June 2012
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Finding Poetry in Illness
A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry:
I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In between, I found Swithering by Robin Robertson...
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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,...
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Dirt Under the Rug
What’s wrong with the crime stats in Baltimore? “The Wire” creator David Simon on how to fix them, and how beat reporting is necessary to understand the problem:
So if you’ve read this far, and you understand the actual dynamic in play, you’re probably saying to yourself: What’s the solution? In the past, the detectives and lawyers simply swept their mistakes under the rug,...
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Consequence
In 2007, Eric Fair wrote an article in the Washington Post describing his experience as an interrogator in Iraq. He has had trouble finding a way to move on.
I tell my professor I am sick. I put away verb charts, participles, and lexicons, board a train for Washington, D.C., and meet with Department of Justice lawyers and Army investigators in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. I disclose...
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What to Do?
[Fiction] A man’s romance with a psychic:
The psychic from the Third Base suckered drunk-me into getting a reading: twenty buckaroos. She had a table set up and was circling the bar in her hoop earrings and a fake mole that was supposed to be gypsy somehow, looking for customers. Real gypsies have a hair coming out of that mole, but hers was bald. Real gypsies don’t have breast implants...
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