Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?
In my study of African American history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and found not a shadow, but the Big Bang that brought the ideas of the modern West to fruition. Our lofty notions of democracy, egalitarianism, and individual freedom were articulated by the Founders, but they were consecrated by the thousands of slaves fleeing to Union lines, some of them later returning to the land of their birth as nurses and soldiers. The first generation of the South’s postbellum black political leadership was largely supplied by this class.
The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures of Sportswriting’s Last Badass
Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable person.”
Wenner apparently felt one Hunter Thompson was all he needed, so George headed instead to the Boston Phoenix, that town’s version of the Village Voice. It was the ideal place for his freewheeling reviews of poetry, books, and music. His passion, however, was sports.
Derek Boogaard: A Brain ‘Going Bad’
[Part Three of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.”] It did not take long for Dr. Ann McKee to see the telltale brown spots near the outer surface of Boogaard’s brain — the road signs of C.T.E. She did not know much about Boogaard other than that he was a 28-year-old hockey player. And the damage was obvious.
How Do You Explain Gene Weingarten?
You might wonder why the best writer in American journalism would have fake poop as his Twitter icon. Or spend an inordinate amount of time making prank phone calls. Or concern himself with monkey sex, fake sneezes, or bacon taped to cats. As he once put it in a column, “I mostly write about underpants.”
Weingarten is not a horrible person, but there may be something wrong with him.
Monday Night Lights: How Jon Gruden Became America’s Football Coach
The broadcast started at eight-thirty, with final predictions from the booth. Gruden looked solemn. “I think the Kansas City Chiefs are in real trouble tonight,” he said.
Jaworski looked at Gruden and Mike Tirico. “You guys can call me crazy, but I’m excited about Tyler Palko tonight,” he said. Tirico giggled, but Gruden just squinted.
Derek Boogaard: Blood on the Ice
[Part Two of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.”] When his cheek was crushed by Boogaard in 2006, Fedoruk’s first thought was to “save face” and skate off the ice. He did.
“Their bench was cheering like you do when your teammate gets a guy,” Fedoruk said. “I remember skating by their bench.
“Their faces kind of lost expression because I think they seen — you could see it. You could see the damage that was done because the cheekbone, it wasn’t there anymore.”
A Monster Among the ‘Frum’
[Not single-page] Levi Aron remained single for the bulk of his twenties, a sign that he was considered by both his family and the neighborhood shadken to be of lesser stock. For companionship, he turned to a group of like-minded Jews, most of them also single men. They called themselves rebels, one friend remembers. They raged against the strictures of the frum, or pious, world and gathered at restaurants and bars around South Brooklyn—their go-to spot was a dimly lit kosher Japanese steakhouse called Fuji Hana. Aron could be a hard person to talk to, by turns aggressively chatty or heavy-lidded and silent. “His head would just drop down and his face would go blank,” one former friend remembers. “We’d ask him if he was okay, and he’d lean over and show us the scar from the bike accident.” He seemed to have trouble “distinguishing emotional distance,” one acquaintance said. “He could tell you if he knew someone, but he couldn’t tell you who’s a friend, who’s just some guy he barely knows.”
Exquisite Corpse
[Fiction] He told her that she was moving too much, that she had to stay stiller, the camera was finicky, the exposures depended on no motion, like just stop breathing, he said looking at the playback, just stop breathing, okay. Lindsay thought it was a joke and laughed but he said it was serious, this was going to be on the app, super HD so the viewer could fingerzoom into her 1,000% without the quality falling off at all. She said okay and tilted her head back to the left the way he told her, like in the second bed picture, number 18, and he leaned in to move the curl in front of her eye to match the reference, holding his phone up against the light to check.
A Boy Learns to Brawl
[Part One of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.”] But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the N.H.L.’s most fearsome fighter, a caricature of a hockey goon rising nearly 7 feet in his skates.
Over six seasons in the N.H.L., Boogaard accrued three goals and 589 minutes in penalties and a contract paying him $1.6 million a year.
On May 13, his brothers found him dead of an accidental overdose in his Minneapolis apartment. Boogaard was 28. His ashes, taking up two boxes instead of the usual one, rest in a cabinet at his mother’s house in Regina. His brain, however, was removed before the cremation so that it could be examined by scientists.
Face to Face with Radovan Karadzic
This is an interview requested by Karadzic before I give official testimony the following day in open court. Ironically, when the witness unit’s call came out of the blue in August 2011, saying that “the defence” had requested an interview, I was driving through pluvial mist up a mountain track in Bosnia to attend the consecration of a small monument to mark a remote mass grave: a crevice into which the bodies of 124 men had been dropped and concealed – a secret well kept by the Serbs for years. The men had been prisoners in concentration camps at Omarska and Keraterm in north-west Bosnia. They had been moved on the very day I arrived, and uncovered the camps along with an ITN crew – 5 August 1992 – to the forest above a hamlet called Hrastova Glavica. Once there, they were taken off buses in groups of three. They were given a last cigarette and shot one by one, their corpses dropped down the cranny in the rock and into the void, to be found and exhumed 15 years later.
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