A recent college graduate, she was jailed briefly for trying to skip out on her dinner tab in Malibu, then freed in the middle of the night in a neighborhood far from home. She had no car, no ride, no phone, and no money. When she disappeared, it raised a flurry of questions about how the sheriff’s department handled her case. The discovery of her body a year later only raised more.
Growing up in Hot Springs put horseracing in my blood. My grandparents landed there as carnies following the horserace circuit. My father grew up in the barns of the backstretch working as a groom and a hotwalker. He started taking me to the track as a child, teaching me to read the Daily Racing Form at the age of nine. Many years ago my father came to visit my wife and me in New York and he only wanted to go one place, to see the fabled Saratoga Race Course. We took him for Travers weekend, the highlight of the four-week race meet, and he was bowled over by the town and the track. “Why couldn’t Hot Springs do this,” he wondered. “This place is awesome. This is what Hot Springs should be like.”
When, a few months later, the time came for me to go to Paris, I called her again and said that much as I loved Paris I did not enjoy traveling. Besides, I never found Paris relaxing, I would much rather stay in New York and imagine having wonderful dinners in Paris. “Yes, of course,” she agreed, already annoyed. “Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor.” Exasperation bristled in her voice. “When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”
“I’ve been waiting,” Echols wrote her. “I knew that sooner or later someone would take notice… . Do you have any idea how it feels to be called a killer by everyone who sees you, even though you know you’re innocent? I go through hell every day, sitting here waiting to die for something I didn’t do. It’s a nightmare… .”
In many ways, Forstall is a mini-Steve. He’s a hard-driving manager who obsesses over every detail. He has Jobs’s knack for translating technical, feature-set jargon into plain English. He’s known to have a taste for the Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG, in silver, the same car Jobs drove, and even has a signature on-stage costume: black shoes, jeans, and a black zippered sweater. (He favors Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirts for normal days at the office.) Forstall is like Steve in one other important way: He can be, in what some of his co-workers might call an understatement, a polarizing figure.
Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house. “And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve squandered what time you had, that you must trust this house of concrete you’ve built to stand up to the sea. Your wife joins you on the second-floor terrace, reporting that she, too, saw the neighbor’s house wash away. ‘We should run,’ she says, but you say, ‘It’s too late.’ And then: ‘We’ll be fine.’ Her arms circle your waist and lock there, while you stand stock-straight, gazing at the mountain, without daring to look back at the sea. These will be your last words to her—We’ll be fine. And you’ve already departed your body when everything seems to break beneath your feet and a roaring force crashes over you.”
LOGAN: So it’s not necessarily the idea that media coverage of this event will make anyone that has any power change anything, but that it will inspire us to change stuff ourselves?
SAM: I mean, partially. Anything like this always has 500 million different goals and other things that it’s going to accomplish without even intending to accomplish them. So for example, one thing that I thought when I saw a reporter ask the President a question about Occupy Wall Street, and he used it as a chance to try to, he tried to say he agreed with the protesters, even though the reporter had framed the question as like, clearly they think you haven’t done enough and are part of the problem, like, just the fact that that interchange took place! Before Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party were the loud people who were in the street doing things and making noise, which set a tone so that when reporters asked the President a question, they would say, “It seems like a lot of people out there think that government is too big and is spending a lot of money and that taxes are too high, what are you going to do about that?” Right? And now the question was from the opposite direction. And so simply having that be a thing that happens is important.
John Howard Griffin had embarked on a journey unlike any other. Many black authors had written about the hardship of living in the Jim Crow South. A few white writers had argued for integration. But Griffin, a novelist of extraordinary empathy rooted in his Catholic faith, had devised a daring experiment. To comprehend the lives of black people, he had darkened his skin to become black.
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