Stephen King’s Family Business
The writer visits Stephen King’s prolific family in Maine. King’s wife Tabitha, his sons Joe and Owen, and his daughter-in-law Kelly Braffet are all published authors. His daughter Naomi is a Unitarian Universalist minister and storyteller:
“Owen can live with selling fewer books than his brother or father, both of whom set unusually high standards for that metric. ‘I think my brother’s and father’s drive for success is greater than mine,’ he said. ‘I just want to sell enough books to be able to justify continuing to write.’ As the youngest of the siblings and the one who stayed home, rather than go to boarding school, he was exposed more often than they were to his father’s growing fame — the snapping cameras everywhere, the strangers forever approaching them. ‘I want to be as successful as I can be while still living a very private life,’ he said, ‘and I think my ambition is probably a little bit limited by that desire.’
“His brother, by contrast, embraces the public’s attention. He recently posed for a series of photos in which he pantomimed being strangled and stabbed by fans, then posted them on Twitter. Owen admired the project but could not relate to the impulse. ‘I don’t want to be choked by a stranger,’ he said. ‘Not even pretend choked.'”
Advice from George Saunders
“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”
The Lady Jaguars
A look at a basketball program for teenage girls that offers guidance and refuge from their rocky family lives in a town plagued by unemployment, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy. The program is part of the Carroll Academy, a school run by the Carroll County Juvenile Court in West Tennessee. John Branch reports the story in two parts:
“Hannah arrived when she was 12, after she admitted stealing prescription pills from her mother and bringing them to school under orders from girls who had threatened to beat her up. It was Monica, wanting to teach Hannah a lesson, who called the school.
“It was only this spring that Hannah acknowledged that it was a lie — a lie conceived by her father, Hannah said, so that he could take the pills and avoid the wrath of his wife. Hannah wants to graduate from Carroll Academy. She likes the attention and a predictable schedule. She likes playing on the basketball team. She has flitting dreams of becoming a doctor or a veterinarian.
“Hannah’s parents do not like that she goes to Carroll Academy. Getting her to the van stop in the nearest town is inconvenient, and picking her up after basketball games (when school vans do not run) can cost an hour of time and $20 in gas money, if the car is running at all. But if Hannah does not attend, her parents could end up in jail. The juvenile court views truancy as a parent problem, not a child one.”
Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?
“Modern journalism is a kind of video game…to be silent is to lose points.” How social media editors for mainstream media sites, feeding off the Reddit community, incorrectly identified a missing 22-year-old Brown University student as one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. The family of Sunil Tripathi, who was later found dead, has now been forced to pick up the pieces:
“At 2:43 a.m., a Twitter user named Greg Hughes (@ghughesca), who was previously tweeting things like, ‘In 2013, all you need [is] a connection to the Boston police scanner and a Twitter feed to know what’s up. We don’t even need TV anymore,’ shifted the now-fervid speculation to established fact: ‘BPD scanner has identified the names,’ Hughes tweeted. ‘Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.’ (Hughes has since all but disappeared from the Internet, and where he got this information is unclear.) Seven minutes later, Kevin Galliford, a journalist for a TV station in Hartford, relayed the same information to his own followers; Galliford’s tweet was retweeted more than 1,000 times in a matter of minutes. The next multiplier came from Andrew Kaczynski, another journalist at BuzzFeed, who sent out the police-scanner misinformation to his 90,000 followers and quickly followed up with: ‘Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi.’
A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold
How banks influence the commodities markets and make money while raising the prices of consumer goods:
“The maneuvering in markets for oil, wheat, cotton, coffee and more have brought billions in profits to investment banks like Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, while forcing consumers to pay more every time they fill up a gas tank, flick on a light switch, open a beer or buy a cellphone. In the last year, federal authorities have accused three banks, including JPMorgan, of rigging electricity prices, and last week JPMorgan was trying to reach a settlement that could cost it $500 million.”
A Life-or-Death Situation
Margaret Pabst Battin, an expert in bioethics and right-to-die issues, comes to grips with the same questions in her own life, when her husband Brooke Hopkins is in a bicycling accident that leaves him quadriplegic:
“By the time Peggy arrived and saw her husband ensnared in the life-sustaining machinery he hoped to avoid, decisions about intervention already had been made. It was Nov. 14, 2008, late afternoon. She didn’t know yet that Brooke would end up a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down.
“Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death — these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and now, suddenly, they turned unbearably personal. Alongside her physically ravaged husband, she would watch lofty ideas be trumped by reality — and would discover just how messy, raw and muddled the end of life can be.”
Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy Writer in America
Meet the man who created “Deep Thoughts” and “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer”—and who is about to release his first novel, The Stench of Honolulu:
“’A lot of comedy is going the extra step,’ Handey continued. ‘An unfrozen caveman was funny — but that’s not enough.’ Later, he e-mailed me a sheet of sketch ideas he typed up in 1991. The sketch seemed to be a combination of two ideas: ‘Too Many Frozen Cavemen,’ in which a surplus of frozen Neanderthals drive scientists crazy, and ‘Swamp Bastard,’ about a Swamp Thing-like creature who keeps stealing everyone’s girlfriends. ‘I guess my brain put these things in a blender,’ he wrote, ‘and out came Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.'”
What Does It Take to Stop Crips and Bloods From Killing Each Other?
How community members like Cynthia Mendenhall, a former gang member, have teamed up with police and other leaders to negotiate peace in L.A.’s toughest neighborhoods:
“Causality is slippery, especially when it comes to crime. The L.A.P.D.’s decision to deploy 30 additional officers to Watts’s three largest housing projects has undoubtedly contributed to the area’s improvement. Research has shown that ‘hot-spot policing’ — flooding high-crime areas with police officers — effectively reduces crime without simply displacing it. But the department’s efforts in Watts go beyond ‘cops on dots.’ In recent years, the L.A.P.D. has been conducting an unusual experiment in community policing in Watts. Its centerpiece, the Community Safety Partnership, is the department’s collaboration with a group of residents known as the Watts Gang Task Force. Every Monday morning, community leaders meet with top police commanders to discuss what’s happening in the Watts gang world — who’s feuding with whom, where criminal investigations stand, which are the issues residents are worried about. What makes the initiative unusual is that many of the task force’s participants have close ties to street gangs. Some, like Mendenhall, are former gang leaders. Others are the mothers and grandmothers of notorious gang leaders past and present.”
The Last Mermaid Show
Behind the scenes of a live mermaid show in Weeki Wachee Springs State Park in Orlando, Fla.:
“I sat down next to Crystal Videgar on a bench in front of a mirror that ran along one wall. She wore a black fishnet stocking pulled down over her face, which she used to create a scale pattern as she dabbed metallic green and purple eye shadow around her temples. The conversation had turned to whether everyone should meet up at Hooters or Applebee’s after work, but Videgar worked on her makeup with quiet focus. When she pulled off the stocking, I could see in between the fish scales that her skin was lightly freckled from life in the Florida sun. ‘We love that we get to dress up all day long,’ she said. ‘It’s like reliving your childhood.’
“Videgar and her co-workers earn $10 to $13 per hour. They punch timecards when they arrive at Weeki Wachee an hour before the first show and again when they leave after the last show of the day, usually by 5 p.m. In between performances, they train new recruits, scrub algae off the theater windows, do laundry and clean their locker room, bathroom and showers. They take breaks on a rooftop sun porch, where a surprising number of them smoke; their joke is that inhaling is good practice for holding your breath underwater.”
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero
Jason Everman was kicked out of both Nirvana and Soundgarden, before the bands went on to sell millions of albums. He then decided to do something completely different:
“So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered a fast track to becoming a Ranger and perhaps eventually to the Special Forces. He told me he always had an interest in it. His stepfather was in the Navy; both grandfathers were ex-military. Most of the people he grew up with scoffed at that world, which was part of the appeal to him. Novoselic remembered something Everman said way back in the Olympia days. ‘He was just pondering. He asked me, “Do you ever think about what it’d be like to be in the military and go through that experience?” And I was just like . . . no.'”