Michael Powell: The judge waves you into his chambers in the State Supreme Court building in Brooklyn, past the caveat taped to his wall — “Be sure brain in gear before engaging mouth” — and into his inner office, where foreclosure motions are piled high enough to form a minor Alpine chain.
Every week, the nation’s mightiest banks come to his court seeking to take the homes of New Yorkers who cannot pay their mortgages. And nearly as often, the judge says, they file foreclosure papers speckled with errors.
He plucks out one motion and leafs through: a Deutsche Bank representative signed an affidavit claiming to be the vice president of two different banks. His office was in Kansas City, Mo., but the signature was notarized in Texas. And the bank did not even own the mortgage when it began to foreclose on the homeowner.
William Wan: For the longest time, the question just sat there on his screen. Cursor blinking. Waiting quietly, like a patient priest in a confessor's box. Religious Views: _____.
Creating a Facebook profile for the first time, Eric Heim hadn't expected something so serious. Hunched over his laptop, he had whipped through the social network Web site's questionnaire about his interests, favorite movies and relationship status, typing witty replies wherever possible. But when he reached the little blank box asking for his core beliefs, it stopped him short.
"It's Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?" said Heim, 27, a college student from Dumfries. "But a question like that kind of makes you think."
Dan Barry: ... Cancer, as is often said, tends to focus the mind. But my diagnosis hovered in the theoretical until the moment I began the first of six rounds of chemotherapy, each one requiring a five-day hospital stay. The nurse hung bags of clear, innocent-looking liquid from an IV pole, found a plump vein along my right arm — and the fog slowly lifted.
Sickened by the mere smell of food, I suddenly saw the wonder in the most common foods: an egg, a hard-boiled egg. Imprisoned and essentially chained to an IV pole, I would stare out my hospital room window at the people below, and feel a rush of the purest envy for their routine pursuits. Imagining the summer night air blowing cool through sweat-dampened shirts, I’d think how good a $3 ice cream would taste right about now, or a $5 beer, and how nice it would be to watch a baseball game of no consequence.
Men acting like boys, hitting, throwing, running on grass. I used to play baseball.
Check it: Spooky things began to happen this summer in the yachting mecca of Newport, R.I., shortly after the Newport Daily News hurled caution to the wind and began charging a $345 subscription fee for its online news—$200 more than for the print edition.
First, the phones stopped ringing in the paper's circulation department. Fewer subscribers were canceling home delivery of the paper, something they had been doing in droves when they knew they could get the same product for free at NewportDailyNews.com. "Those calls have stopped," William F. Lucey III, assistant publisher and general manager, told NEWSWEEK.
But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that's a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph. "The fact that weather hasn't been fantastic makes me believe that the pay wall has had an effect," Lucey says. "We think that more people are buying the paper now that they can't get it for free online."
This one's from a while back, but somehow I think I failed to post it. It's beautiful. Jeff Klinkenberg: This story is about what happened on one remarkable day in St. Petersburg — Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008, to be exact. It's about a chance encounter between a couple of Dickensian characters, a crusty one-legged man who lives in the city, and a sad-eyed little boy from Orlando.
The amazing coincidence of their meeting changed their lives. When the broken man met the broken boy, they began a journey to become whole again.
We have a contender for next year's National Magazine Awards. Read every word of this story by David Grann: The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.
The U.S. patrol had a tip that Taliban fighters were lying in ambush, and a Marine had his weapon trained on the trees 70 yards away. "If you see anything move from there, light it up," Cpl. Braxton Russell told him.
Thirty seconds later, a salvo of gunfire and RPGs — rocket-propelled grenades — poured out of the grove. "Casualty! We've got a casualty!" someone shouted. A grenade had hit Lance Cpl. Joshua "Bernie" Bernard in the legs.
A Marine and son of a Marine, a devout Christian, Iraq war veteran and avid hiker, home-schooled in rural Maine, Bernard was about to become the next fatality in the deadliest month of the deadliest year since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The troops of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines had been fighting for three days to wrest this town in southern Afghanistan from the Taliban who had ruled it for four years. As dusk approached on Friday, Aug. 14, things had quieted down. The Taliban seemed to have gone. Another day had passed in the long, hard slog for U.S. troops serving on the parched plains and mountains of Afghanistan, in a war that has steadily intensified.
Then, as the Marines were enjoying some downtime, reports of mortar, machine-gun and sniper fire sent them scrambling again.
Hank Stuever: The General Motors truck assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, outside Dayton, closed a couple of days before Christmas last year, leaving 2,200 workers and 200 managers without jobs. By one calculation in the morose but absorbing documentary "The Last Truck," airing Monday night on HBO, each lost job at the plant caused the loss of five to seven more jobs nearby.
Which, of course, rippled outward to us all. In the days leading up to the shutdown, Paul "Popeye" Hurst, a 53-year-old toolmaker with a ZZ Top beard, drives around the plant's perimeter, forlornly noting the acres of parking lots filled with unsold SUVs: "Makes me sad to see all these vehicles sittin' here."
On a late summer morning so muggy that merely standing constitutes a workout, nine young adults in drenched T-shirts clear a trail in Elk Neck State Park. Three of them buzz expertly with chain saws through drooping oaks and pines, while six others haul the downed limbs deep into the woods.
Horseflies and mosquitoes conspire to thwart their labor, but it is the bees, disturbed from a nest, that succeed. Sadie Stone, 24, clearing brush, takes a sting for her country. Then Hilary Griffin, 23, cutting with her chain saw, takes three. The work stops, but only for a moment.
In the last few months, the combined experience of this team has also included cleaning up the muck after floods in West Virginia, building houses along the hurricane-pummeled Gulf Coast and working with children of low-income families in southern Georgia — all for about $80 a week and $4.50 a day in meal money, and a $4,725 educational award once they have completed their 10-month hitch.
Excellent series of stories from Konrad Marshall, who, unfortunately for us, is leaving American journalism to return to Australia. Read his stories, then send him some love at konradmarshall@hotmail.com.
Just the tease: Two soldiers die; a unit mourns. But for Sgt. Jacob Blaylock and others in the 1451st Transportation Company in Iraq, the tragedy would only grow once they returned home.
I wonder if there's any correlation between newspaper circulation and mass transit ridership?
Alexis Mainland: THE middle-aged woman with the black cardigan around her shoulders had assumed a meticulously calibrated posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely clenched, muscles relaxed yet alert.
She was not preparing for a tae kwon do bout, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, intently, on a sardine-can D train heading swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush. Without holding on.
“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”
Reading on the subway is a New York ritual, for the masters of the intricately folded newspaper like Ms. Kornhaber, who lives in Park Slope and works on the Upper East Side, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines, office workers devouring self-help inspiration, immigrants newly minted — or not — taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the tattered covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude in a city of inveterate multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.
Todd Frankel: He lay on his back in the dirt of the Pittsburgh ballpark. His neck hurt. Striking his face on the crushed rock along the first-base side felt like breaking through glass. He was bloodied. And the foul ball was gone. He had missed it, missed his one chance to grab a game ball for his son on the boy's 21st birthday.
Tim Tepas, a retired schoolteacher, wanted only to climb over the short railing and sit back down next to his son. Disappear. Forget the whole thing. But the television cameras were on him. The stadium seemed to gasp in unison at his fall along the sidelines of that Pirates-Cardinals game in early August.
Tepas struggled to stand. He heard a voice behind him, felt hands on his back.
Eli Saslow: VINCENNES, Ind. The students filed into their social studies class just after lunch and slumped into desks where they had learned about the Civil War, Lewis and Clark, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On this day, teacher Michael Hutchison said, the class would feature "another of those huge moments in our history." He reminded the high school juniors and seniors that he would be grading their notes. Then he dimmed the lights and played a video on the classroom TV.
Some students set backpacks on their desks to use as pillows, and others pulled the hoods of their sweat shirts low over their eyes. "Nap time," one of them said.
N.R. Kleinfield: The day dawned different and stayed that way. Traffic was thin and sidewalks quiet. The stock exchange didn’t open, nor the airports, the schools, Broadway. People loaded up on bottled water, batteries, canoes. The law enforcement presence was intense: men with machine guns, gunboats circling the harbor.
Downtown, fires burned, smoke plumed. The odor stood.
It was a city humbled and scared, where the possibilities of destruction had been recalibrated. It was Sept. 12, 2001. The day after.
So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning.
But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event’s enduring legacy.
David Carr: ... “Look, I no longer have to collaborate with 15 people on a plan to go to the bathroom. PSEG is a very successful company. They know what they are doing. But big companies are by nature hierarchal and cautious. If I want to walk into my editor’s office and tell him I think he’s a bozo, I can.”
For the record, his editor does not think Mr. Moran is a bozo for returning.
Leonora LaPeter Anton: After she'd thrown out the microwave popcorn and the Fluff, after she'd gorged on McDonald's hamburgers, chicken nuggets and Reese's peanut butter cups, Stacy Woltmann sat down for her Last Meal. She smoothed her paper napkin on her lap. Her husband poured her a glass of cabernet. "It's not like I'm on death row or anything," she said to him.
Stacy weighs 419 pounds. A chair once collapsed beneath her at Subway. Another time, she was escorted out of the Mummy roller coaster at Universal because she couldn't fit in the seat.
Recently she decided to go on a diet — and lose 100 pounds in a year.
Last night over at Ben’s I told him that more and more I feel like I’m writing to a static box of text of arbitrary length and leaving worthwhile material in my notebooks. I find myself wanting a forum, I told him, I guess it could be a blog, let’s say blogs.tampabay.com/michaelkruse, where I can tell readers what I’m working on, how I’m doing the reporting, what I’m reading, who I’m talking to, what I’m learning, all while building toward a more traditional piece that would run in the paper and on the Web site, and then linking that to the forum, too, and then finally using the forum to share any stuff that didn’t make the final cut and respond to any questions or feedback prompted by the piece.
Ben put down his beer and told me that I had it wrong -- that we write STORIES, bitch, and that we are the “gatekeepers,” and that I had “Twitter brain.”
I’ve had this conversation before with some other people. This was just the most recent.
I know I’m not theonly one who’s having these thoughts. Far from it. And I may or may not have “Twitter brain” but I don’t know that that’s necessarily all bad.
I want to have my reporting process at this point be way more transparent, and I want my work on a story to be a continuous dialogue more than a one-time, me-to-the-reader bullhorn. Because WHY NOT? There are all these tools available through which to deliver a constant stream of reported information, earned, acquired KNOWLEDGE, and we seldom use them. And even if we do use them here and there we still tend to devote most of our time and energy and thought to the idea of an ARTICLE that’s going to run TOMORROW on 1A or 3B or whatever and is going to be 15 inches or 25 inches or whatever.
We talk about space.
We talk about SPACE!
As in: It’s really tight tomorrow. There’s not much space. It’s gotta be 20. Not so much because that’s what the story deserves. Not so much because that’s what the story needs. But because that’s the size of the hole we have to fill.
SPACE? In 2009?
I feel like this with almost every story I work on by now, although the ongoing Rifqa Bary story has been particularly frustrating -- I feel like I know more and have more to share than what I actually end up giving the reader, and I’ve written NINE stories, with no end in sight.
To which Ben said last night: Who WANTS that much? Who CARES that much? Well, not everybody, obviously, but some people. Will everybody want the same level of detail or complexity? No. Of course not. But why not throw it all out there and let people drill down as deep as they want. Because they CAN. And so can we.
Just to be totally clear: I’m not saying we shouldn’t still write stories. I’m not saying we shouldn’t still be striving to write well-reported, well-thought-out, well-constructed, beautiful and definitive works of narrative non-fiction. All I’m saying is that to ONLY do that at this point feels … limited, and limiting.
Working, working, hoarding, hoarding, and then letting people see what you’ve done feels so … 2005. Why not instead build context and credibility along the way?
To which Ben replied: What a waste of time. But I’m ALREADY spending the time. Sharing what I’m learning more or less AS I’m learning it wouldn’t take THAT much more time, and the benefits to the most interested readers, OUR BEST CUSTOMERS, or POTENTIAL best customers -- here’s even MORE -- and the potential benefits to ME, too -- here’s what I know, the reader, and now let me share it with you, the reporter -- I think would far outweigh any extra time spent.
Honestly. What else am I going to do? Go home at 5?
Oliver Mackson: ONE OF THE WORST THINGS EVER to happen in the placid village that the locals call "Slow-Motion Goshen" occurred on a sunny afternoon on June 4, 1991. Two girls, best friends, went exploring off North Church Street, near where the village gives way to the more woodsy, spread-out Town of Goshen. One girl was 14. The other was a month away from turning 14. They were curious about an old hotel, tumble-down and vine-strangled, fallen into decrepitude long before they were born.
They were poking around the crumbling foundation of the building when they were confronted by a tall man, 6-foot-3 before you counted the pile of his reddish-brown afro. He carried a long knife and a .22-caliber rifle.
The younger girl tried to joke it away: "Are we on 'Candid Camera'?"
The tall man's name was Josh Duggan. He was 28. He had a juvenile record for arson, and he'd been the target of an investigation into a 1981 rape in the village, according to court records.
He bound the girls with plastic strips and forced them to walk back to his nearby home. He marched them upstairs, to a bedroom filled with so many porn magazines and X-rated videotapes that police would later have trouble opening the door.
David Von Drehle: On Sept. 12, a large crowd gathered in Washington to protest ... what? The goals of Congress and the Obama Administration, mainly — the cost, the scale, the perceived leftist intent. The crowd's agenda was wide-ranging, so it's hard to be more specific. "End the Fed," a sign read. A schoolboy's placard denounced "Obama's Nazi Youth Militia." Another poster declared, "We the People for Capitalism Not Socialism." If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic. Either way, you may not be inclined to believe what we say about numbers, according to a recent poll that found record-low levels of public trust of the mainstream media.
At any rate, what we can say with confidence is that Deanna Frankowski was there. A cheery woman of 49 from Leeds, Ala., Frankowski said she had come to Washington as part of a group of 100 or more protesters. They filled two buses. And they were motivated by a concern about runaway government spending — that, plus an outraged feeling that their views as citizens are not being heard. "We are sick and tired of being ignored," she said. "There is too much money being spent."
So, there was this magazine story that the Washington Postkilled, apparently because it was too depressing. (The author: Matt Mendelsohn. The subject: a woman with four amputations.)
Then read "Game Brain," from GQ, by Jeanne Marie Laskas.
It's got me fired up to do better work.
Here it is: On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.
The State of Alabama has just dedicated $6 million in federal stimulus money to combat a certain invasive weed, and the two men chosen to lead this ground war can already hear you laughing. Millions of dollars to kill some weeds? Sounds like another good-old-boy boondoggle. Heh-heh-heh.
But we’re not talking dandelions here. This weed is the killer weed, the nearly indestructible weed, The Weed From Another Continent — a weed that evokes those old science-fiction movies in which clueless citizens ignore reports of an alien invasion, leaving the heroes to rail in frustration:
The fools! Don’t they understand? This is cogongrass!
Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG — Alexandra Kensler had been working weird hours, not sleeping well.
The imposing teen with the blond ponytail and iron grip was awake at 6 a.m., alone in the house while her mother was out of town.
She trudged to the kitchen wearing a sports bra and boxers. She grabbed a bottle of water, hung a cigarette between her lips and turned for the front porch.
Artist Tracey Falcon: "As the roots and the rings on teh trees offer information on the land over time, the pages of the newspaper are steeped in human history. Information, truth, opinion, fact, lies, propoganda; fed through the thin pages for all to contribute to and all to feed on. ... History echoing around the walls. The writing in the wall. Newspaper has everything, the rythm of life, land and people."
From Soul of Athens: For 63 years, Tom Rose and his wife, Mary, built a life together on his family farm on Canaanville Road. Then last year Mary passed away, leaving Rose to face the future alone, surrounded by a lifetime of memories.
Gary Smith: She's the water boy on the football team. She's president of the National Honor Society, a year from graduating as valedictorian. She can bench-press 180. She hunts deer with a bow and arrow. Anything might arise from this land. Something that never has in the history of U.S. sports is about to.
A freckle-faced ranch girl from the very heart of Texas is going to win the state track team championship.
Much of the debate about health care reform has centered on the nation's 47 million uninsured. But those pushing the nearly $1 trillion plan are also concerned about families who have insurance but find that it runs out or becomes prohibitively expensive when they need it most.
Sean Daly: LARGO — Jim Priebe will never forget how he found out: Nine years ago, he called home to check on his mother, a routine how-ya-doin' in the middle of the day. Margaret Priebe — in her mid-70s at the time — was just fine...in the garage, car doors open, stereo cranking.