In a modest hotel suite at the Ho-Chunk Casino, a few women from out of town gather for a reunion. Homemade brownies sit on the counter, along with a peach pie, some cheese curds, several cans of soda and a long, sleek bottle of cherry vodka — a perfect name, they joke, for a burlesque queen.
There is no Cherry Vodka in the room. But Nocturne is here. And La Savona. And Ann Pett. And the Irish Mist. And Bambi Jones, also known as Bambi Brooks, Joi Naymith, the Black Panther Girl, the Mona Lisa Girl, the Garter Girl, Evangeline the Oyster Girl — and, for a while there in New Orleans, “The Girl the Whole Town’s Talking About.”
And Pat Flannery, just Pat Flannery, may also show up. Nearly 60 years ago she did her “How Do You Do?” routine at the old Moulin Rouge in Oakland, wearing dark opera gloves, a polka-dot gown and a look that said, You naughty boy. By act’s end, only the look remained.
Iris Schneider: I have always wondered what it would be like to reenter society after years of wrongful incarceration. Is there anger, bitterness, joy, regret--or all of that? I decided to ask Bruce Lisker, recently released after 26 years in prison for the crime of killing his mother, if I could visit with him occasionally to see how he fares as he rebuilds a life he left so many years ago. He has maintained from the start that he was innocent, and the DA decided on August 21 not to retry him for the crime. He has agreed to let me tag along as he makes a new life for himself.
Mailbag: "I've been reading a lot of crime nonfiction lately for a story I just finished on church shootings. The problem I encountered was the whole idea that in most newspaper murder stories, you know who's going to kill who eventually, so it's tougher to build that sense of tension/drama. Have you encountered that before? Any suggested readings for crime stuff?"
Michael Kruse: WESTERVILLE, Ohio — Rifqa Bary saw a girl. She kept seeing her. She saw her in the bathroom and the lunch room and the locker room.
"And for some reason," Rifqa said later, in a video posted on YouTube, "I told her I was a Christian."
Which she wasn't. Not yet.
"Wanted to fit in, maybe," she said.
Eventually she would run away from her home here and flee to Florida, believing her Muslim family had to kill her because of her conversion to Christianity. Eventually she would become for some a critical character in a culture war. Eventually her story would fill TV airtime, stoke partisan blogs and spark dueling custody cases in courts in two states.
But this is where it started: Rifqa saw a girl. The girl asked her to go to church. So she went.
They had noticed the old men and the television trucks gathered at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys.
They were not allowed outside, but this day last October was about them, too. So said the plaque about to be fixed to the building called the White House.
May this building stand as a reminder of the need to remain vigilant in protecting our children as we help them to seek a brighter future.
The men outside called themselves the White House Boys. They were assured that the abuse they endured here 50 years ago — beatings that left them bloody, ruined their sleep, wrecked their marriages and destroyed their lives — would never be repeated. This was a different place now. The boys inside were safe.
After the ceremony, the superintendent would write to her staff: "I am proud to show what our Dozier is truly all about today."
But behind closed doors, were those boys safe and protected? Were they being nurtured toward brighter futures?
"When the media was around, they would hide us," said a boy named Matthew Schroeder. "They didn't want us saying a word to anybody, because they knew what we would say.
Tom Hallman's thoughts (thanks, Dan): Sam’s story took two trips to Boston. Each day it ran on Page 1 and had two full pages in the A section, across four days. In addition to the logistical things about cost, you couldn’t get that kind of space now. But good narrative doesn’t have to take months to do.
I’m all for other media when it works, but the online component would have ruined that story. The power of the story doesn’t come from talking to the doctors or having a graphic to show where the surgeons went in and how many procedures they did. Nobody cares about that—they care about the boy having a journey.
If we want to compete with other people in other media, if we just try to do it faster, it’s a losing battle. The way we can define ourselves is by telling stories.
Ylan Q. Mui: Ann Powers makes unemployment glamorous. She's sassy and sexy, the kind of woman who jaunts off on a weeklong sailing trip to Antigua because it calms her nerves and costs less than paying for therapy. She dabbles in stand-up comedy because, well, why not? She's got time. Getting laid off really frees up the day.
To Ann, looking for a job is a lot like dating. First impressions are so important. She still gets Botox just in case she snags an interview or a man, and takes care to maintain her size-2 figure and golden bob. Her adventures in labor and in love are chronicled every day on her blog.
"The one good thing about being unemployed is that I can eat chocolate chip cookies with a glass of red wine at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, which is about the time I've hit the wall searching for my next 'big opportunity,' " Ann writes in one entry.
Colleen Jenkins: A sore back brought Michael Thornton to the jailhouse infirmary, but far worse problems plagued him.
He was in trouble — again. Even more devastating, his youngest son had gotten into trouble, too. Serious trouble. Somewhere in the jail, William was wearing the same inmate uniform.
Michael was anxious, sad, disappointed and scared for his son. Most of all, he was angry. For a guy who had made more than a few mistakes in his life, Michael was a perfectionist. He liked to give orders, and the person to whom he gave the most was William. William was his project, a chance to prove that at 48 he could still get it all right.
Now the project looked like a failure. And when William walked through the infirmary door in early September 2005 for a checkup — the first time Michael had seen his son since the 17-year-old's arrest — the father's anger poured out.
A female guard urged William to hug his father, but neither moved toward the other.
"We don't have that type of relationship," Michael said.
Six or seven other inmates lingered around them. Michael was glad for the audience. He laid into William, as if they were alone in their living room.
"Neither one of us is supposed to be here," he told William. "But you especially are not supposed to be here.
Malcolm Gladwell: Only when you see football at close range is it possible to understand the dimensions of the brain-injury problem. The players were huge—much larger than you imagine them being. They moved at astonishing speeds for people of that size, and, long before you saw them, you heard them: the sound of one two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man colliding with another echoed around the practice facility. Mihalik and Guskiewicz walked over to a small building, just off to the side of the field. On the floor was a laptop inside a black storage crate. Next to the computer was an antenna that received the signals from the sensors inside the players’ helmets. Mihalik crouched down and began paging through the data. In one column, the HITS software listed the top hits of the practice up to that point, and every few moments the screen would refresh, reflecting the plays that had just been run on the field. Forty-five minutes into practice, the top eight head blows on the field measured 82 gs, 79 gs, 75 gs, 79 gs, 67 gs, 60 gs, 57 gs, and 53 gs. One player, a running back, had received both the 79 gs and the 60 gs, as well as another hit, measuring 27.9 gs. This wasn’t a full-contact practice. It was “shells.” The players wore only helmets and shoulder pads, and still there were mini car crashes happening all over the field.
Scott Waldman: ALBANY -- William Williams does not want to stutter in front of 700 people. He inhales sharply so he has enough air and grabs the microphone.
"Good morning. Today is Monday, October fifth."
Breath
"Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance."
This is not some audition for "Annie." It isn't singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in the school chorus as your parents beam. William and five other eighth graders are vying to become the next Voice of Myers.
Henry Allen: R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, has illustrated Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
It starts out with brass-band grandeur: the Creation. "When God began to create heaven and earth . . ." Not just something out of nothing, but everything out of nothing.
"And God said, 'Let there be light.' "
The words come from both the King James Version and a recent translation by Robert Alter. The pictures come from Crumb's pen, the same sort of art pen that he's done all of his life's work with -- all of it, no pastels, watercolors, pencil, just this pen scritching away for half a century in a fury of crosshatching and black-and-white starkness. He's that geeky kid in the class who drew all the time with the funny-looking pen, a Rapidograph, probably, and the boys wanted him to draw porn, which Robert Crumb did, publishing a lot of it in '60s underground comics such as Zap or Despair.
A traveling barfly finds himself in a small town near the border and entertains the locals at the tavern one night with amazing tales of his adventures. This barfly has been everywhere, of course, and makes a great impression, especially on a young man of romantic nature who, alas, is rather poor.
Early the next morning, the young man turns up at the traveler’s room, eager to thank him for the words of inspiration he heard the night before. But the barfly seems distracted and, as he pours himself the first drink of the day, he turns and says: “Please, sir. If you really want to help, tell me where I am, not what you learned.”
For the last 12 months, this column has been many places: in a sweatshop, at a sex club, at the morgue and at the mayor’s office, in kitchens and bathrooms and, once, in a bowling alley in the basement of the Frick. The idea, all along, was fairly simple: to look at the interiors of the city and, working on a micro level, to explore the rich fabric of New York.
David Rhode: THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.
Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside — reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see — and feared we would be dead within minutes.
It was last Nov. 10, and I had been headed to a meeting with a Taliban commander along with an Afghan journalist, Tahir Luddin, and our driver, Asad Mangal. The commander had invited us to interview him outside Kabul for reporting I was pursuing about Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The longer I looked at the gunman in the passenger seat, the more nervous I became. His face showed little emotion. His eyes were dark, flat and lifeless.
Justin George: TAMPA — The chickens belong to Ybor City but Tommy Stephens has taken a few under his wing.
The latest was Chicken Nugget, who lapped up Budweiser and napped on Stephens' chest. When the cock began to crow, Stephens put him in the open back yard with his wild brethren.
Last month, Chicken Nugget met a fowl fate. A dog got him. It had happened before, to other defenseless chickens.
Richard Perez-Pena: Of all the consequences of shrinking newsrooms, one of the oddest is this: Fewer journalists are available to watch people die. But Michael Graczyk has witnessed more than 300 deaths, and many of those were people he had come to know.
An Associated Press reporter based in Houston, Mr. Graczyk covers death penalty cases in Texas, the state that uses capital punishment far more than any other, and since the 1980s, he has attended nearly every execution the state has carried out — he has lost track of the precise count. Whenever possible, he has also interviewed the condemned killers and their victims’ families.
What makes his record all the more extraordinary is that often, Mr. Graczyk’s has been the only account of the execution given to the world at large. Covering executions was once considered an obligatory — if often ghoulish — part of what a newspaper did, like writing up school board meetings and printing box scores, but one by one, such dutiful traditions have fallen away.
He's well known at the Hillsborough County lockup: trespassing, drinking in public, resisting arrest. Alkie crimes. It's petty stuff, but the record fills 83 pages. And that's just in Florida, since 1993.
At 77, he's one of the oldest guys in the Falkenburg Road Jail. In his mug shots, he's always wearing overalls. Sometimes his thin chest is bare beneath the dingy denim. Sometimes he wears an undershirt. But always, those overalls — except, for some reason, in the most recent booking photo.
The other day I went to see him.
"You want to talk to me?" he asks, shuffling into a holding room. "Why?"
Wright Thompson: NEW YORK -- I am a man of the people, which is why I generously tipped the guy who shined my shoes in a suite near the home plate of Yankee Stadium. Actually, that's a lie. I didn't tip him. Why should I? He gets to be in the presence of me and my fellow masters of the universe. Maybe he'll catch success by osmosis, and that's tip enough. Someday, if he works hard, he can grow up to be like me: a man who enjoys a beautiful fall day by spending $1,200 of other people's money on a baseball ticket.
I am the American Dream. I drink wildly expensive French wine with my ballpark lunch and give half the bottle to the guys slaving away in the kitchen, because generosity toward the working man is a burden I carry with grace. I order a $60 glass of pregame scotch and throw the last swallow away, because backwash is for proletarian strivers.
Check out Wes Ferguson: There will be tears tonight.
There will be voices in the cemetery — a child's laughter, a whispered threat.
On a cool, damp night in Longview, paranormal investigator Misty Richardson says she will not fear the spirits she expects to encounter during research of a local burial ground.
"Me, what I believe is that I have the Lord with me," she says. "We say a prayer and feel that He protects us. Some of them do try to possess you, so you have to do it with a clear head. If you act relaxed and peaceful, you don't have anything to worry about."
If you give in to panic, on the other hand, you become vulnerable. You must not panic.
... over at Nieman Storyboard. Good stuff. Like this: Is there anything narrative journalism does that can’t be done by some other type of print or online story?
Narrative journalism is not about delivering information. It’s about delivering the experience of something. That’s what other kinds of journalism, with sidebars and timelines and hypertext and graphics and mapping—all the wonderful things that journalism can do to convey information—none of those things even attempts to deliver the sense of experience.
Paul Grondahl with Poppy's Story in seven chapters (thanks, Brendan). Here's the first: ALBANY -- "I ain't nobody, boss. I ain't nobody."
The man was wrapped in three layers of thermal wear: coveralls, snowmobile suit, down jacket. He wore a wool hat with earflaps.
He had come to a South End food pantry for a free lunch on a Saturday in January. Outside, it was wicked cold. A biting wind knifed up from the Hudson a few blocks away -- lip-chapping weather.
He'd spent the night outside, he said, and had been living on the streets, more on than off, for eight years. Right now, home was a blue-tarp shanty near the 787 overpass, down by the river.
"Wanna see it?" he asked. He leaned in close, gauging my reaction.
He smelled of damp earth and stale beer.
Before I could reply, he requested a cup of tea and off I went to fetch it. He wasn't drinking the watery coffee poured from the spigot of a big silver urn like the others at the pantry.
My daughter had come to the pantry with a friend as part of a middle school community service project. I joined them in table-waiting duties.
The man expertly made breakfast tea and sipped it with a practiced, delicate touch, pinky extended.
Joel Achenbach: Gary Smith writes very long stories for a living. They run 8,000 words. He crafts four of them a year for Sports Illustrated. He is a throwback, a spinner of yarns in what we will call for the millionth time the Age of Twitter. Narrative these days competes against incrementalized information -- data, chatter, noise. Smith doesn't think he's a dinosaur, but he does fear that the long-form narrative doesn't quite work on a computer screen.
"You're on the Web and the Internet all day, and you got your trigger finger on that Scroll Down button. And you're looking to move material across the screen. Move-and-skim is the mood you're in."
And that's no way to read a story.
"A story curls you back into yourself," he says, "and you need a special time and place and setting and mode for that. If it becomes all one smear with your work life and checking your e-mail, your Facebook, it's lost all its reason for being."
Andy Meacham: ST. PETE BEACH — Julius Stewart and Angie Lee Burnham were childhood friends who moved away and married other people.
Both their spouses died young, and of unusual causes — his wife to a gas leak; her husband to a German U-boat.
The old friends reunited and wed shortly after World War II. They were together 64 years, until death separated them last week.
They died a day apart. Mr. Stewart, who was 90, died Saturday. Mrs. Stewart, who was 92, died Sunday.
"I think they decided that they were meant to be together," said son Lee Stewart. "They almost knew what each other was going to say or do. It was sort of like a communication that you didn't see."
First in a continuing series of nuggets from Hank Stuever's book Tinsel, which you should get, if you know what's good for you. If there are typos, they're mine. Page 67:
People sometimes go to the mall twice a day. On weekday mornings and afternoons it is the “Strollerbriar” of its nickname, filled with bored moms who visit over and over again, eddying out by the play area, and watch carefully as their children maniacally romp on toys in the shapes of a giant, smiling plastic cell phone and a computer terminal. On Friday nights Stonebriar Centre fills with packs of teenagers, who seem to have stepped right out of television shows about teenagers, who screech joyfully at one another between checking their phones. Emo rocker teens with pink-tinged shag haircuts and Joey Ramone drainpipe jeans gather at tables by Sbarro pizza. On Saturday nights there are married couples, MILFs with their DILFS, who’ve hired babysitters so they can have dinner at Cheesecake Factory or California Pizza Kitchen and now wander around Barnes & Noble, browsing together and then drifting apart, until it is time to ride the escalator together up to the AMC 24 for a 9:20 showing of a comedy starring Will Ferrell or Will Smith or Will Anybody. On Sundays, Stonebriar fills with football widows who paw lackadaisically through the sales racks at Macy’s and Nordstrom. On weeknights, near closing, lonely employees stare abjectly from the Brookstone and Hot Topic and T-Mobile.
Wright Thompson: ANGOLA, La. --The prison dentist walks slowly down the gravel road past the warden's house. He is stooped, with a big belly, two white tufts of hair and a bald spot. He's got a bulbous nose and a creak in his step. But look closer. There are still pieces of the man he used to be. He moves with a subtle feline grace. He's got the deepest blue eyes, familiar somehow, like an old photograph. They seem to only absorb information, never giving anything away. He's alone, carefully making his way from the party to his white Ford truck. He's been on display long enough.
"I'm going to play with my horses," Dr. Billy Cannon says.
Even in his 72nd year, people can't help looking at him. They see only the broadest strokes: the LSU football hero who fell unimaginably far. Almost no one is allowed to see deeper. He doesn't like to be inspected -- once he saw me taking notes in a hotel lobby and barked, "Put that damn book up" -- because his life then becomes the property of the observer.
Of course, what he likes hasn't mattered for a long time now. For the past half century, he has existed mostly through the eyes of others, the narrative of his life in their control. They stare, they whisper, they point. They wonder what to make of his hard exterior, or the gruff responses he gives to strangers, or the fact that he has spent much of the past two decades in virtual seclusion.