a child is potentially being abused must make a report to the Department of Human Services or the police. Child abuse experts urge us to follow the law and not take it upon ourselves to evaluate or investigate allegations or suspicions of abuse. But that is exactly what Grace did. And they reaped what they sowed.

-

Maybe it began with the tittytwisters. Or the tousled hair, the hugs, the body slams.

“Older brother-type stuff,” Josh remembers. “He would slowly desensitize you.”

Josh was Aaron’s first victim, although of course he didn’t know it back in 1996. Aaron would ask him to stay after gym class to help put away PE equipment.

-

At Grace, the bodies of the young were policed with the utmost of vigilance. When a ninth grade girl kissed a seventh grade boy on the cheek, he was suspended and banned from sports tryouts. Shaming was a teaching tool. When a 15-year-old girl got pregnant, her expulsion was announced to the whole school in chapel, with her younger sister sitting there in the pews. The infractions of children—major, minor, and everything in between—were punished swiftly and severely.

-

Josh wanted something that Grace—as a corporate entity deeply vested in protecting its assets—would never give him: an apology; a recognition that he’d been wronged and hurt; an assurance that the people in charge were sorry for failing him. A court could tell him what Grace would not: the school hadn’t protected him when they could have and should have. “If Bob had been kind and repentant and just a little heartbroken,” Josh reflects, “I would have never sued Grace.”

-

Heading toward the Mingo Valley expressway on the way out of Broken Arrow, you can see, rising from the hillside, something that looks like a brand new airport hotel. It’s stamped with rainbow-colored lettering large enough for passing cars along east 91st Street to read from across an immense grassy field: “Grace Kids.”

Inside, a gilded carousel awaits.

- Kiera Feldman

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

- Marina Keegan

Did Joe know? 

Who knows. The files raise questions but provide no answers. 

And regardless, it doesn’t change the basic fact, testified to by almost everyone who’s ever met him or worshiped him: Joe Paterno was a good man. But let’s agree on one more thing.

Joe Paterno did precisely what school regulations required him to do in 2002, when a graduate assistant came to his home to tell him he had just witnessed Jerry Sandusky molesting a preadolescent boy in a shower stall at the football building. 

Joe Paterno notified another Penn State administrator. 

Joe Paterno did not do anything more than that. 

There are a lot of words you could use to describe Joe Paterno’s behavior. 

Managerial. Bureaucratic. Lawful.

Heroic?

Let’s agree that if you are going to look for any real heroes in this story, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.

- Luke Dittrich (Esquire, June/July 2012 issue) 

The incorrigibles, the brawlers, the chronic alcoholics fall further yet. Escorted by fellow angels, they are walked down the street and through a crooked door into an abandoned nightclub. Drunks babble in the dark, bodies wither from illnesses and the air is thick with the stench of urine and vomited blood.

A burly former Latin Kings gang member from Chicago oversees Area 3. He keeps vampire hours, blasting Pink Floyd and pulverizing a lumpy punching bag under a bare light bulb.

His neck tattoo reads: Perdition.

- Richard Marosi

In the era of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., when newspapers have flailed under new digital realities, the New York Times Company has shrunk dramatically. Once it was a wide-ranging media empire of newspapers and TV stations and websites, and even a baseball team, that was worth almost $7 billion; today it’s essentially two struggling newspapers and a much-­reduced web company, all worth less than $1 billion (for comparison, consider that the Internet music company Pandora is valued at almost $2 billion). Despite the shrinkage, the company has retained essentially the same top-heavy management, which it has kept well compensated. Even though the paper froze executives’ pensions in 2009, as it is threatening to do with union employees, the company created two loopholes, called the Restoration Plan and the Supplemental Executive Savings Plan, which allowed certain high-earning executives to take money out anyway. As a result, Janet Robinson received an additional lump-sum payment of over half a million dollars upon exiting the Times.

- Joe Hagan

My worry is not about the loss of the earthy smell of freshly rendered pages. A newspaper, even one short on advertising, is a great ad for at least one thing: the paper itself. The constancy of a daily paper — in the rack at the convenience store on Frenchman Street or on the tables of the coffeehouse on Maple Street — is a reminder to a city that someone is out there watching.

- David Carr

Corruption, fraud, violence, injury, death. The ruin of college football was complete by the end of the century. The 19th century. The rest of its history has been the gold-plated accounting of a long-running hit.

- Jeff MacGregor

A young gentleman engaged in getting an education ought not to exhibit himself for money and he and his fellows ought not to raise a mere sport to the dignity of an occupation. The tremendous loss of time which overattention to football occasions is its worst feature, though the brutality and maiming are serious evils, too. Both will be cured by cutting off the money supply, which the Faculties can do by two-line resolution.

“Make lynching expensive and public football unprofitable.”

- The New York Times

Bull Cyclone made sure, though, that no one on the team felt safe. Sometimes he would advise his players, “I’ve killed more men than I can stack on this football field.” That usually got their attention. One time, when he was mad at Bradberry, he said, “Bradberry, I killed seven gooks with a foxhole shovel. One more sonofabitch like you won’t matter.”

- Frank Deford

What happens next will cause those closest to him to struggle for answers. It will lead them to construct and embrace a myth of denial and implausibility that starts small but then grows, giving life to questions that, more than a year later, cause pain they cannot ease. They will ask God for the truth. What happened, and why? Many of them say that they will never believe that Uche killed himself, even if they are shown indisputable proof.

- Kent Babb

Bonus

I dwelled in a backward age, full of darkness, before the VCR boom, before streaming and on-demand, before DVRs roamed the cable channels at night, scavenging content. Either a movie was on or it wasn’t. If I was lucky, I’d come home from elementary school to find WABC’s “The 4:30 Movie” in the middle of Monster Week, wherein vengeful amphibians chased Ray Milland like death-come-a-hopping (“Frogs”), or George Hamilton emoted fiercely in what one assumes was the world’s first telekinesis whodunnit (“The Power”). Weekends, “Chiller Theatre,” on WPIX, played horror classics that provided an education on the subjects of sapphic vampires and ill-considered head transplants. I snacked on Oscar Mayer baloney, which I rolled into cigarette-size payloads of processed meat, and although I didn’t know it at the time, started taking notes about artists and monsters.

-

Although I still wasn’t distinguishing between good movies and bad movies, I recognized that directors fell into different classes. At the pinnacle were those who appeared in the mainstream press as well as in the monster mags: Famous Directors, who dropped the occasional genre outing in with their more (so-called) highbrow offerings. Kubrick adapted Stephen King’s “The Shining.” Hitchcock’s “Psycho” provided the template for the unhinged psycho-killer genre, and his enigmatic avian apocalypse in “The Birds” inspired more dread than your average nuclear-fallout pic. Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” sired numerous knockoffs, including my beloved “The Devil’s Rain.” This is what artists do, I learned: they mix it up. And it was O.K. to get your start in the scare business. A.I.P.’s Roger Corman, who bestowed upon the world “The Wasp Woman,” “The Brain Eaters,” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” had a knack for giving a break to young talent: Francis Ford Coppola’s axe-murder outing, “Dementia 13,” was a Corman production, as was “Piranha,” written by John Sayles. John Landis also showed up in Fangoria a few times, on account of “An American Werewolf in London,” although he was en route to “Trading Places” and “Coming to America,” and made sure to point out that he was “known as a maker of comedies.”

-

The Thalia, the local repertoire theatre, was only a few blocks from my house (we’d moved again, we were always moving), so there was a good chance that I could make it there without being seen. I couldn’t think of anyone who’d want to go to the documentary double feature with me. It was 1985, and my sisters didn’t live at home anymore. My parents usually lit out for Long Island on the weekends. My brother and I were in high school now, and we’d gone our separate ways, beset by our particular adolescent predicaments. The clever reader will have caught on that I was not dating much. I was on my own.

-

I was an incredibly strange creature the year I wrote my first novel, “The Intuitionist.” The premise—which involved rival elevator inspectors and the notion of a perfect elevator that would deliver its passengers to the future—seemed completely sane to me, so why did other humans look at me as if I were wearing a rubber monster suit or a bloody hockey mask? I’d tried to sell a novel before, one with a similarly ludicrous-sounding premise, and had got dumped by my high-powered agent. Now here I was doing it again. Like an imbecile. But I had no choice. I kept working, and if that meant departing from the realm of normal people to enter the psychotronic, so be it. How far is “I’m writing a book about two warring groups of elevator inspectors” from “I’m going to make the first monster musical”? About the same distance as “insane” from “stark raving.” It depends what row you’re sitting in.

- Colson Whitehead

For starters, my generation probably owes yours an apology. Because, hey, we definitely shanked it. We choked. We let ourselves get distracted with greed, with gloss, with the taste of the bread and the glitz of the circuses. We took our eyes off the prize — which was always this:

There cannot be two American experiments, one for the fortunate and another for the rest. All of us must share the same future — like it or not. For the republic to long endure, there must be a real American collective, and all of us must have some stake in that collective.

- David Simon

He described a ride that was as troubling as it was brief. He said the man had not given him an address to go to, just a terse instruction: Drive. Before long, he said, “the kid started to scream, saying that they weren’t going the right way to school.”

- James Barron

Long and gangly, Nerlens Noel found the last folding chair along the Tilton School’s bench after a prep school tournament win and sat by himself for as long as peace would allow.

It was one of the few moments when things didn’t feel as if they were moving at the speed of business.

- Julian Benbow

That night he chained her ankles to the bed, turned off all the lights, and lay down next to her. Pearson didn’t sleep, though, and Maxwell didn’t sleep much either. Every time she would turn to look in his direction, she’d see his wide, owl-like eyes peering back at her through the darkness. It was her first night away from home in more than 40 years.

- Michael Mooney

The streaker is an institution familiar to sports, where the caste system of on-field chicanery deifies the man (or woman) dumb (or drunk) enough to strip naked and grace tens of thousands of people with a pound (or more) of flesh. It’s not so much the image of the streaker that sears into onlookers’ minds, though this is a Pulitzer-worthy snapshot of Grundstrom. More often it’s the unforgettable laughter of seeing someone – in this case a 22-year-old landscaper from Jefferson City, Mo., the state’s proud capital – so prone, showing off his wicked farmer’s tan and daring anyone to pounce on his bare self.

- Jeff Passan 

He saw himself as an explorer, possessed by a restless, youthful curiosity to find out where music came from and where it led. Each one of his distinguished accompanists—none longer-serving than Gerald Moore, an Englishman, seen at work with him above—taught him something about a piece and made him see it with new eyes. If it challenged him, so much the better. He patiently teased out Tippett and Henze, Hindemith and Reimann, despite believing that, ever since Schönberg, music had merely been dancing round in convulsive spasms. He had a go at singing almost everything, even if it hurt.

- The Economist

What those people who hate this family from afar can’t see is the very particular love that stamps it. Bruce Jenner has taken it upon himself to rescue his ridiculous extended clan by doing what none of its other members will ever do: He has elected to lose. The person in the house who has most earned his fame has chosen to accept the least of it. “I’m done with competition,” he says. He says that in response to a question about his helicopters, whether he might fly them in the professional events that have been cropping up around the country, but he means it about everything. Jenner has made decisions, now, here, during his own second life. He has made up his mind once again. His singlet is in storage because he wants it to be. He’s the one who locked his medal away in the safe.

- Chris Jones 

Kendrick Perkins, whose game face would scare a train off its tracks, is one of the nicest guys in the league.

- Rick Reilly

Control is no small concern. Mayweather’s engine runs on it, along with equal parts confidence, machismo and flamboyance. During one of his recent workouts (he’s known for his epic three-hour sessions), two long rows of folding metal chairs in the gym are filled. There are women in heels (stilts?) and painted-on clothes, children in shorts and tank tops, men who have somehow found their way into the inner circle. After a session on the mitts with his uncle Roger, the cheers reverberate from the margins of the ring. Floyd likes the gym hot, so the women are constantly fanning themselves or consciously not moving, anything to reduce the risk of having their makeup sweat down their necks. One of the women is Shantel Jackson, known as Miss Jackson. She is Floyd’s longtime fiancée. She’s wearing an engagement ring that has an 18-carat diamond with 10 one-carat diamonds dotting the shank. The main diamond is roughly the size of an unshelled walnut.

- Tim Keown

By the time you read this, I will be gone from America’s Oldest Continuously Published Newspaper. I didn’t get fired, though that would be a good guess on your part. I certainly gave a generation of bosses ample opportunities.

But no.

- Susan Campbell 

Sheri Patko plans to visit her father’s grave in Costa Mesa and thank him for introducing her to the sport.

- John Horn

Cole, 27, and her four children have moved nearly a dozen times in the last year while living on about $1,000 a month in public cash assistance and food stamps. She wants to provide a better life for her children but seems not to know how.

“I just know what I know,” she said. “All I can do is raise them…. They are going to make their own path in life.”

- Anna Gorman

We used to joke that the T-P was like the city of New Orleans itself. Day to day, it could be pretty average. But come a big event, no one rose to the occasion better.

- Wright Thompson

You would have to be tone deaf to the advantages of familiarity with the battleground not to understand that, in a very real way, the staff of the Picayune were exactly the people one would want covering the story from its earliest hours. This is their city, and they know it’s quirks and corners better than any airlifted out-of-towner ever could. While I was still in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, a reporter for the New Republic who was in Mississippi and Louisiana for several days, told me that the Times-Picayune reporters seemed to be treated with more respect, and possibly given more access, by the authorities because they knew they were locals, and were writing about the destruction of their own backyards. Once I saw them in action in New Orleans myself, I came to agree with this assessment.

- Paul McLeary

The first post-Katrina print edition of the Times-Picayune was scheduled for Friday, four days after the flood. It would be printed in Houma and distributed mainly to shelters.

We watched as it rolled off the press. It was filled with nothing but ugly news, but to us, it was beautiful.

I asked the production manager for 500 copies and returned to Convention Center Boulevard in New Orleans, where thousands of people had been sitting in the heat, day and night, for four days.

“He’s got Times-Picayunes!” someone yelled.

I couldn’t hand them out fast enough. All I remember is arms reaching and waiting.

It was just the daily paper, but to them — and to me — it was a sign of life in the city we loved.

- David Meeks

One of the many pleasures of New Orleans is waking up, pouring a cup of strong, rich coffee, and opening the morning paper. As befits a city that exists outside the usual laws of time and physics, it still has a great paper. Not what it once was in the glory days of ink, no, but the Times-Picayune manages to reflect the community.

It’s full of stories of political corruption, police shenanigans, high school, college, and pro football, and just the right amount of whimsy. There will be an award-winning investigation next to a tongue-in-cheek crime story about a would-be robber who got his ass kicked by an ex-Marine Lucky Dog vendor. You know you’re in New Orleans when you pick it up.

- Wright Thompson

Pulitzer-prizewinning staff will be replaced by 22-year-olds fresh from (northern) colleges who will recap tv shows and blog about pinkberry.

Make no mistake, this is the end. Losing the Times-Pic is as serious as losing the Saints, whether or not people know it. I mourn this great newspaper and offer my condolences to its staff. The amazing recent prison series proved to me the TP was still growing, still improving even after all these years.

Now our city’s newspaper has been murdered, just to tilt the numbers and tweak the profits in some New York ghoul’s ledger-book. This is a dark, dark day for New Orleans.

- A comment left by someone called “Beauty and Truth” on this story

Gutting a profitable newspaper in a city like New Orleans is the functional equivalent in an information sense of lining up to piss into a reservoir.

- Charles P. Pierce 

—

Sutter is a cattle rancher from Alberta who once got lost driving to downtown L.A. because he was expecting a stoplight at the intersection of Interstate 105 and the 110. He greeted a crowded press conference last week by asking, “This for the Lakers?”

- Lee Jenkins

Marko’s feet, however, looked dead — swollen, charred and disfigured. Over the weekend, the skin on his feet crusted and peeled around his toes. After six days, a doctor approached Marko and told him his feet would be amputated. “Holy cow,” Marko said, the only English phrase he could think of. He watched as a nurse marked severance lines below Marko’s knees. Awake all night, he stared at the lines where his identity as a runner would end.

- Seth Wickersham

To describe the past year in the life of an Elaine’s expatriate is to wander into a world in which you feel both disconnected from, and yet — partly because of social media — at least superficially connected to other expats. It’s a place where there is more time to try new things, though often only tepid interest in doing so. It’s a place where a sliver of familiarity can take on great importance, and where, at least until now, there is still a feeling that something important is missing.

- Peter Khoury

Which reminds me — how many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three, of course. Two to hold the giraffe, and one to put the candles in the bathtub. I’ll leave you with an inspirational quote from our favorite surrealist philosopher: “Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus flytrap. The flytrap can bite and bite, but it won’t bother the frog. Then some other stuff could happen and it could be like ambition.” Good night, and good Spaghetti-O’s!

- Ryan Newberry

SR: ”Everything happens for a reason.”

BM: That drives me nuts. I want to give them five on rye when I hear that. “Everything happens for a reason.”

SR: Five on rye?

BM: Five on rye.

SR: A knuckle sandwich.

- Scott Rabb and Bill Murray

From outside the Specialists building, on Grand Street, it is hard to tell that such martial riches are inside. Mr. Washburn said he preferred it that way. Ring the bell outside and a dozen surveillance cameras track your movements until you reach the main office, where a glimmering suit of armor stands watch over the reception desk. A pair of fake AK-47s lies on the floor awaiting delivery to a set. Men in black T-shirts bustle about, moving mysterious tall black cases to the shipping dock out back.

- Erik Olsen

Some people will tell you Hargett was the most exciting high school player they’ve ever seen manipulate a Spalding. Though he never got a chance to put his mark on the game as he and many others anticipated, Hargett’s impact was still felt. So much so that, to this day, high school kids at camps 10 years removed—and even NBA All-Stars—still ask.

What about Jonathan Hargett?

“I’ve still never seen a player that does the things he can do on the floor,” says Tyrese Rice, a Richmond native and former standout at Boston College. “Guys like Deron Williams and Chris Paul, they still ask about Hargett every time I talk to them.”

- C. Vernon Coleman II

But according to prosecutors, DiNunzio wanted power, and he sought to define his reign as soon as he took the helm. He explored ways to extort new businesses, and used the threats of violence to keep his underlings in order. He had questioned whether any of his members were cooperating with the FBI, and he suspected Salemme, who is in a witness protection program, was talking. He sent someone to look for the former boss.

- Milton J. Valencia

Heimbach’s passionate testimony about the baby’s death made the long-term health concerns about flame retardants voiced by doctors, environmentalists and even firefighters sound abstract and petty.

But there was a problem with his testimony: It wasn’t true.

Records show there was no dangerous pillow or candle fire. The baby he described didn’t exist.

Neither did the 9-week-old patient who Heimbach told California legislators died in a candle fire in 2009. Nor did the 6-week-old patient who he told Alaska lawmakers was fatally burned in her crib in 2010.

Heimbach is not just a prominent burn doctor. He is a star witness for the manufacturers of flame retardants.

- The Chicago Tribune

Although Greg never took my bait and blamed the Blazers for his premature return, it’s impossible not to wonder if Portland’s medical staff contributed to any of the problems Greg endured during his injury-plagued career. This isn’t to say Greg never would’ve gotten hurt had he played somewhere else, but Portland’s medical staff has long been rumored to be less than stellar. At any rate, nobody can deny that Greg genuinely felt pressured — either by the Blazers, their doctors, his own guilt, or all three — to return to the court before his body was ready. That’s why he claims he wasn’t surprised that he needed a second microfracture surgery. That’s why he responded to the news by shrugging his shoulders and saying “OK” as if he had just been told by a McDonald’s employee that the McFlurry machine wasn’t working.

- Mark Titus 

Here’s the beauty of the Girls from Room 506: They’re not here to be receptacles. They have too much respect for themselves. They know they can never compete with the bony-assed blonds who might end up with, say, a Kobe Bryant and a juicy lucrative lawsuit. (That’s for white girls.) Nor are they interested in being Gutter Groupies—they won’t do anything to anybody.

In fact, they’re not even here for the players!

On the ride back to the hotel, I ask them if they’re interested in the game this weekend. The game? They don’t go to the games. Their favorite team? Who cares! It’s not like they’d throw Allen Iverson out of the rack, but they’re really here for the rappers. Or the rappers’ assistants. Or the rappers’ bodyguards. Or the rappers’ bodyguards’ assistants. Real thugs. Good thugs.

This is the deep, dark secret of the NBA. The first sport to embrace hip-hop has essentially been hijacked by hip-hop. What keeps the girls coming back is not the sport, for Lord’s sake. It’s the proximity to their guys, their peeps. NBA All-Star weekend is like the Hip-Hop Summit, with a lot more cocktails.

- GQ

“You’ll never find a bunch of players sitting around talking about the good old days with Rick,” says Ken Macker, the Warriors’ executive vice-president. “His teammates and his opponents generally and thoroughly detested him.” And while that seems an extreme judgment, influenced by Macker’s loyalty to his boss, Franklin Mieuli, even Barry’s defenders concede its essential truth. John Roche, a friend and teammate of Barry’s on the Nets, says, “Many players resented Rick. The way Rick conducted himself could be construed as implying superiority. But I always felt it was unintentional. People misread Rick. Most people admire competitiveness. But apparently Rick’s took forms that angered people.” Another friend, the Spurs’ Billy Paultz, who played with Barry on the Nets and the Rockets, says, “If you got to know Rick you’d have realized what a good guy he was. But around the league they thought of him as the most arrogant guy ever. I couldn’t believe it. Half the players disliked Rick. The other half hated him.” And there’s this from Beard: “He’ll never get the acclaim due him. It has nothing to do with his play. It was his manner, his honesty. He had everything going for him. He was white; he was well-spoken; he looked good on television. But he never learned to come across softly, and he ticked off a lot of people.”

Barry doesn’t bridle at the assessment. He doesn’t, as he did regularly when he was whistled for a foul, stand with his hands on his hips, contemptuous of the call, snarling. His rehabilitation has begun. He seeks forgiveness, not exoneration. Yes, he feels rejected and hurt. Yes, he feels sorry.

“If you want to know the truth,” Rick Barry says, “inside I’m dying.”

- Tony Kornheiser 

It happens slowly but clearly. His voice becomes higher-pitched, quick but not rushed, with confidence in the direction of the words, without the long pauses to read the maps inside his mind. All his memories are still in there, somewhere, only much of the time he can’t translate them into words. Today he can. The pictures seem to anchor him. The walls are covered with certificates and mementos of his service. He’s an honorary assistant coach for the 1975 season. He’s a 1978 national champion. To his left, surrounded by the small frames, is a large photograph of Bear Bryant at the 1982 Liberty Bowl, sicker than anyone but Billy and a few others knew, bundled tight against the cold. To his right is the famous painting “315” that shows Bryant on the sideline as he breaks the all-time wins record, and down the wall from that is a pencil-and-ink drawing of Bryant as a young man.

“There’s Coach Bryant,” Billy says.

- Wright Thompson

You’ve seen the suits and the ties and the pins and the belts and, in the blazer pocket, the blobs of fabric. You’ve seen the stripes, plaids, polka dots, creams, pastels, sorbets, slub knits, and hall-of-shame hell prints: zoot suit, hunter’s camo, stuffed animal, Divas Livegift basket, Nicholson’s Joker, planetarium ceiling, melted fro-yo, autopsy.

- Wesley Morris

One boy wrote to ask: “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”

- Valerie Nelson 

If things are going well, if the writing’s coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled. But I always remember Ernest Hemingway’s advice to writers: always quit for the day when you know what the next sentence is. If it’s coming near the end of a chapter and I’m really getting into it, I tend to get up earlier and earlier, just because I’m excited to get to work. So Ina will say to me, do you know what time it is? And I often don’t want to know what time it is because it’s too early. I don’t want to see the first digit on the alarm clock.

- Robert Caro

The town has a population of about 10 people, but it sells more than four million cans of beer and malt liquor annually — because it is the main channel through which alcohol illegally enters the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation a few steps away.

- Nick Kristof

People love the paper, or they hate it but can’t live without it, or they leave but keep coming back, or they think the world of it but want to fix one or two or 10 or 12 things. I’ve seen people yell at the paper – I mean, yell at the actual copy in their hands – or throw it across the room, or hug it like a baby. Most companies long for their products to create the emotional response that readers have with the newspaper every day. Some days, when I wade into the online comments on a story, I feel like I need a machete and a Hazmat suit. But y’all care. Y’all care a lot.

Even when we parted company over the Vietnam War, I never hated L.B.J. the way many young people of my generation came to. I couldn’t. What he did to advance civil rights and equal opportunity was too important. I remain grateful to him. L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.

- Bill Clinton

The most foolproof way, it seemed, was a bullet to the head. But I didn’t have access to a gun.

- Matt Calkins

No amount of defiance could stifle the tears, the misplaced guilt oversaturating his ducts. “You just let the team down,” Rivera said, and away melted the robotic façade he built for the last 18 years as the greatest closer of all time for the New York Yankees. Because even if this was an accident, a stupid, crazy, freakish accident, the grim reality of it stared down Rivera, and he had trouble staring back.

- Jeff Passan

Life Magazine paid him a handsome $21,000 to publish “The Old Man and the Sea’’ in a single issue, which appeared in their September 1, 1952 edition. A week later, it was released as a book and sold 5.3 million copies in two days.

- Bill Lucey

You have to understand: Junior Seau didn’t live in San Diego. He was San Diego.

- Jim Trotter

So much has changed in recent years in the Garden State, which the brilliant Princeton-based writer John McPhee once described as the slyest state because it keeps its natural beauty to itself and allows the transients — maybe McPhee was thinking of some orange fright-bewigged Flyers fans from the Delaware Valley — to see the eyesores of the Turnpike corridor and continue of their merry way.

- Michael Farber

“That sounds a little weird,” I said. “It’s unacceptable. We must have access to everything.All of it. The spectacle, the people, the pageantry and certainly the race. You don’t think we came all this way to watch the damn thing on television, do you? One way or another we’ll get inside. Maybe we’ll have to bribe a guard — or even Mace somebody.” (I had picked up a spray can of Mace in a downtown drugstore for $5.98 and suddenly, in the midst of that phone talk, I was struck by the hideous possibilities of using it out at the track. Macing ushers at the narrow gates to the clubhouse inner sanctum, then slipping quickly inside, firing a huge load of Mace into the governor’s box, just as the race starts. Or Macing helpless drunks in the clubhouse restroom, for their own good … )

- Hunter S. Thompson 

Here was a drunk white lady speaking what so many others over the years must have been insufficiently drunk to tell me. It was the key to many things that had, and had not, happened. I understood this encounter better after learning about LEAP, and visiting Asian Playboy’s boot camp. If you are a woman who isn’t beautiful, it is a social reality that you will have to work twice as hard to hold anyone’s attention. You can either linger on the unfairness of this or you can get with the program. If you are an Asian person who holds himself proudly aloof, nobody will respect that, or find it intriguing, or wonder if that challenging façade hides someone worth getting to know. They will simply write you off as someone not worth the trouble of talking to.

- Wesley Yang

The one time I met him, at a reception before a reading, I spoke to him only to mumble stock phrases about “admire your work,” etc. But the visual impression has remained strong, because in that cocktail-party atmosphere (Tom Wolfe was ten feet away, in his white suit), Wallace was possibly the most physically uncomfortable-looking person I’ve ever seen. If you have, at any point in your life, been trapped in a room in a mountain house with a forest animal, a raccoon or a bobcat, that’s how Wallace seemed, frozen like that. He had a smile on his face like he was waiting for someone to punch him. Yet was polite and shoulder-shruggy when he spoke to you. Everyone was all dressed up except Wallace, who had on a kind of Russian-peasant’s shirt and was in a full-on “I have long hair like a lady but also a beard” phase. It gave him a homeless-person vibe, like he’d seen the food table and decided to join the party. Yet when he got up onstage in the end, alongside George Plimpton and Seymour Hersh among others, he not only held his own but held the theater spellbound and more than once had to stop and let laughter pass, enunciating those roundly nasal vowels.

- John Jeremiah Sullivan

They drove then once more at night. Below a moon that rose round before them. What was termed the truck’s backseat was a narrow shelf on which the girl could sleep if she arranged her legs in the gap behind the real seats whose headrests possessed the dull shine of unwashed hair. The clutter and yeast smell bespoke a truck that was or had been lived in; the truck and its man smelled the same. The girl in cotton bodice and her jeans gone fugitive at the knees. The mother’s conception of men was that she used them as a sorceress will dumb animals, as sign and object of her unnatural powers. Her spoken word aloud for these at which the girl gave no reproof, familiar. Swart and sideburned men who sucked wooden matches and crushed cans with their hands. Whose hats’ brims had sweatlines like the rings of trees. Whose eyes crawled over you in the rearview. Men inconceivable as ever themselves being children or looking up naked at someone they trust, with a toy. To whom the mother talked like babies and let them treat her like a headless doll, manhandle.

- David Foster Wallace from The Pale King

Through it all, Lolohea’s employment empire has remained. Recently, he put up a placard outside his house, advertising jobs in Dubai. He also opened a new office in Suva, where, each morning, throngs of workers have been lining up outside his gate. They bring their passports and pockets stuffed with borrowed cash. They are undeterred by the large white sign at the entrance, which the police have ordered Lolohea to post, reading, “NO Recruitment Until Further Notice.” Most have heard the rumors about Lolohea’s shady past, and they know that he was long denounced in the local newspapers as one of “Fiji’s most wanted men.” But they’ve also heard that he’s offering a starting salary of six thousand dollars a month to prospective security guards and military logistics workers for his new company, Phoenix Logistics Corporation Limited. And so the crowds keep flocking to his illicit office in the midst of the rainy season—most of them eager young men in baggy jeans and baseball caps, or in traditional sulu skirts, but also the occasional woman, her head filled with dreams of a life in the City of Gold.

- Sarah Stilllman 

The .22-caliber bullet entered underneath her left eye, penetrating her skull and lodging in the brain stem, causing instant death. Her body fell over in a heap. Will kneeled near her, the mother of two of his four children, and pulled the trigger again. I never got to say goodbye.

- Matt Watts in The Independent Florida Alligator

The United States is a bit like a 375-pound, middle-aged man with a heart condition walking down a city street at night eating a Big Mac. He’s sweating profusely because he’s afraid he might get mugged. But the thing that’s going to kill him is the burger.

- David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy

Coaches, though, describe a player who tried almost too hard at times, who wanted to be too perfect. No detail was too small. If he was facing a hard-hitting defense, he’d plan to play at exactly 222 pounds. If he wanted more quickness the next Saturday, he’d decide early in the week he’d weigh 216 pounds instead.

At Baylor, athletes meet once a week with sports psychologists. “We told him, ‘Griff, if the ball’s not right on the point or everything doesn’t work out great, it upsets you. That’s your weakness,’ ” Kazadi said. “We showed him the bad side of being a perfectionist.”

Griffin said he understood and immediately set out to correct it.

- Rick Maese in the Washington Post

Near the tarp is a small pool. Before he became a household name, King was a construction worker with a union card. He set the stone surrounding the pool. In black tile, he inscribed two dates: 3/3/91, the night he suffered over 50 blows from police batons, and 4/29/92, the night the rioting began.

- Kurt Streeter in the Los Angeles Times

Harris-Moore was sentenced in December to seven years in state prison for dozens of crimes, including burglary and identity theft, stemming from his sensational two-year run from the law in stolen boats, cars and airplanes. A self-taught pilot, he was finally apprehended in a hail of bullets in the Bahamas in 2010, after he crash-landed a plane stolen from an Indiana airport.

- Gene Johnson in the Associated Press

Israelson had been writing an imaginary letter to Atteberry for more than 30 years. But now the man became a bit of a boy again, writing an essay to a man who had once mattered. He struggled to find the right words.

- Tom Hallman Jr. in The Oregonian

Steven Egan, 52, was hunting with his girlfriend, Lisa Simmons, in the northern part of the state when he mistook her for a hog and shot her.

- Eric Pfeiffer in Yahoo! News

At the White House, too, coming up to the 1972 campaign, he planned total war against all that was leftist, peacenik, spineless and immoral. This was dog-eat-dog, and attack was the best possible form of defence. When the longed-for call from Nixon came, he left his lucrative law practice to do whatever he was asked. He would chew people up, and spit them out, for the president. He would break all the fucking china, as Nixon once suggested to him, to get an order ready to sign on his desk by Monday morning. “The president wants to see you, Mr Colson,” were words that set his spine tingling, as it did when he heard martial music, or the words “United States”. To be the president’s point-man, his hatchet man, taking down his hunched, muttered confidences on yellow legal pads, was the fulfilment of his life.

- The Economist 

Pace was 8 when his older brother accidentally shot him in the head while playing with their father’s .22 caliber rifle in the barn on the family’s Texas farm. It was October 1917. Doctors decided to leave the bullet alone, deeming brain surgery too risky. The bullet remained in place for 94.5 years.

- Claire Noland in the Los Angeles Times

He insists he grew his mustache only because his father had one. But this filial devotion didn’t endear him to teammates. Several players conspired to grow their own mustaches so Jackson would blend in. (Take a moment to appreciate that logic: The A’s were so annoyed with Jackson, they decided to look more like him.) Then the real twist: Finley, who was never a wallflower when it came to marketing gimmicks, offered $300 to anybody on the team who also grew one. Thus, the “Mustache Gang” was born.

The fact that the A’s then won three straight World Series, from 1972 to 1974, shouldn’t be considered mere coincidence, said Aaron Perlut, chairman of the American Mustache Institute. “It could be argued that there is no greater performance-enhancing device in baseball,” he said. Perlut also claims that mustaches improve good looks by 38%. “That’s science,” he said.

- Scott Cacciola in the Wall Street Journal

After the Heat acquired Cleveland State point guard Norris Cole on draft night, James invited him to Bath to work out. On a table in James’s living room was a book about leadership called The Ant and the Elephant, a gift from a friend. James is not much of a reader, but he opted for the book over TV. “It’s about an ant who is trying to find his way to this great place, this oasis, but the only way to get there is to train an elephant who wants to get there too,” James says. “At one point the ant is on the elephant’s back and they are walking through the sand and there is a pack of lions, and the elephant scares the lions off. The ant is like, I have the toughest friend in the world. But later that day the elephant sees a mouse, and he gets scared and runs away. The ant can’t understand how this big creature could be so dominant over a pack of lions but so scared of a mouse. The ant has to train the elephant to let him know, You are the biggest, baddest thing out here.” James pauses for a moment. As a member of a supposed juggernaut, he can relate to the ant. And as a 250-pound force of nature, he can relate to the elephant. “I took a lot from that,” he says.

- Lee Jenkins in Sports Illustrated

Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine. 

- “Rick” (played by Humphrey Bogart) in “Casablanca”

“He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.”

- The final paragraph of J.D. Salinger’s short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”

But you can’t talk to people, right?
You can’t tell a story
You’re tall, long legged
and your heart’s full of liquor
And me and everybody are just ice in a glass

- From “You’ve Done It Again, Virginia” by The National

And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve squandered what time you had, that you must trust this house of concrete you’ve built to stand up to the sea. Your wife joins you on the second-floor terrace, reporting that she, too, saw the neighbor’s house wash away. “We should run,” she says, but you say, “It’s too late.” And then: “We’ll be fine.” Her arms circle your waist and lock there, while you stand stock-straight, gazing at the mountain, without daring to look back at the sea. These will be your last words to her—We’ll be fine. And you’ve already departed your body when everything seems to break beneath your feet and a roaring force crashes over you.

- Michael Paterniti in GQ

“CQD CQD,” Phillips tapped out. Calling all ships — distress. “Come at once. We have struck a berg.”

- Henry Chu in the Los Angeles Times

Whoo boy. Who else demands that her players sit in the first three rows of their classes and forbids them a single unexcused absence? Who else finds out about every visit they make to the mall for a new pair of jeans, every trip to a restaurant or a movie, and always mentions it the next day, so that it seems they can do nothing without her knowing it? Who else, at the end of a three-hour practice, times the suicide sprints on the big scoreboard clock? Who else films every practice and then sits through it all over again, so that if a player is fool enough to question a single one of her criticisms, Pat takes her right to the videotape in her office and stops the dang thing so often to prove she’s right that it takes an hour to cover the first 10 minutes? Who carries five VCRs on road trips and watches tape of her opponents while she works out on the treadmill while she scribbles POINTS OF EMPHASIS on a notepad while she talks on the phone with an assistant—all after she has read a book to her son, Tyler, and put him to bed?

- Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated

Chess is embedded in the culture of I.S. 318. All sixth graders take weekly chess classes and can continue chess as an elective for the next two years. Players from acclaimed elementary school chess programs like the one at Public School 31 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, feed the school, but the team also welcomes beginners. Chess banners line the hallways, and the school’s answering machine says, “Thank you for calling I.S. 318, home of the national chess champions.”

- NYT

You know the rest of the story: How the Sox, in 2004, with a ritual shedding of blood, finally won the World Series again based in a revamped—a revampired?—Fenway Park. The victory came as a great relief to countless fans, among them Stephen King, the most renowned horror novelist since Bram Stoker, to whom he is tied not just through genre but through Fenway, a monster every bit as unkillable as any other conjured by man.

- Steve Rushin in Sports Illustrated

This is what she lives with: a disturbing sense of disorientation when she wakes in strange, dark hotel rooms on the road. Difficulty drawing, which means she can’t diagram plays anymore. A weird mental slipperiness when it comes to retaining numbers, especially room numbers in hallways that all look the same. An unmistakable loss of her old ferocity. An occasional pause in her brain function that means sometimes she has to be more patient in answering questions — and that friends have to be more probing of her thoughts, and patient in listening to her — which is all the more puzzling because she can still be so lightning quick.

- Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post

This is the lede: “Back in September 1958, a roly-poly Tulsa boy named Billy Jay Killen came home from high school and wanted to watch Dick Clark’s television program,American Bandstand. His mother, who didn’t particularly care for rock music, was all set to watch a different program so she told Billy ‘No.’ He seethed the whole night long. Then in the morning Billy took out a rifle and shot his mother dead. Millions of American teenagers feel just as strongly about Dick Clark.”

- Alex Pappademas in Grantland

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Cicero said Mr. Castro-Wright had encouraged the payments for a specific strategic purpose. The idea, he said, was to build hundreds of new stores so fast that competitors would not have time to react. Bribes, he explained, accelerated growth. They got zoning maps changed. They made environmental objections vanish. Permits that typically took months to process magically materialized in days. “What we were buying was time,” he said.

- David Barstow in the New York Times

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

- Sherry Turkle in the New York Times

Bonus: 

It’s about a place where Curt Gowdy said, “Hi, neighbor, have a ’Gansett.’’ A place where Ted Williams got in trouble for shooting pigeons. It’s where Bob Tillman hit John Wyatt in the back of the head with a throw to second base; where a young Peter Gammons reinvented the way sportswriters covered baseball; where Carl Yastrzemski covered home plate in dirt after an objectionable called third strike; where Jim Rice hit one out to the right of the center field flagpole; where John Updike sat and took notes when Williams hit his final homer; where Tony C was felled by the Jack Hamilton pitch on Aug. 18, 1967; where Duffy Lewis ran up and down the cliff in left field; where Reggie Jackson knocked in 10 runs with an illegal bat when he played for the A’s; where Al Luplow robbed Dick Williams of a homer, making a catch as he vaulted into the bullpen.

It’s where girls from Simmons and Emmanuel went to tan on hot September days when the bleachers were easy and cheap to get into in the 1970s; where security guards from Boston College discouraged fans from running on the field; where groundskeeper Joe Mooney plowed snow up against the left field wall so it would melt faster; where a Massachusetts judge graded bar exams on lazy afternoons in the right field grandstand; where the Royal Rooters and the Dropkick Murphys sang “Tessie’’; where Babe Ruth beat the Cubs in the fourth game of the 1918 World Series.

- Dan Shaughnessy in the Boston Globe

Watson’s teammates that day included Jim Rice, who three years later committed an act of humanity at its best. On an August afternoon in 1982, 4-year-old Jonathan Keane was seated near the Sox dugout when a line drive slammed into his head. Panic ensued, many witnesses recoiling at the sight of blood gushing from the boy’s fractured skull.

Not Rice. He sprang from the dugout, cradled the child in his arms, and hustled him to urgent care, where doctors credited Rice’s rapid response with sparing the boy from brain damage.

Thirty years later, Jonathan Keane lives in Durham, N.C. He is a new father, longing for the day he can introduce his son to the Hall of Famer who saved him and the park he considers a monument to human kindness.

‘‘Rice’s heroism that day says the world about him,’’ Keane said. ‘‘I’m lucky to have survived, and I’m really looking forward to getting back to Fenway Park, one of the most special places on the planet for me.’’

- Bob Hohler in the Boston Globe

This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us, and applauded. I had never before heard pure applause in a ballpark. No calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand, It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the Kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-two summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

- John Updike in the New Yorker