The Hard Life of an NFL Longshot

The writer’s nephew, a star linebacker in college, struggles for a shot at the pros:

“Mike Nolan, a former defensive coordinator for the New York Giants, Jets and five other N.F.L. teams before being hired by Atlanta last winter, had just signaled for the ‘Threes,’ with Pat at middle linebacker or ‘Mike,’ to execute a ‘Dallas freeze,’ a package featuring two blitzing linebackers. As one of the scheme’s designated blitzers, Pat shot toward the quarterback then deftly swerved inside a blocking fullback to get at his target. Another head-turning display, although in this instance for entirely the wrong reasons. Coaches love speed. They love schemes even more, and in that one Pat was designated to be the ‘contain man.’ His responsibility was to go outside the blocking back to prevent the play from developing wide.

“‘Give me two good reasons,’ Nolan’s voice boomed, ‘why you went inside.’

“Pat went slack beneath a bowed helmet, then shrugged.

“‘That’s right!’ Nolan replied. ‘Because there aren’t any!’

Published: Nov 21, 2012
Length: 38 minutes (9,521 words)

The Heart of Darkness

A man’s only grandson murders another man’s only son. After the tragedy, the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, and work together on a program that teaches nonviolence to young people:

“Felix wore a suit and tie on the day—November 3, 1995—he met Khamisa for the first time. It was a moment Felix had anticipated for months. As he shook Khamisa’s hand in Tony’s attorney’s office, he said, ‘If there’s anything I can do to be a support to you and your family, please call on me.’ He added that Khamisa had been in his daily prayers and meditations.

“It struck Khamisa as fortuitous. He immediately felt close to this man. ‘We both lost a child,’ he told Felix, before detailing the particulars of his newly formed foundation and its goal of preventing children from committing violent crimes. Felix felt a weight start to lift.”

Source: Spirit Magazine
Published: Nov 1, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,628 words)

Standing Up: Davien’s Story

A young man becomes paralyzed in a shooting near his church, and struggles with identifying the shooter, whom he recognizes as a former classmate (link includes both parts one and two):

“Surgeons had labored for five hours to patch his left lung, remove his left kidney and his spleen. They could do nothing to repair his L1 vertebra. His legs were paralyzed.

“A nurse brought pad and pen. Davien wanted to tell his family about the shooting. He had recognized the shooter, but he was too scared to write down a name.

“Instead, he scribbled: ‘I forgive them.’

“Days later, Sheriff’s Det. Scott Schulze showed up at Davien’s bedside with a series of mug shots.

“Davien spotted the shooter immediately. Jimmy Santana had taken gym classes with him in middle school and later joined a Latino gang, Monrovia Nuevo Varrio, or MNV.

“The detective asked Davien if the shooter was among the photos.

“Davien feared what could happen if he snitched. He also believed as a Christian that it was wrong to lie.”

Published: Nov 18, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,660 words)

Deadhead

A history of the Grateful Dead, as told through its concert recordings:

“After Garcia died, Lesh was briefly involved in vetting the live releases from the vault. He also spent a great deal of time listening to the output of the final years, hoping to find material worth releasing, but came across little that made the grade. ‘It’s tremendously time-consuming, and often really boring, to listen back to what you did years ago,’ he said. ‘What bores me the most is listening to show after show, and it’s just average. You’re just going through the motions. Everything seemed better at the time than it turns out to be on tape.’ When he listens to music today, it tends to be Bach. ‘I also listen to a lot of country music, you know, like the new country music. Brad Paisley.’

“When I asked him about last year’s giant Europe ’72 release, he said, ‘I have to admit, I have not listened to it.’ It should surprise no one that Lesh can recall little or nothing of many Heads’ cherished nights. ‘Sometimes I remember what they looked like, what they felt like,’ he said. I ran a few dates by Lesh, mentioning the venue, the context, the set list, the high points—such as a certain transition in Scar->Fire. ‘Scar-Fire?’ he repeated, unfamiliar with the shorthand. I may as well have been a Ukrainian Trekkie accosting Leonard Nimoy on the street. ‘The Fox in Atlanta? I don’t remember,’ Lesh said, with a look that seemed to combine apology and condescension. The eighties dates in particular provoked a curdled look. ‘I may have consciously blocked out some of this stuff,’ he said. ‘It was very distressing to see Jerry fall apart. It seemed like the negation of everything we’d ever worked for. It wasn’t a tribe or a cult or a boys’ club, or anything like that. It was a living organism of several people. It was Homo gestalt. Did you ever read Theodore Sturgeon? “More Than Human.” Check it out. That’s the conceptual matrix.’

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 19, 2012
Length: 49 minutes (12,404 words)

The Man Who Charged Himself With Murder

[Not single-page] In the fall of 1993, Trevell Coleman, a former rapper part of Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy crew, shot a man and fled. Haunted by the incident, Coleman turns himself in to the police nearly two decades later:

“Several years after they got married, he told her that he’d fired a gun at a stranger when he was a teenager. ‘One time he said he shot someone and they lived,’ she says. Another time, it was a slightly different story: ‘He shot someone, and he doesn’t know what happened to them.’ She wasn’t sure what to think. Once, while he was high, he’d announced he was Jesus. He’d also accused her of being a cop. At least three times, he’d been carted off to hospital psych wards.

“Coleman confided his secret to three other people, too: his mother, his daughter’s mother, and a friend. He recalls that his mother responded by saying: ‘Well, that was a long time ago, that was in the past.’ And then she’d change the subject. ‘I don’t think she really believed me,’ he says. ‘She was just bringing up other stuff: ‘Are you still going to the rehab?’ She didn’t really want to talk about it.’

“Coleman would sometimes mention that he was thinking of going to the police. ‘I would bring it up just so people would be like: “Man, you can’t be serious. Don’t ever do that.” And I’d be like: “You know, you’re right,” ’ he says. He was hoping somebody would make a convincing argument for moving on. ‘I just wanted somebody to say, “Don’t worry about it,” ’ he says. But after a while, he found that no matter whom he told—or what they said—nothing could quiet his conscience. ‘There wasn’t really an answer I could get. I was looking for something that wasn’t there.'”

Published: Nov 18, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,697 words)

Against the Odds

A group of young doctors from the Clinical Excellence Research Center at the Stanford School of Medicine are looking for new models to make health care better and more affordable:

“Patel was second up in the presentation, a little nervous and barely tall enough to be seen behind the podium. She stated the problem in her target area: Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, with costs estimated to be $173 billion by 2020. These rising costs are unsustainable.

“And what do many poor-prognosis cancer patients get for all the money spent? ‘Horrible treatment,’ she said, citing a statistic that silenced the room: Seventy-three percent of terminal cancer patients never have an end-of-life discussion with their oncologists. ‘Many patients are rushed off to chemotherapy without understanding the big picture. And when predictable treatment side effects happen at night and on weekends, patients who are unable to reach their oncologist end up in misery in emergency rooms and hospitals. Later in their illness, many die painfully in intensive-care facilities that bankrupt their families emotionally – and sometimes financially.’

“During her presentation, Patel’s eyes became dark pools that threatened to overflow. A few people in the audience wept silently, perhaps remembering loved ones who had similarly suffered.

“‘Overall, these added services improve the quality of life of patients, giving them what they need and want without delay,’ she added after describing her model. ‘And best of all, we lower health insurance costs … simply by doing the right thing.'”

Author: Kris Newby
Published: Oct 26, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,103 words)

Brad And Angie Go To Meet The African Pee Generator Girls

[Fiction] A celebrity couple’s ill-fated trip to Lagos:

“She put her pen down and thoughtfully chewed the silky inside of her left cheek. She stared hard at the photo on her iPod of those beautiful, strong young African women who had just invented this amazing generator that made electricity out of human urine. She shook her head. It was amazing the things that people did in the face of adversity. She continued shaking her head, trying to comprehend the humanity of humanity.

“‘Be careful shaking your head,’ said her son Maddox, who was sitting on the other side of the enormous bed, watching ‘Homeland’ on his iPad. ‘A shard of your beauty just hit me in the face.’ She barely heard him. She let her eye cast around the room for a moment. All her children were here, Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, each with his or her iPad. Maddox was next to her on the bed, Zahara was stretched out along the foot. Pax was on one corner of a pink velvet couch, Shiloh on the other. All four were staring at their iPads. In the bedroom foyer, Knox and Vivienne were making a cat out of wooden blocks.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Nov 17, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,100 words)

Last Call

How the rapidly consolidating beer industry could change the way America drinks:

“The United States, too, has seen vast consolidation of its alcohol industry, but as of yet, not the kind of complete vertical integration seen in the UK. One big reason is a little-known legacy of our experience with Prohibition. From civics class, you may remember that the 21st Amendment to the Constitution formally ended Prohibition in 1933. But while the amendment made it once again legal to sell and produce alcohol, it also contained a measure designed to ensure that America would never again have the horrible drinking problem it had before, which led to the passage of Prohibition in the first place.

“Specifically, the 21st Amendment grants state and local governments express power to regulate liquor sales within their own borders. Thus, the existence of dry counties and blue laws; of states where liquor is only retailed in government-run stores, as in New Hampshire; and of states like Arkansas where you can buy booze in drive-through liquor marts. More significantly, state and local regulation also extends to the wholesale distribution of liquor, creating a further barrier to the kind of vertical monopolies that dominated the United States before Prohibition and are now wreaking havoc in Britain.”

Published: Nov 16, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,879 words)

The Shots Heard ‘Round The World

Can you make a firearm using 3D-printed parts? People are trying:

“In May 2011, a year before Defense Distributed began, a mechanical engineer and amateur gunsmith named Michael Guslick successfully fabricated the lower receiver of an AR-15 rifle (the same weapon that was purchased legally by the Aurora, Colorado shooter) with the help of an industrial Stratasys FDM1600 printer that he bought on the secondary market. The receiver is the element of the gun that houses the trigger mechanism and magazine, without which it wouldn’t function. As such, the receiver alone is officially classified as a firearm under U.S. law and is strictly controlled. The part usually holds the weapon’s serial number, which Guslick’s certainly lacked.

“Guslick, whose mild voice and intensely technical internet persona is far more suited to a father tinkering in his garage than a terrorist, assembled the full rifle with parts that can be purchased online and fired it on July 1, 2012. The resulting shooting session was likely the first time a DIY gun with 3D-printed elements was successfully fired. Blogger Turomar at Ambulatory Armament Depot posted this video of a shooting session using his own AR-15 with a 3D-printed lower receiver in August.”

Source: ANIMAL New York
Published: Nov 12, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,157 words)

The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly

Georgia teenager Ashlyn Blocker is learning to navigate through the world despite not being able to feel pain:

“The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light. She walked a few steps to the sink and ran cold water over all her faded white scars, then called to her mother, ‘I just put my fingers in!’ Her mother, Tara Blocker, dropped the clothes and rushed to her daughter’s side. ‘Oh, my lord!’ she said — after 13 years, that same old fear — and then she got some ice and gently pressed it against her daughter’s hand, relieved that the burn wasn’t worse.”

Published: Nov 15, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,802 words)