Things I’m considering reading (thanks to Longform) during the potentially 2-hour long, ridiculous mandatory training I’ll be sitting through this afternoon:
BAD, BAD LORI ARNOLD
How Tom Arnold’s little sister started the meth epidemic.
SEX, LIES, AND HIT MEN!
A Houston man allegedly tries to hire several hit men to kill his wife. Each fails miserably. It becomes the talk of the town.
KILLING JARED
A group of misfit boys from the fringes of Las Vegas form a clique. Then, with murky motives, they decide to murder one of their own and bury him in a desert pit.
Should be a good time!
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
* “Wildwood” was originally published in The New Yorker, and later became part of Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”
Wildwood*
by Junot Diaz
Tough love in the Jersey suburbs. A Dominican daughter comes of age in America, battling her fierce and traditional mother every inch of the way. The tour de force is read by Sonia Manzano, showing very different stripes than as Sesame Street’s Maria, the role for which she is best known.
* “Wildwood” was originally published in The New Yorker, and later became part of Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”
2 plays
The Demands of Cold Blood
When a crime reporter is told an outlandish account, his first obligation is to establish the facts. But when the story turns out to be far more shocking—a conspiracy, in fact, of appalling darkness—it can knock his sense of duty until it cracks.Click!
Navahoax
How Timothy Patrick Barrus, a white writer of gay erotica, reinvented himself as a (wildly successful) Native American memoirist.Oh, what the hell. Click!
Mysterious Circumstances
David Grann / New Yorker / Dec 2004
The world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert found dead in a locked room, leaving no note.Click!
Which One Of You Is Jesus?
Jenny Diski / London Review Of Books / SEP 2011
In 1959, a social psychologist in Michigan brought together three institutionalized patients for an experiment:Click![W]hat would happen, he wondered, if he made three men meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be the one and only Jesus Christ?
Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street
Meyer Berger / NYTimes / SEP 1949
A blow-by-blow account of Howard Unruh’s slow, deadly walk through Camden, New Jersey — written in two and a half hours.Click!
The Death-Wish Kids
Joe Morgenstern / Vanity Fair / Oct 1984
Two 16-year-olds form a suicide pact, driving a Pontiac off a cliff. One of the boys survives — and gets charged with murder.Ack!
The Body on Somerton Beach
In fact, this case…is so opaque that we still do not know the victim’s identity, have no real idea what killed him and cannot even be certain whether his death was murder or suicide.Click!
The Siege of Fulton Avenue
Just after midnight, Rye police arrived to bust a house full of partying teenagers. The kids refused to unlock the door, and parents and cops flooded the street. A minute-by-minute account of the standoff.Click!
