November 2011
6 posts
Dalton Trumbo on war
If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food the guys who make clothes and paper and houses and tiles the guys who build dams and power plants and string the long moaning high tension wires the guys who crack crude oil down into a dozen different...
Gay Talese on journalism
Journalism is for the young. Young people who go into journalism as a calling are entering, I think, the most worthwhile profession that is possible, and the reason I say that is that there is no profession or industry or calling that tries very hard to tell the truth and to sell the truth and to make the truth make money. The truth is hard, first of all, to get. And harder still to communicate....
Pat Forde on the scandal at Syracuse
This issue is far bigger than sports. And as Joe Paterno found out earlier this month, there is a big, unforgiving world outside the cocoon of college sports that doesn’t care how many games you won or how long you’ve worked at a university if you have an accused pedophile on your staff or in your building.
— Pat Forde
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Charles P. Pierce on the Penn State scandal
If that blights Joe Paterno’s declining years, that’s too bad. If that takes a chunk out of the endowment, hold a damn bake sale. If that means that Penn State spends some time being known as the university where a child got raped, that’s what happens when you’re a university where a child got raped. Any sympathy for this institution went down the drain in the shower room...
Hunter S. Thompson on breakfast
I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor...
Jeff MacGregor on W.C. Heinz on life
What Bill Heinz knows and what Bill Heinz wrote is that life is the biggest fix of them all, and every one of us was bought the day we were born. Maybe you can pick the round you go down, or hold out for more money, or book yourself into the main event in a bigger room. But for all the training and the roadwork, for all the hours and weeks and years spent in patient, useless practice, for all the...
October 2011
2 posts
David Shields on the sexiest thing a husband can...
When I come home, flush with all this new semi-insider gossip, my wife, Laurie, startles me by saying that during the first couple of months of my sabbatical, when I was home all the time, there had been “no energy in the house” and how grateful she is that I’m finally doing something “purposeful” in public. One can forget this or disguise it or pretend it isn’t...
Michelle Mirsky on kamikaze missions in death, sex...
In the space of My Darkest Year, in no particular order, these things happened. My younger son died. My marriage ended. A rabbi and renowned jazz musician whom I’d only met once performed my son’s funeral. People applauded. I fell in love with a blond poet suffering from PTSD. It didn’t work out. My divorce was granted. The only Jewish funeral director in town admitted to me, unbidden, that her...
September 2011
3 posts
David Fleming on dark history of the Pittsburgh...
In March 1973 (Ernie) Holmes, who was later diagnosed as suffering from acute paranoid psychosis, allegedly pulled a shotgun from his truck while driving on the Ohio turnpike and began shooting out the tires of passing trucks. This led to a high-speed chase, a shootout and a standoff with state police that ended in a nearby forest with Holmes allegedly shooting an officer in the ankle.
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A...
Tom Wolfe on Chuck Yeager from "The Right Stuff"
But no one would contest that as of that time, the 1950s, Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Brothers. And that voice… started drifting down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots...
Darcy Frey on air traffic controllers
All the way down the bank of radar scopes, the air traffic controllers have that savage, bug-eyed look, like men on the verge of drowning, as they watch the computer blips proliferate and speak in frantic bursts of techno-chatter to the pilots: “Continental 1528, turn right heading 280 immediately! Traffic at your 12 o’clock!” A tightly wound Tom Zaccheo, one of the...
August 2011
7 posts
Jack London on boxing and steak
All together, it was the face of a man to be afraid of in a dark alley or lonely place. And yet Tom King was not a criminal, nor had he ever done anything criminal. Outside of brawls, common to his walk in life, he had harmed no one. Nor had he ever been known to pick a quarrel. He was a professional, and all the fighting brutishness of him was reserved for his professional appearances. Outside...
John Lardner on Hell's Kitchen
Hell’s Kitchen, the region west of Eighth Avenue around the Forties, won its name many years ago and continued to deserve it until about the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Things are different there now. So its residents will tell you, and so you can see for yourself, if, having known the neighborhood a little during Prohibition, you visit it even briefly today. Once it was...
Johnny Cash on "A Boy Named Sue"
Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes And he went down, but to my surprise, He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear. But I busted a chair right across his teeth And we crashed through the wall and into the street Kicking and a’ gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.
- Johnny Cash
David Simon from "Homicide: A Year On The Killing...
So where does that leave Barney Erely? And Orlando Felton? And Maurice Ireland? What was so wrong, so irrelevant, about them that they could end here beneath this wretched patch of country mud, wasted souls, with their city’s gleaming skyscrapers just close enough to mock them? Drunks, addicts, dope peddlers, numbers men, children born to the wrong parents, battered wives, hated husbands,...
Nicholas Schmidle on bin Laden's death
Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” After a pause, he added, “Geronimo...
David Simon on the Huffington Post
“The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing, is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of balance.”
- David Simon putting you-know-who in her place.
http://www.thenation.com/article/david-simon-arianna-huffington-and-future-journalism
July 2011
23 posts
Charles P. Pierce on The Man
The Man can’t stop our music.
- Charles P. Pierce
This is his motto posted on his blog page on Boston.com
Black Jesus on The Man
The Man has got you beat .
-Black Jesus
Saw this written on a Priority Mail sticker posted inside a L.A. Times newspaper box in Venice, Calif.
