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How Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo went from a small Wisconsin high school football field to the NFL, and what teammates, coaches, and a local sportswriter remember about Romo’s performance at one particular game:

‘He knew what he was doing,’ Luther says. ‘He doesn’t look like your prototypical quarterback in high school. He knew where to put it. It was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever been involved in.’ 

After watching Romo in that game, Jackson says he believes that if Romo had played with any of the Racine city schools, they would have won the state championship. ‘It just doesn’t happen,’ he says. ‘You knock a guy out, he comes back in, and he just torches you some more. It was just a game that you don’t ever forget. I think if he goes to a city school, he goes to a high Division I university. We had all the exposure in the city. At given games, Wisconsin was there, Nebraska was there, Ohio State was there. All the scouts come into the city, because you find good talent with good competition.’

“Tony Romo: The Natural.” — Peter Simek, D Magazine

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A look at Degrassi, 25 years after resonating with teens:

Degrassi ’s grassroots approach to social class served as a near-invisible narrative strategy, but it anticipated the show’s most memorable legacy: its unflinching, plain-spoken treatment of pregnancy, suicide, interracial dating (a big deal in 1987), and HIV/AIDS. What’s more, Degrassi didn’t treat its characters with benevolence. Spike’s pregnancy at age fourteen — the result of a clumsy first-time sexual encounter with Shane, a baby-faced ninth-grader — didn’t end with a convenient miscarriage. Her character spent the remainder of the series as a struggling single parent. Later that season, Shane experimented with LSD, fell off a bridge, and suffered permanent brain damage. Wheels, one of the most popular characters, lost his parents to a drunk driver, and later experienced a breakdown that culminated in a drunk driving incident that killed a child, blinded his friend Lucy, and landed him in prison. In the early years of HIV/AIDS, Dwayne contracted the virus after having unprotected sex with his girlfriend (a thoughtful plot choice in an era when many thought of it as a ‘gay disease’). In a 1999 cast reunion on the CBC talk show Jonovision, actor Darrin Brown, who played Dwayne, was asked where his character would be now. ‘Dwayne would probably be dead,’ he replied.

“Teenage Dreams.” — Emily Landau, The Walrus

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The Great Heights of Venus and Serena Williams

Photo: Ian Gampon

Venus and Serena Williams, living as adults, free of their parents, and still America’s biggest tennis superstars:

I asked Oracene what she felt, watching her daughters reclaim the heights after what they’d been through. “Honestly?” she said. “I reflected on the fact that in the United States, you don’t have many players that are doing well. And then you have these two old, black girls, up in age now, and they’re still holding up America. That to me was remarkable.” I thought about it. She was right. There isn’t another American right now who’s capable of really penetrating at a major. Or maybe, in fairness to Andy Roddick and a couple of other people, it’s better to say that there isn’t another player whose penetration at a Slam would not make your eyebrows jump. It’s just these two girls, these two sisters. They’re what America has right now.

“Venus and Serena Against the World.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine

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An oral history of Burning Man, which started as an effigy burning in 1986 on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, and moved to the Black Rock Desert in 1990 to become one of the largest annual gatherings of inventors, artists and free spirits:

ALAN “REVEREND AL” RIDENOUR (head of Los Angeles Cacophony): In ’96, Burning Man was at its peak. We did the Damnation of Tinseltown and the flaming Helco tower. Burn Night felt like a scary, transformative ritual. Flash played Satan, and he came through with a gas can and doused Doris Day and John Wayne. I was on acid when I heard Flash’s booming laugh. He was Satan.

ELIZABETH GILBERT (author of Eat, Pray, Love who wrote about Burning Man ’96 for Spin): Honestly, I was scared of it. I remember the way the camp turned from this playful thing by day—beautiful and fanciful and Narnia-like—to this menacing thing at night. Being around all that fire, people with guns, and a lot of people on drugs, I was like, “They’ll be eating each other soon!” And in some ways they were—more sexually than anything else. I understood that Burning Man was waking something up. That awakening might lead to transcendent creativity—or it might be savage and ungovernable once it’s released.

“Hot Mess.” — Brad Wieners, Outside magazine

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The Stranger, Esquire, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Jane Friedman.

Four advice columnists, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, Salon’s Cary Tennis, Slate’s Emily Yoffe, and The Globe and Mail’s Lynn Coady, discuss what it’s like to give advice to people online:

Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?

Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.

Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, ‘Move forward.’ The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of ‘My husband looks at porn.’

“My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin.” — Britt Harvey, Hazlitt Magazine

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.

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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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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