The Passion of John Wojnowski
Meet the man who’s been standing outside the Vatican embassy for 14 years—a vigil on behalf of the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic church:
“Time weighs on John Wojnowski. It wears him down. It winds him up.
“Time, for Wojnowski, is not just the half century since the priest in the mountains of Italy touched him. It is also the lost days since then, the wasted months and years when he is sure he let everyone down: his parents, his wife, his children, himself.
“Markers of time are there, too, in the ragged datebooks that cleave to his body like paper armor. While riding the bus late one night, after another of his vigils outside the Vatican’s United States embassy, he showed them to me: The 2010 datebook inhabits the right pocket of his frayed chinos, 2011 the left; the 2012 book, its pages bound by rubber bands, stiffens the pocket of his shirt.
“He has come to this corner and stood with his signs for some 5,000 days. In his datebooks, he records—a word or two, just enough to jog memory—the sights and sounds that keep one day from bleeding into the next.”
The Truth About the Fast and Furious Scandal
An investigation into how the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) became accused of intentionally allowing American firearms to get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels:
“Voth grew deeply frustrated. In August 2010, after the ATF in Texas confiscated 80 guns—63 of them purchased in Arizona by the Fast and Furious suspects— Voth got an e-mail from a colleague there: ‘Are you all planning to stop some of these guys any time soon? That’s a lot of guns…Are you just letting these guns walk?’
“Voth responded with barely suppressed rage: ‘Have I offended you in some way? Because I am very offended by your e-mail. Define walk? Without Probable Cause and concurrence from the USAO [U.S. Attorney’s Office] it is highway robbery if we take someone’s property.’ He then recounted the situation with the unemployed suspect who had bought the sniper rifle. ‘We conducted a field interview and after calling the AUSA [assistant U.S. Attorney] he said we did not have sufficient PC [probable cause] to take the firearm so our suspect drove home with said firearm in his car…any ideas on how we could not let that firearm “walk”‘?”
How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down
A look at the rise of the hactivist group Anonymous, and why they’ve targeted certain organizations:
“On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 senior hackers who made all the decisions, and he purportedly had linked their IRC handles to real names using social-network analysis. He was planning to announce all this, he said, during a presentation at an upcoming security conference.
“Anonymous responded with inhuman severity and swiftness. Within 48 hours, all the data on the email servers of HBGary Federal and its former parent company, HBGary, had been stolen and then released in full on the Pirate Bay. Anons further humiliated Barr by seizing his Twitter account and (they allege, though this has never been confirmed) even erasing his iPad remotely. Barr’s Anonymous presentation was posted on the net and laughed at for its supposed inaccuracies. The notice on HBGary Federal’s site read, ‘This domain has been seized by Anonymous under section #14 of the rules of the Internet.’ (Rule 14 is a real thing, from a ‘Rules of the Internet’ list that often made the rounds on /b/. It reads as follows: ‘Do not argue with trolls—it means that they win.’)”
My Life as an Heiress
Nora Ephron on her uncle Hal, an inheritance, and working on a famous screenplay:
“My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several trees. I ripped out the scraggly lawn and imagined the huge trucks of sod I would now be able to pay for. I considered a trip to the nursery to look at hydrangeas. My heart was racing. I pulled my husband away from his work, and we had a conversation about what kind of trees we wanted. A dogwood, definitely. A great big dogwood. It would cost a small fortune, and now we were about to have one.
“I went upstairs and looked at the script I’d been writing. I would never have to work on it again. I was just doing it for the money and, face it, it was never going to get made, and, besides, it was really hard. I switched off the computer. I lay down on the bed to think about other ways to spend Uncle Hal’s money. It crossed my mind that we needed a new headboard.
“Thus, in fifteen minutes, did I pass through the first two stages of inherited wealth: Glee and Sloth.”
Keeper of the Flame
A father and son visit a collector of Nazi paraphernalia in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina:
“My father glanced over his shoulder at me and emitted a wheeze-burst of laughter—an exhalation intended to express disbelief. He had led me to an underground vault containing the artifacts of the last century’s most brutal regime, and he now seemed downright giddy. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think or what to say. I found it difficult to process what any of this meant. That is, I didn’t know why it was here, how it had gotten from where it had been made to where it was now. Were we in the presence of some kind of monster? Or had he created this space for stuff he deemed historically significant, buried it in a moisture-controlled vault because he fancied himself one of history’s unbiased curators? Was this the product of an obsessive and sympathetic mind, one which interpreted the mainstream records of history as having been unduly cruel to the Third Reich, which had been a movement, in his eyes, about nationalism, about ancestors, about revering and honoring the past? I didn’t know. And, honestly, I was afraid to ask.”
Another Life
[Fiction] A husband, feeling sick, leaves his father-in-law’s party early:
“At this point, the husband realizes that he doesn’t want to spend the night reading Rousseau in bed, alone. He thinks about going downstairs to the hotel bar. It’s the kind of thing he never does—but ten minutes later there he is, sitting at the bar, reading his book. The husband is not trying to pick anyone up. His wife will be back in an hour or two, and besides, who would dream of picking someone up with Rousseau? Of all the authors you could try to pick someone up with, Rousseau is probably the worst. Or maybe Kant. The husband orders a hot toddy. The bartender, an attractive young woman with crinkly black hair, brings him the drink and they exchange remarks about it. Is that what you wanted? Yes, it’s perfect, the husband says.”
Weir Fishing for the Last Sardine Cannery in North America
On the dying art of Weir fishing in Maine:
“When Foster rebuilt the Money Cove weir in 2002, he talked with an old-timer named Bill Blass, who had fished the weir for years, about the cove’s rocky bottom, the contours of that bottom, the tidal patterns, and the arrival of phosphorescent organisms. During the “August darks,” when the tides are on and running hard, phosphorescent organisms can light up, or “fire,” weirs, almost like daylight. Light provides a good example of the enigmatic nature of herring. While they flee the electric lights onboard purse seiners, so the boats fish in darkness, as the day dims toward twilight, herring tend to migrate upward to feed near the surface, sometimes chasing luminescent organisms. (When you gut fish in the dark, you can find tiny glowing orbs in their stomachs.) In the late 19th century, dorymen exploited this behavior by lighting birchbark and kerosene torches over their bows and scooping the fish out of the water. One night when they were in their teens, Foster’s sons Carter and Justin collected wood along the beach and lit a huge bonfire under the high cliffs near their dad’s weir. The following day, the Fosters hauled in the biggest bunch of herring they had ever seen.”
The Kingpins
How the upcoming Mexican presidential election could impact the drug war in cities like Guadalajara:
“Weary of pantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bust—the ‘historic’ meth-lab raid in Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars’ worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really worth that much? Well, no. The more experts I consulted, the lower the number sank. Maybe it was a billion, if the meth was pure. Then was it really fifteen tons of ‘pure meth.’ as widely reported? Well, no. There had been some confusion. There were precursor chemicals. A lot of equipment—gas tanks, reactors. Maybe it was eleven pounds of pure meth. Eleven pounds? Nobody wanted to speak on the record, but the spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Guadalajara, a young man named Ulises Enríquez Camacho, finally said, ‘Yes, five kilos.’ Eleven pounds. The fifteen tons had been methamphetamine ready for packing, according to the Army. But it was not ‘a finished product,’ and there had been only five kilos of crystal. In the U.S., where meth is often sold by the gram, that amount might be worth five hundred thousand dollars. So the reported value had been inflated by a factor of eight thousand?”
A Tempest in My Soul
A baptist minister in a small Southern town learns acceptance and leans on his faith after his gay son dies of AIDS:
“In the meantime, word spread from the AIDS outreach organizations across the Chattanooga area that a minister’s son had caught the virus, and the Nevelses were asked to speak at an evening service at First Baptist in the Golden Gateway. It was considered a watershed moment, because few parents were willing to talk about the infection at the time.
“It would be Matt’s first plea with a church to alter its thinking.
“‘All have sinned,’ he said.
“‘We have got to quit trying to play God.'”
The Untitled Lincoln Love Story Project
[Fiction] The making of an Abraham Lincoln movie:
“‘Lincoln has a lot on his plate here. There’s the war, obviously. His son just died, his wife is a compulsive shopper with deep ties to the South—I mean that doesn’t look good for him—and to boot, he’s found himself unable to get his mind off this man. Amid all this chaos and horseshit, there’s a pony. And that pony is love.’
“Pony=Love, Mel scribbled.
“‘And, you know, your postures should change more when you’re together, should melt a little.” He stopped and looked at Miles. ‘Think about how your body responds when you’re with the people you love.'”
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