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I Was A Teenage Narc

A writer recalls being employed by the Washington State Liquor Control Board as a teenage informant who bought cigarettes and alcohol without an ID:

The convenience store was on a suburban street in West Seattle. Kelly parked in the front, in view of the counter, instead of around the corner like she usually did. I went inside, where a clerk who didn’t look much older than I was sold me a Bud Light. I walked back to the car, gave it to Kelly and waited in the car for her to return.

I could see her through the window, showing the clerk her badge. As they spoke, a man in his mid-40s came out of the store’s back room, walked past Kelly and came, furious, toward the car.

I checked to make sure the windows were rolled up and the doors were locked. He clawed at the door handle.

‘Get out of the car!’ he shouted.

I froze.

‘I said, get the fuck out of the car!’ He kicked the window. I scrambled for the driver’s seat.

‘If I ever see you again I’ll fucking kill you!’ he shouted, finally loud enough for Kelly to hear. ‘You better never come here again!’

“I Was A Teenage Narc.” — Rottin’ in Denmark

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Classical, National Geographic, Chicago Reader, The Morning News, fiction, plus a guest pick from Kriston Capps.

Neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKee, a Green Bay Packers fan, on her autopsies of former NFL players and research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy:

Over the last four years, McKee has become the most visible member of a cohort of research scientists and family members — wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the dead, dying, and demented — who have forced the issue of chronic brain trauma into the forefront of American consciousness. The process has engendered enormous publicity as well as criticism and jealousy in the scientific community, which is every bit as competitive as the NFL. Her work has brought ‘a great deal of acclaim, exposure, and recognition,’ says neurosurgeon Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University and co-director of CSTE. ‘But at the same time it’s brought a great deal of pressure. Not everybody greets her findings with the same degree of enthusiasm.’

War-painted denizens of the upper deck may view her as The Woman Trying To Destroy Football. In fact, she is The Woman Trying To Save Football From Itself. The process has engendered a particular intimacy with those who entrust their loved ones to her posthumous care. Virginia Grimsley, whose husband, John, was the first NFL player diagnosed by McKee, says, ‘He’s in good hands with her. They’re all in good hands with her.

‘If Joe Six-Pack was as educated as the wives that have gone through this and as Dr. McKee, Joe Six-Pack would sit down, shut up, and continue to drink his six-pack,’ Grimsley says. ‘She’s not trying to destroy football.’

McKee says: ‘I’m just trying to tell football what I see.’

“The Woman Who Would Save Football.” — Jane Leavy, Grantland

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A look at tour bus drivers, who hold the lives of musical acts in their hands on a daily basis, and what it’s like to drive around music’s biggest stars:

Providing a band with a smooth ride, free of sharp turns and unexpected pit stops, isn’t just a matter of comfort. Good drivers get work because band members trust that they can go to sleep at night knowing they’ll wake up in one piece. Ben Kitterman know this better than most, having driven for Tom Petty (‘Favorite gig ever. Extremely professional.’), Motley Crue (‘Tough gig. They’re a little bit rougher.’), Creed (‘Fuck every minute of that! Those guys thought they were such a big deal.’), and John Legend (‘Not a whole lot of interaction. He just likes reading and chilling out and doing his own thing.’). He recently made the unusual transition from driver to rider when he became Aaron Lewis’ full-time pedal steel player.

‘Driving smoothly is really an art form,’ he says. ‘I’ve ridden with a lot of pretty well-known drivers and was surprised at how shitty the ride was. Once, I was rolled out of my bunk and dislocated two ribs. Going into four shows in a row with dislocated ribs is not a pleasant experience.’ Driving, though, is only a small part of a driver’s job. Buses must be cleaned, inside and out, on a regular basis. And as Ron Ward — who’s driven for Sean Combs (‘He lets me do whatever I want. If I need Ciroc, I can get bottles from the distributor.’), the Wu-Tang Clan (‘I have to get a new damn lung every time I come off the road with them’), and Chris Brown (‘He don’t tell me nothing but, “You want to go partying? Clubbing? Let’s go!”’) — makes clear, there are certain things he doesn’t abide.

“Tour Bus Confidential: Behind Music’s Bumpy Road Show.” — David Peisner, Spin

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Very few cases of law enforcement officers who are “feloniously killed” in the line of duty go unsolved. The murder of officer Tom Wood in Maywood, Chicago is one of those unsolved cases, and corruption in the Maywood force may have impeded the investigation:

The ensuing homicide investigation was equally haphazard. Several witnesses whom Wood saw or called in the days leading up to his murder were never questioned. And although the flooding problems at Maywood’s police station were well known, officers allowed evidence in Wood’s case, including a cell phone, to get wet. (Officials insist that the material was not badly damaged.)

Meanwhile, Elvia Williams, who had been Maywood’s police chief for only a few months when Wood was killed, made a decision that, according to current and former police officials, complicated and perhaps encumbered the investigation: She asked for help from the West Suburban Major Crimes Task Force (known as WESTAF), a consortium of detectives and other specialists from police departments in the western suburbs.

Some Maywood officers were angered by the outside interference (Maywood isn’t part of WESTAF) from a group they thought had little knowledge of the local bad guys. And the WESTAF members—well aware of the history of corruption and brutality on the Maywood force—did not fully trust the local cops. One former WESTAF member even suggests that the Maywood cops held back relevant information.

“Maywood Confidential: The Unsolved Murder of Police Officer Tom Wood.” — Robert Herguth and Dane Placko, Chicago Magazine

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On eating squirrels:

But somewhere along the way, squirrel declined in popularity as a game animal, replaced by bigger quarry, such as deer and turkey, whose numbers had grown in the countryside as the number of humans dwindled. Mainstream views on squirrel eating began to drift toward disdainful—it became something hillbillies and rednecks did. In the late 90s a pair of Kentucky neurologists posited a link between eaters of squirrel brains—a time-honored delicacy among hunters—and the occurrence of a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a theoretical but terrifying new mad squirrel disease. (Peer review later deemed this connection unlikely.) And though noted woodsman and Motor City Madman Ted Nugent devoted a few pages of his wild game cookbook Kill It and Grill It to “Limbrat Etouffee” in 2002—written with a vengeance he typically reserves for sitting Democratic presidents—when the 75th-anniversary edition of Joy of Cooking was published four years later, for the first time in the book’s history it didn’t include an illustrated how-to for pulling the skin from a squirrel.

“Chicken of the Trees.” — Mike Sula, Chicago Reader

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[Fiction] Two friends decide to loot houses after a natural disaster strikes:

I turned onto the first street, where we entered one of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods, a pink two story house greeting us in every direction. The houses had fared well, except for their roofs, now without tiles. Every roof looked identical, the neighborhood having managed to maintain its vision, even post-hurricane. Red tiles were sprinkled throughout, mixing with branches and debris, giving the neighborhood an artistic vibe that the residents, had they been around to see it, would’ve commented on favorably. I could see all this, because the moon, as if privy to the artistry of the red clay tiles, had found a cloudless opening. I kept going, crushing a tile, only to realize that pulverizing it only added to the street’s flavor. Still, I kept driving over them, as they were impossible to avoid, an unwilling artist.

‘Cut the lights,’ Danny said.

“Looters.” — Alex Perez, Guernica

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Eradicating urban poverty was a priority for Obama when he was running for president in 2008, but it has not become a focus for the president during his first term. A look at what still needs to be addressed, and the neighborhood of Roseland, where Obama got his political start:

The reason for this shift in priorities, according to people in the Obama administration, was the economic crisis they inherited. As David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior adviser and current chief campaign strategist, described it to me, ‘We were essentially an economic triage unit, trying to prevent the country from sliding into a second Great Depression.’ The president’s economic team during the transition was staffed mostly with centrist economists — Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Jason Furman — but one of their top priorities, early on, was to send aid to poor people. A central tenet of Keynesian stimulus spending is that in an economic crisis, you try to get as much money as quickly as possible into the hands of people who will spend it right away, and the less money people have, the more likely they are to spend every dollar they receive from the government. The previous summer, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, who was serving, at the time, as an adviser to the McCain campaign, testified before Congress on the need for an aggressive stimulus program. In his testimony, he included a handy chart, based on his own algorithm, that listed the ‘Bang for the Buck’ that various stimulus measures would provide. According to Zandi’s calculations, aid that went to wealthier Americans would not be very effective as stimulus: for every dollar that Congress cut from corporate taxes, the G.D.P. would gain 30 cents; making the Bush tax cuts permanent would boost it by 29 cents for every dollar added to the deficit.

Stimulus measures that gave money to poor and distressed families, on the other hand, would be much more productive: extending unemployment-insurance benefits would boost G.D.P. by $1.64 for every dollar spent. And at the top of Zandi’s list was a temporary boost in the food-stamp program, which he calculated would produce $1.73 in G.D.P. gains for every dollar spent.

“Obama vs. Poverty.” — Paul Tough, New York Times Magazine

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The founding editor of Sassy and Jane brings a new cast of characters to her site xoJane:

Jane Pratt has been 15 for an awfully long time now.

She calls that her ‘emotional age,’ and she thinks we all have one: It’s the time in our past that we can’t entirely let go, because of something that happened to us then. Ask her and she’ll guess yours, along with your birthday (this is a trick she sometimes does with callers to her Sirius satellite radio show). You see, she describes herself as ­being ‘psychic-intuitive,’ which is something like having ESP. Not long ago, she tells me, she guessed the emotional age of one of her employees and it turned out that was the year she’d been raped. After we talked in her office for two hours, at her latest venture—an online women’s magazine called xoJane—she told me that she’d put mine at 13. And maybe she’s right, and I’ll always be that lonely kid in a new school.

Or just as likely, Pratt knows that a lot of us have felt that way and don’t really get over it, but form ourselves around that hoarded trauma. Whether or not this comes by way of paranormal talent, it’s a great insight, and the reason why Sassy, the nonconformist’s teen magazine she was hired to edit when she was just out of college, in 1987, was so beloved. Her Sassy understood.

“Jane Pratt’s Perpetual Adolescence.” — Carl Swanson, New York magazine

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A writer discusses the awful living conditions of China’s booming cities after seven years of living in the country for seven years, and visiting 21 of China’s 22 provinces:

“A Beijing-based blogger who lived in Harbin in 2003 told me about leaving Blues after several drinks and flagging a taxi driver, whom he recognized. ‘The taxi driver told me, “Hi, I just came from a wedding and I’m soused. You drive.”’ So he drove himself home through Harbin’s icy, deserted streets.

Like many Chinese cities, Harbin can be extremely challenging to the health — and not just due to the sometimes scandalously toxic food served in dim, poorly lit restaurants. Hospital bathrooms in Harbin and elsewhere often lack soap and toilet paper, ostensibly out of fear that residents will steal the items. Six months after I arrived, a benzene spill in the nearby Songhua River briefly left the city without running water. The air in Harbin was so polluted that I felt as though the coal dust had sunk into my lungs, and a fine layer of black soot seeped in through our windows overnight. But even Harbin wasn’t as filthy as Linfen, a city of 4 million people in central China’s Shanxi province that Time in 2007, on a list of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, said made ‘Dickensian London look as pristine as a nature park.’

“Unlivable Cities.” — Isaac Stone Fish, Foreign Policy

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