I was 13 when the O.J. Simpson trial verdict was announced. It’s my only clear memory of the trial: my math teacher halting class so we could watch the verdict. My parents were purposely avoiding the case, so I knew very little about it (I don’t know how they did it, as much as this case saturated the media). When the jury declared him not guilty, I didn’t think much of it. Guilty, not guilty–I was too young to have ever seen Simpson play football, so […]
Take A Walk on the Wild Side
“So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?” After a decade spent as a paramedic, it’s a question Kevin Hazzard loves to hate. Which stories should he tell? Should he talk about the gunshots, the cardiac arrests, the overdoses, the man swarming with maggots? Or should he lighten the mood and talk about the fake suicide attempts and the surprising amount of nudity? Either way, he knows that people will be listening. Because the dirty secret is we’re all rubberneckers, slowing down to stare at […]
Frantic Avoidance
As a piece of art, I have to give it to Dave Eggers. AHBWOSG is carefully composed, wonderfully constructed, funny, poignant, and moving. But it’s also a pile of emotional bullshit that took me ages to read, and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough once I had inhaled the last intentionally-breakneck run-on paragraph. I have now moved on, immediately and purposefully, to “Men Explain Things to Me.” But back to the “Staggering Genius,” which is a memoir, slightly fictionalized, as Eggers explains […]
I got this rat, this gnawing, cheese eating fuckin’ rat…
From Marcus Brutus to Judas Iscariot, there are few figures people hate more than the double-crossing informant. In places like 1970s South Boston, there was a rule about it. Never talk to cops. Don’t be a rat. Better to die or rot in jail than snitch. It was a Mafia rule enforced from the top down. If a guy was even suspected of going to the cops, things weren’t going to end well for him. The notorious gangster Whitey Bulger loved to rail against snitches, […]
At least politicians take credit for their insults these days. The founding fathers used pseudonyms to attack each other in print.
I’ve been listening to WNYC’s On the Media podcast religiously since 2007. News, especially political news, stresses me out, but something about OtM makes it bearable. They take an overhead view of issues and talk about the ways different types of media succeed or fail in a snarky, intellectual way. The hosts, Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, are great. If I had to answer one of those questions about hosting dinner parties and inviting anyone dead or alive, Brooke would 100% be on my invite […]
Going Home
Last summer, as part of my job as a health educator, I visited a woman at her home who had recently given birth. Newborn tests showed that the baby may have had a serious hemoglobin disorder. The woman spoke no English, and in fact her native language was spoken by such a small population that it had taken a lot of work to find an interpreter, who I had on speaker phone. At one point I asked the interpreter to define hemoglobin, explain that her […]
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