Dan Barry: ... But a request to talk to people who had recently joined the cause was met with resistance by James Fitzgerald, the national director of field activities, who began the conversation by criticizing a New York Times article about the society from 1966. The best he could do, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to suggest a visit to a Sunday street fair in Union, N.J., where members would have a booth.
The tip was solid: there, near a funnel-cake operation, a foldout table covered with Birch Society literature.
The coordinator was Chris Nowak, 24, a substitute math teacher who said he joined after his father, a longtime Bircher, re-educated him about American history; for example, he now understood that the United Nations was founded by President Harry S. Truman “and other communists.”
With Mr. Nowak were Ray Tisch, 37, an electrical engineer, and Matthew Yamakaitis, 49, a warehouse worker, who said they had joined the John Birch Society within the last two years because they shared its concerns about the North American Union, the mainstream media and the conspiracy of elite insiders.
“At the highest levels there are controls in place,” Mr. Tisch said. Mr. Yamakaitis agreed, saying that if the insiders succeed in creating a new world order, “It basically means less power for us.”
“And more for the elite,” said Mr. Tisch.
“The Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Rothschilds,” said Mr. Nowak.
“Ssssssssss,” said the sausage cooking on a nearby grill.
Lane DeGregory: You have to go to work early. That's what they call it, going to work.
Get there by 7 a.m. or some guy who says he's disabled, or some woman who claims she has kids, will steal your slice of sidewalk.
You want an interstate off ramp: lots of traffic, an overpass for shade. Or a busy intersection with a long stoplight.
And you need a sign: your life story summed up on a soggy square.
Better yet, make two signs, so you can be whatever you need to be.
"After a while, you learn what works," said Roderick Couch, 28. He was in a wheelchair outside a St. Petersburg Wal-Mart last week, clutching a sign that said, "Disabled." The word was in quotation marks, as if the writer were crossing his fingers. Couch limps but can walk 100 blocks of U.S. 19 in a day. He hasn't worked since he got out of jail.
Sean Daly: Let's start with that name, a go-go-booted Space Age shout, a classic souvenir as fun to blurt as it is to make, fondle, sniff.
Go on, say it with me:
Mold-A-Rama!
Feels good, doesn't it?
That's not mere fancy talk, either. Just as those sideshow hyphens puckishly promise, this enduring staple of Vacation Wonderland U.S.A. builds to a big finish, spitting out a do-it-yourself memory that's hot to the touch.
Vacation bliss in 30 seconds.
You might have put the smooth, warm plastic to your lips or dared your brother to take a bite, before tossing it in the back of that hideous brown-yellow Chevy Caprice along with your haul from Shell City.
You either made a Mold-A-Rama toy as a kid — a flamingo, a red skull, a gator from Gatorland — or you bought one for a kid, maybe your kid, the circle of nostalgia going 'round and 'round, your life encased in polyethylene.
A palm tree with butt rot fell over a few weeks back and crushed this community's historic three-hole outhouse.
Stop laughing. This is serious.
Good riddance? Not here.
Dunnellon is a south Marion County town of not quite 2,000 people. On the outskirts, it looks like so much of Florida, Wal-Mart, Sonic, billboards for car insurance, foot doctors and retirement homes. Get closer to the center, though, and that starts to change.
There's a blue-gray, rust-topped, way-cool water tower. There's a TV repair shop. There's a pastel-pink, single-story motel called the Two Rivers Inn.
There's also a house, now home to First Realty of Dunnellon, with creaky hardwood floors, and a silver metal roof, and a big, deep porch good for sitting on wicker chairs and drinking tea that's too sweet.
Behind the house is the outhouse.
And inside the house is the woman who says she's going to save it.
Corey Kilgannon (thanks, Raja): Despite his nickname, Short Al stood tall in the pantheon of overnight callers to talk shows on the New York sports radio station WFAN-AM.
Such callers, sometimes called FANdroids, are known by name, neighborhood and loyalties.
Bruce from Bayside likes the Cleveland Indians, while Bruce from Flushing is a Yankees man. There is Marc in the Bronx (Denver Broncos) and Miriam from Forest Hills (Islanders and Mets). Regular listeners know that Jerry from Queens is Jerry Seinfeld, a proud FANdroid and occasional host of the show.
Short Al from Brooklyn was a Mets devotee who, having been a regular at Ebbets Field since boyhood, provided an old-timer’s perspective. He called in the predawn hours nearly every day since WFAN went on the air in 1987, becoming a favorite of Steve Somers, a host known as “The Schmoozer” who shared Al’s love for the Mets but prodded him to get to the point by saying, “Time is short, and so are you.”
Short Al suddenly disappeared from WFAN’s airwaves last year, leading some listeners to worry that he had joined the great lineup of FANdroids who have died, including John from Sandy Hook and Doris from Rego Park. “I can’t tell you how many times people called in and asked, ‘Why hasn’t he been calling? What happened?’ ” said Marc Malusis, another of WFAN’s overnight hosts.
Dan Barry: Thirty years ago this month, the Sony Corporation made a huge contribution to human interaction by ensuring there was less of it. No longer would people who did not want to engage the world have to stick fingers in both ears and say, over and over, “La, la, la, I’m not listening!”
Thanks to Sony, they now had a portable stereo device called the Walkman, which allowed them to block the sounds of their surroundings with a very private cassette recording of, say, Supertramp. So what if the headset and the 14-ounce unit strapped to your belt made you look like a drive-thru attendant at some Wendy’s of the future?
Today, of course, the ocean of humankind is cluttered with solitary islands of disengagement, thanks to the iPod, the iPhone, and so many other devices that say I. But before we explore what the Walkman has wrought, it might be instructive to revisit the events leading up to its invention.
Connie Schultz: ... A panel discussion about newspapers' future sparked David's idea on how to save them.
"I heard [Plain Dealer Editor] Susan Goldberg talking about how revenue from online advertising is pathetically low and newspapers can't recoup their investment. As soon as she said it, the wheels started turning. You have all these free riders like Daily Beast and Newser and local television stations aggregating your stories online while diverting readers and advertisers from your site. And they're doing it for a fraction of the cost of the newspapers that generated the original copy.
"And it hit me: All those theories out there on how to prop up newspapers -- why isn't anyone saying this? Why aren't we talking about how this free-riding by aggregators affects the market rate for everyone? "
I almost stopped reading this, and then I kept going, and by the end it had worked its way deep enough into my mind to keep me thinking about it for the rest of the night, until I finally fell asleep.
We instigated the dares most frequently when we went to the archery course, and we brought Tommy’s video camera with us on nearly every outing. The rules of the game had been developed by Tommy, Eddie, and Hector over the years they’d spent together before Aaron and I joined the group: After shooting the first target, the best marksman would choose the punishment—the dare—to be performed at the end of the following round by the worst marksman.
Some of the dares were to be fulfilled at later dates, like mooning the cashier the next time Tommy treated us to drive-through Jack in the Box. Others included walking backward down steep trails with your pants around your ankles, pissing from a cliff in plain view of other hikers, or shooting the final target, which wasn’t far from the parking lot, wearing nothing but your shoes.
***
I've got a few more things to say about this story, but I'll wait until you're done reading it.
INTERVIEWER: Your piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is often singled out as the classic work of New Journalism. How did that assignment come about?
TALESE: Harold Hayes, my editor at Esquire, said, I have your next piece: Sinatra. I told him I didn’t want to do it. Sinatra had been done to death. I mean, Christ, another piece on Sinatra? But Hayes is a strong person with a polite manner who got his way. So I go to the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles and I call Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. He says Frank’s not feeling well. He has a cold. Mahoney is also not happy about other things. He’s unhappy about this rumor that Sinatra is friends with organized crime figures. Mahoney says, We may want you to sign an agreement saying we can see the piece first. I say, I can’t do that. He says, Then we might not have a deal. At the end of the week, I’m still in the hotel room, and Mahoney calls to ask me what I’m doing. I say, I’m waiting for you to call me. How’s Frank feeling? Well, he’s not very good. I say, He still has a cold? He says, Yes, he still has a cold. He brings up the agreement issue again, and again I say that’s a problem. He says, I understand you’ve been seeing people. Yes, I’ve been seeing people. You’ve been seeing some of Frank’s friends? I say, I don’t know if they’re Frank’s friends, but I’ve been seeing people. He asks me, How long are you going to be doing this? I don’t know, I say, and then he hangs up.
That night I’m sitting at a bar around ten o’clock, watching people, and sure enough I notice Frank Sinatra sitting down the corner of the bar with two blondes. Sinatra goes to play pool and I witness a scene between Sinatra and a guy named Harlan Ellison, and I write it down on a shirt board. But I don’t get it all, so I go up to Ellison and ask him if I can talk to him the next day. He gives me his phone number and address. When we speak in person I ask him not just what everyone said, but what he was thinking. I always ask people what was on their mind. Were you surprised by Sinatra? Had you met him before? Did you think he was going to hit you, or did you want to pop him? Then someone I knew had a secretary who had gone to school with Sinatra’s daughter Nancy. She told me this great story about how she went to this party at the Sinatras’ house. At the party she accidentally knocks off from the mantle an alabaster bird. And little Nancy says, Oh no, that’s my mother’s favorite. Then Frank Sinatra knocks the other one off.
I called Floyd Patterson, whom I’d written a piece about in Esquire, because I knew Sinatra was going to see him in a fight in Las Vegas. He got me tickets to the fight and I just followed Sinatra around. I was in touch with Floyd because when I finish a story, I don’t finish a story. I keep in touch with the people I write about. I did that even as a young sports writer just starting out, twenty-five years old. I keep in touch because I always think that there might be more. The stories go on.
So I was getting little things like that. I called Harold Hayes, my editor, almost every day. He asked me how it was going. I said, I’m out here getting things. Harold never asked me if I wanted to come home and I never thought of asking him if I could leave.
At the edge of the remote prairie town called Eagle Butte, just past a fireworks stand, there is construction. Where winter wheat once grew, workers in hard hats now pour the foundations that will cement buildings to dusty earth.
Perhaps somewhere else this might be just another construction site. But here on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation, in what may be the poorest county in the country, people sometimes stand at the edge and watch, as if to convince themselves of at least this promise being kept.
Erin Sullivan: NEW PORT RICHEY — It was Sunday night and the ghost hunters stood on the steps of the West Pasco Historical Society, trying to talk with William Barber, a Union soldier whose desk is inside the building.
The desk dates to 1850 and was donated to the society in 1983. It is said that Barber's spirit is still very fond of his desk and that he doesn't like things put on it. Museum volunteers say people often smell wafting cigar smoke when they pass by the desk.
The museum was closed. The ghost hunters — Courtney Micalizzi, 20; Sarha Chapman, 21, and Nathan Thomas, 20 — like to go at night, when all else is sleeping. They addressed Barber as "colonel," although his actual rank is disputed. With their recorder rolling, they talked to him, hoping to capture "electric voice phenomenon," known as EVPs. They heard nothing and went home, thinking their night was a bust. Thomas stayed up late going through the tape.
Toward the end, he heard a voice answering back in the darkness.
You've got to read The Long Walk, a C.J. Chivers piece about soldiers in Afghanistan in the latest Esquire, and Build The Wall, an essay by David Simon in the latest Columbia Journalism Review. I couldn't find either one online, but both are easily worth the cover price of the magazine.
John Noble Wilford(thanks, Nigel): In memory, after all this time, Apollo resists relegation to the past tense. It is close to midnight, and the summer air is warm and still, no heavier than usual for Florida. We are driving toward a light in the distance. Its preternatural glow suffuses the sky ahead but, strangely, leaves the land where we are in natural darkness.
After the first checkpoint, miles back, where guards inspected our badges and car pass, the source of the light comes into view. The sight is magnetic, drawing us on. Strong xenon beams converge on Pad 39A, highlighting the mighty Saturn 5 rocket as it is being fueled. Our car radio tells us the countdown is proceeding on schedule.
These are the wee hours of the day — July 16, 1969 — the country has waited for since 1961. The rocket fueling continues, the radio informs us. The countdown proceeds without interruption.
'SHE MANAGED TO SHOUT THAT SHE WAS BEING KIDNAPPED'
C.J. Chivers (thanks, Nigel): NATALYA ESTEMIROVA is gone now. Her executioners forced her into a car in front of her home in Chechnya and sped away with her on Wednesday morning. She managed to shout that she was being kidnapped, her last known words documenting the beginning of the crimes against her, just as she had documented crimes against uncountable others.
Her killers worked quickly, as if on orders. They drove to a remote place, shot her and left her near the road, killing her in exactly the manner her friends had long feared would be her fate. Her purse was nearby. Her killers did not want it. This crime was about something else.
Ms. Estemirova was an essential member of a tiny circle of the premier human rights investigators in the entire Caucasus — a woman of immeasurable courage, precision and calm. She was a researcher for Memorial, the human rights organization, in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital.
I will step out of character as a reporter and declare it: she was both a trusted source and friend of the last several years, a time when the foreigners still trying to understand Chechnya shrank to an inadequate few.
William Langewiesche: On the afternoon of last January 15, a flock of Canada geese flew about 3,000 feet above the Bronx in a loose echelon formation, tending to their own business as usual, with nothing special in mind. Much about those particular geese will never be known—for instance, where they came from, and where they were headed, and why—but it is likely that they were large, well fed, and self-satisfied. Evidently they were also fairly dumb. Their stupidity cannot be held against them, since they were just birds, after all, but geese are said to be adaptive creatures, and it is hard not to think that they should have had better sense than to go wandering through New York City’s skies.
Need inspiration on describing one of your characters? Try this passage from Herzog, by Saul Bellow:
In the brighter light of the seaward side of the house she looked extremely well, happy, her face tanned and smooth. On her mouth she wore poppy-colored lipstick, and gold-mesh jewelry on her arm, a heavy gold chain on her neck. She had aged a little--she must be thirty-eight or thirty-nine, was his guess, but her dark, close-set eyes, which gave her a fluid and merged gaze (she had a delicate, lovely nose), were clearer than he had ever seen them. She was in the time of her life when the later action of heredity begins, the blemishes of ancestors appear--a spot, or the deepening of wrinkles, at first increasing a woman's beauty. Death, the artist, very slow, putting in his first touches.
Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — On boxed trailers, flatbeds and mammoth refrigerators on wheels, America drives to, from and through Stark County.
Before sunrise, under the midday sun and in the still of night, truckers hauling everything from onions to TVs, zip through this area along Interstate 77. They deliver products to businesses and warehouses here. They take them from here to far-flung locations around the country. Or, they simply just pass through, on their way from Point A to B.
“If you bought it, a truck brought it,” truckers tell you.
Regular folks, casual drivers in cars and SUVs — four-wheelers as truckers call them — share the road with these trucks every day. Rarely, if ever, do they know what’s inside those trucks, who’s driving them or where they are headed.
Lane DeGregory: ST. PETERSBURG — Under the interstate, in a square of shade, a tired-looking woman with bloodshot eyes sat fanning herself with a cardboard sign.
"Homeless with children," said the sign. "Anything will work."
Her dirty flip-flops were worn thin. Her white T-shirt was clean. She had tugged a ballcap over her short blond hair.
"I've been flying for about a year, ever since my husband died," she said. She calls panhandling "flying a sign."
"Had to do something to support my kids," she said.
She said her name is Tracy. Wouldn't give her last name. She said she's 38 and has three children, ages 8, 10 and 17. "My oldest, my girl, watches the boys while I work.
So the over-65 crowd has long been the most dedicated newspaper readership demographic.
It's high time we forgive them for calling to complain about the word "suck" appearing in print and for referring to our 80-inch narrative as "that ad you put in the paper."
And we should get them something. Anything. A pillow? Blood pressure pills? Lipitor?
For the first time, people aged 65 and over are expected to outnumber children under age 5 (Figure 2-1). The global population aged 65 and over was estimated to be 506 million as of midyear 2008, about 7 percent of the world’s population. By 2040, the world is projected to have 1.3 billion older people—accounting for 14 percent of the total.
The number of centenarians already has jumped from an estimated few thousand in 1950 to more than 340,000 worldwide today, with the highest concentrations in the U.S. and Japan, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. Their numbers are projected to grow at more than 20 times the rates of the total population by 2050, making them the fastest growing age segment.
Specific to the U.S.:
... centenarians are expected to increase from 75,000 to more than 600,000 by midcentury. Those primarily are baby boomers hitting the 100-year mark.
What that mean$ for new$paper$ remain$ to be $een.
I loved this behind-the-curtain look at a robbery investigation from John Barry: TAMPA — In blurry videos of three convenience store robberies last week, one detail got everyone's attention — a big, black, blunt gun. It looked like a sawed-off shotgun. The way the robber pulled it out of his shirt and aimed it gut-level looked unforgivingly lethal, a murder in the making.
It turned out to be the strangest of cases, a jewel of police work.
One long day last week, a detective swore he wouldn't go home without a bust. He worked day and night, 21 hours. And when he finally got his man, nothing about the case was what he expected.
David Barstow: WICHITA, Kan. — It did not take long for anti-abortion leaders to realize that George R. Tiller was more formidable than other doctors they had tried to shut down.
Jennifer Fermino (thanks, B): The latest candidate to throw his 10-gallon hat into the race for mayor is a Nietzsche-spouting semi-nudist who lives in New Jersey, twice posed for Playgirl and regularly rakes in $300 an hour crooning off-key in Times Square.
The Naked Cowboy's panty-prancing around the Crossroads of the World has made him a hit with camera-snap ping tourists all over, but it's his off-hours persona that's really bizarre.
1. Get away from home. The more you see, the more reasons you’ll have to write. Wherever you go, take books with you. – Paul Theroux, travel writer
2. Reporters can be pretty intimidating to “normal” people. Bridge the divide by having a drink with the person you’re interviewing, or by offering them a cigarette. (But don’t pick up a smoking habit along the way.) – Ashley Harrell, SF Weekly staff writer
3. Famous people can dictate their own legacies. It takes a lot more sensitivity to work with people who only have one chance to get their stories out there. – Bill Minutaglio, author of First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty
4. In a story where people are getting killed every day, it’s more dramatic to write about the empty barstools and tables in restaurants that used to thrive. – Diane Solis, Dallas Morning News senior writer
5. It’s important to brand your voice as a writer, and Facebook and twitter can be useful tools. If someone reads 140 characters that you write, they might read a longer piece. Hopefully. – Joy Sewing, Houston Chronicle fashion writer
6. Out of any 20 story ideas, two thirds of them will be crap. Don’t waste your time trying to make bad ideas work, but always have a stockpile of backup ideas. – Ira Glass, This American Life host
7. There are two goals when writing about social injustices. First, you have to outrage your readers. Then you have to inspire them. – Roger Thurow, Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent
8. You better learn to laugh at yourself, because you’re not that cool. – Julia Reed, Newsweek columnist
9. You have to make real people into characters in a story, and you can only do that by getting into their heads. Some of the best insights come from how someone relates to others, and not necessarily other people. – Susan Warren, Texas Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal
10. Risk failure with every single story you write. – Alma Guillermoprieto, author of Dancing with Cuba
The chief emerges from his tent to face the leaden morning light. It had been a rare, rough night in his homeless Brigadoon: a boozy brawl, the wielding of a knife taped to a stick. But the community handled it, he says with pride, his day’s first cigar already aglow.
By community he means 80 or so people living in tents on a spit of state land beside the dusky Providence River: Camp Runamuck, no certain address, downtown Providence.
Because the two men in the fight had violated the community’s written compact, they were escorted off the camp, away from the protection of an abandoned overpass. One was told we’ll discuss this in the morning; the other was voted off the island, his knife tossed into the river, his tent taken down.
The chief flicks his spent cigar into that same river. There is talk of rain tonight.