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“Which city do you pity most?” I ask just before the elevator doors close.
They laugh and in unison say, “Vallejo!”
Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was From, about the delusions of her California pioneer ancestors. If you want to know how she feels about the sudden 2003 death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, you can readThe Year of Magical Thinking,her stark but openhearted account of emotional dislocation. And if you want to know how she feels about the drawn-out death of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, two years later at the age of 39, you can order her new memoir, Blue Nights, on Amazon.
“Which city do you pity most?” I ask just before the elevator doors close.
They laugh and in unison say, “Vallejo!”
(Fiction) My sister, Isa, speaks English and Tagalog. But one word, she could say in many languages: koigokoro, beminnen, mahal, amor. “It’s the most important thing,” she used to say, “the only thing. L-O-V-E. Love.” So when we learned that we would be moving to California, to a city called L’amour, she called it home, the place where we were always meant to be. I believed her. This was January of 1974, our final days in the Philippines. Isa was sixteen, I was eight, and we were from San Quinez, a small southern village surrounded by sugar-cane fields and cassava groves, with a single paved road winding through. Every house was like ours, made of bamboo and nipa and built on stilts, and every neighbor was somehow family. No one was a stranger where we lived.
(Not single-page) Nothing irritated phone company executives more than the use of the word “hello” in initial telephone conversation. In 1910, Bell’s Telephone Engineer magazine sponsored a contest for the best essay on proper telephone etiquette. AT&T had the prize article distributed to telephone directories. Here’s what it said about the h-word: “Would you rush into an office or up to the door of a residence and blurt out ‘Hello! Hello! Who am I talking to?’ No, one should open conversations with phrases such as ‘Mr. Wood, of Curtis and Sons, wishes to talk with Mr. White…’ without any unnecessary and undignified ‘Hellos.” No aspect of telephone use escaped the interest of AT&T’s etiquette police. “Speak directly into the mouthpiece,” explained a California franchise’s instruction manual, “keeping mustache out of the opening.”
“It breaks my heart to go out and tell people, ‘Hey, you know that place your grandparents immigrated to, the place you call home, that seaside cottage? Well, it turns out to be a high-risk disaster zone. Yeah. We get a massive earthquake every 300 to 500 years around here, and we’re due. They’re super bad. When it comes, it’s a monster. A full-rip nine.’ ” By “full-rip nine” Corcoran means a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, the kind of massive offshore temblor that triggered the tsunami that killed 28,050 people in Japan on March 11, 2011. Geologists call them megaquakes. Geologists also call the Northwest coast of North America—from Vancouver Island down to Northern California—one of the likeliest next victims.
As we hiked into the Zagros Mountains, which rise to nearly 12,000 feet along the border between Iraq and Iran, the driver grew nervous. “We’re going to have lunch in Tehran,” he said with a tense laugh. He had reason for his gallows humor: Six months earlier, three Americans—Shane Bauer, 27; his girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, 31; and Josh Fattal, 27, Bauer’s former housemate from the University of California at Berkeley—had walked along this same trail, with disastrous results. The hikers had—accidentally, it seems—strayed across the unmarked border into Iran, been seized by border guards, accused of being U.S. spies, and transported to the notorious Evin Prison, in Tehran, where they remained as this story went to press, in March.
If crisis there is, it surely has something to do with the larger crisis in American society: the increasing gap between haves and have-nots, the retreat from any commitment to economic fairness, the sense that the system is rigged to benefit a tarnished elite that no longer justifies its existence. The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest. (Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—generally considered the greatest public university in the world—had their telephones removed from their offices last year, in a nicely symbolic gesture of their helplessness under the budget knife.)
Sixteen years ago, the man who helped raise Megan Michelson was shot to death at a remote kayaking lodge in Northern California. The writer embarks on a painful search to find out what happened, and why. “At the time, Mom told me Jerry had gotten into a fight and that his body had been found in the doorway of the Otter Bar owners’ private residence. The few times I asked for specifics, Mom’s response was short: ‘You don’t want to know.’ But I’m 28 now, and I do want to know.”
The History of the Glock in America—and What Happened To Our Conversation About Gun Laws
Glock led the charge back into the large-capacity clip business. Other gun and accessory makers also pushed ever-larger magazines. Today, Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson, where Loughner bought his Glock, advertises a 50-round “Tactical Solutions Drum Magazine” for .22 caliber Ruger rifles priced at $64.99. The store also sells Glock-factory magazines, designed for six to 17 rounds, at $29.99 apiece. The outlet’s website notes, however, that “compact and subcompact Glock pistol model magazines can be loaded with a convincing number of rounds—i.e. … up to 33 rounds.” The online store CDNN Sports, based in Abilene, Tex., advertises 33- and 31-round Glock-compatible mags that it labels “Asian Military MFG.” Only six states—California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York—now have their own limits on large magazines.
High-efficiency weapons make American criminals deadlier, and in extreme cases, such as Tucson, large magazines make them deadlier still. Compared with other industrialized Western democracies, the U.S. does not have an especially high level of crime, or even violent crime. What it does have is “a startlingly high level—about five times the Western European/Canadian/Australian average—of homicide,” UCLA public policy professor Mark A.R. Kleiman writes in his 2009 book, When Brute Force Fails.
By Paul M. Barrett, Businessweek
Sober Traveling: AA Roadside Assistance for a Recovering Alcoholic
My goal for this trip in the winter of 2008 is to drive from California to a conference in Florida and back, attend AA meetings in seven states and see how they differ — and how they don’t. I have two fears: that a low-budget camping trip is dangerous for a lone woman and that I’ll end up hating the AA I find outside my local group. Without the one place I’ve felt most at home the last 28 years, where would I be?
By Kathy P., Los Angeles Times
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