Ten years ago I bought a copy of the annual Best American Magazine Writing collection. It contained a story called “Hollywood’s Information Man,” by Amy Wallace, originally published in Los Angeles magazine. I was just out of college then, working my first daily newspaper job, and this story knocked me over. It showed the astonishing possibilities of a magazine story, the combination of wit and humor and investigative reporting that an expert could weave under just the right circumstances. Now, over at Nieman Storyboyard, Elon Green has done a version of Paige Williams’ Annotation Tuesday with Amy Wallace on the piece. If you’re just starting out, this is a road map for success. And if you’re a veteran looking for a spark, it just might fire you back up. Take a look.

Tom Lake: Jerry Jerome Brown Jr. comes along at a strange time in history: a time when humans willingly enter cages of glass and steel that move in such great numbers at such terrific speed that a subtle turn of the steering wheel can easily result in death.

Anyone with clear eyes and a steady hand can accidentally make this subtle turn in a single moment of inattention. And every night in every county in every state, probably on every road, someone tries to avoid this mistake while drunk. In 1987 on the roads of the U.S., 23,632 people will die in alcohol-related car crashes. If today is an average day, these crashes will kill 65 more people by midnight. If the deaths come at regular intervals, they will come every 22 minutes.

A thin crescent moon rises at 5:03 a.m. over the hospital in St. Louis where a 19-year-old factory worker named Stacey Irons waits for her son. He is two weeks past due. She has been here since yesterday morning. The labor-inducement drugs are not working. Fluid builds up. The pain is excruciating. That’s gonna be a good baby, says Stacey’s mother, Theresa Clark. ‘Cause he’s takin’ his time.

Two hours and 12 minutes pass between moonrise and sunrise. Six more dead. The boy’s father, Jerry Brown, stands at the bedside. He calls Stacey his first love. In eight months they’ll be married; in eight years, divorced. Twelve years after that a state trooper will find Jerry Sr. drunk in a Chevy Blazer on the side of an interstate with his seven-year-old daughter and an open bottle of beer.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely (pdf): She told everyone her boobs were real, which was a laugh: They were immobile and perfectly round, and looked airbrushed, even in person. She credited her violet eyes to Lithuanian genes, rather than the purple contact lenses she wore. And on this afternoon last November, sitting in a Philadelphia hair salon with a college textbook open on her lap, she told the stylist she was a University of Pennsylvania student named Morgan Greenhouse. The name was as fake as the hair now being glued onto her head.

“I love this,” Jocelyn Kirsch declared, fingering her new $2,200 auburn hair extensions. “Don’t you love it?”

Her boyfriend, Ed Anderton, looked on adoringly. “I love it,” he echoed. The two of them returned to their murmured conversation, discussing the $400 room they planned to rent at the W hotel, once Jocelyn finished taking her final exams. After that, they planned to spend winter break vacationing in Morocco.

Jocelyn and Ed made performance art out of their extravagance. They posted photos on Facebook of their constant travels: smooching under the Eiffel Tower, riding horses along Hawaiian beaches, sunning themselves on Caribbean sand. They lived in one of Philadelphia’s most expensive neighborhoods, Rittenhouse Square, where they dined in pricey restaurants and danced on tables in the trendiest bars. Friends figured Ed must have been pulling in a big salary as a financial analyst, which seemed plausible; he was a bright recent Penn grad who’d majored in economics.

Plus, Jocelyn held herself out as some kind of trust-fund baby, with a closet full of expensive clothes – for today’s hair appointment, tight True Religion jeans, a navy cashmere hoodie and white Juicy Couture flats – and bore the expectant, impatient manner of the rich.

(thanks, Dan)

Steve Friedman (thanks, Don D.): You know what people think. They see jeans too short and winter coat too shiny, too grimy, and think, homeless. They watch a credit card emerge from those jeans and think, grifter. They behold a frozen grin, hear a string of strangled, tortured pauses, and think, slow. Stupid.

You learned too young about cruelty and pity. You learned too young that explaining yourself didn’t help, that it made things worse. People laughed. Made remarks. Backed away. So you stopped explaining. You got a job, got a cat, got an apartment, and people can think what they want to think. You built a life without explanation and it was enough.

What people see now, this moment, is a solitary man leaning into the wind, trudging down snow-dusted streets toward a faint, watery dawn.

Danielle Dreilinger: Ka’Nard Allen, 10, does not want to talk about what must be the longest and hardest 10th year of life in all New Orleans. He doesn’t want to talk about Mother’s Day, when he was grazed by a bullet at a second line parade in New Orleans’ 7th Ward, one of 19 people injured in a mass shooting.

He doesn’t want to talk about October, when his father, 38-year-old Bernard Washington, was fatally stabbed in eastern New Orleans by his stepmother after Washington allegedly choked and beat her. She has been charged with manslaughter.

And he really doesn’t want to talk about his 10th birthday party last May 29, when his 5-year-old cousin, Briana Allen, was fatally shot and a bullet hit Ka’Nard in the neck. The man accused of shooting Briana was arrested last month and, last week, was among 15 people indicted on gang racketeering charges in that incident and many others.

Standing on the Simon Bolivar Avenue neutral ground Monday evening, across from his grandmother’s house where Briana was killed, Ka’Nard just wants to ride his shiny black four-wheeler, a gift from his mom after his dad’s death.

He wants an adult to start peeling an orange for him because he can’t get it started himself. He wants to dunk an empty juice bottle into a garbage can and launch high, elegant roundhouse kicks at the pail. He wants to get on that black four-wheeler and drive it off the grass speckled with broken glass, watching for traffic, circling on Simon Bolivar — fast. He’ll even give you a ride on the back.

Rush-hour traffic raced by the skinny boy, dressed all in red with a Band-Aid on his right cheek. Maybe when one has endured two of the most shocking shootings in the city in less than a year, and come within a hair’s breadth of serious harm or even death each time, there are bigger worries than traffic.

Deadline is approaching on the Best American Narrative Newspaper Writing Contest. Don’t forget to submit your best work.

In an effort to encourage narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across America, the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and The Dallas Morning News are launching a new writing contest this year. The Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest will award prizes to three long-form narrative nonfiction pieces previously published in daily U.S. newspapers or on the newspapers’ websites.

Newspaper reporters and editors may submit one to three narratives published between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2012, including narratives that are part of a series.

The first-place winner will receive $5,000 and free registration to attend the 2013 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which will be held July 19-21 (Friday-Sunday) at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine, Texas. The contest’s second-place winner will receive $2,000 and the third-place winner $1,000. The three winning narratives and three runners up will be published in print and e-book form in an anthology, “The Best American Newspaper Narratives.”

All submissions to the Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest must be postmarked and sent electronically in word and pdf format no later than June 1 (Saturday). The winners will be notified by e-mail on June 15 (Saturday). Editors and writers may submit a short cover letter with each entry, explaining the challenges of producing the story and readers’ reactions to it after it was published.

For more information about the contest, contact contest coordinator Tasha Tsiaperas at tsiaperas@gmail.com or 469-387-6985. For more information on the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, contact Jo Ann Ballantine at 940-565-4778 or maybornconferenceinfo@unt.edu.

GBSNP Varma at a hospice in India:

Rajamma weathers these episodes one dreaded night after another. Time, for him, is measured in breaths.

What does he like about his wife?

“Goodness,” he says, after a gasp and sigh, looking toward the ceiling.

“Patience,” he says after a gasp again. They have not travelled much together. It was always work and home. “Lot of work,” he says.

Dan Stockman:

FORT WAYNE – Four times, doctors said Sandy Koeneman was dying. Four times, they tried to tell her husband, Richard, that this was the end.

Richard wasn’t ready to let go.

“When you love somebody so much, they’re your whole life,” Richard explains. “Without her, I’d have nothing.”

Four times, Richard asked the doctors to do everything they could to save her, and each time, they did.

By now – after all they’ve been through, after all the close calls in the last few years – you might think Richard would be prepared to say goodbye to his wife of 51 years.

But he’s not. Not at the north-side home they’ve shared for decades, not at the nursing home where she gets 24-hour care.

“When we get her home, we’ll get her up in the wheelchair every day and get her out in the backyard where there’s lots of flowers and sunshine,” Richard says over the wave-like sound of the ventilator that breathes for Sandy. “The main thing is we’ll be together all the time.”

How does he find hope in the face of such odds?

Easy – Sandy, 71, has been dying for 40 years.

House ad from the Jackson County Floridan, 1961, for all you kids who had a route back in the day. Be proud.

“You’re learning the importance of responsibility. You’re learning the value of money earned and money saved for the future.”

A Salute To America’s Newspaperboys (PDF)

Amy Wimmer Schwarb: LARGO — Two years ago, Bob and Connie Cain bought a two-bedroom, two-bath house in the suburbs. They added a porch swing and painted it a pleasing shade of green, with cream trim.

They are retired government employees from Ohio who love God and Harleys. The house is a three-minute drive from the beach. The couple and the house made a perfect pair.

The neighborhood seemed nice enough. Two doors down, Don and Claire Yoder had lived in their home for 30 years and seemed to get along with everyone. Across the street, Pat Ross was in her 70s and recuperating from cancer, yet still mowed her own lawn and trimmed her own trees. Next door, a renter named Michael Glick maintained an immaculate lawn; his flower beds brimmed with voluptuous tropical plants.

Shortly after moving in, Bob Cain saw Glick walking down the street. “Hi,” he called out, stepping to the end of his driveway. “My name’s Bob.”