The Hell of American Day Care
An investigation into the abysmal state of child care in the United States:
“All too often, it takes an incident to force a closure. Last November, for instance, DFPS closed a center after a caregiver left a nine-month-old infant alone on a changing table without a belt. The baby fell onto a concrete floor, sustaining a serious skull injury. In addition to the caregiver, DFPS cited the director for failing to ‘contact the parents the next day when a “mushy” bump was observed on the infant’s head.’ I asked McGinnis how many of the area’s providers she’d trust with her own child. She answered promptly: ‘Twenty percent.'”
20 Years After Fire, David Koresh’s Tragic Spell Lingers
The writer meets with a surviving Branch Davidian, 20 years after a fire that killed cult leader David Koresh and 73 of his followers:
“Was it his good looks? His guitar? The fact that he had memorized so much of the Bible?
“‘I don’t know that he was a very talented con man,’ Doyle said. ‘It was not like we were swept off our feet because he looked like Jesus. You listened to what he had to say and either you were impressed or you weren’t.'”
Getting Stuffed: A Tale of Love and Taxidermy
The writer visits a taxidermy shop to purchase a Valentines’s Day gift. This essay will be included in David Sedaris’s new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls:
“The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a doctor.
“‘Me?’ For some reason I looked at my hands. ‘Oh, goodness no.’
“‘Then your interest in those skulls is non-professional?’
“‘Exactly.’
“The taxidermist’s eyes brightened, and he led me to a human skeleton half hidden in the back of the room. ‘Who do you think this was?’ he asked.
“Being a layman, all I had to go by was the height – between four and a half and five feet tall. ‘Is it an adolescent?'”
David Lee Roth Will Not Go Quietly
A profile of rock star David Lee Roth, who has had a diverse career and life. He’s now 57 years old and back doing shows with Van Halen:
“He eventually became a certified EMT in New York and then completed a tactical medicine training program in Southern California. Not famous enough to headline Madison Square Garden, plenty famous enough to stand out in a tactical medicine training program.
‘The altitude drop is when somebody realizes who you are and they take you to task. Now you’re the guy who gets to do garbage five days in a row instead of one, and doing ambulance-garage garbage is different from I-just-finished-dinner-and-now-I-have-to-dump-the-garbage-darling garbage. That will test you. But I was old enough and smart enough to know what I’d signed up for. These tactics are of value, they’re a contribution.’ For years he went on ambulance calls all over New York City, and found that a life in the music business was good preparation for rushing to the aid of grievously injured people in the less picturesque corners of the city. ‘My skills were serious,’ he says. ‘Verbal judo, staying calm in the face of hyper-accelerated emotion. Same bizarre hours. Same keening velocity.'”
When War Came
The author recalls a childhood summer in the New Jersey countryside in 1939 before World War II:
“Toward evening, after we had showered and changed, we could hear grown-up voices rising and falling in contention. Whenever any of us would come near, they’d stop talking and pretend they hadn’t been arguing, but we could feel the tension even when we hadn’t heard any words. There was something else going on, and it had to do with the news they were hearing from the radio. All the Grinberg guests would gather in the evening around the set, a big wooden box sitting on an embroidered cloth covering a small table in the living room. One of the adults would fiddle with the radio dials, trying through the hiss and crackle to get a clear signal and hear the latest bulletins. The others would crowd the little table, their faces intent, for once seeming oblivious that children were also in the room. We couldn’t make out much, but the stern expressions told us a lot and seemed to have some connection with the words ‘Hitler’ and ‘war’ that kept recurring from both the radio announcements and adult conversation.”
An Old Magician Named Nabokov Writes and Lives in Splendid Exile
From the author of the new novel All That Is, a 1975 profile of Vladimir Nabokov that he wrote for People Magazine:
“The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta.”
The Re-education of Chris Copeland
How Copeland went from European basketball unknown to 29-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks:
“You are never fully at ease, but you begin to transition. Maybe you date a local girl, or even marry her. You begin to buy tighter jeans, learn some of the language and before you can blink, you are in the twilight of your career. Eventually, you do move back home and tell anyone that will listen that you did, in fact, play pro basketball. You try to find a 9-to-5 job while fighting off the inevitable depression that comes from losing the only thing you’ve ever truly loved, and, over time, you forget you ever had a dream in the first place. It’s a good life, at times an amazing life, filled with peaks and valleys higher and lower than you could ever imagine. And then, it’s over.
“For Copeland, however, there remained a gnawing inside his gut. No matter how well he did, it wasn’t quite enough. ‘I was feeling sad even though I was having a lot of success. In my head,’ he said. ‘I just still believed I could do better. I knew if I didn’t make it, I’d look back with a lot of regrets.'”
The Body in Room 348
The dead body of 55-year-old Greg Fleniken is found in a hotel room, and with no clear motive, detectives are left trying to answer the all-important question: Why?
“There are not that many murders in Beaumont. Greg’s was one of 10 that year, which was about average. Most are not mysterious. Detective work was usually a matter of doing the obvious—interviewing the drunk boyfriend with gunpowder on his hands, or finding the neighborhood drug dealer who was owed money. A case like this was a once-in-a-career event. If you enjoy working a stubborn whodunit, which Apple does, then this one was an exciting challenge. But the problem with the hard cases is that they are indeed hard. Over the next weeks and months Apple chased down every angle he could imagine to explain the death of Greg Fleniken. But about six months into it, he was stuck.”
I’m For Sale
A writer looks for a balance between creative ambition and financial security:
“I recently asked my dad if he ever regretted not following those early ambitions. No, he told me. Even though he’d toyed with doing a more commercial craft like silversmithing or pottery, he realized how hard a life that would be, always having to scramble to keep the money coming. So instead, he found a career that drew on something else he cared about—helping others—and that would also, in later years, allow him to support a family and have enough time to be active in raising them. ‘I was never out to make a whole lot of money. My whole goal was balance,’ he said.”
Who Killed The Deep Space Climate Observatory? (2011)
NASA built a satellite designed to track global warming. It never launched, and more than a decade later, it sits in a box in Maryland:
“It has never become entirely clear why the satellite had ended up here. In his 2009 book Our Choice, Gore wrote, ‘The Bush Cheney administration canceled the launch within days of taking office on January 20, 2001, and forced NASA to put the satellite into storage.’ Warren Wiscombe, a senior physical scientist at NASA, blames a Bush-era ‘hostility’ to earth science at NASA. ‘As to who ordered the axing of the mission,’ he says, ‘we’ll never know, but the word we got was that Dick Cheney was behind it.’
“Mitchell Anderson, a Vancouver-based reporter who has obsessively covered the DSCOVR story, also suspects Cheney’s hand, citing an unnamed NASA informant. Over the course of three years, Anderson filed five Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to DSCOVR. After querying NASA in 2006, he waited 11 months to receive the documents. ‘They told me they were consulting with their lawyers,’ says Anderson, who was then writing for desmogblog.com. ‘When they finally e-mailed me the documents, they were scanned sideways. I couldn’t read the top and bottom of the pages.’ The 70-page packet contained mostly letters that prominent scientists had written in defense of DSCOVR. All correspondence relating to the mission’s mothballing was excluded.”
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