The Man Who Smelled Too Much
Was William Nowell’s odor strong enough that he deserved to be evicted from his home?
“If only he’d taken a bath. Barefoot and miserable, the defendant, William Nowell, watched the jurors laughing and chatting as they filed out of the courtroom. Like they were at a cocktail party, he thought. Never mind that his life had just come apart. He started to cry. The verdict was in. He’d been evicted for smelling bad.
“Nowell does smell. Even he admits it. But precisely how bad is a matter of debate. In August, it became a matter of legal debate, when the owners of the luxury loft building Nowell lived in took him to court in an effort to kick him out of the very apartment they’d let him into.”
“Nowell had been living on the streets for the past two decades, and he looks it. He owns one outfit, which he wears every single day: too-big, ragged black sweatpants wadded up into a ball at the waist, and black hoodie sweatshirt. No socks. No shoes. Fierce blue eyes peek out from beneath a large, scruffy dreadlock of hair, which clings to the back of his head like some crazy animal.”
After Sandy, A Great and Complex City Reveals Traumas New and Old
A writer joins her friend Ben Heemskerk, the owner of the Brooklyn bar The Castello Plan, as he organizes a group of community volunteers to help in the hardest hit areas post-Sandy:
“On Monday the same thing started all over again. Our numbers were smaller, people were returning to work, and we’d lost our escorts, but our group now included an Army captain who had just returned from Afghanistan. By noon we’d been dispatched to a church parking lot on Beach 67th Street in Rockaway Beach.
“The parking lot was empty when we arrived except for one National Grid truck; National Grid is the contract operator that works with the Long Island Power Authority, whose power lines run onto the Rockaway Peninsula. Rockaway is the one part of New York City not served by Con Edison. The National Grid truck had set up a table where people could charge their phones.
“It was difficult not to conclude based on our surroundings that the neighborhood had not been served at all. Within five minutes of us setting up our goods in the empty lot, and without any real outreach needed, crowds began to appear—batteries, flashlights, disinfectants, diapers and blankets were getting snatched up quickly. It’s at this point the need began to feel overwhelming, and the frightening suspicion that help, official help in the form of city officials or large established disaster-relief organizations, was not going to arrive, started to sneak up on us.”
Outrageous Freedom
A look at the Ugandan gay rights movement and how it received international attention:
“But it was the funeral, not the murder itself, that confirmed Kato’s transformation from a beloved friend to a hero of gay liberation, Longjones says. Uganda’s gay community converged in Kato’s home village for the ceremony — only to find that the local pastor Thomas Musoke wanted to use his death as an opportunity to berate his survivors. ‘After everyone had given speeches, this guy comes up and says, “I knew David and talked with David. And he cannot repent anymore. But you people can, and you must. And we pray that his whole clique perishes.” That is where problems started, and we could not tolerate this man anymore.’
“‘Do you know what it means when you lose someone you love so much, someone you see as a mentor?’ Longjones asked. ‘You just… get tired. You get fed up. And you don’t care what consequences come your way. What happened at the funeral just made everyone get sick and tired.’
“Kato’s death made international news, and served as confirmation of Uganda’s reputation for gay-hatred. Much of the Western diplomatic corps attended the funeral and watched appalled when the pastor called for the death of Kato’s mourning friends. And by turning the mentor into a martyr, it moved the Ugandan gay rights struggle into its next phase.”
A Brain with a Heart
Inside the life and work of Oliver Sacks, whose newest book is Hallucinations:
“He has been in psychoanalysis, continuously and with the same Freudian interlocutor, for 46 years—remarkable for a materialist neurologist. ‘We were both young men, and now we’re old men. There’s a longitudinal study for you,’ he says. The two remain on formal terms: ‘He’s still Dr. Shengold, and I am still Dr. Sacks,’ he says. ‘I think that a patient can become a friend, but that one shouldn’t be a doctor to a friend—there is a distance, which paradoxically allows closeness, as I feel with my own patients.'”
“Sacks says his shyness simply ‘doesn’t occur’ in those interactions, which may be one reason he is so good with his patients and another reason he so loves them. In his work as a physician, the social landscape is unusually even-planed, for him and for them, and he has an uncanny ability to put his patients at ease—with sustained attention; curiosity and empathy; and a physician’s bag, stuffed with balls, a reflex hammer, and magazines, that could serve a clown. ‘Among other things, I’m a good and sometimes involuntary imitator,’ Sacks says a little mischievously.”
Lizards’ Colony
[Fiction] An Iraqi-born American woman works as an interpreter inside a prison camp:
“She opened the door of the trailer, the rising sunlight submerging her. The still air was saturated with extreme humidity, making it feel like Basra, and the temperature was close to thirty-five degrees Celsius. The heat might have been tolerable but not the humidity, which left heart, soul, and spirit filled with loathing. Besides, something somewhere was making a stench like rotten eggs—no, decaying fish. Was it the sewers or the rank smell of the sea? Was she imagining it? Was this a result of the shock of the rape that had kept her in the hospital for ten days? Who could say?
“During those ten days she had consumed nothing but liquids. How could a person work in a hostile environment with everyone else lying in wait? She was raped and lacerated. She had entered a hospital the first day and had received her work there; no one cared about what had paid happened to her. Before she had time to heal, a load of documents had been dumped on her head, documents she had to review: dozens of tape recordings for her to hear and reconcile with the huge, companion file. She started in the hospital and then finished in the small, cramped, stifling trailer. She read while the pains racking her midsection grew increasingly intense and tears came uninvited to her eyes. She speculated about the appearance of Ahmad, the able-bodied terrorist covered by this huge file and the many tapes. He was no doubt an awe-inspiring, powerful, grand giant with a muscular body. She gazed at the sky. Why did it look pale blue in the morning?”
Can’t A Guy Just Make Some Friends Around Here? Maybe.
The difficulties of making friends in a city with few singles. The writer attempts to find some using Craiglist:
“I chatted with a divorced businessman who wanted a lunch-break buddy, and with a perfectly normal-sounding guy who wanted somebody to go with him to a nudist camp. And I met up with a friendly bouncer and UMKC student named George, who hung out with his buddies regularly but had trouble convincing any of them to come smoke shisha. We went to Jaskki’s, in the West Bottoms, and puffed on a hookah.
“Then I met up with a woman, an introvert named Audrey, whose ad said she’d moved to Kansas City around a year ago but couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone out socially with anyone. We hung out for a while in the fiction section of Barnes & Noble and talked about our favorite writers.
“But I saw neither George nor Audrey again. Maybe because of the way we’d arranged our meetings, the energy in them was too low to demand follow-up. Or maybe because I hadn’t been serious enough about doing it. Making friends cold turkey turns out to be oddly like dating — sometimes you’re more into somebody than that person is into you, and the doubt and anxiety that come with that imbalance don’t feel good. And sometimes a response I sent to an interesting Craigslist ad was met with silence, as though we’d already broken up.”
The GOP and Me
A Muslim-American’s history with the Republican Party—and how they lost him:
“Newt Gingrich, who also ran for President, introduced an angle that I – and presumably every American of sound mind – had never considered before. Speaking at a Texas church in March, 2011, Gingrich brought up his grandchildren to the audience, and then said, ‘I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.’
“I’ll admit: I had never considered the threat of secular, atheist, radical Islamists before. But then, that’s why Newt Gingrich was running for president and I wasn’t. He sees things the rest of us don’t. He even has the ability to see things that don’t actually exist.”
The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills
Undying hope from a city’s football fans—and a fear that their team will soon disappear:
“For Bills partisans, white, black, or anything else, the greatest fear is not that the team will lose a game or suffer another demoralizing season. A far more distressing concern is that the team will follow industry and investment and generations of young Buffalonians before it and abandon the region for good. Ralph Wilson, who founded the Buffalo Bills in 1959, still owns the team. He’s 94. For a few of those years it seemed one of his daughters, the NFL’s first female scout, was being groomed to replace him, but she died of cancer in 2009, at the age of 61. Wilson has refused to announce a plan of succession or to comment further on the team’s future without him. Upon his death, his heirs appear ready to sell the Bills to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, fans exist in a suspended state of disbelief and existential terror. They are sure one moment that Mr. Wilson must have a backroom deal set up to keep the team in Buffalo, a city he’d stuck with for the past half-century, even if often at a distance from his mansion in Michigan. But the next instant they can’t figure why he’d then let them suffer. The old man had done all right for himself in Buffalo, paying just $25,000 for a team currently worth about $800 million, while Erie County has covered the costs of stadium renovations. Yet now he seems ready to allow Toronto, with its armada of newly built glass and steel towers, to pirate away their team. Since 2008, the Bills have been playing one ‘home’ game a season in Toronto, which for many in Buffalo feels like an unwanted trial separation. Maybe more threatening is Los Angeles, with its mega-market revenues and media, which is angling to lure not just one NFL franchise but two. When Bills management negotiated a lease extension on its current property, they signed up for only a year. Hardly the long-term commitment of a Bills fan’s dreams.”
The Eye
[Fiction] From Munro’s collection Dear Life: A young girl develops a special bond with her housekeeper:
“I suppose all this was making me ready for Sadie when she came to work for us. My mother had shrunk to whatever territory she had with the babies. With her not around so much, I could think about what was true and what wasn’t. I knew enough not to speak about this to anybody.
“The most unusual thing about Sadie – though it was not a thing stressed in our house – was that she was a celebrity. Our town had a radio station where she played her guitar and sang the opening welcome song which was her own composition.
“‘Hello, hello, hello, everybody – ‘”
The History of Cannabis in Colorado … Or How the State Went to Pot
A look at what led up to the passing of Amendment 64 in Colorado, which legalized recreational marijuana use in the state:
“While the medical marijuana industry was evolving, activists continued to push for recreational use of marijuana. In 2005, Mason Tvert’s newly founded Safer Alternatives to Recreational Enjoyment pushed — and passed — resolutions at Colorado State University and CU demanding that cannabis penalties be no worse than penalties for alcohol offenses on campus. That same year, SAFER put a measure on the Denver ballot that would decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by anyone over the age of twenty. When Denver voters approved the proposal, the Mile High City became the first major city in the country to make such a move — even though it was mostly symbolic and simply reinforced the state’s 1975 decriminalization laws.
“Still, it was seen as a win for the cannabis community, and it inspired SAFER to push for a similar statewide measure in 2006 that only received 40 percent of the vote. In 2007, SAFER again focused on Denver, which this time approved making marijuana possession the city’s lowest police priority.
“And soon a lot more people would be possessing marijuana — legally.”
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