Philip Levine, The Art of Poetry No. 39

When I was about nineteen I showed my poems to one of my teachers at Wayne. He said these were incredible poems, poems that should be published. I said, “Oh really?”—I was thrilled—“How would I go about doing that?” He walked over to his bookshelf and brought back a copy of Harper’s. He wrote down the name of the editor and said, “Send the poems to him. I met him once at a party, he may remember me. It doesn’t matter, the poems are so good. Just send them.” So I sent them. A month later they came back with a little printed note telling me they didn’t suit their present editorial needs. I was just shocked. I took it to the teacher and said, “Why, you assured me.” He said, “I don’t understand it.” He was a very sweet man, but he didn’t know the first thing about publishing.

Published: Jul 1, 1988
Length: 40 minutes (10,007 words)

UK Riots: Paul Lewis’s Five-Day Journey

Minutes later I came across a group of teenagers huddled by Edmonton Working Men’s Conservative Club. Most of them were girls, and in a state of panic. I saw they were holding a topless boy, who looked about 17. “He’s been stabbed,” one said. As soon as he was in the ambulance, his friends fled, telling police they did not want to talk to “Feds” (slang for the police). One screamed: “We hate you.” Another shouted: “You’re the reason this is happening.”

Author: Paul Lewis
Source: The Guardian
Published: Aug 12, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,509 words)

Funworld: The Business of Writing About the Business of Roller Coasters

I answered an ad that asked, “Like amusement parks? Want to write about them?” and was called for an interview. Bill, editor-in-chief of Funworld, was enthusiastic about the magazine, the amusement industry, and, particularly, Funworld’s new computers—he called them machines—which were apparently very fast. When the interview was over, he told me the job was mine if I was interested. I was. At the time I knew almost nothing about amusement parks and attractions. Publications assistant was the sort of entry-level position that would give me a chance to learn. I’d file contracts and send copies of Funworld to anybody who requested them. I’d edit articles that no one else wanted to edit, like the twenty-six-page case study on the effects of G-forces on roller-coaster passengers (negligible), which had awaited revision for two years. And the article about shuttle coasters, which began with the sentence “Whooooooosh!”

Source: The Believer
Published: Nov 1, 2004
Length: 31 minutes (7,890 words)

Soldiers Take One Step at a Time with Prosthetic Limbs

He is wearing two “power knees,” a technological marvel developed by Össur, an Icelandic prosthetics company. Power knees is a misnomer for Berschinski, who has prosthetic legs—he lost both of his own when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan. Of the more than 55,000 deaths and casualties in nine years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, 1,200-plus US servicemembers have suffered limb amputations. Each of Berschinski’s prosthetic legs costs about $40,000—when the prosthesis was developed in 2006, it was almost $100,000—and comes equipped with microprocessors and a battery-driven motor, good for 12 hours, that bends and straightens the knee.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Aug 1, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,862 words)

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…Some Dude?!

Phoenix didn’t know this when he first donned the suit about a year ago, but he’s one of around 200 real-life superheroes currently patrolling America’s streets, looking for wrongs to right. There’s DC’s Guardian, in Washington, who wears a full-body stars-and-stripes outfit and wanders the troubled areas behind the Capitol building. There’s RazorHawk, from Minneapolis, who was a pro wrestler for fifteen years before joining the RLSH movement. There’s New York City’s Dark Guardian, who specializes in chasing pot dealers out of Washington Square Park by creeping up to them, shining a light in their eyes, and yelling, “This is a drug-free park!” And there are dozens and dozens more. Few, if any, are as daring as Phoenix. Most undertake basically safe community work: helping the homeless, telling kids to stay off drugs, etc. They’re regular men with jobs and families and responsibilities who somehow have enough energy at the end of the day to journey into America’s neediest neighborhoods to do what they can.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: GQ
Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,200 words)

Vaughn Meader, Assassination Victim

Among those who remember, Vaughn Meader was one of the most famous names in America for a 12-month period from 1962-1963. After that, his cultural significance evaporated almost overnight, his name thoroughly erased from public consciousness to the point of sub-trivia. To get from there to here requires a bit of doing, and a lot of bad luck. And that’s why, in an industry overrun with one-hit-wonders and flashes in the pan, Vaughn Meader may still be the single biggest crash-and-burn story in the history of showbiz.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Aug 11, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,516 words)

I Watched Every Coen Brothers Movie. Here’s What I Learned

When I was 9 or 10, I watched Raising Arizona on VHS and thought it was one of the weirdest and funniest things I had ever seen. A frequently jailed stickup artist with surprisingly florid diction (Nicolas Cage) and his barren police officer wife (Holly Hunter) kidnap a loudmouth furniture magnate’s quintuplet and run into trouble with two escaped convicts and the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse. I didn’t get it, really, but I didn’t care: It was hilarious and strange, with amusingly quotable dialogue (“I’ll be taking these Huggies and, uh, whatever cash ya got”) and hummable music (the “Ode to Joy” on a banjo, yodeling) throughout. During my high-school years, I caught up with the rest of the Coens’ output and considered myself a fan; their best movie to that point, Fargo, came out just before I graduated and was the first I saw in a theater.

Source: Slate
Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,530 words)

Is That All There Is?

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night.

Author: James Wood
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 15, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,706 words)

Portraits Redrawn: For 9/11 Families, Healing Comes With New Starts and Tributes Paid

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, reporters at The New York Times began interviewing friends and relatives of the people whose lives had so suddenly been ended. The result was “Portraits of Grief,” a collection of brief sketches of the victims. These fresh visits with some of the families were written by Glenn Collins, Anthony DePalma, Robin Finn, Jan Hoffman, N. R. Kleinfield, Maria Newman and Janny Scott, all contributors to the original “Portraits of Grief” project in 2001. #Sept11

Author: Staff
Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,879 words)

The Querent

I was 13 at the time of the accident, 16 when my father died of complications related to his injuries. When I look back at why of all the forms of the occult I’d found the one that appealed to me most was fortunetelling, it seems to me the answer came from my father’s accident and death. I wanted to know how to tell the future. I wanted one of those mirrors, the ones positioned so you can see around a corner, but for my whole life. That’s what I believed the Tarot could be.

Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,971 words)