Weekend Reading
clicks
Pete Iorizzo: Austin, Texas -- Hours before he broke the four-minute mile, Darren Brown thumbed through a novel, keeping his bookmark, a worn color photograph of his father, visible on the facing page.
He drank coffee from a mug decorated with photos of him and his father, running together. The symbolism struck him. In a sense, Darren always ran with his father -- and against him.
A generation ago, Barry Brown broke the four-minute mile, too. Hundreds have. But never before had an American father and son both completed the one-mile race in less than four minutes.
Stephanie Earls: The boy who will be Hamlet faces the court.
On the bench, the judge begins the proceedings, script compliments of the Bill of Rights:
You have the right to a trial. You waive that right. You cannot be forced to testify against yourself.
"Do you understand?"
Line!
Hank Stuever: With so much to love about the "Indiana Jones" movies, is there anything to know?
To ask is to miss the point, but let's miss it by a mile anyhow, on the eve of Dr. Jones's rollicking return to the multiplex. Let us not be like those fawning, tight-sweatered Archaeology 101 coeds from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and instead be film theory students in dirty, pseudo-vintage T-shirts: What does "Indiana Jones" meeeeean? What does it do to us? What part of us does he represent? (Besides summer? Besides ophidiophobia?)
The film professor opens up the question to the whole class. Anyone?
"Um, he's America? He blunders, he plunders? He's ersatz John Wayne?"
Nice one, Eric. But what else? You in the back -- Patricia.
"Misogyny! Xenophobia!"
Patricia, you always say that.
Mark Magnier: HANWANG, CHINA -- At first, Tan Keren tried using his bare hands to tear away at slabs of concrete and giant beams to save the most important person in his life: his wife, business partner and best friend.
Family members tried to help. They called her name, calculated where they should look if she had been watching television at 2:28 p.m. Monday, where she might be if she had fled down the stairs when the earth began to shake.
David Filkins: SCHENECTADY -- On the morning of Feb. 16, Kerry "Slim" Kirkem picked up his cellphone and called his friend and alleged fellow drug dealer Melford "Mel" Perkins.
At 7:57 a.m., authorities began recording the phone conversation as Kirkem and Perkins discussed crack, cocaine, heroin, money, murder and a plan to take over the Schenectady drug trade:
"You wanna know something Mel?"
"What?"
"Word to everything I love Mel, I got rid of maybe fifty little pieces of crack last night. Like fifty."
"Holy (expletive)!"
"Yo, Mel. Swear to God, Mel, I killed them on -- yo, Mel, I made eight thousand dollars in coke and crack last night."
Jeff Klinkenberg: TAMPA
This is how Julie Harter keeps her fragile life together. This is how she copes with her terrifying grief about her late husband, Billy.
She catches dragons.
She pins up her long auburn hair, backs the truck to the trailer and hits the interstate. She checks her cell phone messages, mutters to herself about the work ahead, and aims her Ford F-250 four-wheel diesel past the Wal-Marts and Starbucks of the 21st century. She drives through subdivisions where winding streets are named after herons, all the while keeping her eyes on the ponds and the lakes where the dragons dwell.
Erin Sullivan: DADE CITY — The two migrant workers had wives and children back in Mexico, but came here to make the kind of money they couldn't at home.
They worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, tending to orange groves in eastern Pasco County. Santos De La Cruz, 33, and Quirino Velasquez, 46, each earned $373 a week, and sent much of it to their families.
The men lived in a squat, concrete block apartment with De La Cruz's cousin in Tommytown, a rough, impoverished area on the fringe of Dade City where crime and hope for change are both constant: murders and then marches for peace, murders and then church vigils. Outreach programs and dedicated advocates work hard to better an area that has been like this for decades.
Dan Barry: DICKINSON, N.D. -- An unmarked police car so obviously a police car pulls into the circular driveway of a tired motor lodge that was maybe, maybe, a nice place at one time. The driver steps out in a blue-and-white windbreaker long enough to conceal the Glock on her right hip.
She approaches a guest room and knocks, standing to the side in keeping with proper procedure. The door opens to cast the morning’s light upon a registered sex offender named James Oscar Thompson. He is 36, dark-haired, about 5-foot-3, and high-risk; he is wearing an oversize red shirt emblazoned with the name of his fast-food employer.
Tom Lake and Tom Marshall: Fifteen years ago in North Carolina, Roger Wayne Morgan broke into a movie theater and stole $400 in rolled quarters. Then he moved to Florida, where he stole from a cash register, had the devil tattooed on his shoulder, was charged with armed kidnapping in connection with a botched ecstasy deal, and found work as a bouncer at a club called the Midnight Rodeo.
Up in Michigan, a man he had never met was trying to become a lawyer. By 1999 that man, Joseph A. Pursley, had $2.8-million in unpaid bills and convictions for resisting arrest and public drunkenness. The state denied his application to practice law after a bar association committee cited his foul temper and a "frivolous, cavalier approach to other people's money."
One might think these men's histories would limit their business options.
