Here’s the link—up to 4,000 Facebook shares and counting as of this writing.
Story on the Daily Kos
Posted by Stefan on June 12, 2011
http://kam.ph/2011/06/12/story-on-the-daily-kos/
Headaches, Part II
From a taped statement of a police interview. Goodness, it’s like Lorca meets Beckett.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: (Unintelligible) your mother (unintelligible).
A: Who?
Q: We—we can (unintelligible).
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: (Unintelligible).
Q: Stop and take a breath.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: All right.
A: (Unintelligible).
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: (Unintelligible) that.
A: (Unintelligible) you want. (Unintelligible) you want.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: It’s just really (unintelligible).
A: No, no, please. It’s necessary.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: That’s fine.
A: It’s necessary (unintelligible). It’s necessary (unintelligible) just—
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: She’s (unintelligible).
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: No, she’s not.
A: Yeah, I’m fine. Really.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER: Then I’ll let her tell you about it. Okay?
A: Yeah.
In context, this is a terrible emotional moment of realization—and it’s part of some of the hardest reporting I’ve ever done. More in the weeks to come.
Posted by Stefan on May 6, 2011
http://kam.ph/2011/05/06/headaches-part-ii/
So Close and Still So Far
Some of the best pictures you’ll see of North Korea—taken from across international borders.
Posted by Stefan on May 4, 2011
http://kam.ph/2011/05/04/so-close-and-still-so-far/
Trump’s Potemkin Village
A brief and surreal visit to the Trump Hollywood.
The view from the picture widows is so gorgeous that at first, it’s all you notice. The sprawling condominium — white floors, white walls, white ceiling — opens in a glass rectangle over a white balcony that frames the ocean and sky, two strips of rippled blue glowing in the last diffusions of sunlight, uncomplicated by money, cars, or people: a perfect tableau.
Life at the Trump Hollywood goes downhill from there.
The thing is: the place is beautiful, in many ways. It’s a good but half-baked idea made into concrete and glass then left to founder. I’m fascinated by abandoned buildings and cities—North Korean outposts, ghost towns, Pripyat—and South Florida’s own “ghost towers” are the closest you’ll find down here. Whether you see the couple mentioned in this post as privileged whiners or intrepid frontiersmen of luxury, it’s clear that something here has been left unfinished, then papered over with a name that’s wearing ever thinner, much like its bearer’s hair.
Posted by Stefan on May 4, 2011
http://kam.ph/2011/05/04/trumps-potemkin-village/
Headaches
Well past my tenth hour of reading through discovery materials and depositions in the State Attorney’s Office. And lo, this gem:
Q: Okay. Now, at that point, does he go into describe to you what the plan was for what was going to happen next or?
A: I don’t know if he told me at that point or if he told me later.
Q: Is that anything good, by the way?
A: It’s Motrin. Would you like some?
(An off-the-record discussion ensued.)
Posted by Stefan on May 4, 2011
http://kam.ph/2011/05/04/headache/
Everything’s a Story
After reading Gene Weingarten’s two Pulitzer-winning stories (here and here) and then the astonishing “The Great Zucchini” (which Erik Wemple of the Washington City Paper called “the greatest feature story ever written”), I bought his anthology, The Fiddler in the Subway. All great so far. On the flip side of the idea that everything can be a story, Weingarten shows the extraordinary things that can be done with the editorial faith and freedom that comes with decades of experience. To wit: writing a terribly difficult survey of the sixty-below wasteland of Savoonga, Alaska, simply because he saw it in an airplane magazine and it had a funny name.
From the introduction:
There’s one last truth that I don’t tell them, because it’s needlessly disturbing and would serve no pragmatic purpose. I’ll say it now, just once, and be done with it. A real writer is someone for whom writing is a terrible ordeal. That is because he knows, deep down, with an awful clarity, that there are limitless ways to fill a page with words, and that he will never, ever, do it perfectly. On some level, that knowledge haunts him all the time. He will always be juggling words in his head, trying to get them closer to a tantalizing, unreachable ideal.
It’s a torment you can’t escape. It will reach even into the comfort of a drunken sleep, and it will shake you awake, and send you, heart pumping, to an empty piece of paper.
If you have that, you can be a good writer. Congratulations, I guess.
Posted by Stefan on April 30, 2011
http://kam.ph/2011/04/30/everythings-a-story/
A Hard Day at Work
I had a hard day at work yesterday.
It wasn’t hard because of the usual overthinking and annoyances. Not because I had to call somebody I didn’t want to, and somehow ferreted that unmade phone call into the part of my brain that thinks about friendliness and being accepted rather than the part that knows I have a job to do. Not because any half-sprouted idea of mine, just beginning to show promise, withered and died in the light of day. That shit happens all the time.
It wasn’t part of the usual battle of expectations between a writer and his subject (though there was some of that too). The things we write will offend people, and that’s nothing to apologize for.
Still, I had to make an apology, because I fucked up. I got some facts wrong, big stupid glaring ones too, for no good reason. I wasn’t out chasing the story right before deadline and typing like mad into a netbook on my belt. I simply didn’t fact-check like I should have. I was lazy.
Part of it was the way I wrote the story, coming only belatedly to anything like a satisfying angle or human trajectory. It started with too wide a subject, and for much of the time I spent reporting, I was looking for quotes and attributes to fit into a narrative like pieces in a puzzle.
That never works.
As a result, I was left with a story that looked almost like somebody else had written it. I knew it was good, but it could have been great. It would forever sit at the middle of the pile: not a failure, but not a trophy either.
Until yesterday. Then I was embarrassed, because I didn’t do my job, which is to tell the truth.
To the public: I won’t apologize if you don’t like the facts, or if I present what’s important to me in a way that conflicts with what’s important to you. Writers are given liberties to make the facts relevant on a whole new level, to try and extract some means for empathy. We may flail around trying to do that, and it’s a pursuit that will necessarily inflict some collateral regret.
But if I say something that’s flat-out wrong, out of simple neglect—and especially if it’s a close, personal thing—I will say I’m sorry. And that’s a damn hard thing to do.
Posted by Stefan on April 27, 2011
http://kam.ph/2011/04/27/a-hard-day-at-work/