From the beginning of Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt:
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
One day at that time, not so very long ago, three things happened and at first there appeared to be no connection between them.
At dawn, Mae Tuck set out on her horse for the wood at the edge of the village of Treegap. She was going there, as she did once every ten years, to meet her two sons, Miles and Jesse.
At noontime, Winnie Foster, whose family owned the Treegap wood, lost her patience at last and decided to think about running away.
And at sunset a stranger appeared at the Fosters' gate. He was looking for someone, but he didn't say who.
No connection, you would agree. But things can come together in strange ways. The wood was at the center, the hub of the wheel. All wheels must have a hub. A Ferris wheel has one, as the sun is the hub of the wheeling calendar. Fixed points they are, and best left undisturbed, for without them, nothing holds together. But sometimes people find this out too late.
Kaustuv Basu: Zeeshan Usmani waited weeks to meet with the professor.
Finally, face to face in a cramped office, the 31-year-old Pakistani grasped for words to explain the research that would cap his five years of study at Florida Tech.
He nervously blurted out the idea for his doctoral thesis: Build a computer model to simulate how suicide bombs explode.
Startled, professor Daniel Kirk leaned forward and took a deep breath. Why did this young Pakistani scholar want to know more about terror bombings? If there was one topic this student could choose to make life difficult for himself in the United States, this was it, the professor thought.
Kirk was right. Red flags go up at the mere mention of Usmani's research. The FBI called the student and the professor.
Drew Harwell: A 19-year-old lay on a stretcher in the weeds of a shut-down gas station, his blood dotting the curb.
His orange Isuzu Amigo, freshly crumpled on East Bay Drive, sat nearby. Firefighters knelt at the teen's side, checking his pulse. His friends shaded their eyes and shared hushed worries. Passing drivers slowed to watch, then sped away.
Paramedics would come soon to take the teen away, but someone had beaten them to the scene. She wore gray sweatpants, a saggy T-shirt and a locket of her late dog's ashes. Her name is Sallie Gibson.
Sallie approached with hunched, unsteady steps. Her chihuahua, Little Bear, panted quietly in her arms. Sallie ground her teeth. She stared.
What did it feel like, she wondered, to crash? Did the teen feel shocked? Was he scared? How do people in car crashes, with all that pain, lie so still?
Dan Stockman: Deanna Vasquez said she realized something was wrong when she found herself helping a dental assistant hold down her 4-year-old son’s arms and legs as he writhed and screamed.
“You’re basically brushing his teeth,” she said. “I thought, ‘I could do this at home without holding him down.’ ”
But it wasn’t just her son’s screams that left her queasy, she said. It was also the screams of other children – from behind the closed doors of other rooms at Kool Smiles dental clinic, 1852 Bluffton Road.
“Kids were screaming their heads off,” Vasquez said.
She saw one girl emerge. She was 8 or 9 years old, Vasquez said, and had obviously been sobbing. Her parent was in the lobby.
Five sets of parents told The Journal Gazette that Kool Smiles does not allow parents to be with their children during cleanings or procedures. Vasquez’s presence with her son was allowed, she said, only because she insisted she could help calm him down and that they would leave otherwise.
Paul Schwartzman: MIDDLEBURY, Ind. -- He sinks into the couch, foot jiggling, his gaze traveling from his wife to the television to the darkness outside, broken now and then by the distant glow of passing headlights.
His mind settles into another round of "What if?"
As in: What if we don't have cash to buy milk, eggs, bread or diapers? What if our unemployment benefits run out? What if we never find jobs?
And then Scott Nichols thinks of the words he doesn't want to say, what for him, a 39-year-old husband and father of two, is the option he has hoped to avoid since being laid off nine months earlier.
They already took free food from a church pantry, cardboard boxes filled with Corn Flakes and bologna and saltines, his wife, Kelly, walking in, head down, while he stayed in the car, ashen. They pawned his wedding ring, sold part of her Silver Eagle coin collection and had help from the Salvation Army paying their electric bill.
Now another cliff approaches: the loss of the home they rent.
"Looks like we'll have to go to your mom's," Scott Nichols says to Kelly, 33, who is in a beige recliner, staring ahead.
Monica Hesse: The sordid secret is that everyone, even hipsters, has always shopped at Target. Here is how it used to happen: Once every four months, you rented a Zipcar with some trunk space, and then you zipped out of D.C. and down to Jefferson Davis Highway, land of the big-box stores. Along the way, you talked about how glad you were that you didn't live down there, and how ironic it was for you to be going there at all, as you normally just bartered on Freecycle, and how your dad still tried to be cool by pronouncing it in French, Tar-zhay. You got to the Target, and you bought a microsuede storage bench, a duvet and a doormat, and on the way home you stopped at Outback Steakhouse (which was totally hilarious), and in polite company you never spoke of these suburban adventures again.
Michael Kruse: NEW PORT RICHEY — The killing started just after 4 on a hot weekday afternoon at Friendly Kia.
The white four-door Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo sat in the eight-bay service garage Monday at the Pasco County car dealership on U.S. 19. The paint on the outside was white, the upholstery on the inside was black, and some faded letters on the front bumper said MARDI GRAS.
Mechanic Mike Cox put on clear safety goggles and a pair of blue plastic gloves.
Check out these videos of a local politician hosting a debate on healthcare reform in Tampa. What's fascinating is that every fifth person is making a video of the fracas.
There is something vaguely embarrassing—even narcissistic—about our new era of mass photography. Because we're always carrying cameras, we're moved to document every moment of our lives—sometimes to the exclusion of actually experiencing that moment. Take a look at this picture of Barack and Michelle Obama at one of the inaugural balls. Everyone in the audience has a hand up with a cell phone pointed at the stage, but nobody is actually looking at what's going on. The scene is puzzling: If the guy next to you is taking a picture—one that you can be reasonably sure will end up on a photo-sharing site somewhere—why do you need one, too? But we do this often these days. Win Butler, the lead singer of the band Arcade Fire, once told Terry Gross that he and his band mates have stopped going out into the crowd to perform because nobody pays attention to them—everyone's got their cell phones and cameras in front of their faces.
These people are not there for the experience, or for learning, or for the debate. They're there to show they were there. The proof of being present is currency.
Eli Saslow: NEW YORK -- The first phone call comes 30 seconds after Kim Hall arrives at her desk. She groans, chases two Tylenol with a gulp from her extra-large coffee and sweeps her bangs away from her eyes. She reaches into a drawer and grabs the notepad that contains what her colleagues refer to as "the tally of destruction." After the third ring, Hall grabs the phone and presses it to her ear. It is 9:03 a.m. on a Wednesday, and another day of economic collapse has begun.
"Five O'Clock Club, this is Kim," she says. "How are you this morning?"
She rocks in her chair as she listens and scribbles notes: A law firm in Manhattan. Downsizing. Their third one this year. Twelve employees. Probably in August. More to come in October and November.
"I'm sorry," Hall tells the caller. "This is so hard. This is really awful."
Neil Swidey: The divers packed themselves into the basket and prepared to be lowered by a crane down the 400-foot shaft. But they couldn’t move until DJ Gillis got into the basket with them, and he wasn’t about to be hurried.
“C’mon, DJ,” one of the guys yelled. “Let’s go!”
Tap Taylor, who was DJ’s boss, started yelling, too. “Let’s go!” It was a radiant summer morning, and they were standing on Deer Island, a peninsula that hangs down like a comma from Winthrop into Boston Harbor, curling in front of Logan Airport. It also happened to be Tap’s 36th birthday, and he didn’t want to waste it waiting for DJ to move his tail.
The two of them had a close if combustible relationship. Tap was a hard-charging guy who logged one 14-hour day after another with the singular focus of building his small New Hampshire commercial diving business into something bigger. Still, he had a soft spot for DJ, treating the 29-year-old more like a kid brother than an employee. A 6-foot-2, solidly built charmer, DJ had developed a reputation as a talented diver who worked hard and partied harder. He’d show up late to job sites many mornings, often dropped off by some blonde or brunette. As DJ would be hurriedly changing out of his dress shoes and pants from the night before, Tap would start cursing, threatening to kick him off the job. But those outbursts usually ended the same way. Before long, Tap would calm down, laugh, and begin pumping DJ for details from his latest adventure hopping bars and beds.
Hank Stuever: On the wavy matrix where popular culture and one's time in high school intersect, Gen Xers can often feel like they were born too late (post-Beatles) or too soon (pre-"American Pie"). But with John Hughes's cycle of five high-school movies that he wrote and/or directed in the 1980s, it simply felt like perfect timing. What were meant to be larky, cheaply made teen comedies remain fixed in memory as documentary accounts of that time, that place, that music, those clothes, those people, that angst.
Michael Kruse: BROOKSVILLE — From his small studio at the small radio station in this small town, chain-smoking, caffeine-swallowing longtime talk radio host Bob Haa uses his morning show to pit conservatives against what he calls "the leftists," "the Marxists" and "the fruitcakes."
If you live in Tampa, St. Petersburg or even parts of Pasco County, chances are you've never heard of him. But on WWJB-AM 1450 here in Hernando County, he's loved by some, loathed by others — and listened to by many.
Haa (pronounced HAY) says his aim isn't to mediate. It is to agitate. He has done this five days a week, three-and-a-half hours a day, for a quarter century.
Two Fridays ago, though, he might have gone too far.
'It almost makes me sick how much money I can make'
Peter St. Onge: By noon on Day 8, Nick Maimone's life already had changed. He was one of 27 poker players finding his seat at three tables in a Rio Las Vegas casino ballroom. He had made it deep into the 2009 World Series of Poker, a tournament that began with almost 6,500 players and guaranteed each of these final 27 at least a quarter-million dollars in prize money.
If he did the math – and how could you not do the math? – Maimone would be getting about $90,000 after splitting the money with the backer who paid his entry fee, then paying taxes. Ninety grand. He was 22. He'd been playing poker full time for about a year.
He knew, for now, only this: “I've really been blessed."
Tamara Jones, interviewed by John Temple: The Post newsroom has been decimated, and the people left behind keep being told to do more, more, more with less, less, less. They're exhausted, they're anxious, they're beyond demoralized. And guess what? They're still committed 110% to serving a misguided public that considers them disposable. Has quality been impacted? Of course it has, especially in feature-writing. Voice is being replaced with attitude, and there are more and more 'lite' quickies. The lack of warm bodies and resources in the newsroom also results in less first-hand observation. Travel budgets have been slashed, which translates to a lot more reporting done by phone and surfing the web. You can get quotes and factoids that way, yes, but you won't get poetry. What's sacrificed is depth, nuance, layers. Steve Coll, when he was managing editor, used to call it "sitting still inside the story." I also notice a lot of promising reporters flatlining instead of flourishing, because editors and senior writers who served as coaches have either left or no longer have the luxury of time to mentor. When I wrote my first Style piece, Gene Weingarten was my editor, and we spent two entire days locked in his office, fine-tuning every single sentence of a 100-inch piece. It was about a miracle in Baltimore that had been used to canonize a saint. Gene told me I had "to prove whether or not God exists." Those heady days are gone for good. If I pitched the same idea today, I'd probably be told to just do a phoner with God and cobble together a 10-inch Q&A for tomorrow.
Alex Zayas: The vampires wait outside the back door of the Ybor City nightclub. Newcomers stand on the fringes, alone. The regulars talk about school, about work, about the weather. But not about blood-drinking. Not out here.
Lane DeGregory: The roar of rush hour wakes him: trucks, cars and buses thundering across the causeway above his tent. Behind the shack next to his, someone guns a generator. Spanish music blares from a boom box. Homer Barkley turns on his side, pulls the covers over his head. His mother gave him these sheets when he got out of prison, to use at his brother's house, where he planned to stay. Instead, the sheets cover an air mattress Barkley hauled down here more than a year ago, when he found out he had to live on the edge of Biscayne Bay, with 70 other people convicted of committing sex crimes against kids. Home now is a spit of sand beneath a highway overpass. It's the punishment after the punishment.
First part of this engaging narrative here. And here's the second from Neil Swidey: Dave Riggs wanted to do the right thing. But can something be right if it’s likely to leave you dead? “We need to go!” he shouted through his face mask.
Riggs was one of three commercial divers stranded near the end of a pitch-black, oxygen-deficient tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean floor, more than 9 miles from shore. They had just backtracked 1,200 feet along slippery terrain to get from the very end of the tunnel to their Humvee, only to make a crushing discovery about the two other divers on their team. Tim Nordeen was slumped over in the driver’s seat of the Humvee, while Billy Juse was lying just outside the passenger’s side, his legs under the vehicle and his torso pinned in the narrow space between the door and the tunnel’s side wall.
Riggs assumed Tim and Billy had been felled by the mixed-gas breathing system they’d been given for their high-stakes journey into the earth on July 21, 1999. It’s the same system that he, DJ Gillis, and Donald “Hoss” Hosford had been breathing off while they were at the end of the empty tunnel, removing safety plugs so the Deer Island sewage treatment process could finally work. They’d survived, thanks to Hoss’s quick instincts back there, switching them to their emergency high-pressure air at the first sign of trouble. Still, their prospects for making it out of the tunnel alive were dwindling fast.
excuse me, sir, but you'll have to put that cell phone down
Michael Kruse: Dade City judge and University of Florida grad Pat Siracusa is such a big Gators football fan that he sometimes wears a replica Tim Tebow jersey under his black robe on Fridays in the fall.
His profile picture on his Facebook page is a photo he took with his phone from the stands at last January's national championship game.
It's a good memory.
But the Southeastern Conference might use a different word to describe that image: illegal.
Raja Abdulrahim: Shahjehan Khan rounded a corner at the Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. and let out a laugh.
Before him was a piece of memorabilia -- a destroyed school bus stop sign -- from Khan's punk rock band the Kominas, showcased in the museum's yearlong exhibit "Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom."
How did it get there, he was asked. Backup vocalist Nyle Usmani, his arm slung over Khan's shoulder, jumped in, giving some sociopolitical context to the Boston-based band's moderate success: "I'd like to thank 9/11. I wouldn't be here without you."
"Yeah, basically we wouldn't be here without," Khan agreed.
Tim Botos: EAST CANTON — In the shadow of a sleek BellStores Marathon, a father and son cling to their livelihood in a simple block building.
A customer stepped to the counter at Bay’s Auto Service. He laid a $10 bill on its glass top, as Harold Bay reached to the shelf below. Like a seasoned bartender, Harold slapped a box of Mail Pouch chewing tobacco onto the counter.
“Hi Mike,” he said as he scooped up the currency.
“Hi Harold,” the customer replied.
Harold Bay whirled around from the cash register with $3.61 in change.
The entire transaction was done with that four-word exchange. The men have completed the same sale over and over for so long, there’s no need to mince words. Now, more than ever, Bay’s lives and dies with regulars.
The steel-haired old hippies who grow the finest marijuana in the world began taking over Mendocino County four decades ago.
"Going back to the '60s, early '70s in Mendocino County, land was cheap," said Tony Craver, twice elected sheriff, now retired. "Thirty-five hundred square miles, only three population centers, very little law enforcement. . . . The hippies, if you will, moved in and started growing pot. The hippies became the establishment."
Democratic government serves at the consent of the governed; in this jurisdiction, enforcement of marijuana laws would be lax at best. A "grow" became an accepted component of the homesteads established by the back-to-the-land transplants who made their way across the Golden Gate Bridge, past the vineyards of Sonoma and into the woods. At Area 101, a club named for the highway lined with billboards for hydroponics and fertilizer, December brings the Emerald Cup, a public competition for the "best bud" in the county, if not the world.
"It's so a part of Mendocino County," said K.C. Meadows, managing editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal. "There are fairly large businesses in this town that got their start with marijuana money. And that's okay with people."
How, then, to explain what happened to arrests here last year? Pot busts up 60 percent.
Andy Netzel: The lunchroom is half-full, but the din sounds like it’s packed past capacity.
Two Lincoln-West High School staffers hang at the edges to keep an eye on things, calling out to those passing in the halls to get back to class and tuck in their shirts.
A student catches assistant principal Kate Sergent’s eye. Ruben Rosado is hard to miss. He has long, bushy hair pulled back in a ponytail, but the black frizz doesn’t cover up the collar, which is a different color than the rest of the polo. It’s a violation of the strict dress code that has been implemented at all Cleveland public schools. To make matters worse, the shirt is hanging out of his pants.
“Ruben, you know that shirt doesn’t meet dress code. Now come on. I’ve got to write you up.”
“But Mrs. Sergent, all my shirts that meet code are dirty.”
Mrs. Sergent rolls her eyes. She starts writing. Ruben looks incredulous. He looks hurt.
“How many shirts have we given you?” she says, shaking her head, still writing.
Richard Lake: It's hard to pinpoint when the trouble began, but that doesn't matter now. On Monday, my hands were shaking, and they wouldn't stop. This made note-taking difficult.
Maybe it all began to sink in at a school event Friday, when my daughter's new principal made one of those jokes you're supposed to laugh at when you're in public. And we did, all 200 or so adults in the sweltering heat.
"Daddy," Carleigh whispered in my ear, "I don't understand why everyone is laughing."
You will, I thought, but thank God you're still my baby girl and so you don't need to worry about it right now. Soon, but not yet.
I needed this. Hank Stuever: Wawa in the morning, Sheetz at night.
Sheetz in the morning, Wawa at night.
They're just convenience stores, you shouldn't think too hard about them. (Fair warning: This story thinks too hard about them.)
By late July, this much came clear: Some of us were going no place exotic in this, the bummer summer. There wasn't the time or there wasn't the money. Things keep not happening, or the wrong things happened. We never got farther than the Sheetz convenience store off the interstate. Stood there paralyzed by the choices in a Wawa -- what kind of chips, what kind of sandwich, what kind of soda, what kind of frozen chocolate thing? What kind of life? Which? What?
How about just resigning ourselves to summer's fate? What about a local sort of road trip, a mini-mart epic, bouncing between all the Sheetzes and all the Wawas you can find? Sheetz just opened its 360th location. Wawa will open its 571st this week. We live right where their territories overlap, a lovely Venn diagram of two same-but-different worlds.
Sheri Fink: The smell of death was overpowering the moment a relief worker cracked open one of the hospital chapel’s wooden doors. Inside, more than a dozen bodies lay motionless on low cots and on the ground, shrouded in white sheets. Here, a wisp of gray hair peeked out. There, a knee was flung akimbo. A pallid hand reached across a blue gown.
Within days, the grisly tableau became the focus of an investigation into what happened when the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina marooned Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans. The hurricane knocked out power and running water and sent the temperatures inside above 100 degrees. Still, investigators were surprised at the number of bodies in the makeshift morgue and were stunned when health care workers charged that a well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses had hastened the deaths of some patients by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs. Mortuary workers eventually carried 45 corpses from Memorial, more than from any comparable-size hospital in the drowned city.
Chris Erskine: Santa Monica Pier juts out into the Pacific like Jay Leno's jaw, a defiant, whimsical and improbable landing pad. Just 100 feet below, sharks are at play, scarfing the occasional hot dog and Coke cup that plop into their Sunday soup. Up on deck, L.A. is at play too. Here, on SoCal's splendid splinter.
1. Today's Drink on the 1A rail.
2. Every non-major league local sports story must contain at least 30 names of athletes.
3. We bring back delivery boys on bicycles.
4. And kids who sell papers on the corners.
5. And kids who sell subscriptions door to door.
6. We rip off Extra! afternoon editions for any crime, accident or natural disaster within 100 miles of the headquarters in which six or more people die.
7. No more teases in the print edition to yournewspaper.com.
8. I come into the newsroom all sweaty and jump on a desk and say something cool at least once a month.
9. We tear down the cubicles and shove all the desks back together.
10. It's okay to drink once you've filed or if you're very close to filing, so long as your drink of choice has been pre-approved by the publisher.
11. The web people are in the newsroom and are prohibited from using numbers or words that begin with Z.
12. Every reporter must drive a different route to work at least twice a week.
13. We will be at meetings, but we will not write about meetings unless a punch is thrown.
14. We have a program for visiting out-of-work journalists wherein we provide food and shelter in exchange for stories. Details to be decided later.
15. Cutlines are teases to the story.
16. Headlines and subheds are teases to the story, not summaries.
17. The following phrase is used more often: "Is that the best you can do?"
18. If you've just come back from covering breaking news, you must take the stairs.
19. The Metro section is now called Metropolitan.
20. We use Old English more.
21. Banned: He's/She's/They're not alone.
Kruse said the blog is looking a little outdated, a little behind the times. So I've tinkered with it a bit and I sort of like the changes. Take a look.
David Von Drehle: A story told around Arlington National Cemetery holds that John F. Kennedy paid a visit around Veteran's Day in 1963. As he stood near the mansion that once was home to Robert E. Lee, taking in the sweeping view of the Potomac River down below and the National Mall rolling out toward the distant Capitol, he remarked, "I could stay here forever."
Within three years, that serene and stirring spot had been visited by some 16 million people, for it had become, by a terrible stroke of violence, the eternal resting place of the slain Kennedy. As more time passed, and more visitors climbed the tree-shaded hill to the site, more graves were added in what is known as Section 45 of the rolling Arlington acreage — including graves for Robert Kennedy, and later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Edward Kennedy was buried Saturday on that spot and in that company. It was a hot, thick evening at the end of four long days of remembrance, summation and the grieving of friends, family and admirers.
And Dan Barry: ARLINGTON, Va. — The nation said final farewell on Saturday to Edward M. Kennedy, who used his privileged life to give consistent, passionate voice to the underprivileged for nearly a half-century as a United States senator from Massachusetts. He was the only one of four fabled Kennedy brothers to reach late adulthood, and he was remembered for making the most of it.
Along the rain-dappled roadways of Boston in the late morning, and then in the sweltering humidity of Washington in early evening, people waited for the fleeting moment of a passing hearse so that they could pay respects to the man known simply as Ted. At the United States Capitol, where Mr. Kennedy had served for so long, his wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, stepped out of a limousine to receive hugs, bow her head during prayers, and to hear the singing of “America the Beautiful.”