Henry Allen on Colbert
check it
Eleven minutes in. (Thanks, Hank.)
What I've Learned
robert caro
Gold nuggets from Caro in here, like ...
Always type out your interviews before you go to bed, so you remember the expressions.
And ...
Moses told people not to talk to me. So on a piece of paper I drew a series of concentric circles. In the center I put a dot. The dot was Robert Moses. The first circle was his family. The second was the people in his social realm. But as the circles grew outward, there were people who'd only met him once. He wasn't going to be able to get to all of them.
Check it (thanks, Brendan).
Gone
a short stretch
Headed out of town for a few days. Gangrey is left to the masses.
Topic of discussion: Who do you read? When you need to get in the right head, who do you look up? Is there something you go to time and again? Do you browse? Do you meditate? Do you drink?
Discuss.
How to Fall 35,000 Feet
And Survive
Dan Koeppel in Popular Mechanics: You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?
You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.
Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.
Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.
The List
LET'S TRY IT
The anonymous poster on the "Gone" thread was looking for a list of the most nurturing newspapers when it comes to the kind of work we see on this board.
I'd be interested to see some nominations, especially in the smaller circulation categories.
Anyone?
When Songs Kill
THE KARAOKE MURDERS
Norimitsu Onishi: GENERAL SANTOS, the Philippines — After a day of barbering, Rodolfo Gregorio went to his neighborhood karaoke bar still smelling of talcum powder. Putting aside his glass of Red Horse Extra Strong beer, he grasped a microphone with a habitué’s self-assuredness and briefly stilled the room with the Platters’ “My Prayer.”
Next, he belted out crowd-pleasers by Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. But Mr. Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”
“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?
Blocked
THE FIRST WORDS WON'T COME
So you've done pretty much all your reporting and now you actually have to write the thing but you're staring at the forbidding white screen and you try typing a few feeble words and they're laughably bad so you try a few others and they're not much better and after a while you think to yourself, Maybe I've forgotten how to do this. What if I never write anything good again?
What next?
Good Intentions
SMOKE AND DUST AND DEATH
Ben Montgomery: DELMAS, Haiti — If it had all gone according to plan, Jared Brown would not be standing here, tennis shoes planted on 5,500 pounds of American rice on a truck in the poorest country in the West, struggling to apologize.
If the plan had worked, if they had caught the first flight or the second, if all their boxes of donated tents and generators had wound up in Port-au-Prince, they might not be so angry and scared of what they're about to do.
"I apologize to everybody for the bad, bad, bad things that happened today," he says. "Everybody's angry right now. I understand that."
"Hey, let's go distribute this rice," one of them shouts. "Let's just do it!"
"The fact is I apologize from the bottom of my heart," says Brown, 31. "This trip should not have been like . . ."
"I think your point is made," says another.
"Why are we just talking?" says another. "Let's go. Now."
The Marines of Company K
into the last large Taliban stronghold
Chivers: The helicopters landed before dawn Saturday in a poppy field beside a row of mud-walled compounds. The Marines ran into the darkness and crouched through the rotor-whipped dust as their aircraft lifted away.
Souls On Ice
the drink will see us through
Dan Zak: Voices carry. They bounce off buildings. They come from just beyond the plane of visibility, behind the churning haze. No one's around, yet there are sounds now and then -- sharp laughter, garbled shouting, detached, coming out of nowhere, coming over roofs. It's a gray-white echo chamber out here. Spooksville. Lunar. Plains-y. A winter episode of "Little House on the Prairie," with the hatches battened down. Dark figures fade in and out of view. (Zombies?)
Rebellion
'I would not hesitate'
David Barstow: SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.
But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.
She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. “I was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ” she recalled.
Punching Bag
'now, we're just tall'
Tim Botos: His eyeglasses perched just above his nostrils, Fred Askew sipped tea and scanned the morning newspaper. His long legs stuffed beneath a table at the downtown McDonald’s, he steers clear of the breakfast groups of men who hold court every morning at opposite ends of the restaurant.
“This is how I unwind, get my mind clear for the day,” he said.
He’s spoken to them plenty before, on other days.
When Askew has shared stories of his past, sometimes, they believe him. Other times, not so much.
Young Lives
portraits of violence
Doyle Murphy: Twelve people have been killed in Newburgh since Jan. 1, 2008. Collectively, it's a crisis of violence in a small city. Thousands have packed funeral masses. Friends have held vigils. City leaders have held summits.
Each name eventually fades into the subconscious of Newburgh's tragic character. But those who have been slain remain close for a growing number of relatives and friends. The mourners struggle in small and personal ways to remember their lost loved ones. They study pictures of smiling boys and regret the scent fading from a murdered son's T-shirts. Some dread the holidays.
His Words Have Never Stopped
roger ebert
Chris Jones: For the 281st time in the last ten months Roger Ebert is sitting down to watch a movie in the Lake Street Screening Room, on the sixteenth floor of what used to pass for a skyscraper in the Loop. Ebert's been coming to it for nearly thirty years, along with the rest of Chicago's increasingly venerable collection of movie critics. More than a dozen of them are here this afternoon, sitting together in the dark. Some of them look as though they plan on camping out, with their coats, blankets, lunches, and laptops spread out on the seats around them.
The critics might watch three or four movies in a single day, and they have rules and rituals along with their lunches to make it through. The small, fabric-walled room has forty-nine purple seats in it; Ebert always occupies the aisle seat in the last row, closest to the door. His wife, Chaz, in her capacity as vice-president of the Ebert Company, sits two seats over, closer to the middle, next to a little table. She's sitting there now, drinking from a tall paper cup. Michael Phillips, Ebert's bearded, bespectacled replacement on At the Movies, is on the other side of the room, one row down. The guy who used to write under the name Capone for Ain't It Cool News leans against the far wall. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Peter Sobczynski, dressed in black, are down front.
"Too close for me," Ebert writes in his small spiral notebook.
Jenny Sanford Comes Homes
staying true
Christopher Borrelli: Jenny Sanford came home to Chicago. Specifically to Winnetka, where she grew up as Jenny Sullivan. She came home for the most spectacular of reasons: She left her husband. You've heard about this. She left Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, because he disappeared in June for five days and spent the week with his "soul mate," as he explained later. At first, his aides claimed he wasn't around (on a Father's Day weekend, no less) because he was "hiking the Appalachian Trail." He was in South America, with his Argentine mistress. So, Jenny Sanford, wife of 20 years, dumped him and wrote a book.
"Is it uncomfortable to come back like this?" she said a few hours before her appearance Tuesday at the Book Stall in Winnetka while sitting in the lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel off Michigan Avenue. "No more so than going anywhere else. In other cities, I hear all these women's sad stories. Here, I'm getting high-fives! I got a high-five from a guy in the lobby with a big hat. Here, I see family, catch up with old friends. Here, it's way better."
Reporter
watch party
I've got it on good info that we should all be parked in front of HBO tonight at 9:30 for "Reporter."
Stuever's take: The world feels big and yet way too small in "Reporter," Eric Daniel Metzgar's ennobling, intentionally depressing documentary about the relentless work ethic of Nicholas D. Kristof, the New York Times op-ed columnist who writes firsthand about the worst situations every hemisphere has to offer.
"Reporter," which airs Thursday night on HBO, follows Kristof, 50, and two young idealists (a doctor and an inner-city English teacher) into the fractiously ravaged nation of Congo, where Kristof wants to write a column about the reigning warlord. Ideally, he hopes to teach his companions, who won a contest to travel with him, about the value of witnessing the world's atrocities and scintillating them into stories that will call on people to act. Which is what Kristof did with his work in Darfur, Sudan: He caused people -- from George Clooney on down -- to do whatever they can.
The Burden of Being Myron
tiny sparks of mud
Gosh, Wright: OXFORD, England -- Oxford at first light is an ode to potential.
A Search For Finality
buried
Meg Laughlin: PETIONVILLE, Haiti
Jan. 12 was a happy day for the new American chef at the Villa Therese Hotel. Wearing a white chef's coat with his first name embroidered in black over his heart, he walked through the wrought-iron gates at the elegant 14-room hotel, past mangos and palms, to the kitchen.
Rodney Rightenburg, 51, had moved to Haiti in 2009, after his divorce. Just two days earlier, he had called his former wife and 5-year-old son, who live in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and told them he was doing well.
Border Towns
'We cannot go back'
Dan Barry: EL PASO
At the foot of a bridge that helps bind El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, a United States Border Patrol officer warns two pedestrians not to stray once they reach the Mexican city. Stay on the main road. Avoid side streets. Very, very dangerous city. O.K.?
The pedestrians nod and join the back-and-forth human flow between one of the safest cities in the United States and one of the most violent in the world — getting worse by the month. Including a pause to take in the Rio Grande, here just a muddy stream with a boastful name, their walk takes five minutes.
Holding It To The End
structure
Check this one out. Did it work?
Bill Stevens: NEW PORT RICHEY
John Maccarelli awoke to a Pasco County sheriff's detective knocking on his door. What happened to the baby? Maccarelli, a 33-year-old construction worker renting a house in Holiday with his longtime girlfriend and her 9-year-old daughter, knew right away what Detective Janet Raybuck was talking about. Or so he thought. The night before, he had watched a 3-month-old named Joshua for an acquaintance. Sometime during the night, Lola, his 25-pound beagle, had jumped on the bed and scratched the baby across the nose, he said. It was upsetting, but he didn't think it would bring a detective to his door. Raybuck questioned him about the dog. A technician videotaped Lola jumping on the bed. The next day — Jan. 12, 2009 — the detective charged Maccarelli with aggravated child abuse. Joshua had been beaten. He was in serious condition at Helen Ellis Hospital in Tarpon Springs. A headline in the Tampa Tribune read, "Holiday Man Accused of Child Abuse Blamed Dog.'' Bloggers had their way with Maccarelli. It would get worse.
Tip Jars Remembered
smacks of desperation
Remember this bit of genius about tip jars?
Fail.
The Miami Herald tried for two months but has decided to discontinue the voluntary pay program.
Rules For Writing
if it sounds like writing, rewrite it
The Guardian asked 29 writers to list their rules for writing, and it's pretty freaking wonderful.
Like ...
Jonathan Franzen's No. 4: Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
And 5: When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
And 9: Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
Esther Freud's No. 2: A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.
And 3: Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.
David Hare's No. 3: Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
Zadie Smith's No. 10: Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
What are your rules?
Killface
RED EYES THAT LASH FROM SUNKEN SOCKETS
Here's an old one from Justin Heckert that's unlike just about anything else I've ever read. Check it out.
The Buddhists And The Cats
trouble
Richard Lake: On a dusty corner in North Las Vegas, there is a Buddhist temple. On that temple's property, there are cats. Many, many cats. Dozens of cats, in fact, have been known to congregate there.
These are feral cats, meaning they live wherever they darn well please. Apparently, the Buddhist property in the sparsely populated residential neighborhood at Gowan Road and Simmons Street suits them.
The Buddhists, being people to whom all life is sacred, care for the cats. They feed them, give them water, offer a gentle rub behind the ear when it seems a good idea.
After all, the Buddhists believe in reincarnation, which means they never know who that cat might once have been or might some day become.
An Exercise In Narrative Reconstruction
watch this dept.
Your assignment for today, students, is to write a narrative lede for this wonderful report about a stunt gone wrong. Assume you have spoken to at least five party guests and are equipped with authority.
Ready?
Go.
Chasing Jose
you're not bill clinton
Pat Jordan (thanks, Eric): I have been pursuing Jose, like the Holy Grail, for three months now, trying to nail him down for a magazine profile he'd agreed to do in January, partly because, as his lawyer/agent had told me, "Jose's on the balls on his ass," and partly because Jose was trying to interest a publisher in his second steroids-tell-all book, which existed only as a two page proposal of typos that had yet to interest any publisher. This second book would be titled "Vindicated," and it would "encompass approximately 300 pages and will require six months to complete."
My pursuit of Jose began in January when I called him in California. His girlfriend, Heidi, answered the phone. I told her that I was writing a magazine story about Jose writing a book. "And a movie," she said. "Jose is writing a book and a movie about himself." I said, "You mean a screenplay?" She paused a beat, then said, "No, a movie." I said, "Of course."
The Obit
and the story behind it
Wow. Kruse: CLEARWATER — The obituary was only the beginning.
It read like this: Czernia, Oren, 34, of Clearwater, passed away on Jan. 16, 2010. A University of Miami graduate, he is survived by parents; daughter; sister, nieces and nephews. Mitchell Cremation Chapel.
A post then appeared on a message board for Bruce Springsteen fans at Backstreets.com. It was written by someone called MrBaseball907. That was Oren's screen name.
Hello, the post began.
My name is Michael — the name of one of Oren's friends — and today I come to you with a very heavy heart. I know how much this place meant to him so I thought I should notify all of you. After a brief illness Oren passed away … He was my best friend and I will mourn him for the rest of my life.
The responses to the post started immediately.
my god no