<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>Gangrey</title>
    <link>https://gangrey.org</link>
    <description>A literary blog about the ephemeral moments that make a life.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <atom:link href="https://gangrey.org/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
    
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Goodnight, Grandpa]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/goodnight-grandpa</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/goodnight-grandpa</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A micro-memoir on loss, in fewer than 40 words]]></description>
      <author>Yacob Reyes</author>
      <category>Micro-Memoir</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sonder]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/sonder</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/sonder</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A micro-memoir on coming of age and becoming a storyteller]]></description>
      <author>Yacob Reyes</author>
      <category>Micro-Memoir</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hardwick Gazette]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5852</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5852</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2016 14:01:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Who's in?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nightstand]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5835</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5835</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:45:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Seems like so many exciting new books from friends are hitting the shelves this summer and fall. Here's my rundown. Correct my oversight. And what are you reading?

Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon, by Kelley Benham French and Tom French.

One In a Billion: The Story of Nic Volker and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine, by Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher.

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, by Beth Macy.

The Boys in the Bunkhouse]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dying Alone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5832</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5832</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 May 2016 13:24:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rebecca Woolington: The obituary ran six days after the death of Madaline Christine Pitkin. It recalled the sunny early October evening she was born. It told stories from her childhood, the time she wanted to jump rope like the older girls, the way she loved all animals except spiders.

It said she spent her time taking black-and-white photographs. It described her as spunky, candid, independent.

It didn't say how or where she died — only that she "passed away unexpectedly."

Her parents didn't]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Everyone Leaves Behind a Name]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5828</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5828</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 May 2016 14:18:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NiemanStoryboard launched an eight-week project showcasing the work of Michael Brick, which is collected in Everybody Leaves Behind a Name: True Stories. Here's a Q and A about the book. And here's the first story, with an essay from Wright:

The story of Mr. Todd Fatjo's departure from his truly dope duplex loft is one of those rare pieces that manages to capture a subculture in a moment of transition, and were that all the story did, it would be a success. Most people wouldn't have seen a flie]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[We Were Right]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5825</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5825</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Apr 2016 15:37:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Interesting findings in this new study by Tim Rosenstiel for the Brookings Institute, who says the path toward sustainable journalism is being undermined by terrible data (thanks, John):

Major enterprise pays – The single biggest change publishers can make is to produce more major enterprise journalism. Major enterprise stories scored 48 percent better than others in a measure of overall engagement. However, just one percent of all content produced is classified as such.

People like long stori]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Enigmatic Life Of Anthony Monaco]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5822</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5822</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:46:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Ferro (thanks, Oliver): HIGHLAND – The small, frail man with an Italian passport would arrive unannounced, trundling a small suitcase behind him.

Like a wispy Willy Loman, but with nothing to sell, Anthony Monaco would appear from time to time at one of the motels along Route 299 in New Paltz or Route 9W in Highland.

He had no family there. No desire to go sightseeing. He talked at length with almost no one.

But he was known to local police, mostly because of his erratic behavior — erupt]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fight]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5820</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5820</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Mar 2016 17:07:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Numbered balls of chance rattle and rise two nights a week down at the cavernous community hall of Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It's called a good bingo when your number comes up.

But that last Saturday before Christmas offered no good bingos. The night was reserved for a boxing event billed as Season's Beatings, which had prompted a newspaper deliveryman named Anthony Taylor to pull up in his clattering Dodge Caravan. Twenty-four years old, 5 fee]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Busting Cactus Thieves]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5817</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5817</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Mar 2016 21:56:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Weston Phippen: Yevgeny Safronov and the four tourists landed in Los Angeles on a 70-degree dream of a day last May. They were Czechs, Slovaks, and Russians, here on vacation. It was a holiday, so the banks and much of government had closed, but not all of it. For at least six months investigators in federal agencies that watch the nation's wild lands, its fauna and flora, had also kept eyes on these five foreigners, who would soon drive into the desert, where undercover agents would be waiting.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In The Land Of Missing Persons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5815</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5815</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Mar 2016 21:10:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Tizon: They found what was left of him in the spring of 2014. Firefighters battling a huge blaze on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula first spotted a boot in the dirt. Then they noticed some bones scattered across a wide grassy area. Fire crews in Alaska are used to seeing the bones of moose, caribou, bears, and other large creatures that live and die in these woods. So it wasn't until crew members found a human skull that they stopped to consider that the pieces might go together. The skull was res]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Goodbye, 600]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5813</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5813</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Mar 2016 20:01:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tommy T (thanks, Oliver): The business I love has put a lot of good people on the street and left behind a lot of empty buildings. I love it anyway, and so do the people who came by the paper Thursday, not so much to say goodbye to the old building but to say hello again to one another. I did most of the best work of my life with those people, and had most of the good times I'll ever have, and met the woman I married. Newspapers can break your heart. But I'll let it be broken every time for what]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Everyone Leaves Behind A Name]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5807</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5807</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 06 Mar 2016 23:08:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We've been talking about Michael Brick's craftsmanship here for years. Here's your chance to own a remarkable collection of his stories in book form, including several I guarantee you've never read. This anthology, which debuted at number 1 in essays on Amazon, also features essays on craft from Dan Barry, Andy Newman, Michael Kruse, Thomas Lake, Tony Rehagen, Wright Thompson, Justin Heckert, Chris Jones, Erin Sullivan, Mike Wilson, Michael Wilson, Charles McNair, Tommy Tomlinson, Amy Wallace, M]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[His Faithful Servant]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5803</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5803</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2016 16:52:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Randy R. Potts: I waited in my car for 20 minutes. No last name, precise instructions: "Meet me at the truck stop at the corner of 259 and 144 and I'll take you on from there. You should write it down because you won't have cell service." I found a truck stop but there wasn't a sign for Highway 144; a man pulled up in a black pickup with a Pomeranian in his lap; you could see the Choctaw in the man's kind face. I climbed into his passenger seat and he drove the rest of the way, talking, laughing]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Is 90% of longform crap?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5801</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5801</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:24:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here is the dirty secret of longform: most people, even those who urge its consumption, don't actually read it. Longform may win awards and it may bring prestige, but it remains at least as subject to Sturgeon's law—90 percent of everything is crap—as any other format. (Guest post by Raja)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Lives, One Night]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5798</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5798</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Feb 2016 17:24:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Naomi Martin and Dave Tarrant: Had they met under different circumstances, the two 20-year-olds could have easily been friends.

Sara Mutschlechner loved Quentin Tarantino films and Japanese anime. She played the drums, earned a black belt in karate and cried at Disney movies. She wrote scripts, made funny videos of her cat and dreamed of directing movies.

Eric Johnson was artistic, too. He was passionate about photography, painting and wrote his own hip-hop songs under a persona that was wilde]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain—And Almost Lost His Mind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5795</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5795</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2016 16:32:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Daniel Engber in WIRED:

THE BRAIN SURGERY lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. In the afternoon, after the anesthesia had worn off, the neurosurgeon came in, removed his wire-frame glasses, and held them up for his bandaged patient to examine. "What are these called?" he asked.

Phil Kennedy stared at the glasses for a moment. Then his gaze drifted up to the ceiling and over to the television. "Uh … u]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Brick By Brick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5781</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5781</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 Jan 2016 21:12:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["That word though, if it is a word: Overwritten. In recent years it's become a sledgehammer in the hands of too many cowardly, unambitious, ladder-climbing, cow-in-a-swivel-chair editors. The good ones know how to tell you where to dial it back, and finding a good one is mission critical. I've been lucky in that regard. The bad ones are hanging a kneejerk, uninspired, boardroom groupthink scarlet O on stylish writing." — Michael Brick

Photo by William Philpot, via facebook

I can't remember whe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Meet the Man Who's Been Spoiling 'The Bachelor' for Four Years]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5778</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5778</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 12 Jan 2016 20:11:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jon Caraminico in the New York Times: FRISCO, Tex. — A little more than a month ago, Ben Higgins, the warmly handsome star of the coming season of "The Bachelor," got down on one knee at the Sandals Royal Plantation resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and proposed marriage.

At least, this is the information that, a day later, the blogger Stephen Carbone received as a tip from one of his many sources. A few days after that, after more reporting, he posted the scoop on his website,RealitySteve.com, spo]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unsolved]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5774</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5774</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Dec 2015 14:43:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Are y'all keeping up with this serial narrative?

Here's Part 1 to get you going. From Gina Barton: Mark Zera and his father made their way down the deserted rural road from their home to Franklin High School and back again. As his father drove slowly through the darkness, Mark ran back and forth behind the car, scanning the roadside ditches for some sign of his brother.

John, 14, hadn't come home from school that day. Maybe he had been hit by a car and was lying there, hurt, needing help.

Mar]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Manning Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5772</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5772</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Dec 2015 14:35:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall: Billy is a mean bastard. He has a lot on his mind. He isn't getting shifts. His missus is nagging him for petrol money. Didn't he already give her some?

Billy gets a beer, tries to relax, but she won't let it rest. Won't get off his back. So he stands over her. Holds her down. Yells in her scared little face. Grabs her skinny shoulders and squeezes, nice and hard.

Eyes wild, he screams some more. Kicks her out and locks the door.

Billy is a mean bastard. He is also not real. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Son Learns To Live Without The Mother He Just Rediscovered]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5767</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5767</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2015 17:58:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Casey Parks (thanks, Emily): MYRTLE CREEK — Walter Dickens weaved through his mother's boxes to answer a knock at the door.

It was the fourth one that Sunday afternoon, two days since he'd met the president and 10 since he lost his mother, Sarena Moore, in the shootings at Umpqua Community College. Like all the rest, this latest visitor brought something other than answers.

"More dog food," Dickens said, peeking through the blanket that served as blinds. "And trash bags."

Bullet, his mother's]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Sad Life Of The Brisket Bandit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5764</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5764</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2015 16:34:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: AUSTIN – The man behind the glass partition was famous. His photograph appeared on statewide news sites and national food blogs, wanted as the architect of a brazen scheme.

When officials requested public assistance in his capture last year, they accused him of stealing thousands of dollars worth of meat from at least 19 grocery stores. He most likely devised an ad-hoc black market, police said, among the legitimate middlemen who connect ranchers to trendy steakhouses and barbecu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[When You Share Your Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5761</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5761</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Oct 2015 15:42:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jessica Contrera (thanks, Michael): When 13-year-old Caleb LeBlanc's death made the news this week, millions of people already knew him. He wasn't a pop star, an up-and-coming actor or a child prodigy. He was a boy who liked to wear his hair floppy, play baseball, and belt out nonsensical songs about being a baked potato — all for an audience usually bigger than the population of his home state.

Caleb, whose parents said he died of an "undetected medical condition," was the oldest son of the "B]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I Know We're Done For]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5757</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5757</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2015 11:52:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Patrick Rapa:

… About 24 hours before you read this, City Paper will cease operations. Like a lobster, we were purchased to be killed and consumed. For the purposes of this metaphor, my co-workers and I are the empty red parts.

The archives will go wherever they go. The people will scatter.

Listen: We knew what we were getting into, sort of. As much as we may romanticize the newspaper business, nobody mistakes it for a stable or lucrative career choice. Alt-weekly employees especially recogni]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking For Answers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5755</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5755</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2015 11:34:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin George: As massive protest marches continued across Baltimore, the pressure was building inside police headquarters, and Commissioner Anthony W. Batts wanted answers — fast. Near midnight on a cool April night, he pressed six top commanders sitting at a conference table for details about Freddie Gray's death.

A 30-person task force was interviewing witnesses, reviewing video and searching records in the days after Gray died, but crucial questions remained. Did Gray suffer an injury befor]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tragedy on deadline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5752</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5752</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Oct 2015 17:39:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[AARON YOST and TROY BRYNELSON in the Roseburg, Ore. News-Review:

Hannah Miles sat on a plastic chair inside cavernous Douglas Hall, wrapped in a white Red Cross blanket, shaking.

A grief counselor spoke with her. Another approached with a cell phone and made a call for her. Ten minutes later, Miles was no longer alone.

Her sister Hailey wrapped her in a close hug. Her father, Gary Miles, a pastor at Christian Life Center in Roseburg, consoled her.

Hannah continued to cry, the shock from the ]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[My Kidnappers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5749</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5749</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2015 11:02:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bradford Pearson: Hello, my name is Brad Pearson. In March 2006, you were one of three people who kidnapped me in West Philadelphia. I'm writing this letter not because I'm angry at you, or upset, or hurt. The opposite, actually. While the kidnapping and investigation were difficult for me, in the end they made me a stronger man. I'm a magazine writer now, and I've always hoped to talk to you and Jerry and Mordi about that night, and what your lives have been like since. I'd either like to do th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End Of War]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5747</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5747</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2015 16:27:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Warren (thanks, Tim): The forces of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi had been firing high-explosive ordnance into the city of Misurata for weeks—they'd been shooting tank rounds and they'd been firing rockets. Barrage after barrage. And lots of mortars. And among the 120mm mortars they had been firing were Spanish-made rounds that were a clustering munition that had never been seen in combat before. This was a serious problem, because we now know that the Spaniards had sold the mortars to t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Searching For A New Life, Loss Along The Way]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5745</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5745</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:13:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: BUDAPEST — The train ticket would take Josef Majade to a place where he would be safe, but he no longer sought that refuge.

Instead, he lay his balding head against a heating vent at the Keleti train station and tugged a small scarf around his beard, gone gray. A bag of three yellow apples sat next to him, but he could not bear to eat. He had left Syria with a family of five, and now three of them were missing.

The trains to Austria or Germany kept coming. But each time, Majade]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Murder On The Appalachian Trail]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5742</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5742</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Sep 2015 01:27:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Earl Swift: It is a quiet, restorative place, this clearing high on a Pennsylvania ridge. Ferns and wildflowers carpet its floor. Sassafras and tulip trees, tall oak and hickory stand tight at its sides, their leaves hissing in breezes that sweep from the valley below. Cloistered from civilization by a steep 900-foot climb over loose and jutting rock, the glade goes unseen by most everyone but a straggle of hikers on the Appalachian Trail, the 2,180-mile footpath carved into the roofs of 14 east]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All The Bob Johnsons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5734</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5734</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2015 19:02:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Some serendipity for you. I was searching for something today behind my desk at work and I found an odd envelope. Inside was a funeral program for my father, who died in November 2011, just a few weeks after my grandpa. Those months were kind of a blur, but I remember a woman pushing the envelope into my hands at dad's funeral. I must've taken it out of my briefcase when I got back from Oklahoma and put it aside. Somehow it slipped into the crevasse between my desk and a wall. There was a handwr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Required Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5731</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5731</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2015 15:17:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matt Tullis has introduced a cool new segment on Gangrey, The Podcast, called required reading. But we need your help. Please take a look.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[King Of Tides]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5728</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5728</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2015 16:51:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go read this, from Kim Cross in Southwest Magazine. It's lovely.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Went Wrong]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5725</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5725</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2015 15:22:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Caleb Hannan on Dr. V's Magical Putter: "There's this idea that it's not going to happen to me. There is a momentum to a story that's hard to stop. … It would have been a blow to my ego to set aside something I knew was going to be talked about. But I should have."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In A Small Town, Pride And Shame Over Atomic Legacy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5723</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5723</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2015 15:08:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Sottile: RICHLAND, Wash. — The workers inside Hanford's nuclear reactors in the early 1940s knew their jobs were important, even if many of them didn't know why. They worked hard, and for that they were paid well, tucking their children into bed at night inside handsome homes with green lawns on streets named for brilliant engineers: Goethals Drive, Jadwin Avenue.

The secrecy around Hanford, a part of the Manhattan Project, came to light on Aug. 9, 1945, when U.S. forces dropped a thick-be]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Joe Gould's Teeth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5721</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5721</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2015 15:10:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jill Lepore: For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he'd been writing in hundreds of dime-store composition notebooks, their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.

He wrote with a fountain pen. He filled it with ink he stole from the post office. "I have created a vital new literary form," he boasted. "Unfortunately, my manuscript is ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Lost Girls]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5717</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5717</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2015 18:06:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jason Cherkis: In 1974, when she was only 14, Jackie Fuchs would wake up way before her parents and catch a ride with friends from her house in the San Fernando Valley across the Santa Monica Mountains and into Malibu. She'd hit the beach and paddle out in the quiet, pre-dawn dark.

It was the only time she could be on the water and not have to deal with the catcalls and the teasing, the good-natured gibes that gradually shaded into something harder and meaner. Before sunrise, she was just anoth]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bernie Sanders Has A Secret]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5715</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5715</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2015 15:18:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is how you profile.

Michael Kruse: One morning last month in Burlington, Vermont, at the law office of John Franco, one of Bernie Sanders' best friends since the 1970s, Franco talked to me at length about Sanders' commitment and his consistency and his charisma. Even at the beginning of Sanders' career, he said, four decades before he started packing arenas in college towns and liberal havens as a renegade 73-year-old self-described socialist taking on Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Invisible Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5712</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5712</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2015 14:16:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeff Sharlet: Open your eyes. Sunday. Another lucky day. Darkness. A luxury afforded the man who owns two tents, one popped right inside the other. No street light filtering in, no headlights rising along tent walls. Just—dark. You could be anywhere. Your father's house, before dawn, in Cameroon, or Paris, or Berlin. Or America. Stretch: You want to run, the canyon, your long legs striding, up out of the city until you reach the vista. L.A. You'll close your eyes and feel the sun on your face, a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Now, They Hug]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5710</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5710</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Jul 2015 12:23:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: URBANDALE, Iowa — As this state's most visible culture warriors, Bob Vander Plaats and Donna Red Wing have hurled insults at each other for years.

Vander Plaats's organization, The Family Leader, has derided same-sex marriages such as Red Wing's as "unnatural." Red Wing, leader of the LGBT rights group One Iowa, has called Vander Plaats "bigoted" and "cruel."

But when they ran into each other on the day the Supreme Court declared that same-sex couples could marry anywhere in th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Long Walk's End]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5708</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5708</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:54:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Browning: On a Saturday morning in May, 2015, a group of law enforcement agents, the FBI among them, knocked on the front door of the Montgomery Homestead Inn in Damascus, Virginia. The proprietor, a retired kindergarten teacher who lives across East Laurel Ave. from the inn, happened to be there at the time. She does not know for sure how many agents were on the inn's porch. She guesses three or four, though her husband told her later another man was positioned at the back door.

"There]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Long Strange Trip]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5706</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5706</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Jul 2015 14:03:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jay Cridlin: TAMPA — Minutes after midnight, Uncle John's Band closes another sprawling set at Skipper's Smokehouse with the Grateful Dead's U.S. Blues, drawing cheers from the tie-dyed faithful.

Bassist Mike Edwards deflates into a stoop at stage right, wincing, rubbing his hip and his head. He fingers a cigarette as giddy fans share kudos.

"That was a long four hours," he says, limping off stage.

The hours are all long these days, but Uncle John's Band keeps rolling. This was the Grateful D]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hate, Hurt And Healing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5702</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5702</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2015 15:19:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anne Hull: CHARLESTON, S.C. — The glow of their phones lighted up their faces in the night. Terrell White and his friends kept looking down at the updates, trying to separate rumor from conspiracy theory from actual fact. It was 9 o'clock — 24 hours after a suspected white gunman had killed nine black people at church two miles to the south — and here on King Street, the struggle to understand was underway.

"People at Bible study, hearing God's word?" White said, shaking his head. "That's no he]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Flower for the Graves]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5700</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5700</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2015 19:27:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eugene Patterson, Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 16, 1963:

A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.

It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Platforms and presentations]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5697</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5697</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2015 21:32:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[What are your favorite non-print presentations of stories? I'm partial to reading something on paper, but most of the things I most want to read are only available to me digitally. There are some slick things out there, but sometimes it feels like the flashy presentation gets in the way of the story.

I really enjoyed the Tampa Bay Times' comic book treatment of The Incredible Adventures of Chuck, the Carpenter. (Written by Caitlin Johnston, illustrated by Cameron Cottril)

The New York Times is]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Always A Rotten Apple']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5694</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5694</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:11:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thomas Lake: BB King always slept with the light on, even as an old man, because he'd never shaken his fear of the dark. One summer night when he was a boy, a tornado howled across the Delta and deposited small fish in the cotton fields and left him in his mother's arms in a cabin without a roof.

This Friday, with another storm drenching Mississippi, King lay in his coffin between two of his guitars. The lights were on and his eyes were closed as admirers walked past for a final glimpse. Nearby]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The forgotten man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5687</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5687</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2015 18:32:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this story Keith Sharon at The Orange County Register. Great lede: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/woodward-657889-beach-huntington.html]]></description>
      <author>Mark Johnson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Things They Still Carry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5685</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5685</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2015 12:43:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I thought this, from the young man who lives in my shed, was very well done for the amount of restraint.

Do read Zack Peterson: RIVERVIEW

Christopher Marquis is not quite 6.

He loves lizards and letters and flashcards and trains. To strangers, he offers garden stakes, which he pretends are hot dogs.

He graduates from kindergarten this week, and one day his mother thinks he'll become an engineer or a physics professor.

But his father will never see it.

Army Spc. Christophe J. Marquis died S]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The People's Court]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5676</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5676</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2015 13:39:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big thanks to Mark Johnson for passing this gem along. Mark Kriegel, New York Daily News, Sept. 10, 1989:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Split Image]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5673</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5673</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2015 19:24:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kate Fagan:

ON THE MORNING of Jan. 17, 2014, Madison Holleran awoke in her dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. She had spent the previous night watching the movie The Parent Trap with her good friend Ingrid Hung. Madison went to class. She took a test. She told a few friends she would meet them later that night at the dining hall. She went to the Penn bookstore and bought gifts for her family.

While she was there, her dad called. "Maddy, have you found a therapist down there yet?" he ]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Down & Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5670</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5670</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2015 16:00:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tony Rehagen:

It's the top of the first inning, and Leo Mazzone is already rocking.

Each croak of the springs in Mazzone's brown leather recliner is punctuated by a knock in the wooden frame, like an old screen door blowing open and shut.

Creeeak-clack. Creeeak-clack.

Watching the Braves play the Marlins on the 60-inch flat-screen in the den of his home on Lake Hartwell in South Carolina, Mazzone isn't conscious of the nervous back-and-forth tick that became his accidental trademark during f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lives On]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5668</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5668</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2015 15:56:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: CLAUDIA WILLIAMS FOUND comfort wearing her dad's favorite red flannel shirt. It smelled like him. Time frayed the threads, pulled apart seams, and years ago the shirt went into a safe. She keeps many things locked away. In a closet next to her garage, her father's Orvis 8.3-foot, 7-weight graphite fly rod leans on a wall. His flies are safe too, and she can see his hands in the bend of the knots. She feels closest to him fishing but has been only once or twice since he died. Nea]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Derailed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5666</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5666</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2015 15:53:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mitch Ryals: Chuck Lawrence is breaking Rule No. 1: Don't get too drunk.

"The hell with this," he tells himself. "I'm goin' home."

He buys a bottle of Skol vodka at a corner store. Vodka's not usually his drink — he prefers beer — but it's going to be a long haul home, and vodka lasts longer. He takes a pull from the bottle and waits in the shadows of the Missoula train yard. He scans the tracks for rail cops, known by train hoppers simply as "bulls." Gusts of wind whip at his scruffy face as ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Contest: Best Newspaper Narratives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5662</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5662</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2015 18:32:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From George Getschow at UNT:

Have you submitted your narrative to Mayborn's third annual The Best American Newspaper Narrative writing contest?

In an effort to foster narrative nonfiction storytelling, The Dallas Morning News and The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference are inviting submissions of the best narrative nonfiction published in a daily U.S. newspaper or a U.S. newspaper website in 2014. I hope you'll be submitting what you consider your best narrative to this year's contest. Dead]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA["If he chickens out, we don't have a story"]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5657</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5657</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2015 06:11:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[(Posted by Raja) Ben Montgomery raised some eyebrows and some questions about journalism ethics last week with his story about a mailman who flew a gyrocopter through protected airspace and landed at the U.S. Capitol. Here's one such debate. What does the gangrey community think?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Ghosts I Run With]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5655</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5655</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2015 16:27:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matt Tullis: "Creech."

The name escaped my lips somewhere in the third mile of a five-mile run. It was a name I had been trying to think of, off-and-on, for the better part of a decade, the last name of my nurse Janet from Viking Street in Orrville, Ohio.

Janet brought me sausage biscuits from McDonald's just about every morning because it was the only thing I would eat. She was typically my nurse on first shift. She had short brown hair and was about the same age as my mom, and so she felt ve]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Surviving A Hike]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5652</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5652</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2015 15:39:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Koczwara: A sense of dread has hung over Jason Spare's life.

Spare's father was 33 years old when he had his first heart attack. It almost killed him. Spare's mother had breast cancer and complications related to the chemotherapy haunted her. They both died in their late 50s.

"I always had in the back of my mind a sense of mortality and urgency in life from being in that kind of situation so early on," Spare says.

Spare, 46, looks worried. He's digging through his stuff and reorganizing]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Rookie And The Zetas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5649</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5649</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2015 19:36:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Tone: It was a matter of seconds, closer to six than seven, before what was happening became obvious, the colt masked in pink kicking up clouds of red on its way into the lead. It was late November, 2009. This race, the Texas Classic Futurity, was among the last of the year at Lone Star Park, the last chance to watch the 2-year-olds run. The last chance at a payday: $1.1 million up for grabs, a half million to the winning owner.

All eyes were on that horse in pink. The muscular sorrel colt,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Before I Go]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5647</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5647</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2015 20:28:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Kalanithi: In residency, there's a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted until the operating was done, which depended, in part, on how quick you were in the OR.

A resident's surgical skill is judged by his technique and his speed. You can't be sloppy and you can't be slow. From your first wound closure onward, spend too much time being precise and the scrub tech will announce, "Looks like we'v]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Strawberry Queen]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5644</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5644</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2015 16:58:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anna M. Phillips: PLANT CITY — In a strawberry patch thirty minutes outside of Tampa, just past the exit for a dinosaur-themed amusement park, Maria Zuñiga pulls on her mud-covered rubber boots and ties a bandana under her dark, quiet eyes.

Now in her third season of strawberry picking, her latex-gloved hands know the most efficient choreography. Her body knows to stay bent at the waist, like a runner frozen mid-toe-touch. If you were to pass her from the road, you would see only the curve of h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[100 Years]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5642</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5642</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2015 16:53:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Kovac Jr.: On the evening of July 14, 1915, a couple went into the Southern Railway station in Macon and tried to give away a baby. The blond-haired, blue-eyed girl was almost 5 months old, and she wasn't theirs.

Salvation Army Capt. G.B. Austin was across the way at the Brown House hotel when someone told him. Austin hardly believed it, but he hustled to the station at Ocmulgee and Fifth streets. Built in the 1880s, the depot, replaced by Terminal Station a year later, featured a brick spi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Martyr's Son]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5639</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5639</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:23:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brendan Meyer: John Reeb plodded down the cracked pavement of Washington Street, his thick white beard and frizzy gray hair glowing orange in the setting sun. His feet ached as he moved slowly past the white-brick café on the right, his first footsteps in Selma, Alabama, shadowing the route his father took 50 years earlier.

Sixty-four strides from the café was a 3-foot-wide memorial with a man immaculately carved on the front. John weaved between photographers, reporters, tourists and locals, a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Job, Not A Parable]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5637</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5637</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:19:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anne Hull: The Hardee's biscuit slides toward the heat lamp, and the uniforms are waiting.

"That one's mine," says Brandi Garner, snagging the cinnamon biscuit. A digital clock overhead is tracking each customer's wait time in the drive-through and transmitting the results back to corporate. Brandi folds the bag so the heat won't escape, then leans out into the 8-degree wind chill with snow spitting sideways on her face and farmland all around. At home later she'll have a few nice sips of Equat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rez Ball]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5634</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5634</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2015 15:00:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dirk Chatelain: WAYNE, Neb. — Mike Barry bounces back and forth from the gymnasium to the ticket window, running the numbers in his head.

Inside, bleachers are filling fast. Outside, the line snakes down the sidewalk almost 100 yards. He has a problem.

Barry has managed Wayne State's facilities for 17 years, all the way back to the heyday of Greg McDermott. He has never locked the doors.

If fans keep coming, he isn't going to have a choice.

He knew this Class C-1 clash would draw a big crowd]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Irredeemable Chris Rose]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5631</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5631</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2015 14:35:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Patrick Welch: Chris Rose's Pulitzer crystal sits in his small French Quarter apartment, its glass badly chipped from various accidents. The disfigured accolade for his work on a reporting team at the Times-Picayune is a reminder of both prowess and loss.

"The way the people of New Orleans made me feel after Hurricane Katrina—like I was holding this fucking city together all by myself," Rose tells me at the Napoleon House restaurant and bar, in a graffitied payphone nook where he's eate]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finding Solace, In A Book Club]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5628</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5628</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2015 17:45:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: Robert Barksdale steps in front of the students in an English class at Eastern High School, searching for some semblance of redemption.

"For me, school is a treat because I never got to be in school, for real," he begins. He always envisioned visiting a school to speak to students but was beginning to realize the pressures of standing in front of the classroom. He scans the room and says: "Y'all are a little intimidating."

Barksdale was around their age when he chose the street]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Carrot Top In Exile]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5626</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5626</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:20:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: Tonight is Wednesday night in Las Vegas, which means Scott Thompson has to become Carrot Top a little earlier than he does most nights. He has Tuesdays off, so yesterday he didn't have to be Carrot Top at all if he didn't want to be, except he left the serenity of his house to have lunch with his friend Nicolas Cage, who was wearing a white leather suit. Cage, knowing that a white leather suit has a way of changing everybody in its presence, had asked in advance whether it was okay ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gives, And Takes Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5623</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5623</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:11:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Sottile: CALDWELL, Idaho — In the heart of the Northwest, there is Idaho. And in the heart of Idaho, there is God. And God, residents believe, blesses some and takes others away early.

Like Neil Jacob Randolph, a 3-year-old buried in Peaceful Valley Cemetery in Caldwell in 1982. "Sleep on sweet Neil — and take thy rest," his headstone reads. "God called thee home. He thought it best."

In another row are the graves of four infants marked with identical headstones on which "Infant Bailey" i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Texas In July]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5620</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5620</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2015 23:15:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mayborn is shaping up to be a hoot. See y'all there.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Business, Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5618</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5618</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2015 19:37:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Liam Dillon: On a late Friday afternoon in February 2011, dozens of police officers carrying assault rifles arrived at Sempra Energy's $1 billion liquefied natural gas plant on the coast of Baja California, Mexico.

The officers, dressed in ski masks and body armor, cut the chains on the plant's gates. Once they had broken in, the police put their own seals on the gates.

The cops drove down a winding road through brown, brush-filled hillside. Just before reaching the facility's entrance, the of]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Red Tent]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5616</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5616</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Feb 2015 13:38:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: LARGO

Two afternoons a week, after lunch, before laundry duty, a dozen women at the Pinellas County Jail leave their pods and thread down a long, dark corridor — through 10 locked doors, past a guard station, into a space they call the Red Tent Room.

Here, the air smells like coffee and sugar cookies. Norah Jones sings softly through portable speakers. Beside wide windows, next to the sewing machines, scarlet hibiscus bloom in the winter sun.

"Welcome! Welcome!" calls Polly Ed]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The fire on the 57 bus in Oakland]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5613</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5613</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Jan 2015 20:52:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dashka Slater:

It was close to 5 o'clock on the afternoon of Nov. 4, 2013, and Sasha Fleischman was riding the 57 bus home from school. An 18-year-old senior at a small private high school, Sasha wore a T-shirt, a black fleece jacket, a gray newsboy cap and a gauzy white skirt. For much of the long bus ride through Oakland, Calif., Sasha — who identifies as agender, neither male nor female — had been reading a paperback copy of "Anna Karenina," but eventually the teenager drifted into sleep, sk]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A 'Scumbag' Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5610</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5610</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jan 2015 18:37:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin Heckert: Kyle Kinane is everywhere like farty Jesus. He is in the shower with a six-pack of beer. He is drunk at a Wendy's drive-through ordering chicken nuggets out of the sliding door of a taxi van. He is the guy at Red Lobster getting into a fistfight with the night manager over whether the moon landing was faked. He is accidentally childproofing himself out of a microwave while trying to nuke Totino's Pizza Rolls. Then he is berating the microwave, shouting at the microwave to unlock,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Searching for Answers in the 1961 Death of an Ayn Rand Follower]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5608</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5608</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2015 17:05:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Vadukul (thanks, Klink): Joanne O'Connor keeps a three-ring binder as thick as a cinder block to contain the story that echoes through her head. It is stuffed with her research about a young woman she never met who died more than 50 years ago. She has trouble explaining why obsession gripped her so, but she does know: "I had to find out what happened."

Ms. O'Connor is a 61-year-old wedding and events planner who lives with her cat and dog in a small, elegant Kips Bay apartment. Six years a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All That Land]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5606</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5606</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2015 18:34:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meant to post this a while back. Michael Kruse: FORT PIERCE — Bud Adams, slim and dressed in blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt and cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, drove his Ford Explorer around his ranch in western St. Lucie County, looking at his land and his cattle. His truck, with manure caked in the tires, jounced in the ruts of rough paths. He's been the president of the Florida Cattlemen's Association. He's been named landowner of the year by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How stories change hearts and brains]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5603</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5603</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2015 14:48:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There's a little bit of "of course stories change people… that's why we tell them" when I read this, but it's always nice when science says we're right.

Elizabeth Svoboda in Aeon has the details.]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Distress Signal]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5600</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5600</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2015 17:29:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Hixenbough: Wes Van Dorn slipped out of bed around 4 a.m., pulled a green flight suit on over his boxers, then brushed his teeth and kissed his wife before driving to work. Both of his young boys had woken up crying the night before, and although he needed to be up hours before sunrise, he had been the one to sing and cuddle them back to sleep.

Later, once she had strength to process the events of this day, Nicole Van Dorn would count that as a blessing.

Wes hated to leave her and the kid]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How the Colombian army sent a hidden message to hostages… using a pop song]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5598</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5598</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:22:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeff Maysh: Colonel Jose Espejo was a man with a problem. As the Colombian army's communications expert watched the grainy video again, he saw kidnapped soldiers chained up inside barbed-wire pens in a hostage camp deep in the jungle, guarded by armed FARC guerillas. Some had been hostages for more than 10 years, and many suffered from a grim, flesh-eating disease caused by insect bites.

It was 2010, and the straight-talking Espejo was close to retirement after 22 years of military service. But]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Homeless and Hoarding]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5595</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5595</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2015 19:33:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Sottile: Fear meets Sarah Wolff in the elevator.

It's standing beside her as she rides to her third-floor apartment. Taunting her. Tapping her shoulder and whispering in her ear.

"When I get off the elevator up here, I panic," she says. She can't see her apartment door from the elevator. "Is there a note saying 'You're evicted, you can't live here anymore?' I have that panic every time I leave the apartment … I'm like, 'Oh please don't let there be anything on the door. Dear God. Please.']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Good Thing Turns Bloody. What Next?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5593</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5593</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:26:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: It was our ball when the fight started, game point. Oscar was giving some unsolicited advice to Curtis, who was on his team. Curtis was describing the adequacy of his own basketball knowledge.

We were standing on an asphalt court near Interstate 35 in East Austin, not the only place where I play pickup but the one that matters most. For three years, in temperatures ranging from 30 degrees to 100, we've been running half court threes and fours. We start early in the morning. We pa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Muck City, Football Serves As A Way Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5591</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5591</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:21:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: PAHOKEE — On the day he thought would change everything, Fred left home early while his siblings, nieces and nephews slept. He skipped breakfast, not even a Pop-Tart. His stomach was tight with excitement.

As he waited outside for his ride to school, a slate sky blanketed the black muck behind him. Ahead, the sun climbed above the clouds, casting a golden glow across the projects.

Dontrell "Fred" Johnson, 19, pulled the flip phone from his shorts: 7:28 a.m. Then he shouldered h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The women living in Chernobyl's toxic wasteland]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5587</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5587</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2015 10:47:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Holly Morris: Outside Hanna Zavorotnya's cottage in Chernobyl's dead zone, a hulking, severed sow's head bleeds into the snow, its gargantuan snout pointing to the sky in strange, smug defeat.

The frigid December air feels charged with excitement as Hanna, (above) 78, zips between the outlying sheds wielding the seven-inch silver blade that she used to bring the pig to its end.

'Today I command the parade,' she says, grinning as she passes a vat of steaming entrails to her sister-in-law at the]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Being Bad Luck Brian]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5585</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5585</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:01:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jessica Contrera: Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio — The phone call that made him famous came at 4 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2012. He was very much asleep.

Ring ring. Ring ring.

Actually, it vibrated, and because this is a story about the age of the Internet and the way technology can change our lives, it's important to get the sound right.

Vibrate vibrate. Vibrate vibrate.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Credibility]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5572</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5572</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 15:19:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben's tweet last week about his latest story about the Dozier School for Boys was something I needed to hear.

"This story is based on six years of reporting, the review of thousands of documents and interviews with more than 100 people."

It seems like all the talk about journalism lately has been the kind that crops up every few years, when someone makes something up, or makes someone up, nobody catches it, and it gets into print. Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Michael Finkel come to mind.

]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Murray's Problem]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5575</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5575</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2014 14:20:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson: Murray Blackmore stood at the lectern and tried to take in the dark conference room, the men and women in wheelchairs waiting for him to wrest a little hope from science. But in his preoccupied state, the room was a blur and hope a struggle.The 39-year-old researcher took a deep breath.

An assistant professor at Marquette University, Blackmore had looked forward to addressing the symposium on spinal cord research in Boston. Work filled his daylight hours; interrupted his dreams at]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Michael Kruse Redux]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5567</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5567</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2014 05:48:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[My dear friend Michael Kruse let it be known today that he's leaving the St. Pete Times to work for Politico. We're sad and happy, which exist on the same end of the emotional spectrum. So, I've been drinking, and reading Michael's old stories, and wanted to share a few of my favorites. Cool? (PS: I'm terribly sad. Don't go, Michael.)

Pin Boy's Job Is In The Pits: Shohola, Pa. — Across the Delaware at the Barryville bridge, behind a creaky door and through a smoky bar, up some dusty stairs and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why we stay in journalism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5562</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5562</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:29:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Mark: Anyone else beaten down by this season of newspaper layoffs? I think I've heard enough crap about "right-sizing" and dying industries to last a lifetime. I'll admit it. I need something to feel good about. Here's the best idea I could come up with: Let's start a conversation about reasons for hope — some great work, something innovative, something inspiring. "This makes me want to stay in journalism…"

I'll toss in two to start:

1. C.J. Chivers' expose of America's hidden casualties ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vote For Ben]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5560</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5560</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:48:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dear friends, if you can find it in your hearts, head over to Goodreads and cast a vote for 'Grandma Gatewood's Walk' in the readers' choice history and biography awards. I'm stoked to be among the nominees, and I'll be eternally grateful for your vote. United, we can beat Bill O'Reilly.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finding Marlowe]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5558</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5558</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:03:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Daniel Miller: It was hot and I was late for lunch. I was feeling mean, like I'd been left out in the sun too long.

We were meeting at a joint on La Brea, the kind of place where the booths have curtains you can pull shut if you need a little privacy. I slid across cool leather and got my first good look at Louise Ransil, a wisp of a redhead with high cheekbones and appraising eyes.

She sat with her hands folded on the worn table, a stack of old paperbacks next to her.

Ransil had a script she]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Deepest Dig]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5556</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5556</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 14:41:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brooke Jarvis: On the nights before a dive, Cindy Lee Van Dover likes to stand on the deck of her research ship, looking down into the water the way an astronaut might look up at the stars.

She's preparing herself to do an extraordinary thing: climb into a tiny bubble of light and air and sink to the bottom of the ocean, leaving the sparkling waters of the surface a mile and a half above her.

She makes the trip in a three-person submersible called Alvin, famous for discovering the underwater h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Flight Of The Glory Eagles]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5554</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5554</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 13:24:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: Earlier this fall, someone posted a question on reddit.com: Are there two fake schools operating on the periphery of college football? One was called the College of Faith, in Charlotte, N.C., and the other was called the University of Faith, here in St. Petersburg.

The websites looked hastily made. The teams were losing lopsided games. How could just-opened, online-only institutions be participating in intercollegiate athletics?

Sometimes it's hard to discern what's real when te]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Girl Falls For Her Teacher]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5552</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5552</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 13:19:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Weston Phippen: TAMPA — Addison Allen was 16, about to start her senior year at Tampa's Robinson High School, when the police called. They wanted to talk about the rumors.

Several students had said she was having sex with her European History teacher. One told an officer he'd seen text messages between the two and they'd gone on a date to see The Avengers at WestShore Plaza.

Impossible, thought Lynn Allen, Addison's mother, as the officer stood near their dining table that summer day in 2012. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Father's Scars]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5550</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5550</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 13:16:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie McCrummen: HE WAKES UP, and even before he opens his eyes, he can see his beautiful, delusional son.

Gus, Creigh Deeds thinks.

He lies in bed a few minutes more, trying to conjure specific images. Gus dancing. Gus playing the banjo. Gus with the puppies. Any images of Gus other than the final ones he has of his 24-year-old, mentally ill son attacking him and then walking away to kill himself, images that intrude on his days and nights along with the questions that he will begin askin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Will To Win]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5547</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5547</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2014 12:36:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From our pal down under, Konrad Marshall: The horizon here is a craggy ridge of open cut coal mine, the blue sky above and the Muswellbrook Race Club below. Magpies arc on the breeze this recent Monday morning, warbling at nothing in particular. A whipper-snipper whirs near garden bed of sweet peas. No roses.

This is where Robert Thompson will ride on the first Tuesday in November. He won't saddle up for the Melbourne Cup (as he did in 1986 on Reckless Tradition, finishing seventh to At Talaq).]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['You Are So Loved']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5545</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5545</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:27:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Maybe I'm missing out on some good ones, but I feel like I don't see a straight-up narrative news story that often lately? This one's from yesterday's shooting in my hometown.

Laura Eggertson:

Lawyer Barbara Winters was headed to a meeting Wednesday near her office at the Canada Revenue Agency when she passed the National War Memorial, stopping to snap a few pictures of the two honour guards standing soberly at attention.

Moments later, after passing by a Canada Post office at Elgin and Spark]]></description>
      <author>Eva Holland</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Personal essays replacing journalism?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5543</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5543</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:44:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I see the stories being shared by contacts in social media circles. It's rare to see a piece of journalism make the rounds – recent exception: CJ Chivers' NY Times piece on WMDs in Iraq – but there are times when the same essays show up over and over again.

And I've got a lot of journalists in my friends list. Some of them promote their own best work, others consciously share spectacular or interesting stuff they find. But outside that group, among]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Long Captivity of Michael Scott Moore]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5541</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5541</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 18 Oct 2014 19:52:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joshua Hammer:

Two years ago, when I began researching a piece for Outside about Moore's abduction, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which had given Moore a grant to report from Somalia, as well as the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, which had once employed Moore on its English-language website, asked us to stop pursuing the story. David Rohde, who had been in touch with Moore's mother, also requested that we respect the blackout. "The family and both news organizations think publicity a]]></description>
      <author>Eva Holland</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Stay With You]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5538</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5538</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 13:28:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Driving back from our annual Georgia get-together this week, Kruse started talking about interviewing our friend and just-retired TB Times colleague Jeff Klinkenberg for a what-I've-learned blog post. Somehow the following story from 1987 came up, and I asked Kruse to read it out loud in the car. He struggled through it. We both cried and sat in silence for a few long miles. What is it that makes certain stories unforgettable?

Jeff Klinkenberg St. Petersburg Times

I liked to climb to the roof ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA["Serial," the podcast]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5535</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5535</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2014 16:12:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Is anyone else listening to this? What do you think?

If you haven't heard of it, it's by the same crew behind This American Life. In it, Sarah Koenig recounts her reporting on a 1999 Baltimore homicide, bringing listeners along as she investigates what happened. Here's how they describe the first season:

On January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park. She'd been strangl]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[She Said 'No']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5532</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5532</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 18:06:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Writing fro Oklahoma State's student newspaper, Kassie McClung: Ashley sits at a wooden table and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with a sweaty palm. Her eyes shift nervously from the officer to the floor. OSU Police Officer Colt Chandler places his folded hands on the table and looks at her, waiting for her to say something.

Ashley wishes she was alone.

Chandler slides a document in front of her.

"All I need from you is a signature right there," he says in a video provided by OSU Commu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vape Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5530</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5530</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:57:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Sottile: Two men in flat-billed hats and baggy t-shirts stand back-to-back on a dimly-lit stage. On cue, they bend at the waist, draw their e-cigarettes to their mouths. Wisps of smoke gather around them. And then, slowly, they straighten upward as they inhale. Finally—like human fog machines—the men blow thick, billowing clouds of bright white vapor into the air.

These guys are called "cloud chasers," the name for e-cig hobbyists who pride themselves on blowing bigger, thicker, longer plu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shadow Of Doubt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5528</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5528</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:47:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Part I, from Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Bransetter: Prosecutor Tim Harris stood before jurors deciding Michelle Murphy's fate and told them police found someone's blood near her slain baby's body — blood he implied could be hers.

"Ladies and gentleman, beyond a reasonable doubt this woman killed her child," he told them.

What Harris didn't tell jurors is that as the trial started Nov. 14, 1995, he possessed a report from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation that said Murphy's blood type was]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['I'll Never Forget That Day']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5526</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5526</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:12:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Baxter Holmes: ON ALCATRAZ ISLAND, Calif. — John Hernan dug through memories from six decades back when he patrolled this rock as a correctional officer. And his 93-year-old blue eyes lit up at the mention of basketball.

"If I would've known that you were going to be here today," said Hernan, pointing at the reporter from Boston, "then I would have brought with me a photograph."

A heartbeat later, Hernan was presented with a black-and-white photo, dated 1956.

"That's it!" he said.

In early A]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gaining Independence, Finding A Bond]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5524</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5524</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2014 14:21:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A Sunday wedding that was months away, then weeks away, then days away, is now hours away, and there is so much still to do. The bride is panicking, and the groom is trying to calm her between anxious puffs of his cigarette.

Peter and Lori are on their own.

With time running out, they visit a salon to have Lori's reddish-brown hair coiled into ringlets. They pay $184 for a two-tier cake at Stop & Shop, where the checkout clerk in Lane 1 wishes them good luck.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Priviledge And Burden of Franklin McCallie]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5522</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5522</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2014 12:59:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joan Garrett McClane: They came from across the city. They came black and white to the towering brick house on Read Street.

Bankers, lawyers, judges, government workers, retirees, contractors, small-business owners — a constellation of the middle class.

Greeted with tiny coffee cups and wedges of chocolate cake, they stuck name tags to their shirts and blouses and exchanged polite hellos and handshakes until a bell rang and the crowd settled like dust into chairs and couches. Forty-five people]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5519</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5519</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2014 15:44:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm always a sucker for a Wallace Stevens homage, and this one, from SB Nation Longform, is special: a heartbreaking memoir about two best friends and the 1995 World Series.

Jeremy Collins:

Maddux was warming up to begin the second when Jason returned with two cups of coffee and bag of peanuts. He handed me a coffee.

"Let's get to work, Gregory," he said.

Jason used "Gregory" when Maddux was in trouble, which was rare that year (19-2, 1.63 ERA). But against Cleveland — Lofton, Albert Belle, ]]></description>
      <author>Eva Holland</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Into The Black]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5517</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5517</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2014 12:52:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charles Anderson in New Zealand: He awakes alone in the black at 12.03am. He does not look at the clock but he knows the time. He cannot see their faces but he knows who they are. The silhouettes surround him in silence. He is not afraid. He closes his eyes and remembers their story. It is his too.

He remembers the taste of salt, the smell of gasoline, the constant slap of water against his skin. He remembers what absolute loneliness feels like.

He will say he was ready to die. He will say his]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Expos Nation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5514</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5514</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2014 15:36:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It's been 10 years today since Montreal's beloved baseball team played its last game. Adam Gopnik attended every Expos home opener from the very first, in 1969, until he left for New York in 1981.

Gopnik:

I shut my eyes, and I think, God help me, that I can actually summon that opening-day lineup from forty-five years past. Let me try (no googling or post hoc emendation, I promise): first base, Bob Bailey; second base, Gary Sutherland; shortstop, Bobby Wine; third base, Coco Laboy; right field]]></description>
      <author>Eva Holland</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Do you find sentences fascinating?']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5511</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5511</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2014 15:24:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dinty W. Moore of Brevity Magazine, in The Review Review: I have a standard answer for folks who ask me, "Do you think I should be a writer?" Or "Do you think I can succeed as a writer?" My answer is, "Do you find sentences fascinating?" That's what it comes down to in the end. It is a good thing to live a rich life full of experiences, it is a good thing to have boundless curiosity about what drives people, it is a good thing to be disciplined, it is a good thing to see the world from interesti]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lost Orphans]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5509</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5509</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 17:59:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Scott Atkinson: FLINT, MI — Ermina Hagerman could not have known she was sending her children to die.

It was November 1885, and it was a desperate time. Her husband, Charles, had died just a month before. He had enlisted in the Civil War at 14, lying about his age, and had survived it all. But now at 34, he was gone, leaving Ermina — or Minnie, as she would be known all her life — alone with their four children. It would have been impossible in such a time for her not to think of how she should]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Please Welcome]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5506</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5506</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 17:59:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eva Holland has kindly accepted our invitation to guest curate the blog for a spell. I'm excited to brush aside the gangrey cobwebs and see what Eva has been reading. Stay tuned.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Harvest of Change: Virtual reality journalism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5503</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5503</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2014 20:13:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Des Moines Register has a new piece up. It looks like a video game, informs like journalism. They partnered with all kinds of people to put this thing together, combining photos, reporting, standard and 360-degree video and audio recording into a 3D rendering of an Iowa farm. The full package includes text, photos, video and the virtual reality environment. Learn more about how they did it and why.

Sharyn Jackson and Christopher Gannon (Part 1 of 5):

On the lawn of a ranch house abutting r]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get the little details]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5497</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5497</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 14 Sep 2014 03:29:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rob Rogers: By the end, they had just eight pieces of bread and a half tank of gas left.

It was Sunday night, Nov. 3, and Mark and Kristine Wathke, missing since Oct. 28, were sitting in their Kia Forte trapped in a foot of snow above 10,000 feet on the Beartooth Highway. They had come to the realization that probably they weren't going to be found, that this was likely the end.

It had dropped to 7 degrees below zero that night; Mark's water bottle, sitting in the back window, froze solid in a]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Three from Bloomberg]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5494</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5494</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 14:06:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our pal Tim Loh, who left papers in Connecticut for Bloomberg News, graciously passed along three enterprise stories from the outfit better known for its bread-and-butter business coverage. Take a look.

Alex Nussbaum and David Voreacos: Even in the underbelly of North Dakota's Bakken oilfields, the murder of Doug Carlile stands out, a tale of a Matt Damon look-alike felon, an Indian tribal leader and an accused hit man with a check list that included items like "practice with pistol."

There's ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Last Review Of A Local Yelp Legend]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5492</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5492</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2014 18:42:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lori Kurtzman: Paul F. once gave a gas station a five-star review for its hot dogs. He tore into a breakfast restaurant for charging him a quarter for jelly. He wrote of an enjoyable lunch at an Indian buffet, though he noted, "I don't have the foggiest idea of what I ate."

He reviewed hospitals and auto repair shops, tailors and bakers. He ate pan-seared foie gras ("If I had it to do over I'd have skipped this one") and fast-food dollar burgers ("And they weren't too bad"). He reviewed a lunch]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[With Interest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5490</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5490</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2014 12:34:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: He got the letter in July, at his mom's house in Seminole. She never would have believed it.

Not after everything that had happened.

Dakota Rockwell, 20, had applied to the University of South Florida as a long shot, hoping — but never dreaming — he would be accepted.

Then the admissions office emailed. He could start in August, in the business school.

All summer, he sweated cleaning pools, painting condos, hacking vines off fences. He hauled boats at the marina, moved furnit]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Witness]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5472</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5472</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Aug 2014 13:54:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pamela Colloff: Early one morning in April, Michelle Lyons pulled up outside her daughter's elementary school in Huntsville, seventy miles north of Houston. Set deep in the Piney Woods, Huntsville—which is home to no fewer than five prisons—is a company town whose primary industry is confinement. Many parents who were dropping their children off at school that day worked for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Huntsville's largest employer. Michelle, who sat behind the wheel of her blue Ch]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Right Thing To Do Vs. The State Of Florida]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5470</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5470</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2014 19:35:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: The Tallahassee medical examiner unzipped the body bag. Here was an 18-year-old, muscular, black male. Here was an 18-year-old, muscular, black male with white sneakers and gray boxers and gold Florida State shorts. Here was an 18-year-old, muscular, black male with white sneakers and gray boxers and gold Florida State shorts and a tube up his nose and a tube down his throat and IV needles in his arm and his neck and automated external defibrillator pads still stuck to his chest. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Moral Dilemmas Of Narrative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5466</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5466</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Aug 2014 17:55:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bill Marvel's introduction from the 2014 edition of Ten Spurs.

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."—Janet Malcolm

So which is it? Are we stupid? Or too full of ourselves?

In the years since it kicked off The Journalist and the Murderer, her 1990 examination of the fraught relationship between writer Joe McGinniss and convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, Janet Malcolm's now-infamous quote has go]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Whiff Of City Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5464</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5464</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2014 15:08:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: Justin Green stands on the Anacostia Metro platform, ready to work. A belt stretches across his chest, holding 33 tiny bottles filled with colorful liquids. On his back hangs a leopard-print bookbag, carrying 50 additional pounds of his product.

The train is approaching. Green speaks in a gravelly voice.

"Every businessman has different style," he says. "Some are loud people who want to be seen. Some are more subdued, you know what I mean? My style?"

The train doors open.

"Pe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Why Do You Want To Kill This Boy?']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5462</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5462</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2014 13:55:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alexandra Zavis: BOSSEMPTELE, Central African Republic — The militia fighters were hunting for Muslims when they found the father and son at their home in this mud-brick town. They shot the man, then turned their guns on the 10-year-old boy.

A willowy figure in a black robe rushed up. On his chest was a large red cross.

"You can't be so inhuman," Father Patrick Nainangue pleaded. "Why do you want to kill this boy?"

The boy would soon be a man, they answered, and he would take up arms against ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Little Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5458</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5458</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2014 14:20:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jessica Lipscomb: His first kiss happened long after sunset, illuminated by headlights and perfumed by exhaust fumes on a swath of land in Punta Gorda known as the Redneck Yacht Club. Ethan Arbelo had not yet turned 12; the blonde was 26.

The Redneck Yacht Club was a compromise of sorts. There's an adage that if you want a dog, first ask for a pony, and following suit, Ethan, 11, had asked his mother if he could have a stripper for his birthday.

She thought it over for a while, wondering if sh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[From Schoolhouse, To Symbol Of Servitude, To Dust]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5456</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5456</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 13:12:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: ATALISSA, Iowa — The old schoolhouse on the hill had announced the farm town of Atalissa to the Iowa flatness for more than a century. But a couple of weeks ago, the prehistoric claw of a John Deere excavator took its first swipe, and soon the building existed only in the landscape of memory.

It was just bricks and mortar in the heartland, and yet also a rare landmark of conflicted emotions. In its final years, the schoolhouse had devolved into a squalid dormitory for dozens of Texas]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Butte, You Get Back Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5454</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5454</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2014 19:12:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Sottile: When the kid backed up to the end of the street, a thousand pairs of eyes looked his way. Straddling his bike — a red, white and blue machine covered in stars and stripes and his name, Levi Renz — he kick-started the engine, let the machine cough to life and hunched forward as he rode its chainsaw buzz toward the ramp.

When Renz hit it for the first time, he flew up and up and up, higher than the light posts, higher than the flat roof of the auto shop, higher than he had ever flow]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Case, And A Search For Justice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5451</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5451</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:40:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ashley Luthern: After only four months as a homicide detective, Rose Galindo thought she had the case.

Every detective has at least one.

The case that eats away at you, haunts you. A victim you never forget.

The April 7 shift-change briefing at the Milwaukee Police Administration Building outlined the basics: A woman was driving. She was shot. No suspects.

And, most likely, she wasn't the intended target.

A half-second earlier or later, an alternate route, any other twist of fate and Fredri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pushing The Limits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5449</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5449</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:15:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charlie Scudder: Flies landed on the beast's back as the cowboy got ready for his ride. He pulled a flank strap around the bull's backside and a bull rope with a leather handle around the animal's shoulders, letting it sit loose. He still had time before they would meet again in the chute facing the arena at the Mesquite ProRodeo Series.

It's the most dangerous 8 seconds in sports, but on this recent evening in June, McKennon Wimberly was smiling. He used to shadowbox behind the chutes to get m]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shipped Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5446</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5446</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 20:25:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tony Rehagen: On any given workday, the stretch of Georgia 9 that cuts north-south through Roswell is a four-lane wall of cars. Almost as old as the city itself, the thoroughfare was once little more than a dirt wagon path called the Atlanta Road, connecting this mill town to the burgeoning railroad hub some twenty miles south.

The road also serves as a dividing line. To its west sits the tree-canopied town square, its centerpiece an obelisk water fountain bearing the names of Roswell's foundin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Results]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5444</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5444</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 19:25:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congrats, one and all. From The Mayborn:

DENTON (UNT), Texas — For the second year in a row, an article in The Washington Post by reporter Eli Saslow received the first place award in the Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest sponsored by the University of North Texas' Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

Saslow's "Into the Lonely Quiet," published in June 2013, followed the family of a 7-year-old victim of the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Con]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[When Hope Needs Hope]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5442</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5442</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 14:52:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joan Garrett McClane: Before the cancer, there was Christmastime.

There was convincing her curly-headed 7-year-old son for one more year that Santa Claus existed. There was Amazon shopping for her husband, Terry Cannon, and hopes of sledding on the pillowy white hills if it snowed.

And there was her work, her hospice, the hospice she dreamed to open and almost didn't. There was the nice new sign outside her office building on Rossville Avenue and the excited staff. There was the sense that at ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Newsstand]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5440</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5440</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Jul 2014 15:53:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Marisa Gerber: A red truck pulls into an empty parking lot off Fairfax Avenue just before 6 a.m. René Portillo gets out in a rush and heads to a blue shoe box of a building wearing a message in faded paint: "THE NEW YORK TIMES Expect The World." To the right, a California Lottery banner proclaims: "Millionaire made here."

Portillo unbolts two padlocks and flicks on the lights. He rips the plastic tether on a stack of newspapers and begins arranging them on a wire rack. Then he hears footsteps.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Can I Hug You Again?']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5438</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5438</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Jul 2014 15:24:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lori Kurtzman: He remembers the blond hair, the bobbing head, the lifeless body they pulled from the chilly water that evening. Her dad cried from the banks of the Olentangy River: Save my child. Save my child.

And so Gary Wing worked and worked, desperate to get a breath out of that little blond girl. His partner thought it was too late. Wing, then a Sharon Township firefighter, said he wasn't going to stop until the medics arrived.

"She was just as limp as a rag doll," he said.

Wing paused.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Ride]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5434</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5434</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2014 18:59:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Browning: This woman in ill-fitting, soiled clothes sat beside a shuttered gas station in front of Leigh Mall. I would pass by in the middle of the day and see her. Usually her head was down and she was there a lot. This went on for weeks. We all have places to go.

On Tuesday she was there again, and I stopped and walked over to find her chin against her chest and her eyes closed. In her lap was a notebook with some words jotted down. By the way it sat there, it seemed like she had fall]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why We Play]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5432</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5432</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2014 18:39:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eva Holland: I can still hear the quick crunch of his vertebrae cracking. That's the meddling of hindsight, of course — he was too far away, out in the middle of the night-dark field, and there were too many people around me and around him: the fans heckling, the grunts and dull thud of 16 men crashing together in the scrum, then an ominous silence. People breathing hard, whispering, yelling for help.

But whatever I heard or didn't hear, whatever tricks memory has since played, I knew as soon a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Valley Of Fire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5430</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5430</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2014 14:54:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matthew Teague (thanks, Mark): Wildland fire chief Darrell Willis tore along the highway and turned on his truck's headlights to cut the smoke. Ash and embers rained down around him.

Over the past two days, a small mountain fire had come to life, a monstrous life. He'd just learned that his team of crack firefighters had deployed their emergency shelters, thin blankets of aluminum and silica they carried as a last refuge.

Now he was careening toward the south end of the fire, down where they w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Alone In Life, Unclaimed In Death]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5428</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5428</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2014 14:23:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Louis Hansen (thanks, JHD): NORFOLK

Two visitors stretched the security chain on the motel door and peered through the crack. Inside, a man lay motionless on the floor.

Stay back, the motel manager told Andrea Simmons.

Police and paramedics arrived and told Simmons what she already knew: Stanley Hucks was dead.

Simmons owned Billy's Pizza in Ocean View. Hucks was a deliveryman, soft-spoken but punctual, grumpy with flashes of warmth.

He rarely missed a shift, made great sauce and sliced thr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Not One More]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5426</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5426</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2014 13:53:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Deanna Pan: JUNE 20, 1994 — This is how it all ends: Four gunshots as steady as a heartbeat.

Pop, pop, pop, pop.

The third hits Dean Mellberg in his left shoulder, just a superficial wound. The fourth strikes square between his eyes. The blast sends his body soaring, feet splayed, straight into the air, like a stuntman's in a movie. He spins counterclockwise and lands on his back in the grass, his left hand still gripping the stock of his rifle.

Seventy yards away, Senior Airman Andy Brown lo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Announcement: Mayborn For Free]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5423</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5423</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 18:51:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[To help identify and train up-and-coming narrative writers under the age of 40, George Getschow and two of the Mayborn's literary agents, David Patterson and Jim Hornfischer, have created three scholarships covering conference registration, the contest fee and up to three nights at the DFW Lakes Hilton Hotel and Convention Center. Professional writers working for newspapers, magazines, alt-weeklies, and other digital and print publishers are eligible. So are undergraduate and graduate students e]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Thousand Two Hundred And Fifty-Eight Pounds Of Sons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5421</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5421</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 14:45:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: Gordy Gronkowski, the patriarch of those very same Gronkowskis, America's First Family of Smashmouth Football, the man who somehow parlayed five orgasms into 1,258 pounds of relentless physical force—a first baseman, two tight ends, and two fullbacks—the first father in twenty years to see three of his sons play during a single NFL season, and the first father in nearly thirty years with an even-money chance to see a fourth, might have gone after it a little hard last night.

He spe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[14]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5419</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5419</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2014 18:38:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Krista Ramsey and Cara Owsley: Malik Nu'qman says the three things he values most in life are his brothers, his mother and his bike.

His family, in part because they're the buffer between him and the harsher realities of his Avondale neighborhood. His bike, because it's his means to get around it.

At 14, Malik feels a constant tension between wanting to venture into his community and the fear he'll be jumped or shot if he strays too far. It's not unfounded. This spring, Jashawn Martin and Tyan]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Freelance Work!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5416</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5416</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Jun 2014 14:47:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Spirit magazine is on the hunt for hungry young writers (old and middle-aged also welcome) to breathe some life into our feature well. Think you've got the chops and ambition to craft a great narrative? We're eager to cultivate new talent. (Also, if you're like Ben and have a great new book out, we can get your byline in front of 3 million captive readers.) Either way, we're committed to publishing the kind of storytelling celebrated here at Gangrey. Our writer's guidelines are below. Introduce ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Lucky Few]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5414</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5414</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2014 17:03:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Hixenbaugh: A 91-year-old man lifts off in a commercial airliner bound for France and for a moment can imagine himself in the cabin of a Douglas C-47, preparing to leap into moonlit darkness.

Norwood Thomas was just a boy, really, the first time he arrived in Normandy. Now he is returning for the last time, once again mindful of his own mortality.

More than 100,000 Americans were there at the start of the campaign to retake Europe from Hitler. Only a few hundred are expected to return thi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fire On The Mountain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5405</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5405</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 18:09:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brian Mockenhaupt (thanks, Dan Stockman): Near the end of June, the weather patterns over Arizona shift. Wet air from Mexico flows in from the south, replacing the dry air that pushes in from the southwest during the spring. This is the summer monsoon, from the Arabic word mausim, for season: a shift in the wind. Thunderstorms gather along the Mogollon Rim, a 200-mile escarpment that stretches across central Arizona at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. As they build, the storms suck in ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Auto Biography]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5400</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5400</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2014 18:05:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We're pleased as punch to present an excerpt from the first chapter of Earl Swift's latest, AUTO BIOGRAPHY: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead and 57 Years of the American Dream.

Buy yours here.

Behold Tommy Arney: six-one, two-forty, biceps big as most men's thighs and displayed to maximum effect in the black wifebeater that is his warm-weather fashion essential. Thick neck. Goatee. Hair trimmed tight on the sides and to a broom-like inch on top, having grown too thin to facilitate the lush m]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Did North Korea Kidnap An American Hiker?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5397</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5397</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 May 2014 16:28:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Vogel: In the Northern reaches of China's Yunnan province, just before the rolling hills and deep, river-carved ravines of the Yungui Plateau give way to cascading sheets of limestone and spectacular karst, two mountains—Jade Dragon and Haba Snow—jut three and a half vertical miles into the sky. Separated only by the Jinsha River, a 100-foot-wide whitewater tributary of the Yangtze, these scabrous peaks form one of the world's deepest river canyons: Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Etched into the st]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Spartan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5395</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5395</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 May 2014 16:26:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan England: On an early April morning in 2014, jolts of heavy metal jarred the Spartan Race Gravel Pit north of Las Vegas, a boneyard of rock, grit and wind. As the first few bankers, teachers and marketing professionals planning to hurt themselves stumbled through the gate, the music didn't seem to fit the soft morning light. It glowed sherbet orange against the gray, rocky ground that crunched under Nikes and Reeboks.

Then again, the Spartans, as the Race likes to call them, were facing 9 mi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Too Many]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5392</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5392</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2014 15:00:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matt Sedensky: LOS ANGELES — Jay Westbrook's cowboy boot is planted firmly on the gas pedal of his shiny black pickup. Everywhere he turns, a memory flashes.

In Van Nuys, it is the lifeless little girl he held at Valley Presbyterian Hospital after she was found in the bottom of a hot tub. Near Beverly Hills, outside a Wilshire Boulevard high-rise, it is the old woman in a seven-figure condo whose misery he tried to soothe. On Skid Row, it is the 29-year-old crack addict he brought morphine to n]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Twilight Of An Enforcer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5390</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5390</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2014 14:57:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Koczwara: Jimmy Bonneau was 17 years old when he threw his first punch. It was his first fight and it was with a teammate on the ice. It was the biggest beating he's ever handed out. It wouldn't be his last.

"It was all me. He didn't land a punch," says the 6' 3, 225-lb. French-Canadian. "I was nervous. I was shaking." The words sound soft coming out of his mouth, his English still a bit awkward and spoken with a distinctly Quebecois accent. "I wasn't overly thinking. I knew what I had to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Filed under the "I want to know more" tab]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5385</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5385</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2014 14:36:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Police are trying to determine who shot a calf, took the meat and left the carcass behind. The Janesville Gazette reported that the calf, weighing about 400 pounds, was shot with a small-caliber bullet and then slaughtered between noon Saturday and when it was found at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday. The calf's mother was found bellowing near its offspring in a pasture.

And, because Google is kind of amazing, there's also this 60-year-old gem, also from the Janesville Gazette:

CALF'S STOMACH YIELDS $8]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tales In The Telling]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5382</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5382</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2014 14:53:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Did you read Roy Peter Clark in The Chronicle of Higher Education? The stories we read live on within us, shaping our psyches. Click.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[22 1/2 Years On Death Row]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5378</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5378</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2014 14:19:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brian Haas: CROSSVILLE, Tenn. — Paul Gregory House says "Oh, well" a lot.

His mother says it's a quirk of his damaged brain. A sort of sigh, a mental reset, when his thoughts don't crystallize quickly enough.

He says it all the time, though — not least when contemplating a life that took him from death row in 1986, days away from electrocution at one point, to his mother's modest ranch home in Crossville, where she now feeds him and helps him go to the bathroom and get in and out of bed.

The ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[When I see a wrong, I right the wrong.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5375</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5375</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2014 14:34:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery, on a little thing that became a big thing.

Janet Feldman did not need four dozen rotisserie chickens. Who among us does?

But the 57-year-old Davie woman who makes outfits for strippers is not someone who minds her own business when she discovers a wrong. If society's moral fabric is twisted, she irons it smooth.

"When I see a wrong," she says, "I right the wrong."]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Final Haul]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5371</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5371</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2014 15:12:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this, from Lisa Falkenberg, part of her Pulitzer finalist entry in commentary: Just after 7 a.m., my father is sitting in the dining room, already dressed in his blue-collared uniform shirt and navy pants. He's bending over to lace his shoe. I ask him how it feels to get ready for work for the last time.

"Anxiety," he says.

"He wouldn't sleep last night," my mother hollers from the kitchen, where she's busy at her daily routine of packing him enough sandwiches, snacks and drinks to keep h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Masshole In Full]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5369</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5369</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2014 14:59:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Not sure how this eluded me so long, but read up.

Billy Baker: The first time I saw Robbie Concannon's penis was in the early '90s at a party on the top floor of a triple-decker in Southie.

It was one of those kill-me-it's-so-hot summer nights, and you can plug in only so many air conditioners before the fuse blows and the house goes dark. When the lights came back on, I noticed the room wasn't as bright as before; the lamp next to me had a pair of shorts covering it. Before I had time to thin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Music of Narrative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5366</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5366</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Apr 2014 17:01:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Click.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Awards]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5363</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5363</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Apr 2014 17:37:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So happy to see so many FOGs winning and being nominated for Pulitzers. Congrats, one and all.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Your Best Stuff]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5361</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5361</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 15:10:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mailbag:

The 2013 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest is accepting entries. The deadline is May 1.

The contest, co-sponsored by the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and The Dallas Morning News, honors exemplary narrative writing and encourages narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across the United States.

All entries must have been published in daily newspapers or on the newspapers' websites between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2013 and may include narratives that are pa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Toilets, Plumbed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5359</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5359</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 12:54:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Washington Post April 08, 1996

Toilets, Plumbed By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer

Toilets will never be great art, not even the expensive ones that look like art modern telephones, or the oddly streamlined ones that look as if someone were about to set a world's land speed record with them, or the bluff and British "Deluge" made by Doulton a century ago, with a rectitude that reminds one of the Titanic.

Beautiful maybe, sequestered as they are in the pastoral gloom of bathrooms,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Running The River]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5356</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5356</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2014 17:24:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out the first chapter of Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine, from the fine Texas writer Wes Ferguson: A man shot at us our first day on the river. Of course he did. You expect that sort of thing to happen on the Sabine.

I met Jacob at his father's house early that morning. He hitched the boat to his truck, and we drove south and east into the border country where Texas blends into the forests and swamps of Louisiana. Jacob's father, Henry, rode shotgun. You could tell he was nervous]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[HE CHASED A FLYING SAUCER, NOW HIS LIFE IS SHATTERED]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5354</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5354</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2014 15:54:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sunday, October 9, 1966

by John De Groot

RAVENNA (AP)–In his world of loneliness and twisted nightmares, Dale Spaur wonders if the nightmare will ever end.

It began six months ago with "Seven Steps to Hell" and ended with a flying saucer named Floyd.

In the predawn hours of a gentle April morning, Portage County Sheriff's Deputy Spaur chased a flying saucer 86 miles.

NOW THE STRANGE craft is chasing him. And he is hiding from it, a bearded stranger peering past t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Long Road To New Bethany And Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5351</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5351</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2014 13:13:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rebecca Catalanello and Kathleen Flynn: She hobbled down the jetway carrying a suitcase, a pillow, a teddy bear for good luck.

At the plane's entrance she stopped, paralyzed by dread and memories: blood, Pine Sol, broken glass, shame, God – and those barbed wire fences. God, those fences. She hugged the stuffed animal.

What if they say it was my fault? Will they call me a whore? What if I die?

Someone in the line behind her asked, "Is she OK?"

For 25 years, Jennifer Halter, 39, had been livi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Haverford Hoops!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5348</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5348</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2014 13:35:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Ballard: "You want a story?" my brother said.

"You should write about the Streak."

This was last year, over a beer. My brother is 41 now, a successful doctor with two kids. And here he was, still talking about his Division III college basketball team.

You know those stories about a wise coach who inspires a group of plucky overachievers to overcome the odds and win state, or whatever?

This is not one of those stories.

In the beginning—before the run at the record, the national media a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[To Live And Die In Chiraq]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5343</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5343</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:37:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ethan Brown in Playboy (NSFW, probably): When Lil Reese tells you to get out of the car, you exit the vehicle as fast as you can.

The tension began to boil at breakfast when Brandon, a paunchy white kid and perennial sidekick to Chicago's hip-hop elite, promised Reese a free necklace from a jeweler friend in Los Angeles who bills himself as "Your Rapper's Favorite Jeweler." Now, in the backseat of a Chevy Malibu parked on Chicago's South Side, Brandon's generosity has been turned on its head by]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vapefest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5340</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5340</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 16:30:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: The scent on the breeze is — what? Guava, with a hint of lion's mane? Or maybe a cocktail of vanilla and cherry menthol and jungle juice. Past the hotel lobby, the haze thickens. Smells sharpen, then muddle, then sharpen again. It's smoky, except it's not, because it is vapor that's being expelled in great white plumes in the ballroom, which is clogged with vapers, because this is Vapefest. An announcement is being made.

"Meet Beefcake the Mighty," says a young vaper in a teal polo shi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Death Of A Racehorse And Captain Waskow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5337</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5337</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 13:12:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Fascinating stuff from Paul Coover:

Hey Ben, I was recently reading through some old Ernie Pyle stories because A) I graduated from a journalism school that bears his name on its main building, and was embarrassed about not having read more of his work and B) I want to continue to try to understand the best writing about the military for my current job. I came across something I think is pretty interesting. I know "Death of a Racehorse," by W.C. Heinz, is a much-loved piece of sportswriting amo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Point]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5335</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5335</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 12:56:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read.

For 1/1/00, I assigned Henry Allen to summarize the millennium in poetry. Here's the brilliant result. http://t.co/rN4etlUwxj

— Gene Weingarten (@geneweingarten) March 19, 2014]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tales From Malaysia Airlines Flight 370]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5331</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5331</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 12:54:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Life's Small Moments Loom Large. From the WSJ (thanks TLoh): As night fell last Friday in Kuala Lumpur, businessman Philip Wood hurried to gather his bags for a trip to Beijing. He had confused the dates, but his girlfriend in China texted him to make sure he got on the plane.

A group of Chinese artists capped off their exhibition at a local cultural center in Malaysia's capital city with a day of sightseeing and a banquet lunch of duck soup, fried shrimp and pork in brown sauce.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5328</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5328</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 17:39:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Mayborn and the Dallas Morning News:

In an effort to foster narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across America, The Dallas Morning News is sponsoring the second annual writing contest conducted by the Mayborn Conference: Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest.

We're inviting submissions of extraordinary long-form narrative nonfiction previously published in a daily U.S. newspaper or a U.S. newspaper website. Writers and editors can submit one to five narratives, inc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Puddles]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5326</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5326</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 19:15:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin Heckert: I heard that the clown would never say a word. That he barely ever spoke, even to friends. That he chose to communicate through song, and all of his songs were sad. He was a really sad clown, sadder than all the others, and whenever he had something to say, it could only be cast through the baritone of his beautiful voice. Singing a cover of Lorde's "Royals" had made him a famous clown, but he was still a shy clown, awkward and often timid in his surroundings. His reputation foll]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Star-crossed Love in Afghanistan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5323</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5323</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 16:51:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rod Norland (thanks, Mark): BAMIAN, Afghanistan — She is his Juliet and he is her Romeo, and her family has threatened to kill them both.

Zakia is 18 and Mohammad Ali is 21, both the children of farmers in this remote mountain province. If they could manage to get together, they would make a striking couple.

She dresses colorfully, a pink head scarf with her orange sweater, and collapses into giggles talking about him. He is a bit of a dandy, with a mop of upswept black hair, a white silk scar]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The 'Boys' In The Bunkhouse]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5321</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5321</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 16:13:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: WATERLOO, Iowa — A man stands at a bus stop. He wears bluejeans, cowboy boots, and a name tag pinned like a badge to his red shirt. It says: Clayton Berg, dishwasher, county sheriff's office. He is 58, with a laborer's solid build, a preference to be called Gene and a whisper-white scar on his right wrist. His backpack contains a jelly sandwich, a Cherry Coke and a comforting pastry treat called a Duchess Honey Bun.

The Route 1 bus receives him, then resumes its herky-jerky journey t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Place]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5314</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5314</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2014 13:39:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This fun thing – The Tom Waits Map – making the rounds among my friends got me thinking about place. In most of the daily stories I write, I don't pay much attention to where something is happening.

Actions, plot, dialogue, quotes, characters, those things are a given. I watch for them. But place? I don't look for it every day.

Then I read things like Neil Swidey's "Trapped Under the Sea"

Imagine you are venturing into a tunnel that's been bored into the bedrock underneath the ocean and that ]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[My 13-Year Effort to Save a Boy in Haiti]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5308</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5308</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Feb 2014 13:44:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jonah Ogles: The cinder-block school has no windows and no doors, just a string of incandescent lightbulbs hanging down the center of the ceiling like the spine of a great whale. It's hot and humid, and the room throbs with the voices of 200 Haitians who have paused from fishing, gardening, or painting the sides of handmade wooden sailboats to come see the special visitor who has traveled 1,500 miles to Île de la Tortue, an island where the hills are green and lush and the sand is sugar white an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Props]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5305</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5305</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2014 19:38:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congrats to Mark Johnson and the I-team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for winning the 2014 Selden Ring Award for investigative journalism.

Read the series: Deadly Delays.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trapped Under The Sea]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5303</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5303</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2014 17:53:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our friend Neil Swidey's book is out today. The praise has been great.

Order yours.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Angelo B. Henderson]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5301</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5301</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:54:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Angelo B. Henderson, a Detroit journalist and radio talk show host, died Saturday. He won a Pulitzer in 1999, when he was at the Wall Street Journal, in the feature writing category for his portrait of a druggist driven to violence by encounters with armed robbers.

Read it here (thanks, Mark): DETROIT — "Get on the ground," a man holding a gun screamed. "I'll blow your heads off if you move."

Dennis Grehl and a co-worker complied. Dreamlike, he found himself lying face down on a cold, gritty b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Right Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5298</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5298</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 14:58:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: TRINITY — In the passenger seat of his mom's SUV, Austin Erickson sits silently, clutching his wallet, watching as his subdivision slides by.

"So Publix?" asks his mom, turning onto the highway. "Target?"

Austin, who is 11, doesn't look at her. "The Hallmark store," he says. "This has to be special."

Normally, Austin hates going to the Hallmark store, waiting for his mom and older sisters to sift through Vera Bradley bags while surrounded by all the candles that are supposed t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Abusive Truth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5295</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5295</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 14:57:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lewisville (Texas) high-schooler Katelyn Hoagland: The dreams started in eighth grade, the year when I sang in the choir and performed in theater.

And the year when Logan, the I'm-better-than-everyone-because-I-can-act drama geek, tore me apart with his words daily.

The year when my mom's lupus hit hard.

They always start the same. We're in the bathroom. Someone I love (my mother, my grandmother, my sister) slides their hand up my small thigh.

I ask them to stop.

They laugh.

I cry.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['My Son Died For $20']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5292</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5292</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2014 15:01:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John H. Tucker (thanks, Barry): Here is the friend. Arms cradling the boy he has known since fifth grade. The boy, 17, is on the ground, foaming at the mouth. Moaning, twitching, tongue bleeding—bitten from the convulsions.

"Pull through!" shouts the friend, holding Timmy Castaneda in his lap. "Timmy, pull through!"

"Turn him on his side," instructs the 911 dispatcher.

"Come on, help me get him on his side!"

It's around 1 a.m. on Oct. 6, 2012. Several teenagers have been hanging out deep in ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letter To The Editor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5290</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5290</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Feb 2014 17:07:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few well-distilled thoughts from our colleague Russ Rymer:

It would be encouraging to think, as Jonathan Mahler contends in "When 'Long-Form' Is Bad Form" (Op-Ed, Jan. 25), that long-form writing is a "cult" so pervasive as to be the "journalistic environment we're living in." He suggests that it is so powerful that it may have led to a woman's death.

However, Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the closeted transgender woman supposedly victimized by bad narrative practice, could as easily have been houn]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Next Generation Of Snake Handlers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5288</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5288</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 20:38:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Hardy: LAFOLLETTE, Tenn. — This place doesn't look like much.

The brick exterior is falling away. The homemade sign standing by the dead-end gravel road is written in crooked stencil lettering.

"Tabernacle Church of God. Pastor Andrew Hamblin. Friday 7:30. Sunday 1:00."

But there is no meekness inside this windowless, concrete box of a church. Sound explodes and escalates, a chaotic jumble of tambourines, electric guitar and humming.

At times the volume is so loud it rattles the founda]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He Lost It All]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5285</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5285</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 17:10:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Todd C. Frankel (Thanks, Mark): CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO.

His ex-wife gave him $25 for gas. She didn't need to. But she did. Somehow he had to get to court tomorrow. His borrowed Jeep was out of gas. And as was often the case these days, Scott Moyers was out of money and long ago out of options. So his ex-wife agreed to help. She didn't want any more missed hearings. No more arrests. No more excuses. He was going to go before that judge and take some measure of responsibility for all that he'd done.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Conversations: Pete Dexter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5282</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5282</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 16:59:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't miss this Bronx Banter interview with the great Pete Dexter: (Thanks to Oliver.)

Bronx Banter: What kind of reporter were you when you began?

Pete Dexter: I didn't have a specialty or anything. I was kind of looked on as a guy who could write. I was a careful writer and a careless reporter. Reporting is a talent but it's also just a matter of rolling up your sleeves. A guy like Bob Woodward didn't get where he is by being charming or having a way with people I don't think. He just did it]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tony Dorsett Is Losing His Mind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5279</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5279</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Feb 2014 15:25:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zac Crain:

It was January 3, 1983, the last day of the NFL's strike-shortened season, and Tony Dorsett's Dallas Cowboys were losing to the Minnesota Vikings on Monday Night Football. A fumbled punt had the Cowboys trapped deep in their own territory, the ball a few inches outside the end zone.

And the Cowboys were out-manned. Fullback Ron Springs didn't hear what play they were going to run, so he was still on the sideline, leaving only 10 Cowboys on the field and Dorsett all alone in the back]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Here Come The Bears]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5277</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5277</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Feb 2014 14:38:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: Gated, guarded Wingfield North, outside Orlando in Longwood, is a collection of about a hundred houses with pillars and pools and new BMWs parked out front. Golden evening light gleams through the branches of regal oaks draped with Spanish moss. One of the selling points is its proximity to lush woods, coupled with a stated commitment to the preservation of such wild, natural beauty. Another selling point: privacy. It's set up to keep out — nuisances and intrusions, the uninvited,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Demons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5273</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5273</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2014 17:50:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Marisa Kwiatkowski: A woman and three children who claimed to be possessed by demons. A 9-year-old boy walking backward up a wall in the presence of a family case manager and hospital nurse.

Gary police Capt. Charles Austin said it was the strangest story he had ever heard.

Austin, a 36-year veteran of the Gary Police Department, said he initially thought Indianapolis resident Latoya Ammons and her family concocted an elaborate tale as a way to make money. But after several visits to their hom]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sinners In The Hands]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5269</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5269</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jan 2014 15:57:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sonia Smith: Andy and Patty Grove never planned to settle outside of Texas. Their roots in the state reach back many generations. Patty's ancestors came to Texas on a wagon train from Tennessee in the 1830's (an elementary school in Houston is named for her great-grandfather); Andy's father owned a tract of land that is now part of the posh Houston neighborhood of Hedwig Village. The two grew up a mere five miles away from each other in West Houston, where they attended Stratford and Memorial, r]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Cult Of Long-Form]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5266</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5266</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:54:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Huh?

It wasn't so many years ago that people assumed the Internet would make long magazine-style stories obsolete. Paradoxically, it now seems to have revived this once threatened medium. Magazines may be disappearing, but that's O.K.; we still have "long-form." What started as a Twitter signifier (#longreads or #longform), a way to get the attention of people who might be looking for a substantive read, has morphed into its own genre. In the process, a long magazine story went from being one p]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lawman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5263</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5263</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Jan 2014 15:25:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charles Bethea: "What's happenin', my friend?"

Vernon Keenan is saying hello to a large, shy-looking man named John Gibson in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's main elevator, as the doors open and Keenan steps in. The top of his balding head reaches just past Gibson's shoulders.

"I'm fine, sir. How are you?"

"You been behaving yourself?" The doors close.

"Yessir."

"This man here is in an all-women's unit," Keenan says to the rest of the elevator's occupants. Then, turning back to Gibson]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dr. V's Magical Putter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5260</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5260</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 18 Jan 2014 17:15:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So. Caleb Hannan: Strange stories can find you at strange times. Like when you're battling insomnia and looking for tips on your short game.

It was well past midnight sometime last spring and I was still awake despite my best efforts. I hadn't asked for those few extra hours of bleary consciousness, but I did try to do something useful with them.

I play golf. Sometimes poorly, sometimes less so. Like all golfers, I spend far too much time thinking of ways to play less poorly more often. That w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All That Survives Is A 2,283-Word Prologue]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5257</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5257</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2014 14:24:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You have to read S.L. Price on Richard Ben Cramer's unfinished work. It'll get you fired up.

Time now to speak of writers. We are, most of us, a particularly cramped breed, gunning for little victories: the newest wrinkle, the most telling detail, the juiciest quote, the phrase or paragraph or — please, God — page that approaches the song in our grasping, caffeine-riddled minds. Writers are selfish. Writers judge. Writers trust words more than people. There's a reason writer and neurotic so oft]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Gutbucket King]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5253</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5253</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 15:19:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Easily worth your $3.99.

Barry Yeoman: He stood at the kitchen window waiting. He had memorized everything around him: the pine walls, bare of wallpaper or even paint; the wardrobe where his widowed mother kept her churn for making buttermilk; the stove fueled by the firewood he cut each morning; the two coolers, one for dairy and the other for cakes and pies. He had branded them into his memory, these artifacts of a life that, after today, would no longer be his.

His mother was working in tow]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lincoln Heights]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5251</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5251</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 15:17:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: It only took a phone call in 2005 to persuade then-D.C. Council member Vincent C. Gray to push for the inclusion of the Lincoln Heights housing project and the surrounding area in his home district as part of the city's bold new urban renewal strategy. Nothing has been that easy since.

By now, the 440 low-income families that lived in Lincoln Heights should have moved into new replacement housing in the neighborhood. But only 32 families have been placed.

By now, almost all of ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Addiction: A Death In The Cold]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5248</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5248</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 14:13:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Mark Johnson: Last night, I wound up reading this 18-year-old Washington Post Story about the death of George McGovern's daughter. It's terrific. It got me trying to think whether I've read a better story about alcoholism and addiction. I know there are some great ones out there, but I couldn't recall anything better on the subject. It's a rich subject for journalists and writers in general.

It's terrific. It got me trying to think whether I've read a better story about alcoholism and addi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Mountain Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5245</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5245</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2014 14:13:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thomas Curwen: Frost glistens on the meadow grass. The sun has yet to crest Church Creek Divide, and on his last day in the cabin, Jack English isn't about to break from routine. He swings his legs out of the bunk.

"Good morning," he says quietly to Mary. Her ashes are in a small box on the narrow shelf at the head of the bed.

She's been gone 12 years. He takes her wherever he goes, but in this far-away valley they shared and in this home they built, he feels closest to her.

He tries to pull ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lonely Quest For Facts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5243</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5243</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2014 13:59:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Amy Harmon: KONA, Hawaii — From the moment the bill to ban genetically engineered crops on the island of Hawaii was introduced in May 2013, it garnered more vocal support than any the County Council here had ever considered, even the perennially popular bids to decriminalize marijuana.

Public hearings were dominated by recitations of the ills often attributed to genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s: cancer in rats, a rise in childhood allergies, out-of-control superweeds, genetic contamin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Suspended Justice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5239</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5239</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Dec 2013 18:14:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Some good stuff from the folks over at the Indiana Daily Student:

Katie Mettler:

HE'D ALREADY BURNED HIS PRISON JUMPSUIT AND SECURED A NEW DRIVER'S LICENSE. He'd put back on his finger the wedding ring he wasn't allowed to wear in prison, the ring his wife gave him before they said he murdered her and their children.

Two juries had convicted him. Then, in October, a third jury acquitted him. Now, he had returned to the house where he grew up, but he still wasn't free. Camm felt the staring ey]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[American Dad]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5235</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5235</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Dec 2013 19:40:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael J. Mooney:

When Rafael Cruz walks into the VIP room at the River Plantation Country Club, there's a spontaneous round of applause.

People who were sipping strawberry punch and nibbling on cheese and crackers put down their plates and cups and gravitate toward the bespectacled 74-year-old pastor. He has just arrived in Conroe, a suburb north of Houston.

The room is full of conservative politicians and powerful campaign donors. There are elected judges, state representatives, and candid]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kidd Kraddick's Big Secret]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5233</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5233</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Dec 2013 19:38:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jamie Thompson:

On the last night of his life, Kidd Kraddick picked out a stranger on a street corner in the French Quarter. It was a broiling evening last July in New Orleans. Kraddick had just left an oyster bar and had spotted the man selling pirated DVDs out of his trunk. Kraddick's small entourage, a collection of friends and business partners, walked past the young man, nodding politely. But Kraddick stopped.

What are you doing? Why are you selling these? Don't you know that's illegal?

]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Speak No Evil]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5228</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5228</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 13:48:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In case you missed it in the comments, here's a three-part series from the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Joan Garrett McClane: Her son's body was left splayed on a road where the streetlights were broken.

If anyone knew why, they weren't telling.

So Shonda Mason picked through the weeds that climbed over the jagged asphalt. She searched the leafy overgrowth swallowing a fence. She ran fingers over dirt to find the cave of a bullet hole.

She knelt to study the stains on the street.

Bushes re]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The War Next Door]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5226</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5226</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2013 20:03:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Hixenbaugh: VIRGINIA BEACH

The man in the grainy surveillance footage strides through the sleepy cul-de-sac with purpose, like someone in command of his own destiny.

Freeze the frame, zoom in close. His eyes tell a different story: wide, unblinking, confused.

He has lost all control.

The disabled veteran had been coming unhinged for months. Security cameras installed by his neighbors captured him that night as he hit bottom.

It was about 1 a.m., a few days after Thanksgiving last year.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Best Of]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5223</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5223</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Dec 2013 14:22:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm making a list of the best newspaper stories this year and could use some help. Don't be shy. Please and thank you.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Christmas Books!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5205</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5205</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2013 14:43:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[For your booklovers, here are a few from our friends from this year.

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese, by Michael Paterniti.

In the picturesque village of Guzmán, Spain, in a cave dug into a hillside on the edge of town, an ancient door leads to a cramped limestone chamber known as "the telling room." Containing nothing but a wooden table and two benches, this is where villagers have gathered for centuries to share their stories and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Manhunt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5203</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5203</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2013 15:10:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Christopher Goffard, Joel Rubin and Kurt Streeter: The man emerged from a charcoal-gray pickup and approached the hotel check-in counter. He wanted a room and the Internet pass code. He was 6 feet tall, with a weightlifter's build and military posture. But he could transform his soft, round face into a picture of amiability. He struck the night manager as personable and disarming.

Inside Room 116 of the Hi View Inn & Suites in Manhattan Beach, he stared at his Facebook page and a lifetime's wor]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[After The Fall]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5197</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5197</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2013 20:02:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jessica Contrera: In the days before they buried her, no one knew how not to come undone. Her roommate dropped out of school. Her father kept abruptly needing to leave the room. And her mother, who looked so much like her already, started wearing her daughter's clothes. In the news and on campus, Rachael Fiege became known as the IU freshman who died at her first college party. The one who never even made it to her first class.

The scene played out in her parents' minds again and again – Rachae]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chasing Alexander Supertramp]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5195</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5195</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Dec 2013 20:41:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eva Holland: Alaska's Teklanika River runs fast and cold. One chilly, drizzly day in early September, I stood on its eastern bank and watched two young hikers strip down to boxer shorts and sneakers, stuff their clothes into drybags and then into backpacks, and attempt to cross. Three more hikers stoked a small fire a few feet away, in case their friends fell in and needed to warm up fast; the plan was for two members of the group to tackle the river first, with the other three following if the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Susan Cox Is No Longer Here]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5192</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5192</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2013 19:00:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin Heckert with a heartbreaking story on a woman who didn't want to die alone:

This is something that happened during a long, dry summer, and if I don't write it down now I fear it might haunt me forever. My hope is that the woman from the hospital room will eventually let go of my thoughts, so that I no longer see her peeling fingernails and the black bandanna tied around her head, her ruby slippers and that blue monkey with beads for eyes and a single black stitch for a smile. I can still]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cut Short]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5189</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5189</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:53:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jacob Jones: Enclosed in the broken glass and crushed steel of a crumpled 1969 Plymouth Fury, Margaret Nordhagen sits next to the love of her life. Both of them are dying. For more than 68 years, Floyd had held her steady. Together they carved out a simple life near Chattaroy, raising four children and scores of cattle on 80 acres of hayfield and black pine.

In his 92 years, Floyd boasted of few things except a strong heart and Margaret. A child of the Depression, he worked the Bremerton shipya]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving Bobbi]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5187</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5187</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:10:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pam Louwagie: Opening the door, he paused to let his eyes adjust from the bright light of the summer day outside before he could see her.

The girl was huddled with a friend on a grimy mattress on the floor, lolling in a methamphetamine haze.

Instruments of modern-day bondage lay scattered about: A drug pipe keeping her in a meth-induced stupor, willing to do almost anything for the next high. A prepaid credit card. Three cellphones, tethering the girls to pimps and johns 24/7.

Dressed up in w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Book Of Tebow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5185</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5185</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Nov 2013 22:48:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[T Lake: He arrives early, wearing a white T-shirt and red cotton shorts, and during the handshake he reaches out with his free hand, as if to say, I'm open to hugging, but I'll leave it up to you. You would like him. He would like you. You would like Tim Tebow because he actually looks at you, instead of the floor, or the cars rolling past on Santa Monica Boulevard, and his mind seems nowhere else but here, with you, in this conference room at a law firm in Los Angeles, at 2:25 p.m. on a Tuesday]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Providence]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5181</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5181</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:51:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The last full-time employee in the tallest building in Rhode Island has grown accustomed to the 26 stories of emptiness. He doesn't even hear the absence anymore — that silent roar of business not transacted.

"At first it was very weird," says Paul Almeida, the chief engineer and resident optimist for a 428-foot Art Deco skyscraper that has defined the Providence cityscape since 1928. "Then, all of a sudden, it was nothing."

Just another job. Single-handedly maint]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inside The MMA]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5179</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5179</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 Nov 2013 17:23:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matthew Stanmyer: At 11 o'clock on a Thursday night in August, the thermostat inside George Sullivan's apartment is cranked to 90 degrees.

This might as well be hell.

Over the next 20 hours, Sullivan, a professional mixed martial arts fighter from Brick, must lose 13 pounds. If he fails to shed the weight — 7 percent of his 184 pounds — he will jeopardize a full payday for his fight two nights later in Atlantic City.

Sullivan steps into his small, white-tiled bathroom and slathers his muscula]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stringbean]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5177</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5177</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 Nov 2013 17:21:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Cooper: On Nov. 10, 1973, Tex Ritter stood on the Ryman Auditorium stage and brought David "Stringbean" Akeman to the "Grand Ole Opry."

"Stringbean, like Grandpa Jones, since the 'Hee Haw' shows is playing a lot of colleges," Ritter said, "he's playing all over the country, and he doesn't work for his old price anymore. Give a hand to Stringbean!"

And they did, and the scarecrow-looking banjo player shuffled his way into view of the Ryman crowd. He told a joke about informing a curious t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bridge Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5174</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5174</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2013 19:35:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeremy Markovich: Cody Adams takes a drag off his cigarette, and looks over at Andy Smith.

"You scared yet?" he asks.

"Definitely scared," Smith tells him. "I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not."

"It's good to be scared," Adams says.

Adams and Smith stand in the fog in the middle of the 3,030 foot-long New River Gorge Bridge, in the dark blue of an October dawn in West Virginia, 876 feet above the water below. Adams is skinny, with a gray hoodie, a shaved head and camouflage pants. Smi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Andre Dawkins Has A Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5171</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5171</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Nov 2013 17:48:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And Brandon Sneed tried his best to write it, even though he wasn't sure he should. This brings up a good question that Brandon wrestled with during the reporting and writing process. At what point should we give up and walk away from a story? When you have an unwilling subject, what are the compelling reasons that make you write a feature story anyway? (Yes, "My editor made me" counts as an answer.)]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Girl In The Closet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5168</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5168</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Nov 2013 16:59:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Scott Farwell: Lauren is alone in the dark. She's naked, sitting cross-legged in her own filth, eyes focused on a sliver of light.

It's all she has, that light.

It glows from underneath a locked closet door, and Lauren's discovered if she stares at it long enough, her mind will open a portal to another place.

Doctors say that's how she survived all the years of starvation and solitude and sexual torture. They call it disassociation — the psyche's ability to float away from the pain.

Lauren c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A World Away, The Seventh Game]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5166</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5166</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Nov 2013 16:57:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: The Protestant minister and the Roman Catholic priest had a $10 bet riding on the 1946 World Series. The minister, a Lutheran from Missouri, went with the St. Louis Cardinals, naturally. The priest, a Franciscan from upstate New York, was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, but he went with the Boston Red Sox to make things interesting.

These men of the cloth had earned this minor vice.

For the last 11 months, they had served as the chaplains at Nuremberg prison in Germany, offering spiritual c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Baseball Legend Returns]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5164</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5164</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 14:46:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy McCullough: NEWARK, Del. — The rarity rests behind a stack of papers on a desk inside a first-floor office at the University of Delaware. Kevin Kerrane rises from his chair to fetch it. He is a few weeks from his 72nd birthday, an English professor with snow-white hair and a matching mustache. Above him looms Clint Eastwood on a poster for Le Bon, La Brute et Le Truand.

He fishes past his iMac and retrieves a first-edition copy of his book, Dollar Sign on the Muscle. Inside is a message in]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Voyage Of The Bounty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5161</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5161</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:42:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: In the dark, in the wet, whirling roar of Hurricane Sandy, on a ship tipping so badly the deck felt like a steep, slick roof, the desperate, damaged sailor searched for a spot from which to jump. Close to the stern, he gripped the helm, now all but touching the water's high black churn. He let go and paddled and kicked in the buoyant but clumsy blood-orange suit he had wiggled into not long before. The ship spat up a heavy wooden grating, and it landed on his head. Crack. His adre]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sustainability]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5159</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5159</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:29:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Boston Globe's new owner, John W. Henry: "Now I see The Boston Globe and all that it represents as another great Boston institution that is worth fighting for. There isn't a clear financial model for the news business in the future. Thus, some people have expressed puzzlement about this investment because they expect that the purchase of a business is based on the pursuit of profit. But this investment isn't about profit at all. It's about sustainability. Any great paper, the Globe included, mus]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End Of The Waffle House]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5157</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5157</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:26:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jessica Contrera: On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.

Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell's aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington's Waffle House. His Waffle House.

That Wednesday in September, the owner didn't know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted int]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['I Loved It All']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5153</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5153</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 17:43:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If we define "narrative" in a broader sense than "well-told text story" then this absolutely qualifies http://t.co/6EgfY4Xano @gangrey

— Nigel Duara (@nigelduara) October 23, 2013

Agreed.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trapped Under the Sea]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5151</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5151</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:49:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Neil Swidey has turned his Globe Magazine piece about the divers who became trapped in an enormous underwater sewage tunnel into a book. (I pre-ordered mine today.)

The story (behind a completely-worth-it 99-cent access paywall): The divers packed themselves into the basket and prepared to be lowered by a crane down the 400-foot shaft. But they couldn't move until DJ Gillis got into the basket with them, and he wasn't about to be hurried.

"C'mon, DJ," one of the guys yelled. "Let's go!" Tap Ta]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Red****s No More]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5148</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5148</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 16:58:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brick: I am a third-generation fan of the professional football team in Washington. When my family sat down for pancakes last weekend, with a big game against Washington's archrival, Dallas, looming on the eve of Columbus Day, I had to tell my children why we were not going to use the team's nickname anymore.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Your Monday Morning Annie Proulx]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5146</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5146</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 14:09:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The second paragraph from "People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water," in the 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Real Housewives of Ciudad Juárez]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5144</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5144</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Oct 2013 21:26:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Debbie Nathan

When the couple met in 2005, Emily was a methamphetamine addict, living in a suburb near Phoenix. She was in her early 20s and could barely hold a job, but when she was high she thought she was the cleverest, most beautiful woman in the world. Her previous boyfriends, also addicts, agreed with her. Gordo didn't. He "would tell me I was a fucking idiot for doing drugs," Emily recalled recently.

She tried to deceive him about her habit. "I would wait until he was fast asleep before]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Stolen Ones]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5141</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5141</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Oct 2013 20:45:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Impressive work by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and by J. David McSwane: Wearing only a sports bra and boxers, bruises on her back, the girl surged through the salon's door. Her feet were bare and bleeding from the race over asphalt, her speech a frenzied heave as she spilled the secret of where she had been, what she had been doing.

Camille Johnson's daughter confirmed the unthinkable.

For weeks, Johnson had searched these north Sarasota streets, knocking on doors in the early morning, shoutin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Casual]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5114</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5114</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Sep 2013 19:30:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brendan Bernhard, via Romenesko, by way of Varma:

I was going through my files recently and found Brendan Bernhard's amusing New York Press story titled, "A Casual Affair: Temporary Insanity at the New York Times," which I have saved for 18 years. Unfortunately, the piece from the July 28-August 1, 1995 issue isn't online. I posted some excerpts earlier, then heard from people who wanted to read the entire article. Here it is:]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[31 Shocks Later]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5110</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5110</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Sep 2013 14:58:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Winner of a Casey Medal this year. Thanks to Alex Zayas for passing this along.

Jennifer Gonnerman: Cheryl McCollins got her first hint that something was wrong when she answered her phone on the ­evening of October 25, 2002. "Andre had a bad day." It was a case manager calling from the residential school her son ­attended in Massachusetts, roughly 215 miles away. Cheryl had received calls like this before, but the news tonight was ­nearly incomprehensible: That day, her son had received 31 ele]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Podcast]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5108</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5108</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 20:55:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't seen it by now, Matt Tullis is really running with the podcast. Nine episodes so far: Jason Fagone, Luke Dittrich, Brian Mockenhaupt, Jesse Lichtenstein, Stephen Rodrick, Kelley Benham French, Pamela Colloff, Michael J. Mooney and Justin Heckert. Go listen.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Another Child Fatherless]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5105</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5105</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 20:48:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Duggan: For 16 minutes, doctors in an emergency room treatment bay called Trauma 1 worked urgently to resuscitate the patient, a gunshot victim with no vital signs and a wound so grievous that saving him would have amounted to a resurrection.

David Robinson's life had all but officially ended even before an ambulance crew wheeled him into Howard University Hospital that winter morning in 2012. A bullet fired on a dark street in Northeast Washington had severed his aorta, and surgeon Wendy ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tomato Can Blues]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5103</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5103</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 20:34:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mary Pilon: Scott DiPonio raced to make sure everything was in order — the fighters were ready, the ring girls were on time and the Bud Light was cold.

DiPonio was a local promoter who organized amateur cage fights that looked more like barroom brawls than glitzy Las Vegas bouts. With a mix of grit, sweat and blood, the fights had caught on in rural Michigan, and DiPonio's Feb. 2 event, called Caged Aggression, drew hundreds of fans, even with cage-side seats going for $35.

Charlie Rowan, an u]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Fastest On Earth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5101</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5101</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 20:33:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kyle Swenson: The grin was a dead giveaway. Bob Sellers spotted the smile on his friend's face as he pulled up to the end of the tarmac. Bill Warner was still straddling his race bike, a 'roided-up 1,000-horsepower Suzuki Hayabusa. The black Bell helmet was sitting on the gas tank. Warner's bathwater-blue eyes squinted merrily, teeth straight and bright as new piano ivories. The racer had just been clocked going 296.128 mph down the decommissioned airstrip.

"What are you so happy about?" teased]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letter To A Young Journalist]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5096</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5096</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:58:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ed's note: I got my hands on the following email from Lane DeGregory to a journalism student in response to a couple questions: "Is there anything you wish you could tell yourself when you were as inexperienced as us? What mistakes should we be making?" Enjoy.

I wish I hadn't thought I had to be so smart. When I was starting out, I was afraid the politician I was profiling would realize I didn't understand property taxes; that the hockey coach I had to interview would out me for not knowing a h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Return]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5093</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5093</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2013 13:49:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Finkel: The way it worked was that they joined the Army because they were starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infantry rather than to something with better odds, like finance or public affairs, and then by chance they were assigned to an infantry division that was about to rotate into the war, and then they were randomly assigned to a combat brigade that included two infantry battalions, one of which was going to a bad place and th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Metal And Smiles]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5087</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5087</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:56:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Sottile: When I was 13, I dreamed of kissing boys in the backseat of a car while Scorpions, a German hard rock outfit, crooned "Winds of Change" from the car stereo. It's still kind of a bummer that never happened: Boys at my high school were much more infatuated with the idea of making out to Dave Matthews Band, and I had to work with what I could get.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Woman Who Wasn't There]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5084</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5084</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2013 13:56:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Recall reading this when it came out. Still holds up.

David W. Dunlap: Tania Head's story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to ground zero, was a remarkable account of both life and death.

She had, she said, survived the terror attack on the World Trade Center despite having been badly burned when the plane crashed into the upper floors of the south tower.

Crawling through the chaos and carnage on the 78th floor that morning, she said, she en]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Benjamin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5075</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5075</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:32:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: Our new hundred-dollar bill, like every other single piece of American folding money, is born in this rotary boiler. It's a perfect sphere, an angry kettle fifteen feet across, spinning high off the ground between two stained concrete towers. Most people swear out loud when they see it for the first time. A network of gears, each tooth the size of a fist, churns away in the darkness behind it. The towers and the gears allow the boiler to spin like a planet, like Saturn, rust-colored]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Funeral]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5064</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5064</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Aug 2013 14:05:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall: Christopher Ryan Lane should not be present at this mournful event, on this mercifully mild winter morning. He grew up here but he does not belong in this place. Not in this moment.

He should be over there, far away, across the pacific and beyond the rockies and past the bronzed expanse of southwest, ensconsed in the hospitable warmth of a cornfed small town in Middle America.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Restaurants Were His Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5061</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5061</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Aug 2013 14:15:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Liz Robbins: The tales of Colin Devlin's generosity sound like fables. Once, though he was nearly broke and working as a bartender, he pulled $1,000 out of his sock and gave it to a friend starting a restaurant.

When Mr. Devlin opened DuMont, the first of his three pioneering restaurants in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he offered free meals to loyal customers and new friends, whom he made instantly. He adopted the ugliest, most unwanted dogs; his favorite was Remy, a mutt with a backward paw.

"Ever]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Match Maker: Bobby Riggs, The Mafia and The Battle of the Sexes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5058</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5058</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Aug 2013 13:47:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don Van Natta Jr.: … All of the vaudevillian hoopla made it easy to forget the enormous stakes and the far-reaching social consequences. King was playing not just for public acceptance of the women's game but also an opportunity to prove her gender's equality at a time when women could still not obtain a credit card without a man's signature. If she were to defeat Bobby Riggs, the triumph would be shared by every woman who knew she deserved equal pay, opportunities and respect. Equally sweet, Ki]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Line Of Fire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5055</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5055</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Aug 2013 13:36:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Katy Vine: Although the city of West sits just off Interstate 35, on a stretch twenty miles north of Waco that is saturated with harried drivers, the town itself is tranquil. A couple of blocks from the highway, past the public elementary school and the 1912 yellow-brick city hall, a set of raised railroad tracks offers a view of West's small, historic downtown, where on late afternoons the city's relaxed rhythm is apparent. At Sam's Barber Shop, Sam Pinter is usually sweeping the hair off the f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Crossing A Bridge Where A Sniper Waits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5053</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5053</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Aug 2013 14:54:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our old friend Raja Abdulrahim: Battoul makes her way around the smashed bus full of sandbags and steps into sniper territory. A man balancing a large box of produce on his left shoulder, cilantro peeking out, is close on her heels.

"Hurry, hurry," he says. "This is not the time to walk slowly."

She tries to blend into the crowd making its way over the 300-yard stretch of no man's land that divides the two Aleppos: one held by the rebels, one by the government.

Every day, a government sniper ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Through The Fire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5051</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5051</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:43:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dave Tarrant and Sarah Mervosh: He sat alone in the dark, the tip of his Marlboro glowing red with burning ash.

After the fire and the explosion and the mushrooming black cloud that spread over the town like a shroud, C.J. Gillaspie found himself in his office. It was the one place in all of West where he could be alone.

It was several hours after he and the other firefighters had responded to the most dangerous call of their lives. Gillaspie didn't want to see anyone. He didn't want to talk, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['I'd Like To Have Everything, You Know, Nice.']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5049</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5049</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:49:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Good question from Roy Peter Clark: I've been thinking a lot recently of the famous piece — about 1,100 words — that Jimmy Breslin wrote 50 years ago this November for the New York Herald Tribune on the burial of the assassinated president JFK. What stands out — after a half century — was Breslin's focus on the gravedigger.

Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Stranger Took A Life, And Justice Took Its Time]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5047</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5047</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Aug 2013 14:27:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Louis Hansen: Manuel Montez walked with a Colorado sheriff's deputy into a small room.

Two Norfolk detectives entered and closed the door.

Montez, a weathered man in his mid-50s, sat in a chair, unshackled, wearing prison clothes.

"I know exactly why you're here," Montez said. He added to himself, What took you so long?

Detective Rick Malbon took the lead. The investigator had worked more than 100 cases, tracking killers for weeks, months, even years. But never had he pulled a case like this]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chronic Crisis]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5045</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5045</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Aug 2013 20:01:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Take a look at this four-part series from Meg Kissinger.

Part 1: San Francisco — Rob Sweeney sucked on an unlit cigarette while his mother stood at the car rental counter, trying to negotiate a better deal.

His legs twitched. His eyes darted right and left. His head bobbed to a beat no one else could hear.

After two airplane flights, he was antsy.

"Want to get some vodka and watch movies in my hotel room?" he asked the stranger sitting next to him.

Rob, 25, has been diagnosed with schizoaff]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Who Is Nick Beef?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5042</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5042</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 18:48:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Dan Barry: FORT WORTH — In a corner of the Shannon Rose Hill Cemetery, close to a chain-link fence that separates the living and the dead, a patch of ground has been worn free of grass by all who come to stare at one particular gravestone. With just a surname, the marker says it all: OSWALD.

But in the half-century since a slight, sallow man named Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy, so much continues to be said about the assassination that the various conspiracy devices a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stare Masters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5038</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5038</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Aug 2013 15:20:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few days ago, Charlie Hurt at the Washington Times wrote with nostalgia about the Washington Post of old, and particularly the "simple stories about mundane life that were so beautifully written. In those days, no one was better at that than the Washington Post."

One story I recall was about a crew of construction workers taking their lunch break during nice weather. They sat on a wall along a sidewalk and watched all the women professionals in pretty dresses and high heels walk by. My humble]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fifteen Years, Then An Answer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5034</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5034</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Aug 2013 14:29:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brian Haas: In a graveyard filled with those who died with no money and sometimes no family, he died with even less.

His gravestone simply read, "John (19) Doe."

He was the 19th unidentified man buried in the Bordeaux Cemetery. He lies in plot #555, a grave overlooking the Whites Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. And around him lie 1,001 others who died penniless and, in some cases, unmourned.

They're just a few of those buried in Nashville's paupers' graves. And the city says the numbers hav]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The trouble with Johnny]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5031</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5031</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jul 2013 16:08:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright being Wright (again): Four days after the tweet, Johnny Manziel did what many boys do when they're in trouble. He went home. The farm roads and state highways between College Station and Tyler blurred under the wheels of his black Mercedes-Benz, the one he wanted so badly that his dad finally bought it for him. Paul Manziel didn't want his son to do something stupid to get it for himself. A jagged line marked the back left quarter panel; even before Johnny tweeted that he wanted to leave ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving The Orange By Altering DNA]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5028</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5028</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Jul 2013 15:53:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Amy Harmon: CLEWISTON, Fla. — The call Ricke Kress and every other citrus grower in Florida dreaded came while he was driving.

"It's here" was all his grove manager needed to say to force him over to the side of the road.

The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state's storied groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['No cure for what I have']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5025</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5025</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jul 2013 20:13:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm a sucker for narrative and science meshed together.

Jason Fagone:

What's your full name? Where are you? What month is it? What day of the week is it?

Walter Keller tried to speak, but no words came out, only a dry rasp. The man asking the questions had dark, close-cropped gray hair and a kind, level gaze.

Eventually the man left the room. Walt wriggled up in his bed. Someone put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him gently back into the mattress.]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[See?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5022</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5022</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Jul 2013 18:26:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["Imagine it's your daily coffee. Each time you put down your money the cup gets smaller and the brew gets weaker. That's essentially what's happened to American newspapers. We took things away from people and at the same time gave content away free on the web. How crazy is that? The industry committed a kind of institutional suicide over time."

…

The Register has opened a four-strong Washington bureau, and added fresh wire services for foreign coverage, but the key is local news, especially to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All Shook Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5019</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5019</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Jul 2013 16:59:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I can't stop looking at this photo of The King reading a story about himself in the St. Pete Times on August 6, 1956.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unity With The Universe]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5016</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5016</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Jul 2013 14:46:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: MANHATTAN, Mont. — Something strange is happening at the house glowing in the distance. Or rather, a web of strange things, magic almost, if you'll permit what might seem on the front end to be hyperbole. A man named Tom Morgan lives here, making some of the most expensive and sought-after fly fishing rods in the world, which he does despite having been paralyzed from the neck down for the past 17 years. He's revered for what he calls "thought rods," where the instrument functio]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Words For Man Of Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5013</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5013</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2013 17:50:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Earl Swift: NORFOLK

He found poetry in tomatoes, corn bread, in old dogs and the scent of magnolia blossoms. He found romance, adventure and inspiration in the past and its stories. He found dignity, and decency, in practically everyone he met.

And in a newspaper career that spanned 60 years, Guy Friddell found a place in history: He died early Saturday at age 92, one of Virginia's favorite contemporary writers.

Literary, lyrical and uncompromisingly liberal, Friddell's thousands of columns f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At 99, A Man Finds Meaning In Work]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5010</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5010</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2013 15:43:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: ST. PETERSBURG

His alarm beeps at 3:30 a.m., drowning out the talk radio that keeps him company all night. He rolls over slowly and prays:

"Please, Lord, give me the strength to get up."

It takes a half-hour, sometimes longer, but eventually he hobbles to the kitchen to make tea. And three days a week, no matter how the old man feels, he steps into the cotton pants with the torn right knee and pulls on the white shirt with "Bama Sea Products" stitched above his pacemaker.

The]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Congrats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5007</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5007</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 21 Jul 2013 23:14:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is a belated congrats, but a well-deserved one. Several FOGs are on this year's list of winners for the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism. The award recognizes the best reporting on children, youth and families. They're in-depth looks at some well-hidden parts of our communities and families. Read them.

In God's Name, Tampa Bay Times By Alexandra Zayas, Kathleen Flynn and Chris Davis (ed.)

They shaved him bald that first morning in 2008, put him in an orange jumpsuit and made him ex]]></description>
      <author>Janine Anderson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lost in the long white cloud]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5001</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5001</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 14 Jul 2013 12:56:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charles Anderson: The land slipped and crumbled beneath his feet. It had been several hours since Gerry Tonkin began the search and while the topography around him had shifted wildly — rolling from shallow gravel gullies, to sharp gorse ridges — the scene in front of him had not. Dust and dried leaves and blackberry bush layered the floor, and thick woody vines of supplejack wrapped and sprawled their way through regenerating forest. "Spider web gullies," they were called.

"We told ourselves we]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bam!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4999</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4999</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jul 2013 18:18:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Spend $1.99 for this story by Luke Dittrich. If you do, and you read it, and it fails to blow you away, I will personally double your money back. Triple it, even. Go.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beyond the Finish Line]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4991</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4991</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jul 2013 18:35:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Rohan in the New York Times: BOSTON — Jeff Bauman stared straight ahead, his eyes wary and unconvinced, as his doctor told him the next procedure would be easy and painless. He sat in his wheelchair at Boston Medical Center, and Dr. Jeffrey Kalish, his primary surgeon, explained how a resident would remove the sutures from his legs.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two from the Post]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4986</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4986</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 Jul 2013 17:15:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow and Robert Samuels.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Problem With Writing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4975</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4975</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 Jul 2013 13:51:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to George Getschow for allowing us to publish these two essays on writing, from George and Michael Mooney, which will be published in Ten Spurs, an anthology of the "best of the best" writing submitted to the Mayborn Conference's writing contests each year. Read up.

By George Getschow

Bill Marvel, a very fine writer and associate editor of this publication, and I talk about the vagaries and vicissitudes of writing the way most people carry on about the weather. We talk about the constan]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Me]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4957</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4957</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2013 20:27:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to KVV for pointing to this cool feature in ESPN The Magazine in which star athletes write letters to their younger selves.

I wonder if we can adapt this as a learning experience. What advice would you give yourself at some important moment in your young life.

Anybody want to take a shot at writing yourself a letter?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Introductions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4952</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4952</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2013 16:22:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm excited to welcome a new voice to the mix here. Our friend Janine Anderson has graciously volunteered to help us in our search for the perfect story. You probably know her already, but here's some background.

Janine has spent 12 years as a journalist in southeast Wisconsin, covering suburban communities and the smaller cities south of Milwaukee.

She grew up in small-town Wisconsin and studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she double-majored in dance and found the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ammunition]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4950</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4950</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Jun 2013 01:51:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Recently, Brandon Sneed posted a quote from writing guru Robert McKee on his website: "Convert exposition to ammunition."

This is tremendous advice. Here's what I think it means: Every story contains a certain amount of background information that somehow has to be worked in. Too often, writers do this in terribly unimaginative ways. Such as starting a section of the story this way: "John Quincy Smith was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1947…."

Right about then, I throw the mag]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Doubt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4947</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4947</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2013 17:09:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Baxter Holmes: Flames licked at the vinyl paneling and the plywood boxed around a stovepipe. They crept skyward, toward scattered clouds hung late in the frigid North Shore night.

Finally, near the roof of the two-story Colonial home in Hamilton, they found a way inside.

Christmas ornaments, family photos, and more were collecting dust in the attic, but the fire was blind to heirlooms that measured Michael Carter-Williams's family through time. It saw only fuel.

Quickly, the flames swept into]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Farewell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4945</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4945</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Jun 2013 17:30:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rick Maese: The secret was already weighing on him as the team bus pulled out of Washington and headed north.

Tal Bayer, coach of one of the District's most unlikely athletic success stories, sat at the front, his pale bald head a beacon to his roster of two dozen teenagers. He called them his boys, and the physical expression of their relationship — cleats, gym bags, rugby balls — were strewn all over the bus.

Bayer liked taking his rugby players out of the city, where so many of their lives ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[#womenatlength]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4942</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4942</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Jun 2013 15:12:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Port Magazine heralded the "New Golden Age" of print publishing by featuring six male editors on its cover. Lots of folks took issue, including Alyssa Rosenberg, who wrote: "The choice of those particular six white men, most of whom represent legacy publications (GQ, the New York Times Magazine), suggests that Port has an amazingly conservative understanding of what constitutes the new golden age."

Proof? Mark Armstrong at Longreads compiled a list of 21 Examples of 'Serious Journalism' from Wo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It'll Stay There Like A Thumbprint]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4940</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4940</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:52:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We don't often get to hear Gary Smith talking about the craft. Here's a rare treat: a conversation with Richard Deitsch about Gary's Sports Illustrated cover story on a football coach who helped save lives during a school shooting in Ohio.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Congrats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4937</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4937</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:14:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From The Mayborn:

DENTON (UNT), Texas — An article in TheWashington Post about a Manassas, Va., swimming pool salesman experiencing the unraveling of his decades-long success story during a summer of disappointments received the first place award in the first Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest sponsored by the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

Eli Saslow's "Life of a salesman: Selling success, when the American dream is downsized" was published Oct. 7 in the Post.

The Bes]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hello Out There]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4935</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4935</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:12:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Has anyone else noticed that people don't comment on this site as often as they used to? I'm wondering what's changed. Is it because more people are instead posting their comments to Twitter and Facebook or their own websites? Or is something more at play?

Related question: Do you frequently visit this site without commenting? If so, we'd love to see you join the conversation.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4933</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4933</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:48:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joshua Sharpe: This Father's Day marks the 13th anniversary of the death of a Woodstock teen killed in a car accident. The man accused of causing the crash was believed to be in the United States illegally. There has been no trial in the case.

Dustin Inman was a 16-year-old Etowah High School student who spent his days, like many other Cherokee County boys his age, fishing, hunting and passing time with friends and family.

If he were alive today, he would be 29 years old, but Dustin's life was]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Lonely Quiet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4925</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4925</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Jun 2013 01:31:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[More Eli Saslow: In NEWTOWN, Conn. — They had promised to try everything, so Mark Barden went down into the basement to begin another project in memory of Daniel. The families of Sandy Hook Elementary were collaborating on a Mother's Day card, which would be produced by a marketing firm and mailed to hundreds of politicians across the country. "A difference-maker," the organizers had called it. Maybe if Mark could find the most arresting photo of his 7-year-old son, people would be compelled to ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[When The Beautiful Game Turns Ugly]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4922</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4922</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:24:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: VERONA, Italy — Right up until he started quoting Hitler and dropping N-bombs, my new friend was a great dude. I'll call him The Hooligan. A more generous host would be hard to find. Soon after we met, he made sure we stopped at the one place in town that served Campari correctly. He speaks eight languages, and seemed nothing like the Hellas Verona fans I'd read about, the neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, racist thugs. The Hooligan insisted the Veronese just have a dark sense of humor and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Can A Porn Star Have It All?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4920</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4920</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:06:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Danielle Paquette: Early morning, on a US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Tampa, Taryn Stone cradles a bonsai tree and chats with a gray-haired man who just bought her two shots of Jameson whiskey.

"Where'd you get that tree, anyway?" he asks.

"On the side of the road in L.A.," she says, laughing. "It's for my husband."

"What were you doing there?"

"I work in the film industry."

"Doing what?"

The bubbly 23-year-old considers the vaguest possible response. Should she avoid the conversati]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How About Giving Me A Chance]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4918</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4918</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:11:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery: In February 1961, Vic Prinzi pulled into the visitors' lot at the Florida School for Boys in Marianna and sat in the car collecting his thoughts. He was apprehensive.

"Why am I here?" he wondered.

He could still turn around, head back to Tallahassee and send word that he had changed his mind. Prinzi was 25 and self-confident.

His years as Florida State's quarterback would eventually land him in the school's hall of fame.

He'd played with the New York Giants and Denver Broncos]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Irreversible]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4916</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4916</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:08:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow on the allegations that ruined a football coach's career:

THE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR walked onto the field unannounced, wearing jeans and sandals, and Todd Hoffner knew in that moment that something was terribly wrong. Nobody interrupted his football practices at Minnesota State Mankato without advance notice and permission. His success as head coach was based on maintaining total control; each practice was scripted to the minute. He believed small disruptions in preparation became big pr]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trouble In Paradise]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4913</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4913</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:06:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Jamison: CLEARWATER — Ivan "Van" Farber, 68, careens through suburban traffic beneath a Florida sky the color of ash and indigo, squinting against the wind as his convertible speeds and slows.

Farber's is a face that could have adorned a coin of the Roman Empire, a sloping brow and strong nose that easily express aggrieved dignity. His erratic handling of this Ford Mustang might lack gravitas, but he is nervous just now, as befits a man running from unseen enemies.

It's not his car, anyw]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Firestorm]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4910</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4910</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 May 2013 14:22:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'd be very interested to hear your immediate reaction to this Snow Fall-esque multimedia presentation from The Guardian.

Take a look.

Firestorm: The photograph of the Holmes family hiding from a violent bushfire in Tasmania was shared around the world. But what became of them? In a unique multimedia project, the family speak exclusively to the Guardian about the day their community was devastated, and the new breed of bushfire that is impossible to fight.

(thanks, Mark)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Mr. Buffett]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4907</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4907</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 May 2013 13:53:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gotta respect his passion:

Every Monday at 7 a.m. Andrew Davis sits down and writes a letter to Warren Buffett. His goal is to get a meeting with the billionaire and chat about the newspaper industry.

(thanks, Gerry)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Good Reminder]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4905</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4905</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 May 2013 15:23:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tommy Tomlinson on the core elements of storytelling:

Thanks for having me here today. I want this to be more of a conversation than a speech. I don't need much time for a speech, because today I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

But first I want to tell you a little story.

My wife (Alix Felsing, Storyboard's copyeditor) has this uncanny gift for finding the worst possible movie on TV at any given moment. The other night she landed on the SyF]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hollywood's Information Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4902</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4902</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 May 2013 18:50:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ten years ago I bought a copy of the annual Best American Magazine Writing collection. It contained a story called "Hollywood's Information Man," by Amy Wallace, originally published in Los Angeles magazine. I was just out of college then, working my first daily newspaper job, and this story knocked me over. It showed the astonishing possibilities of a magazine story, the combination of wit and humor and investigative reporting that an expert could weave under just the right circumstances. Now, ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Drinking And Driving And Dying]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4899</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4899</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 19:07:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: Jerry Jerome Brown Jr. comes along at a strange time in history: a time when humans willingly enter cages of glass and steel that move in such great numbers at such terrific speed that a subtle turn of the steering wheel can easily result in death.

Anyone with clear eyes and a steady hand can accidentally make this subtle turn in a single moment of inattention. And every night in every county in every state, probably on every road, someone tries to avoid this mistake while drunk. In 1]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Fabulous Fradulent Life Of Jocelyn And Ed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4893</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4893</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 12:42:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sabrina Rubin Erdely (pdf): She told everyone her boobs were real, which was a laugh: They were immobile and perfectly round, and looked airbrushed, even in person. She credited her violet eyes to Lithuanian genes, rather than the purple contact lenses she wore. And on this afternoon last November, sitting in a Philadelphia hair salon with a college textbook open on her lap, she told the stylist she was a University of Pennsylvania student named Morgan Greenhouse. The name was as fake as the hai]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bret, Unbroken]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4891</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4891</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 12:58:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Steve Friedman (thanks, Don D.): You know what people think. They see jeans too short and winter coat too shiny, too grimy, and think, homeless. They watch a credit card emerge from those jeans and think, grifter. They behold a frozen grin, hear a string of strangled, tortured pauses, and think, slow. Stupid.

You learned too young about cruelty and pity. You learned too young that explaining yourself didn't help, that it made things worse. People laughed. Made remarks. Backed away. So you stopp]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ten]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4889</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4889</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 15:20:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Danielle Dreilinger: Ka'Nard Allen, 10, does not want to talk about what must be the longest and hardest 10th year of life in all New Orleans. He doesn't want to talk about Mother's Day, when he was grazed by a bullet at a second line parade in New Orleans' 7th Ward, one of 19 people injured in a mass shooting.

He doesn't want to talk about October, when his father, 38-year-old Bernard Washington, was fatally stabbed in eastern New Orleans by his stepmother after Washington allegedly choked and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bags Of Money]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4887</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4887</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 14:43:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Deadline is approaching on the Best American Narrative Newspaper Writing Contest. Don't forget to submit your best work.

In an effort to encourage narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across America, the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and The Dallas Morning News are launching a new writing contest this year. The Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest will award prizes to three long-form narrative nonfiction pieces previously published in daily U.S. newspapers or on]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4884</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4884</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:14:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[GBSNP Varma at a hospice in India:

Rajamma weathers these episodes one dreaded night after another. Time, for him, is measured in breaths.

What does he like about his wife?

"Goodness," he says, after a gasp and sigh, looking toward the ceiling.

"Patience," he says after a gasp again. They have not travelled much together. It was always work and home. "Lot of work," he says.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[X-Ray Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4862</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4862</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:12:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Peter Clark studies what made Eric Moskowitz' Boston Globe story work. Look and learn.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At The Fort Knox Of Uranium, With Bottles Of Blood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4860</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4860</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:08:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Fairly amazing story by Dan Zak on a nun and two male companions who breached security at a nuclear facility in the name of God:

The devil was just over Pine Ridge.

From the deserted parking lot on the edge of town, the three servants of God looked into darkness.

They clicked on their flashlights, pushed through the initial thicket of brush and began their trek, aiming for the black wooded slope.

First, the house painter: bearded, calm, quiet.

Second, the Catholic nun: gentle, grandmotherly]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Behind The Wheel]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4857</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4857</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:21:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall: My week at the wheel begins in darkness, at 3.50am on a Monday on an industrial side street in Richmond, out the front of a small taxi depot opposite a panel shop and a dumpling factory.

I'm a little nervous about my first shift. Such apprehension is not unexpected. The taxi company I work for provides a handout designed to walk virgin cabbies through their lonely beginnings – a leaflet entitled: It's my first shift! What do I do?

I should know exactly what to do. I recently f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[With New Arrest, A Strange Turn]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4856</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4856</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:04:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matthew Teague: TUPELO, Miss. — Federal agents of all sorts invaded northeast Mississippi several days ago, on a mission: Find the man who sent a poison-laced letter to the president. But the United States government quickly found itself entangled, once again, in a misunderstood land dominated by squabbling tribes and petty vengeances.

Agents first arrested an Elvis impersonator, released him, then on Saturday arrested his nemesis, a karate instructor. Gradually investigators concluded that wha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Life And Legend Of Chris Kyle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4854</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4854</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:34:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Another ebook you should by, from our friend Michael Mooney. So much to read, so little time.

Journalist Michael Mooney reveals the life story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the American Sniper, from his childhood up through his death in February 2013.

A subject that continues to capture the attention of the American public, Kyle's full story has yet to be told. His heroism and reuptation in the military service earned him the nickname "The Devil of Ramadi" among insurgents, and his impact extended ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Big Race]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4851</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4851</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:00:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our pal Michael Brick delivers a Kindle Single. Buy it.

When a mysterious military vet lures hundreds of bikers on a ludicrously dangerous transcontinental motorcycle ride, he draws in a Sioux shaman, a British financier and a Hollywood auteur with helicopters and private jets.

But Big Jim has a far more ambitious agenda. And it will take them all to a reckoning with the heart of America.

In this rollicking true story, Michael Brick chases the Hoka Hey Motorcycle Challenge from Arizona to the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Along The Route, A New Kind Of Heartbreak]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4848</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4848</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:00:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: HOPKINTON, Mass.

It all starts here, as Hopkinton likes to say. And last week, once again, thousands of marathoners formed a block of Main Street determination that stretched past the Town Common's spring grass, and the Korean Presbyterian Church's white spire, and the public library offering brief amnesty for overdue items, and the Lovely Lady salon, on and on.

But the start of this never-completed race now seems from the distant past, after all that followed. The deadly finish-lin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Worst Job]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4846</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4846</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:19:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Is it me, or do these jobs get more interesting the further down the list you go?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Walking]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4843</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4843</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:57:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eight writers and the walks that inspired them. (Thanks, Kevin)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Contest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4842</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4842</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:13:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mailbag:

Attention longform newspaper writers — Big news from the Mayborn: In an effort to encourage narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across America, the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and The Dallas Morning News are launching a new writing contest this year. The Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest will award prizes to three long-form narrative nonfiction pieces previously published in daily U.S. newspapers or on the newspapers' websites. Newspaper reporters]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Honors]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4822</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4822</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:49:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congratulations to Mark Johnson, winner of the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Farewell, My Lovey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4820</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4820</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:36:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[By MIKE WILSON St. Petersburg Times 11/29/1995

ST. PETERSBURG — On Tuesday morning, the viewing room at Memorial Park Funeral Home bloomed with the bright colors of sorrow: pink carnations, red daisies, white baby's breath, yellow lamplight, shiny-blue casket.

Even the deceased seemed to glow. Her feathery yellow-white hair had been gathered in a tight bun and placed on her head like a golden crown. Her cheekbones shone pink like a baby's. Her skin was a warm bronze.

Just before 11 a.m., an o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Big Why]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4818</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4818</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:41:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Last night on Twitter, emboldened by a combination of Pamela Colloff and Woodford Reserve, Ben was moved to declare, "All you sports folks, I love what most of you do, but there are innocent people on death row. Redirect your energy."

He has since retreated from the statement. (Most of us, including myself, have tweeted something we wished we could un-tweet.) But I think it brings up several important questions. Why do you do this work? How often is it just a job, a series of tasks in exchange ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[American Sniper]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4815</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4815</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:13:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael J. Mooney: There's a story about Chris Kyle: on a cold January morning in 2010, he pulled into a gas station somewhere along Highway 67, south of Dallas. He was driving his supercharged black Ford F350 outfitted with black rims and oversize knobby mudding tires. Kyle had replaced the Ford logo on the grill with a small chrome skull, similar to the Punisher emblem from the Marvel Comics series, and added a riot-ready aftermarket grill guard bearing the words ROAD ARMOR. He had just left t]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun With Royalties]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4811</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4811</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:20:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In which a titan of narrative journalism admits that he spent more than $587,000 on clothes, mostly leather from Gucci, between 2010 and 2012.

Pretty sure that's even more than Wright Thompson spent on whiskey.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mark Prior In The Present Tense]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4809</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4809</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:19:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doug Miller:

The sun is hot on top of a hill in San Diego and the house is white, so white that it looks perfect. A late-model 1990s sedan stops in the middle of the quiet street in the old neighborhood lined with Spanish-style super-casas, mid-century modern showpieces and other glittering fortresses of privilege.

The men in the sedan, who are probably in their 40s, are not close enough to the house to see the sculpted tufts of grass or the doormat marked by the letter P, but they gaze with c]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Be Of Good Cheer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4807</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4807</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:10:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: For as long as anyone can remember, Monday night has been Manly Night at the Playboy Mansion. A little after five o'clock, nine or ten of Hugh Hefner's best friends — invited guests, holders of inner-circle memberships that will be good until death — start pulling up outside the front gate. They talk into what looks like a big round rock, and a disembodied voice questions and admits them, sometimes sounding surprised about it—"Oh, hey, you can come up" — and the gate swings open, re]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Return To Little Lake Nellie]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4804</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4804</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:21:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember the classic Gary Smith story on the boating accident that killed two big-league pitchers?

Here's Anthony Castrovince with the next chapter (thanks, Doug):

The cloudless sky, the shining sun and the still waters betray the truth of what happened here.

This is where the world lost you, Tim, and you, Steve. On Little Lake Nellie in Clermont, Fla. This is where you boarded a black power boat shortly after sundown on March 22, 1993, hoping the bass would be biting on that overcast evening]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mean Streets]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4802</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4802</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:15:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Evan West (thanks, Tony): I was walking the cracked and crumbling sidewalk along the street where I grew up, on the near-east side of Indianapolis, with my dog, a basset hound named Roscoe, when we heard two muffled claps. Someone in the neighborhood occasionally sets off makeshift, window-rattling bombs for fun, at odd intervals throughout the day. So we're used to bangs. But this clap-clap was different, as if a pair of heavy wooden doors had fallen flat on a bare floor. The dog stopped, perke]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Execution Of Andrew Allen Cook]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4800</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4800</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:16:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Kovac Jr.: BUTTS COUNTY — After hours of waiting, Andrew Allen Cook's execution moved quickly to conclusion late Thursday once the process began.

Cook was guided into the death chamber on the back side of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center about 10:45 p.m. He was pronounced dead at 11:22.

In his final statement, Cook seemed remorseful.

"I would like to apologize to the victims' families. … I apologize. It was senseless. I'm sorry," he said. "I know y'all cannot forgive me. I]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deer, Re-Purposed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4796</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4796</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:17:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: The field was barren, all dead grass and half-frozen mud until two weeks ago, when copious amounts of yellow corn mysteriously started to appear on the ground. Fairfax County police poured it there, creating an oasis of food for herds of hungry deer.

Now, as dusk descends, Master Police Officer Bob Swartz appears, dressed in camouflage and carrying a .308 sniper rifle. When he shoots, he rarely misses.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Bloodstains On The Rocks Below]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4793</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4793</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:28:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Mooney sent me the link to this story by Michael Graff. Please read it, and then let's talk about it. I was riveted.

***

You think you know them. You're watching from home. You were raised on Terrapins basketball, and you've followed this group for four years. They're your age, about 22 at the time, and they're winning. On the television broadcast, the announcers have already started wondering whose name will be tied to the final basket. They talk like they have a secret wish. But you sha]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Debbie's Run]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4762</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4762</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:31:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Steve Friedman, (thanks, Harry Hall):

They are sitting together at a round oak table in a sun-soaked living room on a mountain ridge in Ukiah, California, surrounded by fir trees and hiking trails. It's late spring, and they are an hour from the Pacific Ocean, 45 minutes from Mendocino National Forest, and nearly 500 miles from the place where they first changed each other's lives. Forty years ago, when she was just 16 and sometimes running 10 or 12 miles a day, he helped her accomplish somethi]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mayborn 2013]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4759</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4759</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:14:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The line-up is out. Looks great.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All Is Insanity]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4756</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4756</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:47:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: LOS ANGELES — The gowns swish up to the gate. Checkpoint Charlize, let's call it.

"Not on the list, sorry," says a pert Vanity Fair staffer, checking her papers as black town cars creep along barricaded Sunset Boulevard in the police state that is Hollywood on Oscar night.

A brunette in a beaded emerald gown turns her head sharply to her companion, a dirty blonde in a red scaly dress who insists they're on the list.

"The name," the blonde says, "is B-A-R — "

"Not on it. So sorry."

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Props]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4753</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4753</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:28:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm so happy for our friend and colleague, Alex Zayas, who has won the 2013 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, which includes a cash prize of $35,000. Her series, In God's Name, continues to spur reform.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Job Board]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4750</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4750</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:33:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Passing this along from our friend:

Company: The Pacific Northwest Inlander Position: News Reporter at successful weekly Location: Spokane, Washington St. Job Status: Full-time Salary: Negotiable Ad Expires: March 17, 2013 Job ID: 1469159

We're looking for a tenacious and accurate NEWS REPORTER who loves chasing stories, cracking skulls, breaking news, combing through documents and writing magazine-style narratives. Bonus, if you have experience covering government and politics.

Why work for ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Siblings Discover Dad's Scout Sex Abuse, Remember Their Own]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4748</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4748</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:27:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Nigel Duara: On opposite sides of the world, the brother and sister sat transfixed before their computers, reading a stranger's account of long-ago secrets and deeply buried sins.

The memo was just four pages long, about an incident in 1963 at a Boy Scout camp in New Jersey. A Scout executive had gotten drunk during an overnight outing, then was discovered gambling with a group of boys. But there was more.

The brother and sister read on — about how this man "was observed molesting an Explorer ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eleven Hours In Room 407]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4746</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4746</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:24:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: Still inside his mom's womb, Austin Gerstenslager began a journey to his birth and medically certain death.

A half-dozen nurses and assistants wheeled mom and unborn out of Room 407 at Aultman Hospital's birth center. The bed glided across glossy tiled floors, en route to an emergency cesarean section. It was shortly before noon on Aug. 18, a Saturday.

Tears slid down Keri Gerstenslager's cheeks. She watched a blur of hallway lights above. She passed the nurse's station on the left.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving Grace]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4744</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4744</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:32:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Pang: It was the most important night of his career. Curtis Duffy hovered over plates inside the gleaming white kitchen of his new restaurant, Grace. Head down, with the poker face that was the 37-year-old's default demeanor, he arranged long celery curls, ricotta and fried sunchokes into a three-dimensional wreath resembling the architecture of Antoni Gaudi.

The lock on the glass front door was unbolted, and the first customers walked through.

Finally. The restaurant was supposed to hav]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Faded]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4742</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4742</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:32:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andrew Meacham: TAMPA — Tiffany Messingham wanted to get her first-grade students thinking about how the sun works.

How does it change things?

So in November, the bubbly teacher at Lee Elementary School of Technology and World Studies started an experiment. She directed her students to cut outlines of their hands on turquoise construction paper.

The students wrote their names on the palm prints and taped them to classroom windows, where they would absorb the light.

What will happen to the pa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Asses To Kick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4740</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4740</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:30:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Five weeks before his 50th birthday, Michael Jordan sits behind his desk, overlooking a parking garage in downtown Charlotte. The cell phone in front of him buzzes with potential trades and league proposals about placing ads on jerseys. A rival wants his best players and wants to give him nothing in return. Jordan bristles. He holds a Cuban cigar in his hand. Smoking is allowed.

"Well, s—, being as I own the building," he says, laughing.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Unbearable Must Now Be Borne]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4704</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4704</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:12:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson passed along this story, from March 6, 1988. Take a look.

By TAD BARTIMUS, Associated Press Writer BUCKNER, Mo.

BUCKNER, Mo.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers …" — William Shakespeare, Henry V

There is so little left.

A red cardboard valentine with torn paper lace, which proclaims, "I love you Mom." A carefully penned Thanksgiving essay in which the writer says he's grateful for his family "to have someone to love me." A child's "Life Story" book with extra pages left ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sewers, Curfews — Oh, And A Ban On Gay Bias]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4702</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4702</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:30:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: VICCO, Ky. — In a former pool hall that is now the municipal building for a coal smudge of a place in eastern Kentucky called Vicco, population 335, the January meeting of the City Commission came to order. Commissioners and guests settled into patio chairs, bought at a discount and arranged around a long conference table. Those who smoked did.

The Commission approved the minutes from its December meeting, hired a local construction company to repair the run-down sewer plant and tink]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Podcast]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4700</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4700</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:28:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matt Tullis talks to Pamela Colloff. Listen.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Warriors]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4698</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4698</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:08:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin: They came floating through her Chicago office, two words transmitted from a news alert on Dec. 14, two words conjoined to form the awful phrase that has become all too familiar to 26-year-old Mary Hollis Inboden: "School shooting."

As the details began to emerge from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., the professional actress recognized well what was happening to her even as she struggled to control it — her breathing was increasing, the panic starting t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bones Of Contention]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4695</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4695</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:05:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paige Williams: Natural history goes to auction five or six times a year in America, and one Sunday last May a big sale took place in Chelsea, at the onetime home of the Dia Center for the Arts. The bidding, organized by a company called Heritage Auctions, began with two amethyst geodes that, when paired, resembled the ears of an alert rabbit. Then came meteorites, petrified wood, and elephant tusks; centipedes, scorpions, and spiders preserved in amber; rare quartzes, crystals, and fossils. The]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shop Talk]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4693</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4693</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:54:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Me and Tom and Chris talked to Matt Tullis about all sorts of things. Kruse has the highlights.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Forty Two Years Later, The Same Questions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4691</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4691</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:12:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: "Did you commit this robbery?" the attorney asked her client.

Emil Jaroszyk (pronounced Ja-ross-ik) had answered that question many times over the years. First, as a young man when he was arrested for the crime. Then later, on a polygraph test. He told friends and relatives his truth before he went to prison and after he got out. Here he was again this month, as a much older man, answering that same question inside the same Carroll County Courthouse where he stood trial for the crime]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4688</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4688</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:31:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Two-fer. Read up.

Justin Heckert: Behind the empty bleachers he parks his green pickup truck and cuts the engine, spits Copenhagen into an empty plastic water bottle. He opens the door and stretches his legs. He pulls down the hatch on the bed of the truck and sits there for a minute, exhaling into the cold. He's leaving home in two days, leaving Versailles, Ky., driving 1,200 miles to start over again. He is moving to Laramie and walking on to the Wyoming football team, to try and kick field g]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The New Face Of The Pro-Life Movement]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4686</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4686</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:40:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael J. Mooney (thanks to Dixon for the link): As David Pomerantz tells the story, his grandfather was 6 years old at the beginning of World War II, when Pomerantz's great-grandparents were killed by Nazis. The young boy was put on a train bound for a concentration camp. He was riding in the last car—it was packed so tightly with people that he could barely breathe—when a pin fell out of a coupler, dropping his car from the rest of the train. The boy walked to a nearby town, only to find that]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He Can Watch, Just Can't See]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4683</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4683</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:09:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Kovac Jr.: The man who has witnessed more Atlanta Falcons games than anyone on Earth can see them no more.

Oh, he can watch them a little when he scooches his leather easy chair within a couple of feet of the big screen in his apartment at Macon's Pinegate retirement home.

But the players are blurs from his perch in the stands, 32 rows up on the 50-yard line, where Joe Curtis has seen more Falcons home games than any human being.

His blue eyes don't work like they used to. Like they did i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Longform Meltdown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4680</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4680</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:55:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dean Starkman takes the temperature of longform at a few papers. It's not looking good.

The Los Angeles Times, for instance, published 256 stories longer than 2,000 words last year, compared to 1,776 in 2003—a drop of 86 percent, according to searches of the Factiva database. The Washington Post published 1,378 stories over 2,000 words last year, about half as many as 2003 when it published 2,755. The Wall Street Journal, which pioneered the longform narrative in American newspapers, published ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Audible]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4642</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4642</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Dec 2012 15:55:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Up ahead, on your left, Gangrey, The Podcast. Huge thanks to Matt Tullis and Glenn Battishill for pulling this together. Follow @gangreypodcast.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Media Go Home]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4636</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4636</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Dec 2012 13:35:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you've ever been part of a big media descent upon a small town, you know that awkward feeling of trying to get the story while also trying to not be an asshole. It's rare in my experience though that the town becomes so j-saturated that we start cannibalizing each other.

Is the naval-gazing justified? Is there a better way to do what we do when it comes to big events like this?

I'll offer the ignorant opinion that a primary cause for blow-back is the physical space used up by our television]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Running And Hoping To Find A Child Safe]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4634</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4634</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:01:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jim Dwyer: NEWTOWN, Conn. — A few minutes before 10 Friday morning, Michelle Urbina was speaking with a customer at the small bank branch that she manages in Bethel, Conn., when her assistant broke in.

"What school does your daughter go to?"

"Sandy Hook," Ms. Urbina replied.

"There's been a shooting there," her assistant said.

As Ms. Urbina headed for the door, her phone began buzzing with text messages from friends and other parents. It is a 20-minute drive from Bethel to the school. The la]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Murder At Locker 02-069]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4631</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4631</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:59:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Susan Taylor Martin, Feb. 11, 2001: He lives alone in the big city.

Weekday mornings, between 9 and 9:30, he steps out of Apt. 3A and rides the elevator down to the lobby. Walks across the black marble floor, buffed to a gleam. Nods to the doorman.

"Good morning, sir," the doorman says.

He is tall and thin, looks to be in his late 30s. Though he has lived here for more than two years, the doorman doesn't know much about him. Just that he's a good tipper, never asks for anything, has few if an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[If It's for Sale, His Lines Sort It]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4629</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4629</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:53:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Margalit Fox: It was born on a beach six decades ago, the product of a pressing need, an intellectual spark and the sweep of a young man's fingers through the sand.

The result adorns almost every product of contemporary life, including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding.

The man on the beach that day was a mechanical-engineer-in-training named N. Joseph Woodland. With that transformative stroke of his fingers — yielding a set of literal l]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Teachers Sought To Soothe Children In Moments Of Terror]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4626</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4626</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:51:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow: NEWTOWN, Conn. — The day began, like all days at Sandy Hook Elementary, with the morning ritual of taking attendance.

Yellow buses rolled into the parking lot just before 9 a.m., and a dozen teachers working "bus duty" greeted them at the school's front curb. The teachers marked off students as they descended from their buses, patting their heads and counting them out loud. Then the group entered en masse through the glass doors at the front of the school and dispersed into classroo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He loved hamburgers with ketchup, his Dad's egg omelets with bacon, and his Mom's french toast.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4623</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4623</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:18:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[An obtituary for James Mattioli, 6 3/4, who died on Friday at Sandy Hook. Thanks to Justin for passing it on.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fateful Premonition Wouldn't Dim Immigrant's Dreams]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4621</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4621</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:05:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Susan Carroll (subscription required): PIEDRAS BLANCAS, Guatemala – Leonel Tipaz de León stretched out on the wood-framed bed in his parents' tiny adobe home, its peeling, aqua shutters closed to the stifling afternoon heat.

At 21, he already was tired of life, of toiling for less than $7 a day in the cornfields that surround his family's farm high in the Sierra de Chuacús mountains, of scraping by with odd jobs and selling natural medicines. He wanted nice things, Nike shoes, his own home.

He]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Mystique of GUNS]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4616</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4616</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 15 Dec 2012 01:34:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Daniel Boone to Dirty Harry, America's Fascination with Firearms

Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer April 19, 1989 STYLE, PAGE D1

The Great American Gun Mystique:

We love guns. We hate guns.

We spend millions to defend the right to keep and bear guns. We flatten guns with steamrollers for the benefit of television cameras. We never stop arguing about guns. Guns kill people. No, people kill people. Guns are right up there with race as one of the most sensitive, taboo-ridden public]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Never Let Go]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4613</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4613</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:35:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Part 3, from Kelley: The surgeon sewed our baby shut. The neonatologist rose from her prayer rug. Then a nurse returned our tiny daughter to the quiet of her incubator, and we made our bargains with God.

The surgeon wouldn't say it, but she was certain our baby would be dead by morning.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A teen's climb from poverty in the Rust Belt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4604</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4604</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:38:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anne Hull over the weekend in the Washington Post: Week after week, the mailman climbed the steep hill of Shenango Street to the house with the busted porch steps. "Dear Miss Rouzzo," the letters began, or "Dear Tabitha Rouzzo." The college catalogues barely fit in the mailbox. They stuck out like gift-wrapped presents against white aluminum siding gone dingy from decades of wear. On the porch were three new Linen Breeze decorative candles — a nice try, thought the actual Tabitha Rouzzo, who cam]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Rise And Fall Of Epic Beard Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4588</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4588</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 18:10:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to Doyle for passing this along.

Lauren Smiley: On Feb. 15, Thomas Bruso's already unpredictable life took an abrupt detour. It was the day he ceased being Thomas Bruso and became Epic Beard Man, Internet sensation.

That day, Bruso pulled on his custom-made "I am a motherfucker" T-shirt, snapped on his fanny pack, and met the pot-smoking buddy he calls Ugly Bob at the bus stop at Fruitvale and MacArthur in Oakland. They boarded a San Francisco–bound AC Transit bus, planning to buy some ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Article About Lonely Man Results In Birthday Party]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4586</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4586</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:16:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Today I came across a hidden gem of a story, an unbylined piece that ran on page 6A of The Anniston Star in Alabama on October 9, 1972. I present it here, in its entirety, until the Star makes me take it down.

Article About Lonely Man Results In Birthday Party

T. W. Laine was not alone on his 67th birthday Sunday. Nineteen people attended a birthday party for the man whose profile in The Star Oct. 1 revealed him to have been lonely and almost friendless since he moved to Anniston.

Sue Freeman]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Stories At City Hall]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4578</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4578</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:47:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the mailbag:

I was wondering if you could suggest city hall reporters with strong writing chops. Headed there soon and I love narrative-style writing, and I'm fearful that I'll end up writing dull process stories all the time. Looking for folks who take a different approach.

Thoughts? Links?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vanishing Springs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4581</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4581</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:03:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Craig Pittman: North of Gainesville, a church camp once attracted thousands of visitors because it was built around the gushing waters of Hornsby Springs. Then the spring stopped flowing and the camp had to spend more than $1 million to build a water park to replace it. The old spring site is now so stagnant that it's frequently declared unfit for humans to swim in. In Silver Springs, where the water was once so clear it was as if the fish swam through ­air, there are now goopy mats of algae so ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[27 Things]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4579</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4579</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:59:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[T Lake:

1 A hailstorm in Colorado, summer 1993. A mother and her son were riding bicycles along the edge of Horseshoe Lake, in the town of Loveland. They were three miles from home, a mile above sea level, and the mother wished she had not led them so far. But they had only one choice. "Pedal through the pain," she told the boy. And he did. The path was rough, and the hail stung their faces, but three-year-old Collin Klein would not quit. The whole way home she heard him talking to himself. Ped]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[When A Chocolate Puck Tasted Like America]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4576</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4576</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:33:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So much good in here. Dan Barry: There was a time; admit it. There was a time when, if given a choice between a warm pastry fresh from a baker's oven and an ageless package of Ring Dings fresh from the 7-Eleven, you would have chosen those Ring Dings. Not even close.

After opening the tinfoil or cellophane wrapping with curatorial care, so as not to disturb the faux-chocolate frosting, you would have gently removed the puck-shaped treat and taken a bite deep enough to reveal crème — not cream, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Standing Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4572</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4572</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:53:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Two Parts.

Molly Hennessey-Fiske: After the nightmares started, Davien Graham avoided his bicycle.

In his dreams, he pedaled his silver BMX bike through his neighborhood, heard gunfire and died.

If I stay off my bike, I'll be safe, he thought.

He placed it in a backyard shed, where it sat for months. But Jan. 12, 2008, dawned so spectacular that Davien decided to risk it.

He ate Cap'n Crunch Berries cereal, grabbed the bike and rode a half-mile west to Calvary Grace, a Southern Baptist chur]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On A Quest To Preserve History in Pelham, Texas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4569</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4569</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:29:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dave Tarrant (paywall): PELHAM – The 50-year-old tree growing near Catherine Porter's front porch sags from the weight of pecans the size of golf balls. The clusters of green husks are so heavy, they're breaking the branches that are brittle from lack of rain.

The drought has been as wicked as any she's seen, including the Texas drought of the '50s and the Dust Bowl of the '30s.

At least $100 worth of pecans are ripe for the picking. All she has to do is gather them in a barrel and take them t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Goodbye, Newsroom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4567</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4567</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:51:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mailbag:

The Winston-Salem Journal laid off its publisher, its multimedia editor and its arts reporter yesterday. The multimedia editor, Michelle Johnson — a talented woman with a deep appreciation for good narrative and good work — did this video as a sendoff.

Goodbye, Newsroom from Michelle Johnson on Vimeo.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Crossing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4549</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4549</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Nov 2012 19:24:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben in today's Tampa Bay Times: The young man stood at the front of Bus C, his ribs rising and falling with each breath. Before him stood about 20 members of one of the best marching bands in the world, Florida A&M's Marching 100, which had performed for presidents and before a televised Super Bowl audience of 106 million, and now, on a Saturday night last fall, was gathered in the dark inside Bus C, parked behind the Rosen Plaza Hotel off International Drive in Orlando, not far from Pizza Hut a]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Halloween Of My Dreams]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4520</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4520</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:19:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Marjorie Williams, 2004: Every other day of the year, any mother knows that glitter is the work of Satan, but last Sunday it lit her skin with a dew of every color.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Sinking Of The HMS Bounty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4518</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4518</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:51:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jay Price: Four pagers went off simultaneously early Monday, and the on-duty helicopter crew pulled themselves from their warm bunks at Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City. It was 3 a.m.

Some 180 miles away, the 180-foot replica of the three-masted tall ship HMS Bounty, built for a 1962 Marlon Brando movie, was dying. Its 16-member crew, heading south from Connecticut to Florida, had gambled that they could beat Hurricane Sandy by driving far east, but the storm was too big, too powerful.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Strong Work]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4516</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4516</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:24:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I posted Part I below, but go read Part II and Part III of Alex Zayas' investigation into Florida group homes.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I Waited My Whole Life To Meet You]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4513</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4513</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:00:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Wilson: TAMPA — A dark-haired woman pushing a double stroller appeared at Airside E security Saturday morning nearly out of breath.

Two tiny girls reclined in the stroller. A blond woman bustled alongside, carrying bags and cardboard signs.

The dark-haired woman told the Tampa International Airport security officer, "My husband is coming back from his deployment, and he has never met his daughter. Can I go to the front of the line?"

Whatever had been important to the people in that line ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Massage-A-Thon]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4511</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4511</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:11:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Jeremiah Sullivan: About a month ago, editors from this magazine, which employs me, and from which I am therefore loath to turn down assignments even when they are horrifying, assigned me to get a series of massages and other body treatments here in the coastal town where I live, Wilmington, southeastern N.C., Port City of Progress and Pleasure. There was a semi-legitimate journalistic impulse behind it, but it was also billed as an act of mercy. I'd been traveling and writing a lot for the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In God's Name]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4509</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4509</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:54:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Strong, important investigative work from Alexandra Zayas.

Part I: They shaved him bald that first morning in 2008, put him in an orange jumpsuit and made him exercise past dark.

Through the night, as he slept on the floor, they forced him awake for more.

The sun had not yet risen over the Christian military home when Samson Lehman collapsed for the sixth time. Still, he said, they made him run.

The screaming, the endless exercise, it was all in the name of God, a necessary step at the Gatew]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[T.G.I.H.A.F.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4507</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4507</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:24:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Halloween Edition

By Henry Allen Washington Post April 3, 1983

Satan? You gotta be kidding. Didn't science fix that superstitious wagon for good? Didn't Valium and birth-control pills, those aspirins for the soul, chase him away like a mild headache?

Satan is that hooves-and-tail number that ended up on the cutting floor of the big movie we call the 20th century. Satan is the backwoods preaching bit they do right before they start handling the snakes. Satan is what used to explain crime and c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Made For You And Me]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4499</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4499</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:45:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I continue to be surprised and delighted by the upstart This Land Press, and I'm glad they're getting attention. This project — it's more than that at this point — gives me great hope. I love the gumption. I love the verve. I love finding an actual newspaper from home in my mailbox biweekly. Give people interesting stories well done in an attractive format and you'll succeed. If you don't subscribe, you should.

From CJR:

Across the street from a Fastenal hardware store in the shadow of Tulsa's]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Books!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4496</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4496</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:44:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A couple of new ones you might want to check out:

The Next Wave, edited by Walt Harrington and Mike Sager.

Next Wave is fascinating and beautiful reading for enthusiasts and students of vibrant, you-are-there, literary non-fiction. Each chapter includes a photo, a bio, a personal essay, and an outstanding magazine or newspaper story from a different up-and-coming writer. Compiled by two award-winning literary journalists/educators from the last generation, Next Wave is a celebration of today's]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Buzzfeed Seeks 'Longform Editor']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4464</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4464</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 18:17:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Yes, it's true.

Maybe, even as newspapers contract, the people who know what makes a great story will find a way to keep getting paid for their work.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man In The Middle Of Bountygate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4462</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4462</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:13:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael J. Mooney:

So much of Bountygate boils down to evidence. This is the biggest scandal in the history of the NFL, and when the initial punishments came down—long suspensions for both players and coaches—they came with only vague notions of evidence. There were documents, the league said, that proved coaches up and down the ladder knew about serious rules violations and did nothing to stop them. There was talk of pre-game statements and a pool of dirty money and allegations of $10,000 boun]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[GIVE ME THE BIGGEST FUCKING HEART IN THE ROOM: Shop talk with Jones]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4456</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4456</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:47:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to our buddy Erik Hahmann (@ehahmann) for this Q and A with the lovely and talented Chris Jones.

You've written a number of profiles in your career, perhaps most famously Roger Ebert. Is there a specific challenge that you face with them?

For me, if there's a problem, that problem is almost always falling in love. There are exceptions, of course. I've profiled people I've loathed, and I've profiled people I ended up feeling pretty ambivalent about, which is probably a bad sign when you']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Honor System]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4454</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4454</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:39:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: On or about March 15 of this year, Teller — the smaller, quieter half of the magicians Penn & Teller — says he received an e-mail from a friend in New York. In that e-mail, the friend included a link to a video on YouTube called the Rose & Her Shadow. Teller, sitting at his computer in his Las Vegas home, within eyeshot of a large black escape cross once owned by Houdini, clicked on the link. The video lasted one minute and fifty-one seconds. "I had what I can only describe as a vis]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Ballad Of The Babe]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4452</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4452</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:20:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: Nanci Donnellan, better known as the Fabulous Sports Babe, walked slowly one afternoon this past April to a table at a gelato shop on Beach Drive in St. Petersburg. She wore white Easy Spirit sneakers and a pink T-shirt and baggy rainbow-striped shorts. Her hands shook slightly.

"I'm the Babe," she said.

Donnellan once was a sports-talk radio phenomenon, loud, brash, and 5-foot-2 and 300-plus pounds. She quickly became one of the top personalities on ESPN Radio when she debuted in the s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Drought, Child Marriage Soars]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4449</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4449</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:17:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rukmini Callimachi: HAWKANTAKI, Niger — Each day before the reaping, the 11-year-old girl walked between the stunted stalks of millet with a sense of mounting dread.

In a normal year, the green shoots vaulted out of the ground and rose as high as 13 feet (4 meters), a wall tall enough to conceal an adult man. This time, they only reached her waist. Even the tallest plant in her family's plot barely grazed her shoulder.

Zali could feel the tug of the invisible thread tying her fate to that of t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Mysterious Roach-Thrower Of Macon, Georgia]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4445</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4445</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:18:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Kovac Jr.: When cockroaches by the dozen started showing up at the front doors of the Fountain Temple AME Church on Sunday mornings, folks in the 35-member congregation weren't sure what to think.

Their Pleasant Hill church dates to the middle 1800s. A decade ago it was condemned, its steeple caving in. But it was saved. They fixed the roof, put in new windows, purple carpet, purple-upholstered pews, a purple cross in the choir loft and brass chandeliers. The place was spotless, and they ke]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Obama's Way]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4442</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4442</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Sep 2012 14:29:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Lewis: Even af­ter his parachute opened, Tyler Stark sensed he was coming down too fast. The last thing he'd heard was the pilot saying, "Bailout! Bailout! Bail—" Before the third call was finished, there'd come the violent kick in the rear from the ejector seat, then a rush of cool air. They called it "opening shock" for a reason. He was disoriented. A minute earlier, when the plane had started to spin—it felt like a car hitting a patch of ice—his first thought had been that everything ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why She Started Walking Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4437</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4437</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:28:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kalani Simpson: When Nicolette Maroulis first came to, she thought she was dead. They were giving her last rites. The priest hadn't acknowledged that she had woken up, and, so, lying there on that hospital table, it hit her that maybe she hadn't. Maybe this was it.

She calls herself a control freak, and on 9/11, the world itself was spinning so out of control she'd done the only thing she could think of to take it back. She signed up. The bio says Maroulis had enlisted in the U.S. Navy on Sept.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why Did It Close? And What Now?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4435</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4435</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:50:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: JANESVILLE, Wis. — The Labor Day parade here in Paul Ryan's hometown started with a police siren. It moved slowly down Milwaukee Street, followed by clowns, a green-fatigued Vietnam vet with a rifle and a limp, a high school marching band's pimple-faced clarinetists, members of the United Auto Workers Local 95, and its many retirees.

Sitting in a lawn chair on the curb, Lisa Hansen watched the parade move past in the direction of her former workplace — the shuttered General Motors plant ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[His Dark Helmet Already On]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4416</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4416</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Sep 2012 23:21:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I've been corresponding lately with a talented young Missouri Tiger named Seth Boster (class of 2016). He could use some editing. Well, Tiger Nation — Justin, Tony, Seth, Wright, and so on — here's your chance. Give it to 'im straight.

The story:

Dorial Green-Beckham was not allowed to talk.

All he could do was walk through these glass doors of the athletic complex. All he could do was look around him.

The field ahead of him was fresh. The yard lines and the hash marks and the numbers beside]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Conventions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4414</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4414</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Sep 2012 23:15:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mailbag time. Any ideas here?

Dear Tom,]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Its Delicate Marriage Of Order And Violence]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4412</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4412</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2012 14:16:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[KVV: On a hot summer evening, when you drive the stretch of highway that snakes its way through water tower towns and the green and golden fields of farmland that make up the landscape between Northeast Indiana and Western Ohio, it's easy to get lost inside your own head.

There are vast stretches of Middle America where the ground is so flat, if you stare out at the horizon line long enough, you can almost make out the gentle curve of the earth. Large white clouds loom overhead, casting shadows]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hurricane]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4409</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4409</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:43:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Where's Ben? In New Orleans, waiting for the storm:

About a dozen homeless men hung out under a pavilion as rain sputtered and a firm wind blew.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Princess of Matamoros]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4407</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4407</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:06:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You'll want to read this one. Beautiful piece of work from Corpus Christi.

Mark Collette: CORPUS CHRISTI — Phil Rosenstein prescribed himself the only medicine he can fathom for a lonely heart: Honor her. Honor her ceaselessly, fearlessly, publicly.

He skipped wearing it on his sleeve and went right to the front of his shirt, emblazoned with Margarita's calming smile and eyes like dark bottomless pools. The photo was taken at a dance, in embrace, but Rosenstein cropped himself out.

She died S]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Stupendous Desolation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4404</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4404</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:43:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big writing from Michael Browning, 20 years ago: There is simply too much sky.

A fortnight after the attack of Hurricane Andrew, the southern arc of Florida lies luminous and shadowless in an extraordinary wash of daylight, despoiled, naked, hammered by the sun and open to every random rain.

The locust-winds of this tremendous storm, now sped and gone, have fretted every green leaf, stripped tree bark and twig down to the last tendril. Through these shadeless boughs a blank heaven shines, fill]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seventeen Days]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4402</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4402</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2012 17:07:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson reports to the marrow:

HAARLEM, The Netherlands — Everything that would destroy them had already been set in motion when Gregory and Jason Halman squeezed into the narrow staircase that led to the tattoo parlor. They turned sideways to fit through the opening, their broad, muscular shoulders crowding the walls. Paolo Ponziani drew the design they described, then sat them down, one after another, to ink it in the place they requested. Even as he started to outline the cross and t]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stay Away, For Your Own Good]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4399</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4399</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:03:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anonymous observation from a "Junior Member" at SportsJournalists.com:

"Spending too much time with that Gangrey crowd will give one an ego as fat as theirs."

Govern yourselves accordingly.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inside The Uprising]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4396</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4396</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:51:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers: TAL RIFAAT, Syria — Abdul Hakim Yasin, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, lurched his pickup truck to a stop inside the captured residential compound he uses as his guerrilla base.

His fighters had been waiting for orders for a predawn attack on an army checkpoint at the entrance to Aleppo, Syria's largest city. The men had been issued ammunition and had said their prayers. Their truck bomb was almost prepared.

Now the commander had a surprise. Minutes earli]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For Sale: Camel]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4393</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4393</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:02:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rukmini Callimachi: SAKABAL, Niger – In a part of the world where the worth of a man is measured by his animals, Tuareg nomad Soumaila Wantala has come to this market to do the unthinkable: Sell his last camel.

He crouches in the shade of a thorn tree as traders haggle over the 4-year-old male animal, Yedi. When the sale is complete, Yedi rears his enormous neck and lets out a cry, like the deep, subterranean call of a whale. It takes three men to drag the camel out of the arena, as if he under]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Arnie, The Money-Hungry Beagle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4391</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4391</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:02:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Jamison: LARGO — Arnie is a dour 10-year-old beagle known for his eccentricities, not the least of which is a propensity to eat hundreds of dollars in cash.

Seven years ago, the dog devoured $150 that Largo residents Corey and Hope O'Kelley had left out on a coffee table. The money was a gift from Hope's father, and the couple managed to recover $100 intact after it had passed through Arnie's digestive tract.

A long time went by after that. Arnie, known to his human companions as "the we]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving The School]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4386</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4386</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:50:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our friend, Michael Brick, has a new book out today. It's a great, important read.

Dana Goldstein:

Brick has done his homework on the history of American education, and he accurately assesses why schools like Reagan often appear to be such blighted places: less because their teachers are uniformly uncaring or their students unmotivated than because so many impoverished schools have become, over the past 30 years, increasingly cut off from the mainstream of American society, situated in neighbo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Anatomy of a Divorce]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4374</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4374</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:35:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Says Justin Heckert (and confirms Tom Junod): "Required reading for newly hired ATLmag writers. And for ALL writers."

Pat Conroy: Divorce has many witnesses, many victims. It is a lurid duet that entices observers to the dance; the pas de deux expands, flowers into a monstrous choreography and draws in friends, children and relatives. Each divorce is the death of a small civilization. Two people declare war on each other, and their screams and tears and days of withdrawal infect their entire wo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Handyman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4372</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4372</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:32:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Julia O'Malley: Bill "Guillermo" Martinez arrived at my door for the first time looking like a person who'd recently disembarked a cruise ship. He had on a denim shirt, sweater vest and sandals. It wasn't until I looked closely that I noticed his clothes were covered with a fine spattering of paint.

Handymen from Craigslist had been coming for days. They all had baggage. There was the registered sex offender. And the twitchy guy who wanted to be paid upfront. Guillermo, whom I found through a f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Marathon Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4367</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4367</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:14:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Wow. Wow. Has anyone else read Mark Singer's New York piece on Kip Litton, the mystery marathoner? Just finished it today and it's incredible. Apparently not online except in abstract. The structure and pacing are absolutely perfect.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Corners]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4365</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4365</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:01:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Simon: To remember him as we met him, twenty years ago, is to know everything that was lost, everything that never happened to a boy who could surprise you with his charm and wit and heart.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Coach Will Be Home For Dinner]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4360</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4360</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:47:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright: Before you join Urban Meyer, who is walking toward the exit of the Ohio State football office, there's a scar you need to see. A few years ago in Gainesville, his middle child, Gigi, planned a celebration to formally accept a college volleyball scholarship to Florida Gulf Coast University. It was football season, so she checked her dad's calendar, scheduling her big day around his job. As the hour approached, she waited at her high school, wanting much, expecting little. Some now-forgott]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Olympic Showdown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4357</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4357</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:01:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[What's the best Olympics-related story you've read this year? What's the best Olympics-related story you've ever read?

Let's have a showdown. Post your favorite story (even if you wrote it) and we'll all vote on the story that takes gold.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Who would want to kill at a death metal show?']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4347</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4347</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jul 2012 14:35:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thought this was a little gem buried in the metro section.

Jodie Tillman: TAMPA — The call to police Monday came from inside the Ritz Ybor, the scene of a day-long death-metal band tour called Summer Slaughter.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Jake LaMotta's Curtain Call]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4342</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4342</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:55:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alan Feuer: Jake LaMotta was standing in his kitchen on the East Side of Manhattan the other day, wedged in front of his refrigerator, puffing on a Marlboro in the dark. He was blowing smoke out the window and tapping ash into a small bowl of water. LaMotta, 90, is the onetime middleweight champion of the world, a boxing Hall of Famer who retired with 30 knockouts; but his soon-to-be seventh wife, who is nearly 40 years his junior, will not let him smoke in his own apartment.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Golden Girl]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4339</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4339</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2012 22:23:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Sanchez: On a cool January night, more than a dozen preteen girls crowded a staircase above a hallway that led to the Olympic-size pool inside the Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center on the University of Texas at Austin campus. The girls were clutching T-shirts and swim caps and black markers as they prepared to swarm a 16-year-old swimming prodigy named Melissa Franklin. The high-schooler, who lives in Centennial, Colorado, had just finished her second day at the Austin Grand Prix, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4337</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4337</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:46:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't make shit up. Now, carry on.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Petra's Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4333</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4333</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:37:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Montero: Aurora, Colo. » Each morning for the past few days, Austin Hogan has carefully pulled out his clarinet, put in a reed and played music in the hospital room. His audience, lying on her back, is quiet and lets it wash over her. The first day he did it, Hogan played something from Mozart. The next day, she asked for something faster. For Petra Anderson — whose survival is nothing short of a miracle, says her doctor ­— the music delivers something the tubes snaking into her arm from t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Chance To Come Out And Go Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4331</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4331</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:35:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: Usaam Mukwaya realized his American dream at a bar that reeked of sweat and stale beer, where a hunk of a bartender doled out Heinekens and whiskey sours. Men danced and freely kissed other men under strobe lights while a Rihanna track wailed through the loudspeakers.

But when Mukwaya looked out the window, he got nervous. He saw another type of blinking light: the red, white and blue lights of police cars. Too many times, he'd seen officers on the hunt for places like this, loo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seven Days, 79.9 Miles, Walkin']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4329</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4329</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:33:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery:

The sun beat hot and the humidity hung like plastic wrap. The blisters on my heels and toes had grown so fat it felt like I was stepping on cherries. I'd been on the road, on foot, for 11 hours, walking from Tampa to St. Petersburg and back, to … to what? I had no idea.

The project I had pitched to my editor seemed simple enough: For one week I'd shun my car and walk everywhere — to work, to the grocery store, to the park with the kids. I'd set off on a quest for answers.

Is i]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ordinary Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4327</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4327</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:51:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The incredible story of why the Toronto Star assigned 15 reporters to write an obit.

(thanks, Nigel)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Long Road To Theater 9]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4323</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4323</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:17:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brady Dennis: AURORA, Colo. — In the darkness of Theater 9, smoke began to rise. Stephen Barton saw flashes and heard loud pops coming from near a front exit.

Fireworks, he thought at first. Kids playing a prank.

But then he felt the molten buckshot of a shotgun blast pierce his neck and face. His left arm went limp. He collapsed onto the floor in front of his seat as chaos unfolded around him.

As he lay bleeding, Barton heard the sounds of the movie yield to more primal sounds of terror. The]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why Noah Went To The Woods]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4321</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4321</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:54:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Had the privilege of being in the same building as Mark this past weekend at Mayborn. Take a look at this wonderful story:

Mark Sundeen: VERN AND DONELLE KERSEY aren't the type of parents satisfied with hauling their kids to a national park and pitching a tent beneath the floodlights of someone's motor home. Native Montanans both, when they go to the great outdoors they get all the way there. In the summer of 2010, when Vern's only week of vacation was pushed into September, the couple were not]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Vehicle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4254</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4254</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:24:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you want to make someone care about an issue: surprise, surprise. A story works better than statistics. (Via Dan Stockman)]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Go! Go! Go!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4205</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4205</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:59:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Via Liddy Lake and NPR's health blog, the funniest pictures you'll see all week. Reporters literally sprinting with their copies of the Supreme Court's healthcare decision. Wish I'd been there to take part.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sense Of Place]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4203</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4203</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:59:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Mark Johnson:

I've been rereading Angels & Demons by Tom French. I know many gangreyers are familiar with the story, maybe the finest newspaper narrative ever. I was stopped cold by this paragraph near the beginning. I've never lived in Florida but I wondered if there has ever been a better summary of the state than this single paragraph:

"Even then, they were not merely crossing state lines. They were slipping over to the other side, entering the isle of eternal youth, dominion of the su]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Anatomy Of A Homicide]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4201</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4201</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:16:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is like reading about some forgotten pocket of America. Here's Doyle Murphy covering a gang trial: WHITE PLAINS — John "Tarzan" Maldonado spent his final hours in what he must have thought was a safe place.

An FBI video camera recorded him standing, a drink in hand, on the corner of William Street and Benkard Avenue as it grew dark on March 12, 2010. Even then, Luis "King Luch" Tambito testified on Wednesday, the Latin Kings were laying plans to kill him.

A 20-year-old named Jerome "Rude ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4197</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4197</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jun 2012 14:21:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Mooney: When Bill Fong approaches the lane, 15-pound bowling ball in hand, he tries not to breathe. He tries not to think about not breathing. He wants his body to perform a series of complex movements that his muscles themselves have memorized. In short, he wants to become a robot.

Fong, 48 years old, 6 feet tall with broad shoulders, pulls the ball into his chest and does a quick shimmy with his hips. He swings the ball first backward, then forward, his arm a pendulum of kinetic energy, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good-Bye, Operator]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4195</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4195</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:28:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Stockman: They were such an integral part of our existence that it was hard to imagine life without them. It's even harder to imagine now how they disappeared.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Newsroom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4190</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4190</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:42:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[To follow up on Ben's excellent post, here's a picture of my first newsroom, at The Press-Sentinel, in Jesup, Georgia, circa 2001. I'm on the right, covering my face, exhausted. The news editor, Drew Davis, is in the center. The photo was taken by Hank Orberg, our sports editor, the only other member of the editorial staff. If you look closely you can see a wire-mesh tray on my desk where they placed handwritten columns from old ladies in tiny towns like Odum and Madray Springs. "Miss Lala Winst]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Music In The Dust]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4186</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4186</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:51:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Caitlin Johnston:

MANCHESTER, Tenn.

Ukulele and smoke filled the heavy air of the Tennessee hotel room. For $58, the members of the Applebutter Express had themselves two beds with cigarette burns in the comforters and a chair dotted with brown stains.

"You don't come here to mess around," said fiddle player Joe Trivette, 25. "You come here to smoke meth in a cheap hotel room."

Or you come here because you've landed the impossible gig — the one that puts you in front of not tens or hundreds ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tempest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4183</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4183</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jun 2012 11:47:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joan Garrett: It's Sunday morning, and Matt Nevels is at home again.

From his front yard, he almost can see the white steeple of Red Bank Baptist Church. Less than a mile down the road, he knows, the church parking lot is clogged with members. Traffic backs up onto Dayton Boulevard. Crosses dangle from rearview mirrors. Bibles slide on dashboards.

Matt, 78 now, with wrinkled knees and sagging cheeks, was once minister of education at the red-brick church. His babies grew up there. Stephen, his]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mailbag]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4151</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4151</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From my inbox:

"I'm starting to work on a profile, and when I do that I always love to go back and read great profiles for a little inspiration. I was wondering if youd be willing to ask the gangrey crowd for their favorites."

So …]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Daddy Blues]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4181</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4181</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:48:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tony Rehagen: I don't read manuals. But when my wife was pregnant last year with our first child, she studied every so-you're-expecting book she could find. I scanned the sections she assigned, sat through birthing classes, watched the self-help VHS on swaddling and shushing, and viewed a tutorial on infant care she pulled off Netflix—but mostly just to show solidarity with the woman who, five months pregnant, followed my job from our home in Indianapolis to Atlanta last August. I smiled and nod]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hidden Hand]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4106</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4106</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 May 2012 15:29:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[An amazing and disturbing and fearless story from Patrick Hruby. Read it before it disappears:

I believe in the fix. I believe in the hidden hand, that sports have a secret, redacted history. I believe that Game 6 of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals was a sham, that Spygate was a cover-up of a cover-up, that Super Bowl III was preordained, that Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s heartwarming 2001 victory at Daytona was, in fact, too good to be true, that Michael Jordan's first baseball-playing retireme]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Driving Bear Bryant]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4104</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4104</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 May 2012 12:55:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Something important is being lost. Each rising sun takes a little more from the couple who live in the small brick home southwest of downtown. Billy Varner has been married to Susie for 57 years, and as her life was once spent waiting on him to get home from a job that didn't know hours or days off, now it's spent managing his dementia. Each day brings its own reality. On the worst, Billy, who is 76, doesn't recognize Susie. He'll dress in the middle of the ni]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Henry Allen!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4099</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4099</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2012 14:01:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Learning from the barber from Iraq. Read.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Doomed Romance]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4097</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4097</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 May 2012 19:49:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Carr:

My worry is not about the loss of the earthy smell of freshly rendered pages. A newspaper, even one short on advertising, is a great ad for at least one thing: the paper itself. The constancy of a daily paper — in the rack at the convenience store on Frenchman Street or on the tables of the coffeehouse on Maple Street — is a reminder to a city that someone is out there watching.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Winner,]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4094</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4094</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 May 2012 17:35:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[of Writer of the Year for 2012 at the National City and Regional Magazine Awards in Las Vegas, is my old buddy Justin Heckert. This is the second time he's won, which might possibly tie the record.

Hear, hear.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Night To Remember]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4091</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4091</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 May 2012 15:08:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeff Passan: ST. LOUIS – Collin J. Grundstrom, a streaker of considerable skill in the art of persistence and drastically less in that of evasion, was going to get naked Thursday night at Busch Stadium. He was going to get naked because he told his friend he would, and it was his friend's birthday, and birthday promises are sacrosanct, particularly when they involve nudity and lots of Bud Light.

"I'm gonna streak," he announced at the beginning of the St. Louis Cardinals-Philadelphia Phillies g]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Almost Famous]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4089</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4089</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 May 2012 14:17:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Netzel: Kevin Kiley glares at Chuck Booms overtop his reading glasses. His eyes double in size and his voice is full of annoyance as a small smile creeps across his lips.

"Excuse me," he shouts. "Are you Michael?!?"

It's the fourth time this morning Booms has interrupted one of the listeners calling in to he and Kiley's morning show on Sports Radio 92.3 The Fan. Kiley is fed up, sort of. He and Booms' vitriolic back-and-forth feels real, but their listeners expect it.

The rampant bickeri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Conjuror of a Device That Changed TV Habits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4086</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4086</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 May 2012 14:37:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Mark Johnson: I'm an avid obituary writer and a big fan of Margalit Fox of The Times. This one is an example of why her obituaries consistently reward the reader. Great quotes. Deep insight. Humanity. All in relatively few words.

Margalit Fox: Eugene Polley, an inventor whose best-known creation has fostered blissful sloth, caused decades of domestic discord and forever altered the way consumers watch television, died on Sunday in Downers Grove, Ill. Mr. Polley, the inventor of the wireles]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sadness To Anger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4081</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4081</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 May 2012 14:31:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This was real.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4079</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4079</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 May 2012 15:25:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Mooney: Jeffrey Maxwell told the police officers that his house was a mess. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He was a big man, 6-foot-5 with nearly 300 pounds poured over a broad frame. He had thick, gray sideburns and greasy, disheveled hair. He smiled at the investigators waiting for him on the small front porch.

It was just before 6 pm on March 12, 2011. Sgt. Ricky Montgomery and four other investigators had come to this modest, modular lake house in Corsicana—50 miles]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Weekly Communion, With the Occasional Elbow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4071</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4071</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 May 2012 14:23:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: Another wintry Sunday morning at 7. And in the bifurcated building of a century-old Catholic parish called St. Joseph's, the faithful gather. On one side of the church wall, a few congregants beseech God as they join in the celebration of Mass. And on the other side, a few men beseech God as they join in games of basketball, their shouts of "Jesus Christ!" and "Goddammit!" rising above the wheezing of the close but unseen church organ.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For $12 An Hour, He Gets Naked]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4020</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4020</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:45:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — His beat up Asics running shoes tossed aside, a barefooted Andrew Rihn stretched his leg muscles and swiveled his head back and forth to work the kinks out of his neck.

Art professor Chad Hansen slammed the door shut on room 134 of the Fine Arts building at Kent State University's Stark campus. The dozen students in Hansen's evening Drawing I and II classes formed a semi-circle around him as Rihn warmed up at the head of the class.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Vehicle Of Change]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4018</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4018</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:51:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Paul Hoover:

The footsteps begin before dawn Wednesday morning on Tubman Boulevard, runners pounding away down the main artery into the heart of Monrovia. You don't find many runners in Liberia's capital, not in this West African nation more renowned for its brutal 14-year on-again, off-again civil war than for athletic success, but there are some, and they move steadily down the smooth, graying asphalt, sweating in the already developing summer humidity, faces stoic and resolved.

Mo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Apology, 39 Years Later]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4015</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4015</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:38:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As @caryaspinwall said, Replace this, machines.

When he was 12 years old, the boy did something he only later realized probably hurt his seventh-grade teacher. It was minor — he was, after all, a kid — but in time, when he was older and wiser, he wanted to find this teacher and apologize.

But the teacher seemed to have vanished. Over the decades, the man occasionally turned to the Internet, typing the teacher's name into the search box. He never found anything. He never quit looking. A few mon]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Uh-Oh]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4012</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4012</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:46:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[They're coming for us.

Last year at a small conference of journalists and technologists, I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. At first he tried to duck the question, but with some prodding he sighed and gave in: "More than 90 percent."]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At Wal-Mart, A Bribe Investigation Silenced]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4008</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4008</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:27:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Barstow does it again: MEXICO CITY — In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company's largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The form]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['This Is Hard']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4004</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4004</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:47:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our friend Tommy Tomlinson is leaving the Charlotte Observer, where he did wonderful things, for a new sports website, where he will do more wonderful things.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finding Their Way Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4002</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4002</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:23:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bill Landauer: Mindy Bennett dreams of the day.

She will pack her things.

She will pull onto Broadway and turn south on Main Street. She will reach Interstate 83 and head for Baltimore, where a new life waits.

She will leave Red Lion, the old cigar factory town in southeastern York County where she was raised. She'd been a basketball player. She'd dreamed of being a model. She'd had her first kiss there. But she also will leave behind April 24, 2003, and the moment that, for almost a decade, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Bow For Hannah]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4000</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4000</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:31:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lee Hill Kavanaugh: She'd read the books last year, twice. But it was "The Hunger Games" movie that sent our 10-year-old daughter climbing our trees, asking for archery lessons and then, a quiver.

Quiver?

To keep the arrows in, Hannah explained.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Into The Abyss]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3998</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3998</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:51:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Says Heckert: Nonfiction fans/writers/storytellers: A documentary you simply must see.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Big Book]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3996</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3996</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Apr 2012 23:10:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: I. THE FISK BUILDING

On the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building in New York — an elegant brick giant built in 1921, stretching an entire block of West Fifty-seventh Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue — the hallways are lined with doors bearing gold plaques. The plaques reveal the professions of the people at work behind them: lawyers, accountants, financial advisors. But one plaque displays only a name, with no mention of the man's business: ROBERT A. CARO.

Behind that]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Annotation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3245</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3245</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On Paige Williams's nifty new blog, she exchanges notes with Kruse on his missing-woman story: "……dying to know what that receipt was for—lumber? paint? Did you choose to omit that detail to keep things streamlined?"]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Under Siege]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3764</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3764</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thomas Lake and Melissa Segura: To the many levelheaded conspiracy theorists of Venezuela, at least this part of the story rings true: There was a kidnapping on Nov. 9 in a concrete slum of Valencia, a major city near the coast of a socialist republic whose 29 million citizens currently are as likely to be kidnapped or murdered as any population in the Western Hemisphere. Which is not to say that they don't enjoy themselves. At the moment of his abduction Wilson Ramos, the starting catcher for t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Amazing Lucy Morgan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3766</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3766</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NPR's Noah Adams profiles my colleague Lucy Morgan, a legendary investigative reporter in here in Florida.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3709</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3709</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A tale of Texas justice and mysterious salt poisoning, from Pamela Colloff:

WHAT LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT ANDREW Burd's early life is contained in a slim Child Protective Services case file that chronicles the boy's descent into the child welfare system. His mother was just sixteen, the file shows, when she gave birth to him in Corpus Christi on July 28, 2002. She would later admit, according to one report, "to using alcohol, methamphetamines, cocaine and crack cocaine, LSD, marijuana, cigarettes,]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Harry Crews]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3949</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3949</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:10:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Harry Crews has died.

Here's a good one, circa 1984: The Violence That Finds Us]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shut Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3947</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3947</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:40:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Recently, while transcribing some interviews, I realized that I talk too much.

It's a natural human impulse: The other person is sharing, so you want to share too. That's how good conversations usually work.

Well, an interview is not a normal conversation.

You should answer questions if your source asks. Otherwise, resist the urge to tell your own story. If you must tell, keep it very short.

You're not there to talk.

You're there to listen.

That part of you that likes to tell stories?

Wak]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[SHOPTALK: Spencer Hall]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3939</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3939</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:52:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big thanks to Erik Hahmann for pulling together this Q and A with Spencer Hall. Enjoy. Here's Erik:

I'm going to be disappointed if Spencer Hall never writes a novel. That's not something you can say about most sports writers. He writes mainly about college football, yet even those who don't care about the sport can find something to enjoy in his voice and superb story telling abilities. If you're a fan of good writing, be it newspaper, magazine or online, Spencer Hall is a name you'll need to ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Retreat]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3936</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3936</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:51:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: SANFORD

These days, Cheryl Brown has to walk the dog. • For a month — ever since her son heard someone screaming for help and her daughter called 911 and everyone heard the loud snap of a gunshot — Brown's children have been afraid to go outside.

Her youngest daughter, who is 9, won't even look out the window. She keeps seeing the dead teen's body.

"That could have so easily been my son," said Brown. "He wears hoodies all the time."

Brown, a 40-year-old single mom who says sh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Go To Sleep]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3934</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3934</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:23:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The latest classic of straight-faced police reporting from Erin Sullivan:

Doyle Hardwick found himself back at the Land O'Lakes jail this week, this time for 60 days, all because he wanted to check his Facebook page in peace.

The trouble began brewing the evening of Sept. 24, as Hardwick plied his wife with beer, hoping she would go to bed. She drank. And drank. But didn't feel like going to sleep. So he called 911.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Free Fallin']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3932</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3932</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:43:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[She's a good girl, loves her mama Loves Jesus and America too She's a good girl, crazy 'bout Elvis Loves horses and her boyfriend too

It's a long day livin' in Reseda There's a freeway runnin' through the yard And I'm a bad boy, 'cause I don't even miss her I'm a bad boy for breakin' her heart

And I'm free, I'm free fallin'

All the vampires walkin' through the valley Move west down Ventura Blvd And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows All the good girls are home with broken hearts

An]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Departure]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3927</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3927</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:26:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A story by Michelle G. Chan in American Journalism Review describes the decision Emily Nipps made to leave the Tampa Bay Times for a PR job at a hospital. (Even though, according to the story, the paper offered to pay her more than her new job would have.)

I've known several people who made similar moves. Here's what I'd like to know: Do you miss journalism? Are you glad you left? What does the balance sheet look like?

It's hard for me to imagine leaving journalism. Most of my non-family relat]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Chance In Hell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3924</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3924</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:41:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Virginian Pilot's Corinne Reilly won the Ernie Pyle Award last week for a five-part series called A Chance In Hell.

Here's Part I: KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN

The doctors can hear the wailing before their patient is even in sight.

A second later, a flight medic bursts through the trauma department doors. His face is serious. He's short of breath. Outside, corpsmen rush to unload a soldier from a military ambulance that carried him here from a Black Hawk. Two dozen doctors, nurses and surgeons h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Action]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3922</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3922</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:11:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The riveting start of Mike D'Orso's "The Sniper," The Virginian-Pilot, March 22, 1987:

The sun lay low in the Vietnamese sky. Steam rose from the damp jungle mulch. The only sound in the sweltering stillness was the buzzing of flies and gnats as they swarmed above Carlos Hathcock's body, collecting on his neck, probing the corners of his eyes, digging into the creases of his mouth. His knees and elbows were blistered and bleeding. His pants were soaked with urine. But Hathcock felt nothing. He ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Driving Mike Daisey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3919</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3919</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:32:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[" … story should always be subordinate to the truth … "

-30-]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['The Long Fall,' Revisited]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3906</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3906</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:58:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thomas Curwen on Paterniti's masterpiece:

"The Long Fall of One Eleven Heavy" was first published in Esquire in July 2000, and 12 years later, I find myself admiring with each reading the risk that Paterniti took in his telling of this story.

As journalism, the work is idiosyncratic. Paterniti identifies none of the characters by name, and he provides no explanation. The principals are known only as the medical examiner, the television reporter and the father of the woman with the blue Persian]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[No Earthly Trace]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3904</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3904</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:57:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Josh Green: In the days after her son vanished four years ago, it seemed to Erika Wilson that everyone wanted to help. There were Justin's friends, of course, the ones he'd called that last night but couldn't reach. But there were complete strangers too. Like the kids from Parkview High, bitter rivals of Brookwood, Justin's old high school. Or the private detective who brought in the mounted search team from Texas. A command center was set up in the fellowship hall of a Methodist church. Organiz]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How To Pitch A Magazine Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3902</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3902</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:51:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[An excellent primer from successful freelancer Jennifer Kahn:

Never pitch a story until you know who the characters are going to be and understand the arc of their story: You may not know exactly how the story ends, but you need to know the heart of the story. That's the only way you can guarantee the piece will be interesting. Otherwise, it's what I call "junk in the trunk." As in, "Hey magazine editor, I found a trunk full of junk. How about paying me to go on an expensive trip to rummage thr]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back On The Streets]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3900</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3900</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:33:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Simon: Seven-baker-twenty-four unit turns at Mosher and rumbles past that stretch of Appleton Street where Gene Cassidy took two in the head for the company, the first one stealing his eyesight, the second lodging in his brain beyond the skill of a surgeon's knife.

(Thanks, Ted)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Suicide, 13]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3897</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3897</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:32:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Sottile: It was a Tuesday. In a dusty-orange bedroom — papered in Twilight posters and stacked with stuffed animals — 13-year-old Casey Holliday brushed her dark hair into a severe angle over her right eyebrow. She pulled on a grayish-blue hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and black Converse All-Stars.

Casey sidled into the backseat of the family Nissan Xterra. Her little sister, Sydney, 11, sat in front with their mother, Carrie Holliday. Holliday asked Casey why she didn't have her backpack.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Priceless]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3895</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3895</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Mar 2012 02:42:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The 17 books Ernest Hemingway would rather read again for the first time than have an assured income of $1 million a year.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man Who Couldn't Read]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3892</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3892</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Mar 2012 02:35:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A classic work from Gary Smith, Esquire, 1990 (thanks, Ed K.):

Slowly, so the bed wouldn't creak, the millionaire who couldn't sleep rose and walked barefoot to the bookshelves. "Tonight," he whispered to himself. "Please let it happen tonight."]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Symbolism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3639</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3639</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From The Paris Review:

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

Many of them wrote back. Their respo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3738</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3738</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please take a look at the work of Michael Graff, from N.C.'s Our State. (Thanks, Sarah)

The Oyster Way: Down in the mud in the North Carolina sounds,the oyster finds a home and sticks with it. It will never move, not even to do the one thing that makes just about any creature move — not even to mate. Each spring, when the water hits 68 degrees, and not a degree sooner, without even the slightest courtship effort, the male releases his sperm into the water, and the female releases her eggs, putt]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Fifty-One Percent]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3889</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3889</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:06:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The numbers are in. Female writers are significantly underrepresented in major national magazines, just as they are here on Gangrey.

Anyone care to speculate on why that is?

Sub-question: Do you know of any up-and-coming female writers whose work we should be reading? Give us names and links, please.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bringing Down The House]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3887</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3887</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:12:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow: HELEN FORD DRIVES to the house from memory, parks along the curb and idles in her car. This three-story duplex in Cambridge, Mass., had been her home for 40 years, but now she wonders whether she has the courage to enter. She turns on the radio and takes out a crossword puzzle. "I don't know if I'm ready to do this," she says.

It has been more than two years since she was last here — two years since her famous son betrayed her and the foreclosure specialists arrived with moving truc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pull The Trigger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3885</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3885</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:53:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here, preserved digitally by Joe Kovac Jr., is Tom Junod's 1994 GQ gem, "Pull The Trigger."

Junod: He shouldn't laugh, but that first time with the gun – it was funny, you know? That big old German bitch, that frau – she thought he had come to her nursery to buy a bush! He had sauntered down the hill, with the .357 in his waistband, under his jacket, and when she asked him who he was, what he was there for, well, he doesn't know where these things come from, but there it was, in his head, in an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Maybe That Bad Thing Wouldn't Happen Anymore]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3729</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3729</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[12/26/02

Why did you want to be a journalist? Henry Grade 4 USA

Dear Henry,

What a great question. Well, I always liked writing. But it was more than that: Being a journalist really gives you the chance to talk to so many different people and go to so many different places. So I guess at first it was about the writing. And then, once I started doing it, I realized that it was a great way to get paid to be curious. And every day it's something new, and I wanted to do something that was always ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Typecast]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3731</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3731</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is cool.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Boss Wants Pulitzers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3860</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3860</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:11:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Baron on a new direction for Reuters:

During a recent visit to European bureaux Ingrassia contrasted what he termed "adrenaline journalism" – the traditional wire service story flow – with "aspiration journalism" – the new investigative writing at length that is now being pushed for editorial operations.

Spot news is still wanted but the benchmark should be set higher, chief correspondents were told. It is up to bureau chiefs to decide where that level will be and what stories can be ignor]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Props]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3858</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3858</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:47:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congratulations to Teddy Cahill of the Ball State Daily News, who took second in the Hearst sports reporting awards for this story.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Composites]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3855</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3855</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:24:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Police composites of literary characters.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story Of Her Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3853</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3853</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:58:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Diana Moskovitz: After all the torment and torture, Nubia Barahona could still flash a smile. It was radiant and confident, set off by blond bangs and big hazel eyes. She smiled like a girl with her whole life ahead of her.

It showed no trace of her personal hell.

She was born to a drug-abusing former prostitute, removed from the home after her father was accused of improperly touching another child, then sent by the state's child protection agency to live with a couple who, police say, bound ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[National City and Regional Magazine Awards]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3851</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3851</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:48:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin Heckert scores three nominations and competes with Tony Rehagen for Writer of the Year.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Between Roses In Mumbai]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3849</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3849</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:06:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Katherine Boo: July 17, 2008—Mumbai

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father. In a slum hut by the international airport, Abdul's parents came to a decision with an uncharacteristic economy of words. The father, a sick man, would wait inside the trash-strewn, tin-roofed shack where the family of eleven resided. He'd go quietly when arrested. Abdul, the household earner, was the one who had to flee.

(h/t Mark]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Dividing Pig]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3847</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3847</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:37:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Really glad this was on 1A of the Tampa Bay Times.

Will Hobson: LARGO — This was never just about the pig, the neighbors say, but the pig was a problem.

Last March a loud, large, shaggy-haired man named Bernie Lodico moved into Bay Ranch Mobile Home Park. A few months later he brought Kojak, his blind, 300-pound pet pig.

Largo law bars livestock in residential areas. And Kojak stank, some neighbors say. Management sent Lodico a letter.

"It is our understanding that you have a pot belly pig l]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Essence Of Story, In A 358-Word Song]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3843</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3843</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:48:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tommy Tomlinson deconstructs "Ode To Billie Joe."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Typecast]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3840</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3840</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:40:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Pang interviews Montgomery and Kruse for a podcast.

Montgomery describes his beat the same way he's been describing it for many years: "Loneliness, human collisions, choices and consequences."

Kruse is unsparing, as usual: "I don't stop for five seconds, at this point, for Grandma sewing a quilt."]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Escape]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3838</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3838</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:13:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On Radiolab: Christopher Daniel Gay has broken out of jail more times than anyone else alive. He is the stuff of country songs and film rights. Reporter Ben Montgomery learned about him after Chris's most notorious getaway; he had fled prison and stolen a tractor trailer so he could visit his dying mother. (Oh and somewhere in there he also made off with Crystal Gayle's tour bus.) Running had become a way of life for Chris, and that big stunt made him into a folk hero–an underdog with seemingly ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Sickness And In Health]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3720</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3720</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Susan Baer: The dark-oak farmhouse table where Page and Robert Melton spent many a dinner hour is now laden with vases and framed pictures, fragile pieces of their life together that have to be tucked into cardboard boxes. The movers are coming in the morning and, with much still to pack, Page thinks she could be looking at another all-nighter.

She picks up a sepia-toned drawing of blackbirds. They gave each other art in the early years of their marriage, and this was the first thing Page had g]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why So Good?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3722</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3722</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson breaks down a Chris Goffard narrative.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nouvelle Hampshire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3724</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3724</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On the occasion of the first 2012 presidential primary, Dan Zak unearthed Henry Allen from 1988: New Hampshire is a fraud.

Which is to say that behind that idyll of white-steepled, sleigh-belled, town-meeting, republican-with-a-small-R America lurks a much realer and hidden New Hampshire — the souvenir hustlers, backwoods cranks, motorcycle racing fans, out-of-state writers, dour French Canadians and tax-dodging Massachusetts suburbanites who have conspired as New Hampshire has conspired for tw]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Did This Man Really Cut Michael Jordan?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3727</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3727</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: The most infamous roster decision in high school basketball history came down 33 years ago on the edge of tobacco country, between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, in an old town full of white wooden rocking chairs. The decision took physical form in two handwritten lists on a gymnasium door, simultaneously beautiful for the names they carried and crushing for the names they did not. A parade of fragile teenage boys passed by, stopping to read the lists, studying them like i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On the Trail of an Intercontinental Killer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3712</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3712</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Nick Schmidle: A little after 9 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1990, the owner of a steel-products company pulled up to her office in Vinegar Hill, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and spotted a black garbage bag sitting on the sidewalk out front. She parked her car and went to move the bag when she noticed it leaking blood. The woman called 911. Within the hour, Ken Whelan, a homicide detective from the 84th Precinct, peered into the bag. It was full of human body parts.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Life Between The Covers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3716</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3716</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: An order has come in from China. Someone in China is looking for an old book.

"Oh Edward, did you have energy left to hunt for one?" says Natalie Hughes.

"What was it?" her husband says, rising from his chair.

"I don't remember," Natalie says. "Let me look."

She squints at her computer, which is running slow.

"Come on, machine, wake up."

The title is "A Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue of Chinese Bronzes Acquired During the Administration of John Ellerton Lodge." Brown cloth]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Year Later, Event Lingers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3718</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3718</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: TUCSON

January has come again to Tucson. The pleasant days all but demand a hike or a bicycle ride. The cool evenings cast the Santa Catalina Mountains in a mesmerizing magenta. And, for some, the late nights bring to mind a supermarket called Safeway, of all things, and an echoing pop. Pop, pop, pop, pop.

A year later, Nancy Ostromencki, a piano teacher who shops regularly at Safeway, hears them still. She and her husband, Phil, had just checked out at Register 1, with the friendly]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Gentle Touch In A Punitive System]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3706</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3706</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Manny Fernandez: HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — Kenneth Wayne Davis died at 54 as not so much a man but a number: Inmate No. 327320.

Mr. Davis was charged, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated for capital murder by the State of Texas after taking someone's life on Nov. 19, 1977. But when he died in November 2011, Texas seemed his only friend. His family failed to claim his body, so the state paid for his burial.

On a cold morning in this East Texas town, a group of inmates bowed their heads as a prison c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[South of Central]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3697</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3697</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[My pal Chris Zuppa has quietly been chipping off pieces of a series that looks at the lives of people in South St. Pete. It's coming together like a smooth and visually appealing oral history. Nice work. Go check out the others, but here's his latest:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The SportsCenter-ization of Political Journalism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3704</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3704</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Agree?

Patrick Hruby: … Turn on ESPN. There are score tickers and headline crawls, slick graphics and constant teases for upcoming stories, everything creating a sense of urgent immediacy. Now switch to Fox News. Visually speaking, it's the same eyeball-grabbing formula. (Well, replace scores with stock prices, and garrulous sportscaster Chris Berman with a frosted blonde news babe). This is the SportsCenter-ization of the news, in which coverage of Washington — and the world, really — apes a g]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['I Get Things Done']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3762</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3762</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:59:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow: ORLANDO — She was scheduled to deliver a speech across town in 30 minutes, but she did not know where to go, or how to get there, or exactly what she would say if she managed to arrive on time. Bertica Cabrera Morris revved the engine in her Jaguar and an alarm on the dashboard warned that she was almost out of gas. She grabbed her cellphone to make a call and watched the battery die and the screen go black.

"Papa Dios!" she said. "Are you kidding me? Why is this happening now?"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nearly Incomprehensible]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3681</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3681</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paterniti, in a project for Ira Glass, in the NYT Mag (thanks, Dan Stockman):

If you'd been born to farmer parents in Battambang province, in the country of Cambodia, and been given the name Vann Nath (pronounced van NAT), you would have spent four years as a young man in a pagoda, carefully etching calligraphy on a palm leaf, and through that task, learned the Buddhist concepts that were meant to guide your life: a belief in nonviolence, truth-telling and mindfulness. After leaving the monkhoo]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Test Of Time]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3683</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3683</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: LONDON — After the torture of eight disconnected hours, the plane lands at Heathrow. We're still rolling when I turn on both phones, hitting refresh on my email, burning at the twirling wheel. Effing phone and its thinking. The messages finally arrive but won't load. I curse all the way to passport control trying not to run into people as I scan emails and texts. Immigration officer No. 1268 waves me down to the right.

"Why are you here?" she asks.

"The Test match between Engl]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[From Baghdad to Occupy Chicago]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3694</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3694</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Keilman: PERU, Ill. —— They buried Anthony Wagner in his hometown two days before Veterans Day. It was cold, with a stinging wind that tore the last few leaves from the trees and pulled the cemetery flags into taut ribbons of red, white and blue. A lone sun ray spilled from the sky, briefly painting the grave markers with a stripe of gold before vanishing into the clouds.

Wagner couldn't get out of Peru fast enough when he was a teenager. He was a hard case back then, prone to fighting and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[They're Not Comin']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3700</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3700</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charlie LeDuff, ladies and gentlemen:

Ring of Gunfire: Detroit EMS Unit Stranded on New Year's Eve : MyFoxDETROIT.com]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Jobs Out West]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3759</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3759</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:43:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Two jobs you should consider if you're looking. You'd be working for an editor who knows story at the Casper Star-Tribune.

There are the postings: Crime/Courts and Education. Apply here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Purpose In Exile]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3757</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3757</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:14:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Goffard: Reporting from Imbaseni, Tanzania — The fugitive shuffles to his computer and begins typing out his will. He is about to turn 71, and it is time. "My life," he writes, "has been a wild and wicked ride…."

All Pete O'Neal has amassed fits on two pages: A small brick home with a sheet-metal roof. A few road-beaten vehicles. A cluster of bunkhouses and classrooms he spent decades building, brick by scavenged brick, near the slopes of Mt. Meru's volcanic cone. Everything will go to hi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[If You're Late, You're Dead]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3755</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3755</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:49:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Fun Q and A with Kerry Burke, a murder and mayhem reporter for the Daily News:

…

When you arrive at a crime scene, what's generally happening? How do you go about reporting?

Very often it's absolute chaos. But, you know, I've been doing this for a while, and I read scenes to figure out what's happening when the world's gone mad. I realize, okay, these detectives are the actual case detectives and those detectives aren't. Okay, that's family. Okay, the shots had to have come from over there. Y]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Woven Newspaper Portraits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3753</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3753</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:22:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm in love. (h/t Craig)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Making]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3751</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3751</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:57:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this Q and A with Tom.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Waffle House Terrorists]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3749</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3749</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:39:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Junod: The guys were coming over. That's what Fred and Charlotte Thomas both called them — "the guys," as though they were Fred's poker buddies. Fred and Charlotte were both in their early seventies. They were retired. They were living in a place that was still new to them, and in some ways still foreign. They weren't in the best health — Charlotte had pain in her legs, and Fred, just a month before, had endured having half a lung removed by doctors who had misdiagnosed him. They thought he ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Benediction]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3747</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3747</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:55:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Man, howI love this. I encourage you to find the time to listen to it rather than read it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sink Or Swim]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3744</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3744</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:41:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow: CONWAY, S.C. — He awoke to his alarm on Monday morning at 6, just like always, even though his handwritten schedule for the day read only: "Find something to do!" Steven Murdock, 39, poured himself a cup of coffee and rummaged through the defrosted Thanksgiving leftovers in an otherwise barren refrigerator. He grabbed the phone that bill collectors were threatening to turn off and made his first call of the day.

"I need some kind of odd job to help me get by," he told a neighbor. "K]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Racing Katrina]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3740</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3740</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:38:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Rose, circa 2007: As is the fate of most self-styled inventors, pioneers and visionaries — those who toil in decades of anonymity, never realize their dreams and eventually die of broken hearts, or worse — J.T. Nesbitt and Andy Overslaugh's grand scheme never really had a chance in hell.

Fortunately, they did not know that. Or, more likely, they were too stubborn, too determined and simply too beat down to accept it. After all, delusions of grandeur led to things such as Mount Rushmore an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Interview with Ben]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3675</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3675</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:09:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In which he says: I'm sheltered a little at the Times from the woes of the industry, but it's rare that I'm impressed by out of town newspapers, and I buy them — all of them — everywhere I go. Seems like so much slash and burn has skinned a lot of papers down to nothing. To beef jerky. They read horrible and look irrelevant and feel like the flesh of a 100-year-old man. How many stories are we missing because the corporate owners won't employ enough people to give a few of them the time to roam ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Preacher]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3672</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3672</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:37:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mooney:

Before I met Robert Jeffress, I wanted to hate him. Jeffress is the conservative preacher who made national headlines in October, when he called Mormonism a cult. He's the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas, the oldest megachurch in America, and I am certainly not a Baptist. He endorsed Rick Perry for president, and I'm definitely no fan of Perry's. As a matter of fact, Robert Jeffress and I probably disagree on every major political and religious issue. And yet, I really, really lik]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Navigating Love and Autism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3667</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3667</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:52:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Amy Harmon: GREENFIELD, Mass. — The first night they slept entwined on his futon, Jack Robison, 19, who had since childhood thought of himself as "not like the other humans," regarded Kirsten Lindsmith with undisguised tenderness.

She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests — chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen — as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called Aspe]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Pharmacist]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3664</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3664</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:09:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Hessler (thanks, Charles B.): In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in the town of Nucla. More than a century ago, Nucla was founded by idealists who hoped their community would become the "center of Socialistic government fo]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Following the Dreamers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3661</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3661</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:02:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Schwartzman: In 1988, a fifth-grade class at Seat Pleasant Elementary received an extraordinary gift: the offer of a college education paid for by two wealthy businessmen. Could extra attention and hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid help them achieve the kind of success that had eluded their parents?]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Ten Best Journalism Schools]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3658</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3658</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:37:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Did anyone out there in Gangrey Nation go to Syracuse journalism school? Tell us why it's Number One.

(Saslow, I'm looking in your direction. Your career got off to an awfully fast start.)]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Dancer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3656</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3656</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:55:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ed Komenda: His wife standing next to him, Clyde Cressler kissed another woman on the dance floor.

Her name was Elaine Seckar, his ballroom dancing instructor at Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Lemoyne. It was there, under the lights of the chandeliers, dancing over the worn grain of the ballroom floor, that she showed him a temporary cure for the Parkinson's disease running through his legs like pins and needles.

"It was on the cheek, of course," Clyde says.

It was the simplest way the 68-year]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[If I Die Young]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3653</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3653</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:37:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Every day, seven Floridians die of a prescription drug overdose. This is the story of Stacy Nicholson and her struggle to recover from her addiction to oxycodone. Stacy received treatment through the Pinellas County drug court as part of a program called "Ladies' Day." The deal: If she stayed away from OxyContin, Xanax and other narcotic drugs and completed a treatment program, her record would be wiped clean. But for addicts, abstinence is not a simple matter.

Lane DeGregory and John Pendygraf]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[War Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3650</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3650</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:23:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to Raja for pointing out this Foreign Policy piece that tries to identify the stories that "told the story of the Iraq War." They're all, of course, amazing stories, written in difficult circumstances that I have trouble imagining. From Anthony Shadid to Dexter Filkins to Seymour Hersh, these are incredible stories. See for yourself.

I'd build upon the list with David Finkel's story about Izzy, which is my favorite.

What would your list include?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[If I Die Young]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3647</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3647</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:23:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A year of reporting from Lane DeGregory and John Pendygraft coming Sunday in print, Friday online. Here's the trailer:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Punched Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3590</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3590</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[First of three parts. Thanks, Mark.

John Branch: DEREK BOOGAARD was scared. He did not know whom he would fight, just that he must.

Opportunity and obligation had collided, the way they can in hockey.

His father bought a program the night before. Boogaard scanned the roster, checking heights and weights. He later recalled that he barely slept.

A trainer in the dressing room offered scouting reports. As Boogaard taped his stick in the hallway of the rink in Regina, Saskatchewan, he was approa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How Do You Explain Gene Weingarten?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3592</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3592</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Bartlett: The son asks the father why he's not wearing a seat belt. The father says it's because long ago the father's sister drowned. She backed her car into a swimming pool and, because she was strapped in, was unable to free herself. Her lungs filled with water and she died. The seat belt, the very device meant to protect her, sealed her doom.

The son believes the story. Why wouldn't he? What kind of horrible person would make up a story like that?

Gene Weingarten is not a horrible pers]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Their Own]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3594</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3594</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Six parts from the Arizona Republic.

John Faherty: In the predawn darkness, Gerson Gonzalez wakes without an alarm.

He always wakes this way. He lies silently in bed for a moment under his blanket. The January air is cold. Gerson showers quickly and dresses in the dark in the back room of the narrow trailer.

The trip to North High School will require a bus, then light rail, then another bus. But he wants to be there early. He is always hungry in the morning, and school means a free breakfast.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ringmaster]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3588</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3588</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:53:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The NBA lockout wasn't exactly a diamond mine of writing opportunities. Nevertheless, Brian Phillips found a riveting way to put it all in context:

In the past 15 years or so, the NBA has been haunted by a specter, one that began to coalesce around the advent of Allen Iverson before fully emerging in the wake of the Palace brawl. The specter is, to put it simply, the Red State Fan. To put it a little less simply, the specter is "the guy who boasts about preferring college basketball to the NBA ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP, Dear Reader]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3585</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3585</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:34:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Goodbye to a lover (mostly) of local newspapers.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Style]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3566</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3566</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:57:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Speaking of, here's the amazing Washington Post Style section from Sept. 13, 2001. Go ahead and check out the bylines. (thanks, Dan)

(pdfs) 09-13-01-front 09-13-01-p2 09-13-01-p3 09-13-01-p4 09-13-01-p5]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The 9 a.m.-ness Of It All Came Raining Down]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3561</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3561</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:09:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The latest "Why's This So Good?" from Nieman Storyboard, wherein Kruse breaks down Stuever's 9-ish essay.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Ben Wrote For My Wedding]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3552</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3552</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:21:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[photo by Jennifer Morrison

He was walking east. She was walking west. The ribbon of sidewalk was only so wide.

They'd seen each other a few times before, at the cafe where she worked, the new place downtown where he'd park with his newspapers to drink coffee and maybe make a friend.

He'd been feeling old and unconnected, living the lonely existence of a workaholic newspaper man. To compensate, in recent weeks, he'd been shopping for a BMX bicycle. He wore baggy pants and was growing quite a c]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[We Were . . .]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3549</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3549</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:41:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — A light glowed in the long front window of the last house on the left. It cast a soft yellow halo on the drapes. The mood on this chilly Sunday night felt somber, and people kept exiting the front door crying. A group of Penn State cheerleaders left in tears. Two other women did the same: deep, heaving sobs disappearing into the shadows of McKee Street. In the window, Sue Paterno's face filled the glass. She watched them vanish and turned away. Her husband n]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where Turkey Picks Up The Bill]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3547</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3547</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:17:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kim Severson (thanks, WWT): OZARK, Ark. — Brenda Farmer and Willie Blanscet have sat across from each other on the Butterball bagging line for 17 years, 102 cold, raw turkeys sliding by in front of them every minute.

"Me and Willie look at each other and say, 'How in the world can anybody eat this much turkey?' " Mrs. Farmer said.

For $11.40 an hour, the women, both in their 60s, cull the good from the bad.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Faces Of The War Generation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3545</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3545</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:11:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: BAGHDAD — On a bright October day in this city's Tahrir Square, Muhammed Asaad tried to make some noise. He announced his cellphone number to a group of 50 protesters at the weekly Friday demonstration. Text me your message, he said, and he would amplify it through a scratchy-sounding speaker on wheels.

"If you don't demonstrate, you're not a man," chanted Asaad, 26, glancing at his phone, trying to rile up young men in polo shirts and football jerseys. "We are not going to die or give]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Liking Is For Cowards]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3543</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3543</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:31:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jonathan Franzen:

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn't have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Q and A: Stuever]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3541</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3541</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:34:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love Hank:

The point of living in (or through) a renaissance is to leave behind some really lovely frescoes. Paint your brains out and disregard the cultural upheaval around you. For all you know, 400 years from now, someone will be restoring all your Information Age works, to preserve them.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bloodline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3538</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3538</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:29:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matt Baker:

The Hambrick family tree casts a dark and sprawling shadow across the dirt parks and grass fields of the North Suncoast. Pasco County's only high school football state title sprouted here. So did two pro baseball careers and 10 seasons in the NFL.

And so did bloody fights, drug busts and arrests down the road from a street that bears the family name.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Building of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3535</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3535</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:37:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rebecca Skloot: "I honestly think that structure is one of the most important tools in writing, yet it's not something that people often pick apart and really get obsessed with."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man And The Boy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3532</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3532</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:20:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin George: TAMPA

One night this past spring, Kim Bailey was making ice cream in the kitchen of his restaurant when a phone call forced him to put down his tasting spoon. A television reporter had news about J.J. Revear.

He hadn't heard that name in years.

J.J. had been shot dead in the parking lot of a windowless bar on a rough stretch of road. It was just 10 miles away from where Kim stood surrounded by white tablecloths and a waitstaff in white shirts and black aprons.

That contrast re]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lance Cpl. Rodgers Comes Home]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3529</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3529</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:12:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: The proclamation was in the mayor's hands. The marching band, all warmed up. The firetruck and police cars stood on call. And Pinky and Pepe Rodgers were in their beer and wine store in the Kentlands shopping complex, wondering why their store was suddenly so crowded.

But where was Matthew?

Of those assembled, Pinky and Pepe were the only ones who didn't know their eldest son was supposed to come home at 8:40 Saturday night. For seven months, Matthew Rodgers, a 20-year-old lanc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Facing Up To Firepower]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3461</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3461</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:02:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to Kovac for digging this one up.

Francis X. Clines: As he lies healing in a hospital bed, Louis McLendon is a wonder of ballistics: He has nine bulletholes in him from six slugs fired from three different weapons.

Pretty good shooting considering the blur of a target he presented in the Montego Bay clothingstore in Jamaica, Queens, on New Year's Eve, when he suddenly, rather maniacally, stood up toa terrifying holdup gang of five young men brandishing a semiautomatic arsenal.

"I figur]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why's This So Good?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3459</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3459</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:47:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson breaks down Meyer Berger's 1949 story of a mass shooting. Read it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Is Everyone A Writer?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3456</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3456</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:59:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Is narrative hardwired in all of us? Is it only a matter of tapping into our innate creativity?

Dan Kois: … Barry isn't particularly interested in the writer's craft. She's more interested in where ideas come from — and her goal is to help people tap into what she considers to be an innate creativity.

"Kids don't plan to play," she told her class in the first day. "They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.' " Narrative, Barry believes, is so hard-wired into hum]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Crow Patrol]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3453</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3453</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:19:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry in Terre Haute: Her Cadillac glides slowly through the rain-glossed streets of this traumatized city, her gat within reach. The ominous evening sky has yet to turn black, but it will. Oh, it will.

Her name is Joy Sacopulos. She is 72, bespectacled, and so small in her boat of a de Ville that she seems at eye level with the wheel. But don't let her play you for a sap. By day she might be the civic do-gooder, planting dogwoods in the park; by night she is the dame packing pyrotechnic he]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man Who Sailed His House]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3450</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3450</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:51:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Paterniti (thanks, Varma):

Later, lost far at sea, when you're trying to forget all you've left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the ocean.

Here are the neatly packed homes with gray-tiled roofs over which the mountains rise in rounded beneficence, towering over lush rice fields that feed a nation. Here are the boats that fish the sea, in all of its blue serenity, and the grass in all of its green. There is such peace in this picture of abundance: ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Silent Season of a Hero]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3445</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3445</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:11:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Annotated. Y'all saw this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[So She Fought]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3443</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3443</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:02:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joshua Wolfson: She visits him there, beside a lilac bush, framed by Casper Mountain and the city where he died.

A pair of vases bookends the headstone they will someday share. She wipes away dust from the marker and arranges the flowers. Lilies around Easter. Orange roses — his favorite — when she can find them.

She buys small American flags from Hobby Lobby or the Dollar Store and keeps them in her car. Four times a year — on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Flag Day and his birthday — she sets a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Spectacle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3440</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3440</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:05:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben: Allie Mae Neal pushed through the screen door and found a shady spot on her porch where the summer sun didn't bite. Kittens purred at her feet and wasps flitted in and out of holes in the roof. The few neighbors who passed by saw an old woman in a wheelchair, blue eyes lazy and unfocused behind thick glasses. She'd wave and they'd wave back. Black or white. She has never held a grudge.

"I never blamed nobody," she said. "I never knew who to blame."

She never knew because nobody was ever c]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He Said He'd Never Return]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3433</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3433</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:38:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brendan McCarthy: Early in Paul Gailiunas' film, "The Florestine Collection," there's a song that plays as a love letter of sorts to New Orleans. It's an upbeat, joyous ditty on the city's allures: red beans and rice, the Rebirth Brass Band, chicory coffee at 3 a.m.

"We want our children to know why we love that city, so let's go back to New Orleans," he sings.

Gailiunas wrote it years ago — after the flood, before he and his wife and their infant boy returned to their adopted city. He wrote i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Yay For This]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3429</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3429</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:04:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't you wish that sometimes The Onion was true?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Epilogue: Fiddler of St. Petersburg]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3402</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3402</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:02:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Meacham: ST. PETERSBURG — On their way to Tropicana Field, thousands of Tampa Bay Rays fans have walked past a gaunt man with a graying ponytail playing a violin.

His music — hundreds of American, European and Jewish tunes older than his mid 1800s violin — seemed to animate the steps of expectant crowds.

He called himself the Fiddler of St. Petersburg, the name printed on a plain business card that also mentioned his membership in the Chamber of Commerce.

Fellow musicians say he played w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Western Iraq, A Bloody American Legacy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3400</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3400</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:03:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq — The dust storm swallowed the horizon and then the soldiers, who leaned into the windy blur to load rucksacks onto vehicles pointed homeward. At 3:30 a.m. the next day, their Army battalion would roll out under the cover of darkness, concluding their mission to advise and train Iraqi security forces in Anbar province.

The swath of western Iraq the battalion was leaving behind has seen the bloodiest points of the war, but also some of the most promising. Since th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[10 Poems You Should Read]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3396</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3396</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:30:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We totally missed National Poetry Day yesterday. Make up for it by checking out the 10 Poems Everyone Needs to Read from Flavorwire. (h/t @craigtimes)

I'll add one, which I stumbled across yesterday. Written by Abel Meeropol, performed here by Billie Holiday.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thank God It's Henry Allen Friday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3392</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3392</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:07:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Town Style Forgot It's our very own Washington, where women wear "neutral" and men dress like Secret Service agents.

By Henry Allen September 14, 1986 The Washington Post

This is the City of Drab. This is the town where the clothes that fit are the clothes that fit in, where you want to look right, not good; a town where the men look like Secret Service agents and the women have to hide their fur coats from envious eyes back home, lest Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch U.S.A. slouch off to the ball]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Steve Jobs And The Idea Of Letting Go]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3389</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3389</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:25:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: Remember a few years ago, when your Apple store on any given Saturday afternoon ceased being the clean, technological zendo you once admired — the place you bought your iMac — and instead became a crowded bazaar of idealized wonder and hopeless waits at the Genius Bar?

The movement spread. People built their lives around the objects Steve Jobs gave them: the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. What happened with Jobs and Apple over the past decade is one of the rare participa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Rattling Of Wheels]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3376</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3376</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:12:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hemingway once said that Ivan Turgenev's "The Rattling Of Wheels" was the best short story of all time. I recently read it, and it reached a fine climax despite a slow start, but there are others I prefer. Annie Proulx's "People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water," for example. Or that haunting piece, "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson. Or an incredibly evocative story that Justin Heckert recently showed me: "Heat," by Joyce Carol Oates.

For a lot of us who write narrative nonfiction in the rang]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3373</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3373</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:57:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[James Rainey: Want to get under a newspaper person's skin? Tell them you don't need their work because you get most of your news from the Internet.

Inky survivors can't stand to hear that because they know that — technological advances and upstart websites notwithstanding — the bulk of news on the Web actually still originates with newspaper reporters.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[82 Years Strong]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3371</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3371</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:38:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bill Stevens: HOLIDAY — Steve Wrubel fixed a light breakfast Tuesday morning and sat down at the dining room table to pay some bills. He blinked hard to make his eyes water.

"I saw better yesterday," said Wrubel, 102.

Still, he managed to make out the cable bill — $78.06. Seems like a lot for a man who doesn't watch television. He also paid his car insurance bill — $1,160 for six months coverage on the old Chevy he keeps in the carport. He stopped driving last year, but keeps the car so friend]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Treating Ignorance With Respect]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3359</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3359</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:19:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Granger's note in this month's Esquire welcomes Charlie Pierce back to the magazine and drops this interesting nugget: "In a memo to me a few months ago, Charlie exhorted me and all of Esquire's writers to 'avoid the common trap of treating ignorance with respect.' There is more ignorance afoot in the world right now getting more credence than at any other time in history."

Reactions? You think that's true, that we're in the Age of Ignorance? And do you think we're being too easy on the m]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Should Never Go Away, VI]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3360</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3360</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:01:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From our dear friend Janine Anderson: I had no idea this story existed until the 2009 Mike Levine Workshop, when Ben and a few others from the Times Herald-Record brought it up after Pete Hamill spoke at the Eddie Adams barn. At the time, I covered courts in a community that struggled with the same poverty-gangs-drugs-crime-violence-murder cycle as Newburgh. And I struggled with how to keep the community narrative a part of quick-hit stories on people getting charged, tried and sent to prison. A]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Balls]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3254</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3254</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — A dripping-wet fist-bump from Frank Gunsett to all you hackers, duffers, shankers and slicers.

It's because of you that he and his wife hatched a 15-year path to retirement. That he is his own boss. That he works only six months a year. That he can likely rake in upwards of $800 on a good day.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Welcome To Newburgh, Murder Capital Of New York]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3357</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3357</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:17:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Patrick Radden Keefe: One morning earlier this month, just before sunrise, a silent convoy of SUVs streamed into the tiny, troubled city of Newburgh, New York. Over 200 law-enforcement officers descended on the blighted heart of town, and a company of military-style commandos prepared for a synchronized raid. Armed with M4 assault rifles and dressed in helmets, goggles, and green fatigues, SWAT teams burst into a series of dilapidated houses, shouting, "FBI! Get down!"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[From The Ashes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3355</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3355</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:14:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

In the hours after the 2008 election of the country's first African-American president, three white men crept up to a predominantly African-American church being built here in Springfield, blessed it corruptly with gasoline — and faded into the fresh November night.

Soon the church's pastor, Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr., was at the crime scene's flickering edge, weary, saddened. Moments before, he had been anticipating a new chapter in American history, and now here]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Soundtrack To War Goes Quiet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3353</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3353</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:42:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: FORWARD OPERATING BASE PROSPERITY, Iraq — "It's 81 degrees in beautiful downtown Baghdad. Six oh five on your clock on Fun Fact Friday. I'm Prickel."

"And I'm Townsend. Thanks for falling into extended formation this morning."

An apricot sunrise burns through the gray haze over Baghdad, which wakes up Friday to the jocular baritones of two staff sergeants in a ramshackle, mostly disassembled sound booth in a squat, Saddam-era bunker on a dusty side street of the Green Zone.

"Prickel ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Also From The Archives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3234</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3234</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever unearths the above ground pool from way back. So good.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[That Bright Mecca]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3350</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3350</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:29:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anne Hull, circa 1999: In the early 1960s, Walter Elias Disney took a plane ride over Florida. When he passed the vast area of scrub land south of Orlando, he pointed and said, "There."

Disney quietly paid $5.5-million for 27,000 acres, and the bulldozers and the hammers set to work.

As a native child of Central Florida, I grew up in the advancing shadow of the mouse ears. What did we do before Walt Disney World opened, replacing our perceptions of joy? We lived inside our own kingdom.

Our ch]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good Will To All, With A Side Of Soft-Serve]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3248</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3248</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: KENHORST, Pa.

This American summer, the heat is the least of it. A pummeled economy. A credit-rating embarrassment. More tarmac ceremonies for dead war heroes. Tornadoes, floods and other disasters, including Congress. Presidential aspirants stalking Iowa like Barbie and Ken zombies.

Clearly, the country needs to pull off the road and take a break. It needs to treat itself to a soft-serve cone, chocolate-dipped and melting so quickly as to demand a tongue's sculpting attention, whil]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Duckfeathers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3283</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3283</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:27:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse, from Grantland: There is next to no reason the University of Oregon should have a good football team. Eugene is a small city and is not near a major media market, there's very little local college-caliber talent, and for literally 100 years the Ducks did almost nothing but lose. But the past decade and a half has been different. They've been to the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and last year's national championship game, and they will start this season Saturday night agains]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Writer, In His Wife's Shadow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3280</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3280</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:22:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andrew Corsello: My wife is radiant. It comes naturally to her. Yes, she's very beautiful, and that beauty is the first thing people notice and discuss about her.

But hers isn't the radiance of a model or a starlet; it's a radiance that emits warmth — love — as well as light.

What Justice Stewart said of obscenity can be said of Dana's radiance: Words fail, but you know it when you see it. Yup, there it is.

Dana's in the radiance business. Literally — she's an Episcopal priest. And while she']]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Long Walk Through A Storm]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3276</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3276</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:35:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Loh: BRIDGEPORT — Slumped on a cot at Bassick High School Sunday evening, Maurice Ballestas offered living proof that emergency shelters have open-door policies.

His round-trip bus ticket from Hartford to New York, half used, laid across his backpack. His "Streetwise Southern New England Map," bought the night before in Stamford, was folded on a blanket. His clothes, 12 hours after he'd stumbled into the shelter, were soaked. His feet ached.

"It was the longest I ever walked," said the 34-]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Rum Diary]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3273</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3273</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:19:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Fun. Via Pat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Half Of My Life Is Waiting']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3271</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3271</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:12:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow (thanks, Mark): German Morales dressed for work in tattered painter's jeans and a stained white T-shirt, even though he didn't know when or whether he would paint again.

He tucked a brush into his back left pocket and a rag into his right. He walked outside to the utility truck he had bought with the last money in his family's emergency fund and called the only employee he had left.

"I'll let you know if I hear anything," he said.

He turned the truck radio to a Spanish pop station ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Advice From Jack Hart]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3269</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3269</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:27:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm a little late on this, but here's a compilation of Tom Huang's tweets from Jack Hart's session at the Society for Features Journalism conference in Tucson last week. Good stuff.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One On Every Corner, But None Like This]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3266</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3266</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:21:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Yardley (thanks, Nigel): SEATTLE — The sun is not yet up but the baristas are, a blur of busy hands wiping down counters and smoothing black aprons. Chipper and precise, they work at Starbucks, but it is probably not like the one near where you live. Among the 17,000 Starbucks that caffeinate the planet, this one is special.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Family, And The Figure 8]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3263</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3263</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:55:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tony Rehagen: Five miles east of Monument Circle, on the far edge of Irvington, the railroad runs past factories and warehouses and a tiny asphalt racetrack. There is no infield, just a rubber-streaked oval two-tenths of a mile in circumference, little bigger than a hockey rink, surrounded by a wire fence and grandstands of bleachers and folding metal chairs. During the week, the Indianapolis Speedrome stands as empty as many of the abandoned buildings on the industrial east side. But every summ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Not Dead Yet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3261</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3261</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:10:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is so hot.

And a reminder that we're, uh, yeah:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Behind Bars]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3259</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3259</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:47:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Seth Wickersham: JANUARY 2008, 17 MONTHS TO GO.

Michael Vick arrives at Leavenworth in time for lunch. He's led by guards to a small cafeteria and left alone, inmate No. 33765-183. A few days earlier, word passed quickly through this Kansas federal prison that Vick would be serving the remainder of his 23-month sentence for dogfighting conspiracy here, making him the most famous athlete ever to pass through its doors. Vick doesn't pause to scout his new surroundings; he turns around, drops his ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Giant Footsteps]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3197</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3197</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2011 15:35:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Down Clown Alley, in the backstage tent for Circus Smirkus, a slight boy of 14 studies his clown self in a jagged piece of mirror. This is Sam Ferlo, the son of a former circus clown and a former circus showgirl, and the godson of a man once known as the Human Cannonball.

Guess what Sam wants to join when he grows up.

Seeing the need for a touch more of the garish, the boy dabs a finger into the greasepaint he keeps in his most precious possession, a makeup kit th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Casey Medals]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3195</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3195</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:09:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Great news for Joan Garrett and Roy Wenzl, dear Friends of Gangrey. Here's to amazing work by good people.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[And Now We Turn To Baseball]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3193</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3193</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:01:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Two for you from the Twittertron:

A series by Rich Radford: Two dozen sailors and a handful of officers have come to McClure Field on a Tuesday to play softball. Some have their shirts off on this steamy summer day as they toss the ball a few times to warm up before the first pitch.

McClure is a lot of field for such an informal game. It seats 3,500 and is the second-oldest brick baseball stadium in the country. Games have been played here for almost a century. Years ago, the Navy put up a ser]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Broke And Broken]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3191</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3191</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:41:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane: ST. PETERSBURG

Rose Woodworth stood in the center of a weedy parking lot off Fifth Street, surveying what was left of her life:

A wooden coffee table. A plastic dish drainer. Three Southern Living cookbooks.

Everything was strewn around the asphalt. Off to one side, she kept the things she wanted to take with her: Blue flowered sheets. Red Huffy bicycle. A portrait of Jesus, drawn by a friend.

"Hey, is this a garage sale or what?" asked a man walking by.

"Yep," said Rose. "This is all]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Long-form Journalism Online]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3187</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3187</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:52:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In the event your boss tells you to keep it short because nobody reads long stuff online, refer him to this:

One last note before the tale of the tape: These monthly memos quite frequently focus on our online-only efforts. But once again, as we've reported in past months, the significant long-form journalism that is a hallmark of The Times also produces many of our top-trafficked pieces on the website. Christopher Goffard's riveting two-part series recounting the ordeal of a man falsely accused]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shoe Leather]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3185</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3185</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:20:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big thanks to Tommy for passing along this interview with Mary Bishop, who won a Pulitzer with a Philadelphia Inquirer team for stories about Three Mile Island. Reading this feels like sifting through a I-Team time capsule. Read it all here.

You've covered a lot of other stories, including Three Mile Island. What was your part in that?

I had just been at the Philadelphia Inquirer about two months when the first nuclear leak took place. I happened to be sitting near the environmental writer. Th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Giving Lift To Documents]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3183</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3183</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:09:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This strikes me as a good example of how to use records to tell a story.

John Barry and Alexandra Zayas: TAMPA — The Schenecker home in Tampa Palms North appeared, in ways, a portrait of ordinary American family life — kids' Crocs kicked off by the pool, desk calendars jammed with soccer practices, a note board promising "2011, Best Year Ever."

But on Jan. 28, police discovered other layers over this canvas of suburban beige: Blood. Bullets. Pills. A mother in her housecoat, breathing alcohol,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Borders]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3181</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3181</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:28:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Lake: Behold the carcass, once proud.

Borders, the national bookstore chain founded in 1971 by two brothers in Ann Arbor, Mich., died a horrible death the other day.

It died with a line at the front door.

It died with its mouth shut, the employees forbidden to talk about it.

It died screaming like a carnival barker.

"NOTHING HELD BACK."

"STORE CLOSING."

"EVERYTHING ON SALE."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chain World]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3179</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3179</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:22:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jason Fagone: Jason Rohrer is known as much for his eccentric lifestyle as for the brilliant, unusual games he designs. He lives mostly off the grid in the desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. He doesn't own a car or believe in vaccination. The 33-year-old works out of a home office, typing code in a duct-taped chair. He takes his son Mez to gymnastics and acting class on his lime-green recumbent bicycle, and on weekends he paints with his son Ayza. (He got Mez's name from a license plate, and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Bomb That Didn't Go Off]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3177</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3177</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:09:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charles P. Pierce: In 2009, in the city of Spokane, Washington, the Public Facilities District bought a bench. It was metal. It was aluminum, its powder coat a bronze that ran toward brown. It sat three people. The city bought the bench from a company called Landscape Forms in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The bench cost $2,679.46, delivered.

The city placed the bench in the corner of a downtown parking lot at the intersection of Washington Street and Main Avenue, near the Performing Arts Center and tuc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Violence That Finds Us]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3133</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3133</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:36:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I saw this mentioned in an interview I was reading. Here's your Friday time capsule. Enjoy.

By Harry Crews Playboy April 1, 1984

IN 1958, I was on the Going to the Sun highway in Montana, headed toward Canada on a 650-c.c. Triumph motorcycle. It was after dark, and despite the fact that it was August, it was cold. Consequently, when I saw a little place with a restaurant sign out front, I stopped. The dirt parking lot was filled with pickup trucks and old cars. I went inside and had to stand f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Grapevines]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3131</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3131</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:04:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There are quite a few Friends of Gangrey heading to the Mayborn conference in a few weeks. I'm sorry I'll be missing out. It's a great list of speakers and George Getschow puts on a wonderful event.

First thing: Somebody, please, let us know what you're learning out there. Send an email or post something.

Second: Y'all need to break bread together. (As I recall, the Silver Fox is a good place and not far from the hotel, but I'll leave that to you.) If you're going, and you'd like to connect wi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Glasses Up To The Lot Of Them]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3129</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3129</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:25:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pat Fenton: Their beat was up in the bars of Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, it was Beach 116th Street in Rockaway, and places like 9th Avenue down in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, that once had Irish saloons on both corners of 17th Street, Kerrigan's and McNulty's, it was T.J. English's Hell's Kitchen, and Breslin's Queens Boulevard, lined with bars and cocktail lounges all the way down to the entrance of the 59th Street Bridge — bars where stories of the city were told again and again over whiske]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mooney in GQ]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3115</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3115</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:05:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read it: He said he didn't really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he'd never celebrated a birthday in his life. But Jerry Joseph's birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year's Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry's brand-new life. There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than an]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Future]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3112</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3112</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:52:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Guess who's coming to take our jobs. These guys. Special congratulations to Friend of Gangrey Caitlin Johnston.

P.S. Two of the three winners are Hoosiers.

P.P.S. Tom French is holding court up there in Bloomington.

P.P.P.S. This is probably not a coincidence.]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eyes Wide Shut]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3110</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3110</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:18:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[According to Chris Jones, Chris Jones has never read a story by Gary Smith. He doesn't want to be influenced by an unattainable standard.

Also, in the comments section at the end, he says, "No, the fact is, there's been more bad sportswriting committed in the name of Gary Smith than any other writer going."

I think I know what he means — only Gary Smith can write like Gary Smith, and if you try and fail, the results might be grisly.

Incidentally, I could have been indicted for Attempted Imper]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beyond The Editor Wall]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3104</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3104</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:53:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you've been around the past few years, you've probably been witness to plenty of talk about the Editor Wall (see this and this) and how to best deal obstinate bosses or newsroom cultures that prompt the old "narrative is essentially rejected at my paper" lines. I still get a fair amount of mail from folks struggling against such forces. They're "beaten down," as Dave put it in that last link, which is sad.

That's why I was so glad to see some cool stuff recently from William Browning, who co]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Accusations]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3102</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3102</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jun 2011 03:20:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You've got to read Christopher Goffard:

He kept thinking that there had been a mistake, that he'd be out in no time. That the system, set into motion by some misunderstanding or act of malice, would soon correct itself.

That was before the detective informed him of the charges, and before the article in the Ventura County Star. "Man held after woman found raped and tortured," read the headline, and there was his name, along with a quote from a police officer: "In 19 years of police work, this ]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[PTSD And A Puppy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3099</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3099</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:32:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Steve Hendrix (h/t Dan): David Sharpe finally hit bottom on the bedroom floor of his apartment in Yorktown, Va. That's where he sat, legs folded, ready to finish the fight with the demons that had followed him back from the war zone: the sudden rages; the punched walls; the profanities tossed at anyone who tried to help.

There was little in the room but dirty Air Force uniforms, some empty Jaegermeister bottles and a crushing despair. He took a deep breath. Shut his eyes. Closed his lips a litt]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Voodoo And A Prayer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3097</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3097</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:49:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: NEW ORLEANS — The season is lost. The numbers don't lie: Defeats to teams from Georgia, Oklahoma, Illinois, Arizona, two places in Pennsylvania and three in Florida, one of them twice. Shut out at home, in The Graveyard. Yes, there have been turnovers. Yes, there have been injuries. Yes, there have been transactions. Lord have there been transactions. On the active roster of 24 players, 11 remain from training camp, some of whom joined through open tryouts at City Park, paying $60]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Bravest Woman In Seattle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3095</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3095</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:59:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Warning: This is disturbing. Sickening even. But let's talk about this. What do you think of it? Is it too much? How would you have written this story?

Eli Sanders: The prosecutor wanted to know about window coverings. He asked: Which windows in the house on South Rose Street, the house where you woke up to him standing over you with a knife that night—which windows had curtains that blocked out the rest of the world and which did not?

She answered the prosecutor's questions, pointing to a map]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Gun He Used To Kill]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3092</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3092</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:06:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Lee Hancock: I felt jittery and ridiculous lifting my hands toward the hulking silhouette. I told myself to squeeze. I stared at the paper target 20 feet away.

I jerked my index finger and jumped at an explosive flash and bang that sounded like a high-powered rifle. Yet my hands absorbed only a bump, and the barrel of the FN Five-seven barely bounced before leveling on the target. Soon, 20 holes riddled the paper man's chest. I felt a frisson of adrenalin-jacked amazement as I ejected the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Everywhere And Nowhere]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3090</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3090</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:01:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: Kasey (Barton) Proehl has matured from a giggly little girl into a 24-year-old woman. A statuesque 6 feet tall, with gray-blue eyes like her dad's, she holds a master's degree. She teaches high school sciences and embraces her new life in Indiana.

Most days, though, she still thinks of her dad, Kirk Barton. And on this Father's Day, she may even write to him in her journal. It's where Kasey empties her feelings about a dad who helped shape the person she has become. A man who remains]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[First time to Florida]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3011</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3011</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 May 2011 16:26:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane: They woke to the sun streaming through the bus windows. He glanced out the glass and grinned. She buried her face in his sweatshirt. "Too bright." He remembers every detail. They were curled together on the front seat of the Greyhound, between his battered duffel bag and her Hannah Montana purse. For three days, they had been traveling south. It had been dark since they left Atlanta. Now, squinting in the blinding dawn, he saw that they were cruising over a long bridge. On both sides, smal]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Torn Asunder]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3008</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3008</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 May 2011 20:51:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Von Drehle: Warm air rises. The earth is an elegant machine, and this is one of its simple and tireless engines, recycling the oceans into life-giving rains, wafting rainbow-striped hot-air balloons into clear skies, putting the dance in the flame of a birthday candle. This law must not be thwarted. There is hell to pay.

On Sunday, May 22, sometime after 5 p.m. C.T. in the Midwest, a column of warm air struggled against a ceiling of colder air pouring in from the north. When at last the i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Joplin, Looking For A Boy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3006</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3006</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 May 2011 19:15:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Frankel: JOPLIN, MO. — They had to find Skyular. They wanted the baby boy home.

The 16-month-old disappeared from his mother's arms and into the massive tornado that two days earlier had destroyed so much of this city. His mother and father had been taken to a hospital, severely injured. Skyular, a small boy with light brown hair and big brown eyes, was gone.

His relatives were going to try to find him.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[T.G.I.H.A.F.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3003</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3003</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 May 2011 13:33:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Toilets, Plumbed

Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer April 08, 1996 STYLE

Toilets will never be great art, not even the expensive ones that look like art moderne telephones, or the oddly streamlined ones that look as if someone were about to set a world's land speed record with them, or the bluff and British "Deluge" made by Doulton a century ago, with a rectitude that reminds one of the Titanic.

Beautiful maybe, sequestered as they are in the pastoral gloom of bathrooms, but not art. T]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Gloomy Night Searching For Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2999</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2999</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 May 2011 13:10:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Overall: JOPLIN, Mo. – A front-loader goes down the street first, pushing aside tree trunks and rooftops and overturned cars, clearing a path for the firetruck.

"Over there," a sheriff's deputy says as he points a flashlight at a particular pile of debris. "That's where it is."

It's 2 a.m. Monday, nearly nine hours after a massive tornado left a good part of central Joplin looking like Berlin at the end of World War II.

Nothing but rubble stretches for mile after mile, dazed survivors]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Finally, bretheren, farewell']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2995</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2995</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 May 2011 16:30:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: WESLEY CHAPEL — All around the world, all day on Saturday, people mocked perplexed believers who watched and waited for the end that never came.

There were supposed to be rolling global earthquakes, followed by the Rapture of believers everywhere at 6 in the evening, followed by five months of unimaginable torment for those left behind, followed finally by the total destruction of the planet.

Psychologists worried about how believers would handle their disappointment and shaken emotiona]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Funny]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2991</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2991</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 May 2011 02:32:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sean Daly: SARASOTA

It's hard to be funny when you look like you're drowning. Tim Hedley knows this cruel rule of comedy well.

Standing under bright stage lights, Tim grasps note cards he has just pulled from his trusty black Spider-Man folder. He licks his lips. Totters side to side. He leans into the microphone and reads each word slowly, one by one, sans nuance or mirth.

"WHY …

"DID …

It's November 2010. Tim, 29, is practicing his shtick at the world's first, and only, comedy workshop fo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Blink Of An Eye]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2988</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2988</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 May 2011 17:18:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tony Rehagen: THE GEAR IS GATHERED ON THE LANAI—A HALF-DOZEN 7-foot spinning rods, lined and hooked, along with a pair of dusty tackle boxes stocked with lures and weights. Down at the dock behind the house, a wide-decked, 23-foot Carolina Skiff bobs in the canal; in the kitchen sits a cooler packed with snacks and sandwiches. In the master bedroom, just off the lanai, Matt White watches SportsCenter highlights of last night's Butler basketball game with one eye on the sky. Yesterday, the weathe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Second Chances]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2986</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2986</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 May 2011 13:42:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alexandra Zayas, Philip Morgan and Justin George: TAMPA

Walter "J.J." Revear walked out of the Hillsborough County jail that day into hugs from relatives and questions from reporters.

"Do you know what a break you got? Are you going to stay out of trouble now?"

It was his 13th birthday, Oct. 20, 1995. And he was the chubby-cheeked face of a flawed juvenile justice system at a time judges wrestled over punishments for kids who committed grown-up crimes.

The fifth-grader, who stood at 4-foot-6]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Used To Be A Cop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2982</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2982</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 May 2011 13:37:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: SARASOTA — Last spring a respected detective for this city's police department went to the local courthouse and did something stupid.

At the time, Tom Laughlin, a twice-married 41-year-old father of four, was worried about the unstable economy. He found unsettling politicians' talk about cutting the pensions of public employees, and he didn't like President Barack Obama's health care plan. He had some vague notion of wanting to get back to this country's "roots."

Following the advice of]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Man With A Past In A Place That Nearly Isn't]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2941</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2941</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2011 15:16:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Browning: LONETREE — In open country, a humble home sits with a couple of trucks and a car parked in the dirt driveway. The local phone book says he lives here.

Home, a poet said, is where they have to take you in. This was different. Mike Hickey left after deaths that darkened his corner of the world, four of them with details that stain: A teenage girl's mutilated body found on a mountainside, her head caved in. A home bombed in the night, killing three who slept inside.

More than th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Toll]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2910</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2910</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:24:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brian Mockenhaupt: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan— By 7 a.m., the first patients of the day were slid off the medevac helicopters and wheeled into the trauma bay at the Kandahar Airfield hospital in southern Afghanistan.

"I've got a wedding ring. Make sure my wife gets it," Staff Sergeant Jeremy Breece said. His face was streaked black and green with camouflage paint, and smeared with dirt from the explosion. "I need to call her and let her know I'm okay." A tourniquet squeezed each thigh. His legs ende]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Dose And The Poison]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2908</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2908</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:19:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Todd Frankel: LAWRENCE, Kan. — The wind whistled innocently through the opening in the sliding glass door. Rushing in from a buttermilk sky, it gave no hint of radioactive traces from damaged nuclear reactors thousands of miles away.

The old man was not afraid. He welcomed any radiation that might blow in. He would have risen from his blue recliner in the living room and opened his arms to the invisible rays if he could somehow know they were there.

Don Luckey is 91. He has a full face and whi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Uncle Bill]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2904</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2904</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:40:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On William Harrington (thanks, Hank, for the link): I've been thinking lately about a writer I can pretty much guarantee none of you have ever heard of — William Harrington. He wrote or ghostwrote twenty-five novels, including many of the Washington thrillers of presidential spawn Margaret Truman and Elliott Roosevelt, novelizations of the "Columbo" series, several Harold Robbins novels, and his own thrillers. In the New York Times, Anatoyle Broyard praised his clean writing and research. Like a]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Gentleman There in the Middle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2901</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2901</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:35:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Saslow from Sunday: ELKHORN, WIS. — The event had been advertised as a listening session about the federal budget, but nobody could hear much of anything now. Some people booed, others clapped, and a man in extra-large overalls shouted across the crowd, "Why doesn't anybody in Washington tell us the truth?"]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Solitude]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2895</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2895</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:14:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zadie Smith's ten rules for writers include the following:

6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.

Smith is a novelist, of course, and novelists need to be alone. But is there a grain of truth in this advice for nonfiction writers? Could too much time on Gangrey be bad for your writing?

I'm thinking of a young guy like J. Wes Yoder, who's about my age. He completed a fantastic first novel back in 2007, and is presumably working o]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Schemes From My Father]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2889</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2889</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:16:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This personal essay from Eric Puchner might make you cry:

My father, who risked all our do re mi in pursuit of his own California dream, is a case in point. He'd been doing very well in Baltimore, earning six figures as the vice president of a bank, but he tossed his job out the window when some Reaganomics-drunk investor ("an admirer," my father called him) phoned him out of the blue to see if he wanted to direct a savings and loan out west. And for a while after we moved, he seemed to live up]]></description>
      <author>T Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Marine Who Came Home 14 Years Later]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2886</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2886</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:24:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is the best thing you'll read this week.

By Henry Allen April 17, 1979 Style, Washington Post

ADAMS, Ind.

One sullen afternoon in April, a plump little girl walking a dog spots Pfc. Robert Garwood, USMC, who is just home from Vietnam. She's heard all about that.

Garwood is smoking a cigarette in front of his daddy's trailer, his eyes winced up, his shoulders hunched inside a blue-gray vinyl jacket as if a cold wind were blowing, as if the air itself were acid.

"That was the grocery sto]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Happened To Reggie Brown?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2884</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2884</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:27:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brick: AUSTIN, Texas — Football paid for this house. It is a fine house, nothing ostentatious, set back from the highway in the suburbs northeast of Austin. The front door opens onto 2,890 square feet of living space, centrally air conditioned and spread over two stories with an attached two-car garage, two-and-a-half bathrooms, an open porch and a fireplace. On the living room wall, prominent as you walk through the front door, Elizabeth Brown has framed a photograph of her younger son, Michael]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rebuilding Ryan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2882</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2882</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:46:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charlie Pierce, again: The afternoon is fading, and he is standing in the lobby of a salesman's hotel in Cleveland Circle in Brookline. He looks like any other kid in a gray sweat suit, but you notice upon meeting him that the left side of his face has kind of a slide to it and that his speech is just a bit waterlogged. Ryan Westmoreland has come up to Boston to have those particular problems looked over at Massachusetts General Hospital. He left only this morning from the Red Sox spring trainin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Design The New Gangrey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2878</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2878</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2011 19:06:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Okay, contest. Who can make a better blog header than the one at the top of the page? Needs to be 940 x 198 pixels. Needs to incorporate all the things I feel about this blog. Winner gets a free, lightly-worn gangrey t shirt and a 3-pack of Moleskine cahiers.

Ready? Go.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letters Hidden In A Hollowed-Out Book]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2836</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2836</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:58:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Another harrowing tale from our friend Anonymous. Read it here. (Password is gangrey.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Turkey Hand]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2835</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2835</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:53:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm up in the Panhandle chasing a good one and creeping myself out. I'm staying in this bunkhouse on a private campground where a man went missing seven months ago. Tonight I drove into town, a little place called Ponce De Leon, to get some eats. Saw a barbecue place half lit and pulled up. In the parking lot sat a single muddy pickup with two men inside. I killed the car and climbed out.

"They still serving?" I asked the passenger.

"No," he said. "They closed."

He draped his arm out the wind]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why You Should Care About Cricket]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2834</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2834</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:56:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright: DHAKA, Bangladesh — The guy walking across the parking lot is famous. That's easy to tell from the reactions. Crowds part for him. Security guards mirror his every step. Other cricketers who made this same trip to the locker room tiptoed around the puddles. He strides over them, head up, confident. I am following an Indian cricket superstar, but I don't know who he is. That's the kind of trip this is going to be — one of constant confusion and mystery.

He's not a big man, but he's got a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Operation Wrong Exit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2833</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2833</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:43:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Take a look at this one, by Joe Kovac Jr.: The big-city gal had just spent her Friday night in the Twiggs County jail.

Saturday morning found her out on bail, on the phone with the tow-truck folks who'd hauled her car to wherever they haul cars in, at least in her eyes, this God-knows-where Podunk.

At dusk the evening before, she and three passengers heading east in a late-model Dodge Charger bearing Massachusetts plates, a rental from up Atlanta way, had, for reasons known only to them, pulle]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He Do What He Do]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2832</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2832</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:30:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Yes. Mooney: Ron Washington is not happy to see me. I wasn't supposed to come here. Not to New Orleans, the place where he was born, the place he has called home his entire life. Not to his neighborhood in the notorious Ninth Ward, where he and his wife, Gerry, have lived for more than 25 years. And certainly not to his front door, which, after a knock, is opened wide enough for him to peer out, but not so wide that I can see in. The usually jubilant, smiling Texas Rangers manager looks tired, w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Endless Game Of A Lifetime]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2831</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2831</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:51:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: FORT MYERS, Fla. — Our planning went no further than to meet at the ballpark. Simple in theory but madness in practice, given the thousands of others with similar plans. My only hope was to find a white-haired man exuding boyish wonder; who looked as if he was about to see a baseball game for the 10,000th time — and for the first.

There! In the red shirt and sunglasses: Joe Morgan, the former Boston Red Sox manager, whose baseball credentials date to the 1940s, when wily pitchers in ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Stroke At A Time]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2830</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2830</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:27:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: One wet, raw day last April, at the Broadmoor public golf course in Portland, Ore., Dan McLaughlin stood in the center of one of the greens. He wore running shoes, blue jeans and a yellow rubber raincoat. He wrapped his frozen fingers around a two-buck putter and hit one-foot putts, and he did that for two hours straight, stopped for a cup of hot, decaffeinated tea, then did it for two hours more. That's how this started.

On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009, Dan had decided to qu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Props]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2829</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2829</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:40:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[To Wright Thompson, for winning this year's Ernie Pyle Award. Black Maple Hill bourbon's on you tonight, pal.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[That Smell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2828</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2828</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:39:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: Several cases at a St. Petersburg CVS were stocked Wednesday with ridiculous celebrity perfumes.

Malibu by Pamela Anderson. Queen by Queen Latifah. Fancy by Jessica Simpson.

There among the riff-raff stood the chairman.

White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Along The Creek]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2827</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2827</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:41:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl: COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS — Scientists along Buttermilk Creek north of Austin, Texas have found flint knife blades, chisels and other human artifacts lying in a soil layer nearly 16,000 years old — a discovery they say will re-write a major chapter of ancient human history.

For one thing, it is now the oldest and arguably most credible site of human occupation in North or South America; but there's more.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Scottie, The Sweeper]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2819</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2819</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:40:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Browning: Saturday night, moments before halftime, and Scottie Mason wraps what have to be longest fingers in the building around the handles of a dust broom.

The buzzer sounds, players head toward locker rooms. A voice through the PA system pipes out his name and Scottie — who, like Oprah and LeBron, achieved no-surname status years ago — begins sweeping the hardwood to a hero's applause.

This 41-year-old son of a cook and shoe factory worker is something of a cult figure for the way ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Woodward, Quickly]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2818</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2818</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I caught a quick Q and A over at Poynter with Bob Woodward. Quick, like 20 minutes. The audience was made up of a great group of journalists from Denmark and students at Indiana University. I wrote down what made my ears ring. He said a lot more than this.

Is there ever a time when you're too persistent?

We used to put FAA stickers on people's computers. Focus, Act Aggressive. If you're civil about it, and persistent, you can go to the limit with people.

There was a general in the Bush book w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Evolution]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2804</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2804</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charting The Brief Reads of Eli Saslow.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Model For Long Form Journalism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2802</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2802</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You saw this?

What I didn't say is that the pieces I mentioned, I'm sure, got tons of internet traffic, but that's not what pays the bills, right? (At least at newspapers.) It's still the folks who plop a quarter into the honor box or walk down to the end of the driveway to grab the paper, and the advertisers who pay to reach them.

I'm in favor of growing online fan clubs and branding yourself and doing whatever possible to generate buzz and draw more traffic to stories online. Every little bi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Editors' Roundtable]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2803</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2803</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Second course at the Editors' Roundtable. Check it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Clips]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2801</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2801</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:55:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please allow me to introduce you to the work of William Browning, from the Mississippi Delta, covering cops in Casper, Wyoming. Three stories.

Lonely Road: It was midday on a bleak and hard highway when bullets cut the air — cool, thin, Wyoming air.

The first came through the windshield, into his left eye, stopping millimeters from his brain. If there was pain, he doesn't remember. It's the sensation of a falling red curtain he talks about.

He slumped right, across the seat. Fumbling, he clut]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[To The Rat]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2799</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2799</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Steve Rubenstein: They raised their grape juice cups at Lakeshore Elementary School in memory of Jupiter the rat.

"He was a great rat," said fourth-grade teacher Rich Mertes. "Possibly the greatest rat in the world. And he never bit anyone."

Jupiter was so great that more than 100 kids elected to skip recess Friday in order to attend Jupiter's funeral, held inside Room 106 at the school on Middlefield Drive in San Francisco.

Jupiter died Thursday of old age in Mr. Mertes' arms, moments after ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Chefs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2800</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2800</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Gangrey debut of Amanda Heckert: Chris Hall's eyelids droop behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He crosses his brawny arms and lowers his jowl to his chest, dangerously close to nodding off. In the two weeks since his restaurant, Local Three Kitchen & Bar, opened, the chef has averaged 130 hours a week on the job. That's left five and a half hours a day to sleep, to shower, to remember that his dog, Maxine, is more than a picture on his iPhone. Hall can talk rapid-fire on barely a breath—about G]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Clips]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2801</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2801</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please allow me to introduce you to the work of William Browning, from the Mississippi Delta, covering cops in Casper, Wyoming. Three stories.

Lonely Road: It was midday on a bleak and hard highway when bullets cut the air -- cool, thin, Wyoming air.

The first came through the windshield, into his left eye, stopping millimeters from his brain. If there was pain, he doesn't remember. It's the sensation of a falling red curtain he talks about.

He slumped right, across the seat. Fumbling, he clu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Concrete Presence To An Abstract Debate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2798</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2798</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: MADISON, Wis.

Here was a tall man wearing a Viking helmet and a look that said, Ask me about my Viking helmet. Here was a shirtless man, wearing a beaded skirt and a debutante's smile. Here was a young woman with her face painted like a cat, and a thin man on his cellphone and his Segway.

In the museumlike halls of the state Capitol, the granite gem of Wisconsin that for two weeks now has served as an elegant sleepover camp for a resilient band of protesters, the indoor street theat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cock Peeker]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2797</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2797</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:30:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm so glad Jones is on our side. We win every time.

Here's his THE YOUNG REPORTER'S GUIDE TO LOCKER ROOM DECORUM, ETIQUETTE, AND NOT COCK PEEKING.

Read it. Even if you never step foot in a locker room, read it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Kids Are All Right, And All That]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2796</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2796</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:06:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: Anne Hathaway hosted the 83rd Annual Academy Awards on ABC Sunday night, as scheduled. And her co-host, James Franco, did what exactly? (Besides be handsome? Besides a little Marilyn Monroe drag? And besides shouting "NYU, whassup!" to the Best Live Action Short winner? What, that's not enough?)

Don't get me wrong. The kids are all right, and all that. I like pushing the Academy Awards in whatever next-gen direction will get people's attention, and, probably like the rest of your Oscar]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Kids Are All Right, And All That]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2796</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2796</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: Anne Hathaway hosted the 83rd Annual Academy Awards on ABC Sunday night, as scheduled. And her co-host, James Franco, did what exactly? (Besides be handsome? Besides a little Marilyn Monroe drag? And besides shouting "NYU, whassup!" to the Best Live Action Short winner? What, that's not enough?)

Don't get me wrong. The kids are all right, and all that. I like pushing the Academy Awards in whatever next-gen direction will get people's attention, and, probably like the rest of your Oscar]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cock Peeker]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2797</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2797</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm so glad Jones is on our side. We win every time.

Here's his THE YOUNG REPORTER'S GUIDE TO LOCKER ROOM DECORUM, ETIQUETTE, AND NOT COCK PEEKING.

Read it. Even if you never step foot in a locker room, read it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bottom of the 33rd]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2795</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2795</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:05:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I cannot wait for this book to arrive in my mailbox.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The People V. Football]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2794</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2794</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:58:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Storyboard's latest notable narrative, by Jeanne Marie Laskas: She had no idea, back then, that he was sick. She had no idea he was losing his mind. Something neurological, the doctors are now saying, some kind of sludge blocking pathways in his brain. Would it have made a difference if she knew? Of course it would have. But you can't think like that. And you can't give a shit about people whispering behind your back. You hear about Fred McNeill? Star linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings back in]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bottom of the 33rd]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2795</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2795</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I cannot wait for this book to arrive in my mailbox.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Clips]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2793</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2793</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:03:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Storyboard has a great collection of links. Fire up the printers.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Used To Be Run]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2792</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2792</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:24:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So much good stuff in here. Ben in sunny St. Pete: On the street, the word was fear.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Four Forever]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2791</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2791</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Feb 2011 08:44:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: TAMPA

The four should've watched The Office together that Thursday night, teenage girls giggling on webcams, alone at their computers but connected by things only they understood.

They were always together.

But that night, only three faces appeared on screen: Sara Wortman, Jena Young and Tatiana Henry.

They thought maybe their friend was asleep or out to dinner with family. They had no idea everything had already changed; that they were no longer the Inseparable Four.

They would]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bill And Doug Got Married*]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2790</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2790</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:43:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin Heckert, circa 2005: It was a small wedding. Bill and Doug arrived together for the ceremony, as for the past 50 years they had arrived together for everything. Each wore a braided gold band as a symbol of commitment. They were not dressed traditionally for such an occasion, but since it was theirs to celebrate, what they wore didn't matter. They had only three witnesses: a minister, the minister's daughter and a friend who would be taking photos. Bill was the best thing that every happen]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[APSE Awards]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2789</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2789</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:39:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Seeing some FoGs as the APSE rolls out its awards this year. Congrats to Reid and Kevin for explanatory reporting and Dirk for feature writing. Am I missing anybody? More to come, I'm sure.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Words On The Road]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2788</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2788</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:37:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I drove back from Oklahoma this weekend in the '98 Cadillac STS my wife's father gave us. It was a long, (mostly) beautiful drive, made better by a steady cycle of Old Crow's Big Iron World and a handful of This American Life discs. I pulled off I-49 south of Shreveport and ate a damn fine muffaletta at Monjunis Italian Cafe and Grocery, then ducked into the bookstore and bought The Great Gatsby on CD, read by Tim Robbins. I twisted the sound into the rear speakers, so it felt like Andy Dufresne]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadspin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2757</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2757</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:54:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Does A.J. Daulerio represent the future of sportswriting?

According this story, Buzz Bissinger seems to think so.

If he's correct, I'm in serious trouble.

Jones, maybe you could teach me to sell copiers.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Calling]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2756</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2756</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2011 09:14:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl: Jeff Miller of El Dorado crawled exhausted into his airplane seat and had himself a two-finger serving of Scotch in a glass. It was 2004, and he'd been coming to Ghana along the Gold Coast of West Africa off and on for five years, to have a look at all the poverty.

Now he was on the airfield in Accra, the capital, and he was leaving for good, or so he decided.

He wanted to go home to Kansas and stay there.

He wanted to tell his friends from Charlotte and from El Dorado that he was ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Perspective]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2755</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2755</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:04:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I know I'm about seven years late to this party, but damn if this isn't cool. Two songs on the same subject from near opposite perspectives. And, man, the ending on "Uncle Frank" is special. I'd love to see a newspaper try something like this around a big, hairy controversy.

Could that work?

TVA first, then Uncle Frank.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Nate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2754</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2754</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:45:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Friend: EDMOND, Okla. — Something keeps calling Zane Fleming to the back bedroom, 10 years later. It's not a voice he hears; it's a throb in his temples, an outright ache to walk back there. Whenever he enters the room, he takes a whiff of his son's cologne, lies on his son's bed, closes his eyes and relives a day in the life of Nate Fleming.

Sometimes, he'll find himself in a packed high school gym, surrounded by homemade posters that read "Nate the Great." Sometimes he'll find himself sta]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Unluckiest Man Alive]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2753</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2753</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:40:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: TAMPA — Four years ago, John Wade Agan told deputies he was robbed at gunpoint in his taxicab, roughed up and stuffed into the trunk of the car.

Three years ago, he drove to a fire station with a butcher knife sticking out of his chest.

Two years ago, in a news conference from his hospital bed, he told the world he'd been bitten by two different snakes at the same time, a claim experts doubted.

He told the St. Petersburg Times he might have been the unluckiest man in the world.

N]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gangrissues]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2752</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2752</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:58:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The blog has been ill the past few days thanks to either a terrible boll weevil infestation or an STD from Wickersham's last comment. My man is working to get her up and running in full again, so you might notice some kinks. Thanks for all your love and support during this difficult time.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For The Record]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2751</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2751</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2011 13:59:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is a great idea. Can't wait to watch them work.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dogs And Cats And Birds And Bees]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2750</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2750</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:27:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: There are stage lights and a clap board and a Chihuahua named Dane, as in Great Dane, who is very, very calm, considering what's about to happen.

Dane is fitted with a belt — a Gas Girdle — that farts on command. Instant birth control. No one wants to get busy when noxious fumes waft into the woo. Not even an animal biologically programmed to seek a whole bunch of sex.

Pffffffffffffft.

"Voila! Instant turnoff."

That's Joey. He presses the button, expelling a cheeky battle cr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Reynolds Price]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2749</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2749</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:19:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Reynolds Price, whose novels and stories about ordinary people in rural North Carolina struggling to find their place in the world established him as one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction, died on Thursday in Durham, N.C. He was 77.

Here's the first sentence of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, published in 1962:

"Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there firs]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lifetime of Shortcuts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2748</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2748</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:16:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dirk Chatelain: AUBURN, Neb. — On a Thursday in November, at a nursing home just before dawn, a 97-year-old man took his last breath.

Elly Ingersoll hunted pheasants and chased golf balls. He loved Lawrence Welk and Golden Gloves. Before dinner, he drank a vodka and Coke.

For 68 years he cut hair on the same block downtown. Businesses came and left. Faces and names changed. But hair keeps growing.

Start with the clippers. Outline around the ears. Taper it up. Scissors the top. Kick 'em out.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Voice Of America]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2747</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2747</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the great rurritable: At one point in my college career my then girlfriend and I decided to rent a place a little off the beaten path, where she might indulge her fondness for pot and nude sunbathing, and I could avoid some of my old bandmates for awhile and maybe paint some pictures or read some books or something. We scanned the papers for a few days and looked at four or five places that were remarkably similar to the place we were living already. It seemed like every other house in that]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lifetime of Shortcuts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2748</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2748</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dirk Chatelain: AUBURN, Neb. — On a Thursday in November, at a nursing home just before dawn, a 97-year-old man took his last breath.

Elly Ingersoll hunted pheasants and chased golf balls. He loved Lawrence Welk and Golden Gloves. Before dinner, he drank a vodka and Coke.

For 68 years he cut hair on the same block downtown. Businesses came and left. Faces and names changed. But hair keeps growing.

Start with the clippers. Outline around the ears. Taper it up. Scissors the top. Kick 'em out.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man Who Hates America]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2745</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2745</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Junod: Today, here at Esquire — and only at Esquire, because only Esquire has the guts to tell you this story — we're going to tell you about a man you need to know a little better, maybe a lot better: a man named Roger Ailes. Maybe you've heard of Mr. Ailes. As the chairman and CEO of a well financed and admittedly antigovernment organization called Fox News, he made a reported $23 million in 2009, which, to do the math, was not just more money than you earned, it was more money than everyo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Improve Your Lexicon]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2746</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2746</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Mental Floss, via Hank: Ben Franklin turned 305 today! To celebrate, here's a list of expressions meaning "inebriated" that Franklin first published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on January 6, 1737.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Making The News]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2742</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2742</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Maass (thanks, Ramsey): On April 9, 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, commander of the 3rd Battalion 4th Marines, awoke at a military base captured from the Iraqis a few miles from the center of Baghdad, which was still held by the enemy. It had been twenty days since the invasion of Iraq began, and McCoy had some personal chores to take care of—washing his socks, for one. Afterward, he walked over to a group of marines under his command who were defacing a mural of Saddam Hussein. As ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Behind The Mug-Shot Grin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2743</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2743</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NYT staff, written by Dan Barry: TUCSON — Moments after the swirl of panic, blood, death and shock, the suspect was face down on the pavement and squirming under the hold of two civilians, his shaved head obscured by a beanie and the hood of his dark sweatshirt.

Deputy Sheriff Thomas Audetat, a chiseled former Marine with three tours in Iraq to his credit, dug his knee into the gangly young man's back and cuffed him. With the aid of another deputy, he relieved the heroic civilians of their char]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How To Kick Someone's Ass ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2744</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2744</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["One of the deadliest forms of self defense consists of ... a rolled up newspaper." -- Ronald Duncan

Holy heavens. The next time somebody trots out one of the old jokes about bird-cage liners or fish wrappers, do this to them. Seriously, if you do nothing else today, please watch this instructional video. It could save your life.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Newspaper Groove]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2740</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2740</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This, friends, is the marbles. (h/t Hank!)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get Down]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2741</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2741</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pauline Arrillaga (thanks, Nigel): TUCSON, Ariz. -- She arrived right on time - smiling, as Gabrielle "Gabby" Giffords so often did, as she made her way through the small crowd that had assembled for her first "Congress on Your Corner" gathering of the new year. The meetings had become one of her hallmarks as a congresswoman, a way to get face-to-face with the people she served and hear them out, from those who cheered her close re-election to those who opposed her positions on health care or im]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At The Intersection]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2738</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2738</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for awhile, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories."

-- Tim O'Brien, in The Things They]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Tucson Really Means]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2739</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2739</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is the best thing out of there yet, right?

David Von Drehle (h/t Tommy T): So much of this story is ugly and twisted that it's best to begin with something beautiful and good.

Christina Green is walking eagerly through a sun-splashed Arizona Saturday morning, a busy girl on her way to the next adventure. She is 9 going on 29, with mahogany bangs and one of those great third-grader smiles, with the grownup choppers looming in front and the baby teeth so teensy by comparison. She wants to b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Just Because]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2736</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2736</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault."

(thanks, Arielle)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Paper Route]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2737</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2737</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I never had a paper route. Not in the get paid sense. But my brother Matt did for the better part of a year, when I was in grade school. And he was bigger than me, and he was a giant a-hole. He used to make me wake up at 3:30 a.m. We'd drive to the parking lot in front of the TG&Y in South Oklahoma City and pick up bundles of the Daily Oklahoman, along with the other chain-smoking, halter-topped People of the Night. Special breed, they were.

I remember banding hundreds of papers until my knuckl]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Collar Bomb]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2720</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2720</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Dec 2010 10:53:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This may be the strangest crime story I've ever read. It's told in a straight chronology, for the most part, with few visible narrative devices or stylistic flourishes, and I was spellbound to the end. Is there such a thing as letting the story tell itself? No. But when you've done the reporting to get material this stunning, it's not such a bad idea to get out of the way.

Here's Rich Schapiro: At 2:28 pm on August 28, 2003, a middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells walked into a PNC Ba]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[My New Year's Resolution]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2719</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2719</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Dec 2010 09:09:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed with ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking At The Yule Log]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2718</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2718</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Dec 2010 11:17:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: Turn on your television on Christmas Eve at 8 and flip to Bay News 9. What you'll see is four hours of a burning log set to Christmas carols.

This log is the local version of a holiday tradition that dates back to 1966 and since then has been seen many times by many millions.

Was The Yule Log the first music video? Was it the first reality show? Was it a postmodern adaptation of the age-old custom of villagers in distant cultures and centuries felling seasonal logs for warmth an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking At The Yule Log]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2718</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2718</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: Turn on your television on Christmas Eve at 8 and flip to Bay News 9. What you'll see is four hours of a burning log set to Christmas carols.

This log is the local version of a holiday tradition that dates back to 1966 and since then has been seen many times by many millions.

Was The Yule Log the first music video? Was it the first reality show? Was it a postmodern adaptation of the age-old custom of villagers in distant cultures and centuries felling seasonal logs for warmth an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Naked]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2717</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2717</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:12:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: We are more naked, as a nation, than we've ever been. We are forever baring our souls, revealing the mundane and the sacred. We are naked in our curiosity about the semi-famous and the strange, we are naked in our aspirations (to be semi-famous, even for something strange), we are naked online – or, at least, considerably more exposed than we tend to realize.

All of which may help explain why most Americans seem unconcerned about those full-body airport scanners, the ones that s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Naked]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2717</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2717</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: We are more naked, as a nation, than we've ever been. We are forever baring our souls, revealing the mundane and the sacred. We are naked in our curiosity about the semi-famous and the strange, we are naked in our aspirations (to be semi-famous, even for something strange), we are naked online - or, at least, considerably more exposed than we tend to realize.

All of which may help explain why most Americans seem unconcerned about those full-body airport scanners, the ones that s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Runaway Doctor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2716</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2716</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:21:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Buzz Bissinger: His hair is longer than it was in his former life, the life he left behind like a snake shedding its skin. A yellow bandanna wraps around his forehead, and reflective dark glasses cover his eyes, giving him the look of a ski bum trying too hard to hide middle age. Married and divorced three times, he has found serenity in his latest relationship, with an Italian woman named Monica, who runs a small grocery store. It is she who has taken the picture of him after a day in the mount]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letters To God]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2715</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2715</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:02:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: TAMPA

They expect the letters to Santa.

So far this season, about 1,000 pleas to St. Nick have arrived in the Suncoast District of the U.S. Postal Service, which serves more than 4 million addresses from Brooksville to Fort Myers.

But this year, postal workers had to add a new bin: letters to God, and other folks up there.

"In the 10 years I've been doing this, I've seen maybe two or three letters addressed to heaven," spokesman Gary Sawtelle said. "This year, we've already h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For 74 Years, He Was Good]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2714</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2714</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:54:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: TAMPA — Vickie Bruce saw so many police officers when she pulled up to her West Shore Boulevard garden shop that February morning, she thought someone must have been murdered.

She never expected the alternative:

That her 73-year-old husband, a retired Air Force veteran who had never been in trouble with the law, had robbed three South Tampa banks.

That reporters would stake out her home and label James Bruce the "Grandpa Bandit."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[She Has Neither Forgotten Nor Forgiven]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2713</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2713</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:45:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: CARLISLE, La.

A daughter of Plaquemines Parish, her camouflage outfit the color of the forest, checks the oil. She checks the steering, the coolant, the gas. She makes sure that everything is tied down or stored away, so that nothing loose will fly into the fanlike propeller at the rear of her airboat. "Maintenance," she says. "Maintenance."

Then off she roars, a singular woman named Albertine Marie Kimble, guiding her airboat across the grass and into the precious marsh waters, whe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[She Has Neither Forgotten Nor Forgiven]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2713</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2713</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: CARLISLE, La.

A daughter of Plaquemines Parish, her camouflage outfit the color of the forest, checks the oil. She checks the steering, the coolant, the gas. She makes sure that everything is tied down or stored away, so that nothing loose will fly into the fanlike propeller at the rear of her airboat. "Maintenance," she says. "Maintenance."

Then off she roars, a singular woman named Albertine Marie Kimble, guiding her airboat across the grass and into the precious marsh waters, whe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For 74 Years, He Was Good]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2714</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2714</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: TAMPA — Vickie Bruce saw so many police officers when she pulled up to her West Shore Boulevard garden shop that February morning, she thought someone must have been murdered.

She never expected the alternative:

That her 73-year-old husband, a retired Air Force veteran who had never been in trouble with the law, had robbed three South Tampa banks.

That reporters would stake out her home and label James Bruce the "Grandpa Bandit."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letters To God]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2715</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2715</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: TAMPA

They expect the letters to Santa.

So far this season, about 1,000 pleas to St. Nick have arrived in the Suncoast District of the U.S. Postal Service, which serves more than 4 million addresses from Brooksville to Fort Myers.

But this year, postal workers had to add a new bin: letters to God, and other folks up there.

"In the 10 years I've been doing this, I've seen maybe two or three letters addressed to heaven," spokesman Gary Sawtelle said. "This year, we've already h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Runaway Doctor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2716</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2716</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Buzz Bissinger: His hair is longer than it was in his former life, the life he left behind like a snake shedding its skin. A yellow bandanna wraps around his forehead, and reflective dark glasses cover his eyes, giving him the look of a ski bum trying too hard to hide middle age. Married and divorced three times, he has found serenity in his latest relationship, with an Italian woman named Monica, who runs a small grocery store. It is she who has taken the picture of him after a day in the mount]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[GanGifts!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2712</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2712</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:20:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't forget. Outshine your punk friends with the coolest j-clothes going. And proceeds go to a good cause: The Mike Levine Journalism Workshop.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eric's Last Wishes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2711</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2711</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:17:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't miss this, either. From our friend Reid Forgrave: Early one summer morning in 2006, Eric Jacobs awoke with a start.

In bed beside him lay his wife, Heather, three months pregnant and barely starting to show. It wasn't yet 5 a.m., and Heather was fast asleep. So were their four boys, ages 1 through 6.

Eric was scared, confused. He'd just had a terrible dream: That he died too young. That he left behind a wife and five children, and so many unfinished things. And that he needed to do somet]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Quiet Time]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2709</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2709</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin George: Kevin Rouse stood before the judge wearing a patchy beard and a rumpled orange jumpsuit. He was accused of following a young boy into a church bathroom, stuffing paper towels into the boy's mouth and masturbating.

It wasn't the first time Kevin, then in his 30s, had been in trouble. As far back as high school, he had yanked down the pants of a boy, pulled another into a room, and fondled a 7-year-old at a movie theater.

But with an IQ of 60, Kevin couldn't understand the charges]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One In A Billion]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2710</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2710</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't miss this. First of three parts ran Sunday. From our friend Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher: On a Saturday morning in June, when his children are at piano lessons and the Whitefish Bay house is quiet, pediatrician Alan Mayer composes the e-mail he hopes will persuade a colleague to try a costly new technology. He has been shaping the argument in his mind - the chance to take the first steps into the future of medicine and maybe save the life of a very sick little boy.

"Dear Howard - I]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eric's Last Wishes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2711</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2711</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't miss this, either. From our friend Reid Forgrave: Early one summer morning in 2006, Eric Jacobs awoke with a start.

In bed beside him lay his wife, Heather, three months pregnant and barely starting to show. It wasn't yet 5 a.m., and Heather was fast asleep. So were their four boys, ages 1 through 6.

Eric was scared, confused. He'd just had a terrible dream: That he died too young. That he left behind a wife and five children, and so many unfinished things. And that he needed to do somet]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[GanGifts!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2712</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2712</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't forget. Outshine your punk friends with the coolest j-clothes going. And proceeds go to a good cause: The Mike Levine Journalism Workshop.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Homeless To Helper]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2707</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2707</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: CANTON — With steely eyes and a scraggly beard visible through layers of shirts, jackets, coats and hats, the man emerged from a soup kitchen. He cast a long shadow beneath a streetlight as he trudged along a sidewalk.

"Myron! ... Hey, Myron!" Deb Kellogg shouted, as she scurried after him.

Blankets as soft as satin folded under both her arms, she caught up to him along Third Street NE. She poked his back. He turned with a puzzled look. Myron, she said, is one of the area's few — if]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bold for Love]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2708</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2708</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tommy: They met on eHarmony. They had long romantic talks on Skype. He proposed on Facebook. They have dated a year but they have been together face-to-face for less than two weeks.

On Thursday he was coming home, and she waited there to meet him.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Is He Happy? Is He Alright?']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2704</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2704</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Larry King wraps up tonight after 25 years and some 7,000 shows. Here's the best profile of him I've ever read, circa '91, by David Finkel:

"THIS IS A TRUE STORY."

Larry King says this in that perfect radio voice of his, deep in pitch, confiding in tone, a voice that fills the room where he has come this evening to give a speech.

He is in a synagogue, looking out at 700 people who have paid $20 and up to see him. The synagogue is in Philadelphia, a somewhat uncomfortable place for him to be a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Life and Death on Twitter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2705</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2705</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Levine workshop alum Pete Iorizzo: When he didn't tweet about Cliff Lee, she knew something was wrong.

During the weekend Steven Smith had posted dozens of Twitter messages, a prolific output that his 578 followers had come to expect.

Smith lived in Scotch Plains, N.J., but place is moot in the Twitter universe. He had a vast network of friends from Albany to Anchorage, an eclectic crew bound by technology and their shared passion -- sports, especially the Yankees.

Many knew him only as ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Not All Smurfs and Sunshine]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2706</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2706</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jones: "I just want to talk to you about your role in that journey -- what you did that day, how it affected you. I'll ask you some strange questions because I want to get it right."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Want To Make Your Court Reporting Sing?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2701</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2701</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ride to court with the victim. Here's Alex Zayas and Colleen Jenkins: TAMPA — The little girl peered out the window of the car on the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway. She was on these very lanes two years ago, headed to the beach to celebrate her mother's birthday.

Summer Moll was 4 then and hadn't yet learned what it felt like to have pins hold her tiny legs together, or a head wound that just wouldn't heal, or the knowledge that when mommies go to heaven, they don't return.

Summer, now 6]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Coming To Terms]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2702</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2702</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Mozingo (thanks, Mark): He spent much of his life consumed by what the three men on the screen before him had done.

He stared at the glossy, bloodshot eyes of the man in the middle, the one who had so casually demonstrated how he slit his victims' throats, who explained how his hand grew so sore he often switched to stabbing them at the base of the neck.

They were gaunt figures now, impoverished men trudging the rice ponds of northwestern Cambodia. They had agreed to confess their roles in]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Secrets To Idea Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2703</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2703</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Good stuff here. Simple, effective tips from Planet Money's Chana Jaffe-Wolt that can apply across platforms. (thanks, Kelley)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get 'Em Before The Cops Do]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2698</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2698</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Introducing Gangrey's latest fashion line: GanGear.

Click around. Buy shit. Be the coolest kid in the newsroom.

Proceeds go to the Mike Levine Journalism Workshop.

(h/t Wright.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two from Erin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2699</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2699</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[SHADY HILLS — Kenny Cole, who will turn 2 in January, nearly died last Friday afternoon after he and his big sister, Arora, who is 3 and tall enough to reach the front door knob, slipped past their grandmother as she dozed on the couch.

HOLIDAY — This was the first year she had it all together, the tree, the gifts, all wrapped and ready, weeks before Christmas, and now it's all gone, every last bit of it, nothing left, not even her dog, Rascal, who is now buried in the back yard.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Promise Not to Tell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2696</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2696</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 12 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl: Their brothers began molesting them before the girls reached Kindergarten.

When their mother found out, she did little to nothing. When their father found out, he raped them too.

The police who rescued them say somebody should have called 911 immediately, once relatives and friends knew. But it didn't happen like that. When the cops finally showed up, the twins lied to protect the rapists.

Until now this story was shrouded in all the secrecy that society can devise. Revulsion keeps]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Epilogue]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2695</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2695</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben: LARGO -- Carole Jean Richards moved into Sun Village, a quiet little retirement trailer park here off busy Seminole Boulevard, seven years ago.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Top Longreads Of 2010]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2694</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2694</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We've been asked to pull together a list of our top five favorite longreads from 2010. Rather than a single list, we give you five, with some overlap and a few extras.

We each bring our own bias to these lists. So keep that in mind.

This collection illustrates something, I think. Twenty Ten has been a good year for the Gang. (Or perhaps we just think too much of each other.) Thanks for showing up here this year for the learning and barfights, and thanks for contributing.

One request.

Show us]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bypassed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2691</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2691</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: HOOPER, Neb. — A few years ago, the Nebraska Department of Roads rolled out a highway bypass to hasten the already-hurried everyday pace. Motorists rushing north to Norfolk, or south to Omaha, no longer had to slow to 40 miles an hour through a blink-and-miss-it place called Hooper.

No longer did travelers have to pass the Hooper ice cream parlor, or the Hooper grain elevator, or the ancient railroad cars sitting on discontinued tracks, or the decades-old neon marquee, long past glow]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thirty Years Ago]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2692</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2692</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jimmy Breslin, from December, 1980: That summer in Breezy Point, when he was eighteen and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life.

Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.

And now, last night, a thirty-four-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at Eighty-seco]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Decoration Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2693</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2693</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry, boys, but I love these guys, and this song. Here's to dead brothers and Wednesday afternoons.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[From Campaign Dates To Play Dates]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2690</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2690</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The news about Elizabeth Edwards reminded me of this profile.

Kelley Benham: SARASOTA - Emma Claire has lost a tooth. That was Monday, her mother thinks. Today it is Wednesday. Twelve days until the election. Four days since she saw her kids.

"No," she says. "It must have been Sunday. She called and I was between things and I talked to Jack. . . ."

Jack is 4. Emma Claire is 6. Their mother, Elizabeth Edwards, is 55. She is trying to nudge the direction of the free world, and be their mom. She]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Strange Life Of Mickey Clean]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2688</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2688</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this. Michael Mooney: A wiry man with tufts of gray hair hanging over his glasses shuffles into the Pirate Republic Bar late one warm Thursday night carrying a cigar box full of worn-down crayons and a stack of ruffled papers. A few of the newer bar patrons wonder aloud if he is yet another Fort Lauderdale vagrant looking for change. But the regulars light up.

Mickey Clean's leather shoes are worn out, his khaki shorts are dirty, and his wrinkled white button-up shirt hangs loosely off his]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Being 10 In 2010]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2689</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2689</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the Washington Post:

Think of your life as a popsicle. The years are layered, flavor upon flavor. At the center, hidden by time, is the popsicle stick. You can add 50 more flavors, or lick them all off, and there it will be: the quintessential you -- ever-present, unchanged.

That stick is you at age 10.

You were stubborn or reflective or effervescent or introverted. You were full of certainty, confidence, bluster. So what if you didn't know what you didn't know? There was no Who Am I yet]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Happens Next?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2686</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2686</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meg Laughlin: KABUL, Afghanistan

On a late afternoon in November, the young men lounging in the park under evergreen trees stare when a mother and her daughter stride past, swinging badminton rackets.

Women in the park? Playing sports in public? Unheard of — even nine years after the fall of the Taliban.

But Farida Momand and 14-year-old Miriam don't care. They duck and swing. They jump and kick up dust, confident and carefree.

A few minutes into the game, Miriam's father and brothers join i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[His Vigil]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2687</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2687</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Schwartzman (thanks, Cara): As midnight approaches, the father is where he was when the day began, sitting on the edge of his son's bed, peering into his unfocused eyes and misshapen mouth, rubbing his bare chest and scarred scalp. Checking his diaper. Making sure his boy is okay.

He is not okay. Ryan Diviney is 21 years old. For the past year, he has existed in what his doctors call a vegetative state, or "eyes-open coma," resulting from a horrific beating. He is awake but seemingly unawa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Believeland]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2684</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2684</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: CLEVELAND -- There is a burly, angry man with a Chief Wahoo tattoo on the inside of his left forearm, and he knows I work for ESPN. That makes me the devil. We are standing inside the Cleveland Cavaliers locker room not long after their first game without LeBron James. The guy's name is Scott Raab, and besides being a native Clevelander, he's also one of America's best writers. His current project? A book that is part recount of James' breakup with the town and part meditation o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Words On Skin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2685</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2685</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm a fan of literary tattoos. My favorite is pictured here on Harry Crews. (How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death? from E.E. Cummings' Buffalo Bill's.) I'm not sure if it exactly fits the bill, but our friend Charles McNair, hero of the Wiregrass, has a banjo on his knee. Bad ass. Anyway, thought you might be interested in these here from the book The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. (You can grab a copy -- and much, much more! -- from the Shoppes at Gangrey]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Things]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2683</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2683</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:38:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We were talking here the other day about how much we enjoy well-done ruminations on ordinary items after Kruse dropped this ditty about Yankee Candles in the Metro section.

I tried a while back to give red plastic cups their due. Taquitos, too. I'm so very fond of Stuever's story about uncelebrated resin:

There's something about the plastic patio chair. No, there's not. And that's what it is about them.

Henry Allen is genius at this. If you've never read his story about Crayons (partial), ple]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Things]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2683</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2683</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We were talking here the other day about how much we enjoy well-done ruminations on ordinary items after Kruse dropped this ditty about Yankee Candles in the Metro section.

I tried a while back to give red plastic cups their due. Taquitos, too. I'm so very fond of Stuever's story about uncelebrated resin:

There's something about the plastic patio chair. No, there's not. And that's what it is about them.

Henry Allen is genius at this. If you've never read his story about Crayons (partial), ple]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Should Never Go Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2682</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2682</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Nov 2010 11:42:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The following is one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read, fiction or non-. The lede itself, the way we are introduced to the story's main character, is certainly one of the most memorable things I've ever read, and over the years I've read it so much I can practically recite it. The story has a rhythm; a reader, I think, can't help but feel it; can't help but be aware of its presence beneath the words themselves, like resting your head against someone's arm and being able to feel their ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seeking Asylum]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2681</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2681</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:50:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jones: The day begins for Randy and Evi Quaid inside Hearing Room 1 at the Immigration and Refugee Board. The room is windowless. There is a small clock on one wall. It's a few minutes after ten. A Canadian flag hangs in the corner, a coat of arms mounted beside it. Acoustic-tile ceiling. Florescent lights.

Randy Quaid sits beside his lawyer, Catherine Sas, her leopard-skin coat draped over her chair. It's November 23, and it's cold today in Vancouver, white mountains rising in the near-distanc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unbroken]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2680</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2680</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:25:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Monica Hesse (thanks, Mark): "Sometimes I fear that I dress really strangely," Laura Hillenbrand says. "Or maybe I don't speak normally, because language changes while I'm away."

Sometimes something will happen; she will walk into a CVS after years of not walking anywhere beyond the 1,500 square feet of her butter-yellow Glover Park rowhouse, and she will discover that automated registers have replaced human cashiers in the checkout lanes. She is, if she's being completely honest, still not ent]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unbroken]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2680</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2680</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Monica Hesse (thanks, Mark): "Sometimes I fear that I dress really strangely," Laura Hillenbrand says. "Or maybe I don't speak normally, because language changes while I'm away."

Sometimes something will happen; she will walk into a CVS after years of not walking anywhere beyond the 1,500 square feet of her butter-yellow Glover Park rowhouse, and she will discover that automated registers have replaced human cashiers in the checkout lanes. She is, if she's being completely honest, still not ent]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seeking Asylum]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2681</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2681</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jones: The day begins for Randy and Evi Quaid inside Hearing Room 1 at the Immigration and Refugee Board. The room is windowless. There is a small clock on one wall. It's a few minutes after ten. A Canadian flag hangs in the corner, a coat of arms mounted beside it. Acoustic-tile ceiling. Florescent lights.

Randy Quaid sits beside his lawyer, Catherine Sas, her leopard-skin coat draped over her chair. It's November 23, and it's cold today in Vancouver, white mountains rising in the near-distanc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Should Never Go Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2682</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2682</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The following is one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read, fiction or non-. The lede itself, the way we are introduced to the story's main character, is certainly one of the most memorable things I've ever read, and over the years I've read it so much I can practically recite it. The story has a rhythm; a reader, I think, can't help but feel it; can't help but be aware of its presence beneath the words themselves, like resting your head against someone's arm and being able to feel their ]]></description>
      <author>Justin Heckert</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Score]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2679</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2679</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:32:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paterniti talks to Paige Williams. Two parts.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Pardon]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2678</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2678</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:46:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rob Farley: MIAMI

Reina McWilliams woke one recent Wednesday as usual to the sounds of the "Greatest Hits of the '60s and '70s" on Magic 102.7 FM. In between songs, an announcer reported that outgoing Gov. Charlie Crist was considering a pardon of the late Jim Morrison — rock icon and lead singer of the Doors — who was convicted for exposing himself during a now-legendary Miami concert in 1969.

"Oh, my God!" she said out loud. It was her late husband, Terry McWilliams, who had prosecuted Morri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Then He Discovered He Could Brawl]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2677</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2677</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:40:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Wharton (thanks, Raja): There might be blood.

At the very least, there will be violence — George Parros can picture it in his mind.

The veteran hockey player goes looking for trouble, chasing down an opponent, then letting his gloves fall to the ice. It is an invitation to fight.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Then He Discovered He Could Brawl]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2677</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2677</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Wharton (thanks, Raja): There might be blood.

At the very least, there will be violence — George Parros can picture it in his mind.

The veteran hockey player goes looking for trouble, chasing down an opponent, then letting his gloves fall to the ice. It is an invitation to fight.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Pardon]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2678</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2678</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rob Farley: MIAMI

Reina McWilliams woke one recent Wednesday as usual to the sounds of the "Greatest Hits of the '60s and '70s" on Magic 102.7 FM. In between songs, an announcer reported that outgoing Gov. Charlie Crist was considering a pardon of the late Jim Morrison — rock icon and lead singer of the Doors — who was convicted for exposing himself during a now-legendary Miami concert in 1969.

"Oh, my God!" she said out loud. It was her late husband, Terry McWilliams, who had prosecuted Morri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Score]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2679</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2679</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paterniti talks to Paige Williams. Two parts.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thanksgiving]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2676</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2676</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Nov 2010 11:24:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm thankful for y'all, for the energy and thought you put into helping others get better here at gangrey. If I could hug you, I would. I feel lucky to be a part of a community of people who care deep and wide about words.

Thanks.

Onward.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thanksgiving]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2676</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2676</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm thankful for y'all, for the energy and thought you put into helping others get better here at gangrey. If I could hug you, I would. I feel lucky to be a part of a community of people who care deep and wide about words.

Thanks.

Onward.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Waiting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2675</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2675</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:54:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ashley Halsey III and Lonnae O'Neal Parker:

Dillingham, Alaska —

The mountain snapped the five-foot aluminum strut like a hard-bent twig. The metal sliced through the plane's thin skin, shrieked into the cabin for a split second and mowed through everything in its way.

And then there was silence.

The complete and profound quiet of a spot on Earth never once touched by mankind and never likely to be touched again. Now a tiny red plane hung on the mountainside like a slapped mosquito, one wing]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Waiting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2675</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2675</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ashley Halsey III and Lonnae O'Neal Parker:

Dillingham, Alaska --

The mountain snapped the five-foot aluminum strut like a hard-bent twig. The metal sliced through the plane's thin skin, shrieked into the cabin for a split second and mowed through everything in its way.

And then there was silence.

The complete and profound quiet of a spot on Earth never once touched by mankind and never likely to be touched again. Now a tiny red plane hung on the mountainside like a slapped mosquito, one win]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Can't Miss']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2674</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2674</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:35:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Josh Hamilton today was named the American League's Most Valuable Player. A fine reason to re-read Dave Sheinin's story from February 2007: The Devil and the Son of God are waging war from opposite corners of Josh Hamilton's body. This too from Anne Hull.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At Checkpoint, Terror And Testy Travelers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2673</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2673</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:07:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: Behind an unmarked door, in a cluttered break room of half-eaten lunches and morale-boosting posters, a dozen Transportation Security Administration officers listened to their airport supervisor deliver another much-needed pep talk that contained the reminder: "I get paid to be paranoid, and so do you."

The supervisor, Philip Burdette, the federal security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, quickly addressed the recent criticism that the agency']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At Checkpoint, Terror And Testy Travelers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2673</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2673</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: Behind an unmarked door, in a cluttered break room of half-eaten lunches and morale-boosting posters, a dozen Transportation Security Administration officers listened to their airport supervisor deliver another much-needed pep talk that contained the reminder: "I get paid to be paranoid, and so do you."

The supervisor, Philip Burdette, the federal security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, quickly addressed the recent criticism that the agency']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Can't Miss']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2674</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2674</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Josh Hamilton today was named the American League's Most Valuable Player. A fine reason to re-read Dave Sheinin's story from February 2007: The Devil and the Son of God are waging war from opposite corners of Josh Hamilton's body. This too from Anne Hull.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Wreck Of The Lady Mary]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2672</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2672</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Part One. Amy Ellis Nutt (thanks, Mark): Riotous waves pummel Jose Arias. In the frantic scramble to abandon ship, he zipped his survival suit only to his throat and now the freezing Atlantic is seeping in, stealing his body's heat.

The cold hammers him, a fist inside his head.

Seesawing across the ocean, he cannot tell east from west, up from down. At the top of a wave the night sky spins open, then slides away. Buckets of stars spill into the sea.

"S&aacute;lvame, por favor. S&aacute;lvame.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The King's Shadow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2671</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2671</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse, again: MIAMI — Downstairs was a rented Ford Escape with a used hotel key card on the console. Up in his 23rd-floor apartment were a few pieces of furniture and an unhung shower curtain on the edge of the tub. The white-tile floor was a little too white. The brand-new smell smelled a little too new. This, Brian Windhorst said, was going to take some getting used to.

He's in South Florida because of a man he has been following around the country for most of the past 12 years.

Brian covere]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gathering]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2667</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2667</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Journalism conferences seem to get rarer and rarer these days, but the Poynter Institute is having a pretty intriguing one December 9-11 at the campus in St. Petersburg. Roy Peter Clark and Tom French are running the thing. Kruse and Ben and Wilson and Benham and a bunch of others from the St. Pete gang will be there. Jacqui Banaszynski will be there. I'll be there. Still a few spots left, I think. Come on down if you can.]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Archives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2668</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2668</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We've had this story on here before, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Not sure why, exactly, except it has one of my favorite endings of all time. My wife and I both cried when we read it in our Sunday paper almost three years ago.

Here it is:.

OKLAHOMA CITY - Ice covers the plains. It hangs heavy in the trees and knocks the prairie grass flat and smothers the red dirt like frosting. Three waves of sleet and snow have torn through central Oklahoma, knocking out power, stunting lif]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pens To Pins]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2669</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2669</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: IN the dozen years I spent working in the newsroom of the historic New York Times building, just off Times Square, I must have contemplated my future a hundred times, a thousand times. Would I become a national correspondent? A foreign correspondent? An editor? Should I chuck journalism and embark instead on a career in interpretive dance?

But I am fairly certain that I never thought: Maybe someday I will stand in this room with a bowling ball in my hand, admiring the Chinatown d&eac]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Your Brain On Football]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2670</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2670</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: Berkeley Prep's Robert Klein, fast, tough and committed, took the handoff and raced toward the end zone. Crack! He spun off the first tackle and darted to the left and accelerated over the goal line. Crack!

Touchdown.

Klein's father, who played football in high school and college and is now a cardiologist, stood with a video camera on the top row of the bleachers.

Under those bleachers, in the athletic trainer's room, a computer recorded the same play in a totally different way. On the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A New Prayer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2663</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2663</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: In the pre-operating room on the third floor of Tampa General, the two nurses lay in hospital beds, side-by-side.

Their husbands had pushed them close enough for the women to hold hands.

"It's going to be fine," said Pam Mizerany, 48, squeezing her friend's fingers.

Debbie Ismer, 56, smiled. "They said you're going to feel bad. But I'm going to feel so, so good."

Debbie's husband snapped pictures. Pam's husband smoothed her white sheet. Then the chaplain came in and folded th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Soul Of A Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2664</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2664</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Hall (h/t longform.org): On august 20, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spaceship on a one-way ticket to oblivion. Three weeks later, its sister craft, Voyager 1, blasted off with the same destination. Their mission for the first dozen years or so, as they cruised through the solar system, was to gather data from the planets. Their goal for the next 60,000 years or so, as they leave us far behind, is to carry a message in a bottle to the stars. Alongside an array of high-tech cameras, i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Lil Drank]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2665</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2665</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The company pledges to remove the caffeine, guarana and taurine, but says nothing about the Smurf piss, wolf saliva and moon dust.

Steph Hayes: Come to think of it, people were buying a lot of Four Loko.

"Yeah," said Lauren Flanagan, who reflected on her day working at Detroit Liquors in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. One man scooped up several of the $3 clunky, candy-colored cans, mentioning something about a ban.

"I'm going to drink up now," he told Flanagan.

It's scramble time for folks who]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fox News Pundits Love Hank Stuever]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2666</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2666</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On a commercial break, cameras still rolling ...

Lady: "Oh, the Washington Post hated it. Did you see his review, haw haw haw haw."

Other lady: "Yes. It was very good."

Watch it here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Picking Apart]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2662</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2662</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[What is it about Finkel's writing that gives it such powerful forward momentum? Is it dramatic tension? Pure staccato word choice?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Walking Away From Grief]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2660</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2660</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thomas Curwen: Reporting from the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, — When Gary Ferguson closed his eyes, he could still hear the roar of the river and see the torrent of water as it crashed through boulders and fallen trees. Jane was in the bow, he was in the stern, and the rapids surrounded them.

"Paddle hard!" he remembered yelling, as if paddling might have helped.

They slammed into a rock; the canoe capsized, and on that late spring morning in 2005, Jane Ferguson disappeared.

Gary tried to ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Casualties Of War]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2661</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2661</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jim Schoettler in Jacksonville: Carlos Clemons dove to the floor of his friend's Jacksonville home as 30 blasts from two assault rifles ripped through windows, walls, doors and bodies.

The attackers vanished in their white pickup as Clemons looked up to see his baby brother slumped in a chair. Bryan Clemons, 23, never had the chance to duck.

Clemons, 29, stared into his brother's lifeless eyes, screamed for help and carried him outside as an ambulance raced toward them. Death won out in Grand ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Case of the Vanishing Blonde]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2659</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2659</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's the VF tease: After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel's private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan's trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, o]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Missouri, A Town's Doubt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2657</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2657</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[More like this, please. Todd Frankel: The trailer sits alone on a hill about 10 miles outside of town, tucked into the rolling farmland, obscured by trees from the gravel road running below. The green-and-white rectangular box is unremarkable, except for what federal authorities say happened inside.

This is the trailer where, according to a federal indictment, a mentally deficient woman was held as a sex slave and tortured for years, subjected to stomach-churning cruelties, the center of acts c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2658</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2658</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charlie LeDuff: IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, 25, was pacing, unable to sleep.

His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones, slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Televisio]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Home]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2656</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2656</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rick Moody: THE street addresses of my life, and there have been a great number of them, have often felt less like home to me than the places I've written about. The New Canaan, Conn., of 1973, when I was writing about it in the early '90s. The Arizona of the near future, in a recent novel. I love landscapes of the imagination, less so the topographies of the so-called real world. And I suspect that's the case with many writers of fiction.

Still, for me this entire question — the question of ho]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Signature, Kept By Time]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2654</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2654</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: It was still dark when Robin Goddard pulled into the Lowe's parking lot. Still raining.

She cut the engine in front of the garden center. Squinted through her windshield at the sooty sky.

It hadn't rained in weeks. Why did the downpour have to come today, of all days?

But by the time Goddard got her videocamera ready, by the time her mom, daughter, granddaughter and the rest of the entourage showed up, the first rays of dawn streamed through the dark clouds.

The rain stopped.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[She Was Entirely Naked]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2652</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2652</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eric Wilson (thanks, Hank): On Monday night, at a screening of the movie "Due Date," Courtney Love told a reporter from Style.com that she was trying to take better care of herself.

On Tuesday night, Courtney Love arrived at a party in Midtown 15 minutes after it had ended and posed on a mostly deserted red carpet. Women's Wear Daily said she looked "slightly dazed."

On Wednesday night, at 7 p.m., Courtney Love was, by her assessment, "slightly drunk." She was sitting in the lobby of the Merce]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Legend of Zenyatta]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2651</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2651</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright: INGLEWOOD, Calif. -- We are driving to Costco to buy beer for a horse. Not just any beer. It has to be Guinness. The horse likes Guinness, likes it room temperature, likes it at a certain time of day. So assistant trainer Michelle Jensen and I are taking the truck to a strip mall.

This is my introduction to Zenyattaland.

We get into the store and I'm laughing. I have friends who write for Esquire, and they get sent to catch glimpses of Penelope Cruz. Me? I've flown west to buy drinks f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Patrol]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2650</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2650</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alleged Gangrey lurker Brian Mockenhaupt: Staff Sergeant Christopher Gerhart's stomach rolled, queasy. He stood alone under a trellis heavy with fat bunches of white grapes, planted his hands against a mud wall, and stared at the ground, head rocking as "Love Lost in a Hail of Gunfire," by the heavy-metal band Bleeding Through, blasted from his headphones. Gerhart had already deployed three times to Afghanistan and once to Iraq. Promoted 10 days earlier, he was 22, brash and outgoing. "You grow ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Can't Watch. Can't Not.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2648</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2648</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: On election night, Sarah Palin served as Fox News Channel's personification of hope - its poetic muse and telegenic Wonder Woman (in no-costume Diana Prince mode), wearing a salmony red dress that looked, on camera, like an elegant, soft Slanket clipped at the collar with a microphone.

"It is a big darn deal," Palin said of the results quickly overtaking the U.S. map nearby. She had just noted the incoming results of the new GOP House majority as, across the set, Bill Hemmer was findin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[When Did The World Change?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2643</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2643</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Oct 2010 11:01:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Happy Halloween. Here's a treat.

By Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer July 10, 1995

You rent a house at the beach. One night, just back from the ice cream place, you say to your kid, "Wanna go for a walk?"

Over the sea grass and through the dunes. You step out of your sandals and look at all the darkness out there, the flop and fall of surf. You feel privileged, as if you were backstage watching it rehearse.

A different world. There's a bonfire way down the beach. Sand comes up throu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Better]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2642</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2642</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Oct 2010 08:34:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The only thing that would have made this any better is Four Loko. Oh, wait.

Here's Chris Jones: An ancient oak tree stood behind the main house, and the dozen of us ducked under its branches on the walk back to the screen house after lunch on Saturday. We'd pulled from a giant, delicious pot of Brunswick stew, with sides of salad, cornbread, and big glasses of sweet tea. Now we dodged the Spanish moss and vines that hung from the oak tree.

A breeze came through the screen house and each of us ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stewart's Shtick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2641</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2641</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:37:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: In search of the surest way to reach and encourage his core constituency during the midterm elections, President Obama visited "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" Wednesday night — a show that prides itself on never taking anything seriously but still treated him with sympathetic awe.

That's how things are done now in the postmodern politiscape: Two men — Jon Stewart and Barack Obama — brimming with mutual regard, each of them funny in his own way, but managing to not be very funny toget]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dispatches From Captain Maximus]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2640</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2640</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:10:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Barry Hannah was opposed to rules for writing until a persistent and gin-breathed woman badgered him enough. Here are the six handwritten rules he gave her. (Many thanks to S.I. for passing the link.)

My favorite is #4.

4. Pride, dignity, humiliation, wild ponies, criminal, impotent watchers of sex (Popeye with the corncob.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Very Important Brain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2639</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2639</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:41:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[What you won't read in the November Esquire is that my friend Luke spent six years reporting this story. He began when we were both working together at Atlanta magazine, when it was just an idea that we talked about for hours; an idea that transformed into actual reporting, with some big and fascinating roadblocks along the way. I knew that if he ever wrote it, it would turn out to be a great story; that it had to be; that by the very nature of the subject matter, and since he was a great writer]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Future Is Long]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2638</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2638</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:56:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Love this idea from Mark Armstrong at Longreads.com:

…When I click a headline at NYTimes.com, I can never tell whether I'm going to get a 200-word blog post or a 10,000-word epic. At work, I want the former; at home, the latter. But my browser doesn't care. Graydon, you would never ask me to read the Vanity Fair cover story standing at the newsstand. Yet that's precisely what VanityFair.com and others do. Now that I have the ability to "read later," I will. It's time for publishers to start rec]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All The Generous Upright Days Of Their Boyhood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2637</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2637</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:38:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Happy birthday to Pat Conroy, born Oct. 26, 1945, in Atlanta.

From Beach Music, page 281:

In that summer, I would remember my friends and their souls, light and air-streamed as mallards, set loose among the vast table linen of the great salt marshes, happy among the green riches of a land so full with life that the rivers smelled like some perfect distillate made of spartina and the albumen of eggs. The boys of the low country were accustomed to taking their pleasure from the rivers around Wat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All The Generous Upright Days Of Their Boyhood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2637</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2637</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Happy birthday to Pat Conroy, born Oct. 26, 1945, in Atlanta.

From Beach Music, page 281:

In that summer, I would remember my friends and their souls, light and air-streamed as mallards, set loose among the vast table linen of the great salt marshes, happy among the green riches of a land so full with life that the rivers smelled like some perfect distillate made of spartina and the albumen of eggs. The boys of the low country were accustomed to taking their pleasure from the rivers around Wat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Future Is Long]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2638</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2638</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Love this idea from Mark Armstrong at Longreads.com:

...When I click a headline at NYTimes.com, I can never tell whether I'm going to get a 200-word blog post or a 10,000-word epic. At work, I want the former; at home, the latter. But my browser doesn't care. Graydon, you would never ask me to read the Vanity Fair cover story standing at the newsstand. Yet that's precisely what VanityFair.com and others do.

Now that I have the ability to "read later," I will. It's time for publishers to start ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Very Important Brain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2639</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2639</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[What you won't read in the November Esquire is that my friend Luke spent six years reporting this story. He began when we were both working together at Atlanta magazine, when it was just an idea that we talked about for hours; an idea that transformed into actual reporting, with some big and fascinating roadblocks along the way. I knew that if he ever wrote it, it would turn out to be a great story; that it had to be; that by the very nature of the subject matter, and since he was a great writer]]></description>
      <author>Justin H.</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Sentence]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2636</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2636</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:58:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang.

–Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, page 111]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[American Fiction 101]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2635</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2635</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:46:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[An interesting issue came up at Auburn Chautauqua this weekend that calls for the help of Gangrey nation.

If your friend is one of the best magazine writers in America and he doesn't read fiction, what would you suggest to get him going?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Prison Paper]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2634</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2634</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:34:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: Outside the prison library, the women were waiting for their teacher, holding a copy of their newspaper, trying to decide what to do.

They had named the paper Time Flys. Their teacher didn't correct the spelling.

They had spent a month reporting and writing, collecting photos and quotes and jailhouse recipes. Inmate #071 had two-finger typed six long pages. Finally, the October issue was ready.

They had planned to pass it out during writing class. They had told their bunkies t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Prison Paper]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2634</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2634</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: Outside the prison library, the women were waiting for their teacher, holding a copy of their newspaper, trying to decide what to do.

They had named the paper Time Flys. Their teacher didn't correct the spelling.

They had spent a month reporting and writing, collecting photos and quotes and jailhouse recipes. Inmate #071 had two-finger typed six long pages. Finally, the October issue was ready.

They had planned to pass it out during writing class. They had told their bunkies t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[American Fiction 101]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2635</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2635</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[An interesting issue came up at Auburn Chautauqua this weekend that calls for the help of Gangrey nation.

If your friend is one of the best magazine writers in America and he doesn't read fiction, what would you suggest to get him going?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Sentence]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2636</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2636</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang.

--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, page 111]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Jordan's Moment]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2630</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2630</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Halberstam (h/t longform.org): The desolate neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago where the Bulls play their home games is very quiet these days. Their gleaming new arena, the United Center, is set down there as if on a moonscape. All twelve pre-Christmas home games have been cancelled, because of the labor dispute between the owners and the players, which was initiated by the owners in a lockout described as a struggle between short millionaires and tall millionaires, or between billio]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Leaving Arizona]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2619</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2619</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie McCrummen: It is a bright afternoon early in the month, a moment of anxiety at a sun-faded apartment complex in north Phoenix. Down a dusty breezeway, workers are painting white a recently vacated unit. A few doors away, the power company has posted a shut-off notice for a family that left rather suddenly, in the middle of one recent night. And across a barren courtyard, the blinds are drawn over the only window of another apartment, where a conversation is underway.

A week has passed]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Show]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2614</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2614</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 08 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[St. Pete Times music and arts critics Sean Daly and John Fleming talk baseball: ...

The pitching motion is the American form of dance for men. Such are the random thoughts that kept me fitfully interested, watching on TV at home today, in another disappointing performance by the Rays. I started formulating this theory yesterday, inspired by Cliff Lee's effortless, rocking chair motion in setting down the Rays. Today's masterful outing by the other Texas lefty, C.J. Wilson — who, with his boyish]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Every Life Matters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2607</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2607</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:03:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Check this one out. Andy Meacham: ST. PETERSBURG — About 11 p.m. Sept. 12, a car struck Neil Alan Smith and threw him off his bicycle on Fourth Street N. The car didn't stop.

Mr. Smith, who was pedaling home from his job as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack, struck his head on a light post.

He was taken to Bayfront Medical Center. He died there six days later. He was 48.

Police have not located the hit-and-run driver.

Shortly after the St. Petersburg Times announced Mr. Smith's death on it]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Backstage To A Visit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2606</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2606</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:21:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: MADISON, Wis.

Would it be all right if the Leader of the Free World stopped by your campus for a little while?

He wants to surround himself with hordes of enthusiastic young people, toss out a few oratorical gems — as you know, he's got the gift — and reinvigorate his anxious political party. The Secret Service has the usual security concerns, of course, but we'll pay for any inconvenience. Interested?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Every Life Matters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2607</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2607</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Check this one out. Andy Meacham: ST. PETERSBURG — About 11 p.m. Sept. 12, a car struck Neil Alan Smith and threw him off his bicycle on Fourth Street N. The car didn't stop.

Mr. Smith, who was pedaling home from his job as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack, struck his head on a light post.

He was taken to Bayfront Medical Center. He died there six days later. He was 48.

Police have not located the hit-and-run driver.

Shortly after the St. Petersburg Times announced Mr. Smith's death on it]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Face Of The Team, Alone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2605</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2605</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Sep 2010 08:00:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: ST. PETERSBURG — Four hours before Monday's first pitch, as the ballplayers were filing into Tropicana Field and bartenders were tapping kegs for the fans and bloggers were betting that night — surely — the Rays would clinch a playoff spot, the man who brought Major League Baseball to Tampa Bay sat a few blocks away.

Alone.

In the back of Haslam's bookstore.

Reading his memoir.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Face Of The Team, Alone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2605</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2605</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: ST. PETERSBURG — Four hours before Monday's first pitch, as the ballplayers were filing into Tropicana Field and bartenders were tapping kegs for the fans and bloggers were betting that night — surely — the Rays would clinch a playoff spot, the man who brought Major League Baseball to Tampa Bay sat a few blocks away.

Alone.

In the back of Haslam's bookstore.

Reading his memoir.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vertigo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2604</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2604</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Sep 2010 08:02:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: Javier Bardem is listening to a doctor explain proprioception, the cosmic process that allows us to know, among other things, the location of our feet in space. He is listening to the doctor while they're on a sailboat that has tipped nearly sideways on the blue waters off Oahu, Hawaii. In the way that the sailboat won't tip over entirely because its rudder and centerboard know which way is up, proprio-ception makes it possible for us to do things like climb stairs in the dark; it a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Burden Of Work]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2603</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2603</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Sep 2010 07:51:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: The call comes about 5:15 p.m. every day.

In the tidy cubicle in her Tampa office, Julie Hopson stops typing. She looks up at her co-workers filing past her desk on their way out.

Her cell keeps ringing. It's her husband. She knows he's been waiting all day to make this call.

"Hey, Babe," he says when she picks up. "You coming home?"

Julie doesn't want to go home.

She fantasizes about driving across the bridge, over the bay, past the small house she can no longer pay for, ju]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[With Hope]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2602</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2602</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Sep 2010 07:49:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meg Laughlin: TAMPA

Most of the time, Magdala Joseph stays in the bedroom of her South Tampa apartment with the blinds closed, listening to music and reading books in French about raising a healthy baby. She is quick to tell you she knows she needs to get out, but the Haiti earthquake paralyzed her.

"Both my legs and my mind," she says in English.

Joseph, 29, and her husband, a hospital administrator, were living just outside Port-au-Prince, near the epicenter of the quake. On the afternoon o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The sadness of seeing Ali]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2601</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2601</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:30:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go read Wright right now: MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — I went to see Muhammad Ali on Thursday night, and hours later I'm still struggling with the profound sadness of the evening. I'm not sure if other people felt it as strongly as I did, but I walked out of the 5th Street Gym in a daze.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The South Kills Another Negro]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2600</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2600</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:57:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Bradford Huie:

YOU never heard of Roosevelt Wilson. I never saw him more than twice. But Roosevelt Wilson continues to disturb me. Whenever I try to feel that I am an honest and self-assured supporter of the American Dream, Roosevelt Wilson perches on my shoulder, laughs sardonically, and reminds me that I am just another lousy compromiser; that once when I had my chance to strike a blow in defense of the Great Dream, I turned aside with the Pontius Pilates and whimpered: "What the hell]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Past and Present]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2599</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2599</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:44:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There's a spat among Brits over the use of present tense in modern novels.

From Laura Miller in Salon:

What reasons do writers give for opting for the present tense? According to Hensher, they've been assured by "creative writing tutors" that it will make their writing "more vivid" and immediate. Philip Pullman — author of the bestselling series of young-adult novels "His Dark Materials" — also jumped into the fray in the pages of the Guardian, blaming an aversion to the past tense on the "tim]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Begin At The Beginning]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2598</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2598</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Sep 2010 08:50:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Herbert Bayard Swope, in the preface to Treasury of Great Reporting: Literature Under Pressure, which just arrived in my mailbox:

"This work follows the greatest rule of writing (and editing) that was ever laid down — that of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, who, when asked how to tell a story, said: "Begin at the beginning, go through to the end and then stop."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Endless Fun]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2595</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2595</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't yet, go check out the Washington Post Style Tumblr.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Boys On The Balconies]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2594</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2594</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love these. Thanks to Jim Sheeler for passing them along.

THE BOYS ON THE BALCONIES : 40 YARDS OF SILENCE APART

Rocky Mountain News (CO) - Sunday, May 22, 1994

Author: GREG LOPEZ ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS STAFF WRITER

Down on the sidewalk, three boys were playing a game that had something to do with hitting the concrete with a stick, and William Ramirez and Nick Samuels sat on their balconies watching the boys and each other.

Ramirez sat on the balcony on the third floor of the building on the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Should Never Go Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2588</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2588</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Sep 2010 11:07:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This story, "Pfc. Gibson Comes Home," known also as just "Little Duck," ran in the Courier-Journal & Times Sunday Magazine in Louisville, Ky., on July 28, 1968. It won the Pulitzer for local reporting. John Fetterman, born in Danville, Ky., started as a copy editor at the Nashville Tennessean before moving to Louisville. He wrote a book, published in 1967, called Stinking Creek. From the prologue: "This, then, is the story of a few hillbillies who lived at a particular time in history along a cr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Fire In The Swamp]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2582</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2582</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry and John Pendygraft: GAINESVILLE — Pastor Terry Jones stayed holed up in his Dove World Outreach Center most of Tuesday. His center is a large prefab warehouse on a treeless field in a rural neighborhood. It has a large neon cross over the entrance that someone shattered with a rock.

The field outside looked like an RV park, TV news trucks parked everywhere. They parked in front of a sign with red letters that read: "International Burn a Koran Day."

Camera operators waited for Jones]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[After The Sky Fell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2581</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2581</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm preparing for a talk today and I thought of this story, which I love. It's worth re-reading every month or so. Brady Dennis: The few drivers on this dark, lonely stretch of the Suncoast Parkway in Pasco County pull up to the toll booth, hand their dollars to Lloyd Blair and then speed away. None of them knows why the old man sits here, night after night, working the graveyard shift.

Well, here's why:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wicked Good]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2579</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2579</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bob Edwards with Gene Weingarten.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[24 Hours On A Changing Block]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2580</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2580</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: It gleams like a giant silver bullet lodged in the former site of a used-car lot, between a dumpy little liquor store and a rubbly, vacant property. It's a diner, that American symbol of both thriftiness and plenty, community and loneliness, where the well of coffee never runs dry, where you can eat alone and still feel part of something.

Every city needs a utilitarian district where life is staged, where cabs are serviced, trash is compacted and sand and salt are heaped, and this is w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Death, A Donation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2572</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2572</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for the gangrissues yesterday. Back now and rolling. Here's Thomas Curwen (thanks, Mark): If Elizabeth Uyehara were alive, she would be pleased. Everything was working out as she had hoped. The terrible banality of her illness had ended, and she was about to make her final journey.

Two hours before she died, David Jones' pager went off. He canceled his lunch and made a few phone calls to sort out the details with the hospital and the family. He went to his lab and picked up the paperwork ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For A Textile Town, A New Future]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2573</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2573</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Graff (thanks, Elizabeth): Before he started working in genetic sequencing, Randy Crowell dropped out of high school.

He went down to the mill in Kannapolis, 16 years old, and got a job opening bales of cotton. He made a couple of bucks an hour. He got married a year later, at 17. It was the 1970s, and around these parts, about that time, that was life.

Cannon Mills was the provider for a region, the provider for generations, the largest producer of sheets and towels in the world, the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stuever, Times Two]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2574</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2574</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Size does matter: When bathed in his own afterglow, Glenn Beck becomes as soft and gentle as Mister Rogers.

In cadence and content, his Washington rally debriefing Monday on Fox News's "The Glenn Beck Program" was soothing television, with a slideshow that proved theirs was not a choo-choo train trip to the land of make-believe, but a real phenomenon. He called it a miracle.

Here's a picture Beck has of Sarah Palin praying for fully 10 minutes, Beck said, "the most beautiful picture of Sarah P]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Restoring Names To Unknown Casualties]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2575</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2575</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anthony Shadid (thanks, Raja): BAGHDAD — In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers.

In a blue plastic chair, he sat under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 8:58 and 44 seconds, no longer keeping time. With deference and patience, he stared at the screen, each corpse bearing four digits and the word "majh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For Their Own Good]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2576</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2576</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben and Edmund spoke at a company forum yesterday about the work that won a Casey Medal and a Dart Award and was a Pulitzer finalist.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Freedom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2577</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2577</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From that Time story on Franzen and his latest: Franzen is very conscious that people are freer than ever — that word again — to spend their time and attention being entertained by things that aren't books. That awareness has changed the way he writes.

A lot of literary fiction strikes a bargain with the reader: you suck up a certain amount of difficulty, of resistance and interpretive work and even boredom, and then you get the payoff. This arrangement, which feels necessary and permanent to u]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Recipe For Writing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2578</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2578</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John McPhee (thanks, Richard): I always say to my classes that it's analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that's what you're going to make your dinner out of. If you've got a red pepper over here—it's not a tomato. You've got to deal with what you've got. You don't have an ideal collection of material every time out.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Katrina, Revisited]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2571</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2571</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:53:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Let's post the best of the best. This one is worth reading again. Dan Barry: NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 – In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Baby Fat, And Balls]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2570</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2570</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:16:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Blake Hall (thanks, Hank): I met Roy in early 2007. I was the leader of a reconnaissance platoon of scouts and snipers in Iraq and was just back from a two-week leave in the United States. Roy was our new interpreter.

That night, my platoon was sent out on a raid. Our target was an al-Qaeda suicide-attack coordinator. Scanning the intelligence report, I learned that previous attempts to capture him had ended with his bodyguards detonating suicide vests and killing 16 Iraqi police officers. An i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Baby Fat, And Balls]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2570</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2570</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Blake Hall (thanks, Hank): I met Roy in early 2007. I was the leader of a reconnaissance platoon of scouts and snipers in Iraq and was just back from a two-week leave in the United States. Roy was our new interpreter.

That night, my platoon was sent out on a raid. Our target was an al-Qaeda suicide-attack coordinator. Scanning the intelligence report, I learned that previous attempts to capture him had ended with his bodyguards detonating suicide vests and killing 16 Iraqi police officers. An i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Katrina, Revisited]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2571</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2571</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Let's post the best of the best. This one is worth reading again. Dan Barry: NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Little Slugger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2569</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2569</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:41:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[TLake in SI: The New York Yankees' top prekindergarten prospect lives in Jersey City and plays baseball with his three brothers in the dusty courtyard behind their apartment. They made me umpire. You're the empire, they said. I was a bad empire, studying my notebook as plays unfolded, but I was watching when Ariel Antigua lined a home run onto the roof and stumbled on his way to third and lay in the dirt, crying, while his brothers retrieved the Wiffle ball by using a shovel to pull down the lad]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Here's To The Can]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2568</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2568</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:46:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[That picture! I haven't had a Schlitz tall boy since the 6th grade. Here's Dan Zak: The march of Western civilization and the prosperity of the United States have partly hinged on the quiet little object behind those boxes of pricey whole-grain rotini pasta on the third shelf of your cupboard. The object is cylindrical and silver and wrapped in a paper label. It is dusty. Its expiration date has passed.

"You think it's still good?"

"I dunno. Open it. No, wait. Don't."

Or do. Several years ago]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Little Slugger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2569</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2569</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[TLake in SI: The New York Yankees' top prekindergarten prospect lives in Jersey City and plays baseball with his three brothers in the dusty courtyard behind their apartment. They made me umpire. You're the empire, they said. I was a bad empire, studying my notebook as plays unfolded, but I was watching when Ariel Antigua lined a home run onto the roof and stumbled on his way to third and lay in the dirt, crying, while his brothers retrieved the Wiffle ball by using a shovel to pull down the lad]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The New No-Style?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2567</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2567</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:50:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[(h/t HS) Is the way Tao Lin writes a harbinger of a new no-style (concrete/literal) favored by the all-web generation?

Tao Lin profile from The Observer: The Observer was sitting at his desk. It was Friday at 1:03 p.m. His Gmail was open, and the inbox showed a new message from Tao Lin. The subject of the message was "just confirming, 630pm five leaves."

The Observer replied, "Yes, and the assignment is fully confirmed. The profile of you will run in the Observer issue of August 18."

Tao Lin ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Journalism 4308]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2566</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2566</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:32:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Taught by SPT Enterprise Editor Kelley Benham. Here, with her permission, is the About This Course:

In this class, you'll tell stories. A story is not an article. You'll learn the difference.

You'll turn on your old friend, Inverted Pyramid, and embrace new story structures and new tools for storytelling. You'll learn a new kind of reporting. You'll learn to listen. To see and to think. To be still.

You'll learn to gain altitude, to zoom in on the smallest details, to love precision, to accep]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Branding]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2565</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2565</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:15:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The conversation here in the enterprise pod this morning was centered on the St. Pete Times' new branding slogan: One Bay. One Buy.

Which makes complete sense in this two-paper region on Tampa Bay, I guess, and is (way?) better, I guess, than the previous campaign: In The Know. In The Times.

But it still falls short.

I remember the ridiculous branding campaign and jingle developed by a marketing company for the Times Herald-Record a few years ago: Because We All Live Here. (Get in all the the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Should Never Go Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2564</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2564</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:06:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In 1994, Tom Junod wrote a story for GQ called "The Abortionist." The piece won him the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 1995, and would eventually be cited as one of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th century. Many people read this story when it appeared in print, but not me—I read it years later. I sought it out in early 2003, when I was living in New York City after I had graduated college, after I had read all of Junod's work at Esquire and was looking to read the stuf]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Should Never Go Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2564</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2564</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In 1994, Tom Junod wrote a story for GQ called "The Abortionist." The piece won him the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 1995, and would eventually be cited as one of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th century. Many people read this story when it appeared in print, but not me—I read it years later. I sought it out in early 2003, when I was living in New York City after I had graduated college, after I had read all of Junod's work at Esquire and was looking to read the stuf]]></description>
      <author>Justin Heckert</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Going Monthly]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2563</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2563</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:36:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In the last seven years, Atlanta magazine has employed six different writers who did at least one of the following things:

1. Became a finalist for the City and Regional Magazine Association's Writer of the Year award. (Fennessy, S.; and Lake, T.)

2. Won the CRMA Writer of the Year award. (Dittrich, L.; and Heckert, J.)

3. Became a finalist for a National Magazine Award. (Burns, R.)

4. Won a National Magazine Award. (Williams, P.)

(This list does not include Tom Junod, the most-nominated wr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" Question]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2562</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2562</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:58:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Liam Dillon from voiceofsandiego.org writes in with a good question: I'm the City Hall reporter here and am working on a profile of the mayor's chief of staff, a woman who's rarely heard of in public despite the importance of her position. I am expecting her not to participate in the profile and I'm wondering if a) anyone has tips for writing a profile where the subject doesn't participate or b) anyone can link to examples of good profiles where that's happened. Thanks very much for your help an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Diagnostics]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2555</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2555</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Interesting subject matter, unlimited access and very smart characters exploring a timely topic. But does the "narrative" drag this down?

Matt Richtel: GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Utah — Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.

For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. "I forgot," he says.

It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers n]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Help A Brother Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2544</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2544</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:12:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From our friend Dave:

Narrative journalism is essentially rejected at my paper. This has not always been the case, but lately no matter how often I try, all my narrative stories are stripped bare. I feel beaten down. I wonder how other Gangrey readers who work in similar environments deal with this. I don't really have an editor I can go to, as these decisions are coming from the top — or very near it. Is there some way to "trick" the bosses into giving me more freedom to write? Anyway, I'm cur]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Workshopping]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2536</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2536</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:33:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[StoryBoard is rehashing the Mayborn Conference this week. Stuff from Tom Huang and Mary Karr up so far. More to come from Gary Smith, Mark Bowden and others.

Check it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Can Watching TV Cause Chlamydia?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2535</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2535</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:42:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank: Sometimes a critic can be wrong without even typing a word. Take "Jersey Shore," for example.

When this guido/guidette group-house reality show debuted on MTV last December, my schedule was full and my eyes were tired and the show gave off a stench of Axe all-over body spray that was just too strong. The idea seemed redundant after decades of well-documented Spring Break and "Real World" debaucheries that came before, and watching a few minutes of that first "Jersey Shore" episode, I wond]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Good Reads]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2534</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2534</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:02:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Via Kevin Kelly: These here are the best magazine stories ever.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Milestone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2532</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2532</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:42:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check the name in the upper right-hand corner. That's right. Now read his story, Thumbing His Way Back Home: Before we talk about sacrifice, or phantom blackbirds, or the Chipper Jones Momentum-Turn Hypothesis, let me tell you about the time Bobby Cox demolished a toilet with one bare hand.

It happened at Shea Stadium. Braves shortstop Darrel Chaney slid into home, and the plate umpire called him out, and Chaney raised enough Cain to get himself ejected. Cox was so furious on his player's behal]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sniffin' Out Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2531</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2531</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:00:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Looking forward to seeing how this experiment goes. From the Washington Post's Story Lab: There's a truism in journalism that says stories are everywhere, that every person contains the material for a story that can reveal to readers some essential truth about who we are and the pressing questions of our time. To test that theory, six Washington Post reporters this Wednesday will fan out to coffee houses in Virginia, Maryland and the District to find stories that tell us something about the way ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Teamwork]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2530</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2530</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:21:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Step aside, Woodward and Bernstein. Here come Montgomery and Kruse.

This is the first byline I can remember seeing them share at the St. Petersburg Times. (I know they had at least one at the Times Herald-Record). Anyway, it happens to be one crackerjack of a story.

I've got only one complaint. Between the two of them, they couldn't seem to conjure up the brand of Jose Linares's favorite light beer. (Or who knows — maybe it got cut somewhere along the assembly line.) There's an old saying abou]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hot Day He Saved Papa]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2529</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2529</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:44:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: PALM HARBOR — Mikey Enfield called his grandpa on a blazing hot Monday.

Could he help with the yard sale? He loved spending days with his grandparents. And grandpa was of the same mind.

Jack Enfield picked up Mikey, and they hauled tables and boxes from Jack's warehouse. Jack, a former Marine who goes hard and heavy, didn't stop or drink water.

The guys went to Olga's restaurant. Mikey got the biscuit and gravy, and his grandpa got poached eggs.

Jack's face was white.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hot Day He Saved Papa]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2529</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2529</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: PALM HARBOR — Mikey Enfield called his grandpa on a blazing hot Monday.

Could he help with the yard sale? He loved spending days with his grandparents. And grandpa was of the same mind.

Jack Enfield picked up Mikey, and they hauled tables and boxes from Jack's warehouse. Jack, a former Marine who goes hard and heavy, didn't stop or drink water.

The guys went to Olga's restaurant. Mikey got the biscuit and gravy, and his grandpa got poached eggs.

Jack's face was white.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Teamwork]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2530</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2530</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Step aside, Woodward and Bernstein. Here come Montgomery and Kruse.

This is the first byline I can remember seeing them share at the St. Petersburg Times. (I know they had at least one at the Times Herald-Record). Anyway, it happens to be one crackerjack of a story.

I've got only one complaint. Between the two of them, they couldn't seem to conjure up the brand of Jose Linares's favorite light beer. (Or who knows -- maybe it got cut somewhere along the assembly line.) There's an old saying abo]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Unexpected Hero]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2528</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2528</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:03:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gary Smith: ENTER A MAN. EVEN AT 60,in pajamas, his body's hard and ready, a fist. He lies down on his bed, and soon he's in it again, the dream in which the football's in his right arm and the enemy's coming at him. He can never make out uniforms or colors, so he can never be sure if they're Chiefs, and he's about to bounce outside and beat two of them around the corner, then hurdle the third and outsprint the rest, the way he did on that 50-yard screen pass against them 30 years ago … or they']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Unexpected Hero]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2528</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2528</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gary Smith: ENTER A MAN. EVEN AT 60,in pajamas, his body's hard and ready, a fist. He lies down on his bed, and soon he's in it again, the dream in which the football's in his right arm and the enemy's coming at him. He can never make out uniforms or colors, so he can never be sure if they're Chiefs, and he's about to bounce outside and beat two of them around the corner, then hurdle the third and outsprint the rest, the way he did on that 50-yard screen pass against them 30 years ago ... or the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Props]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2527</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2527</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:32:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tons of FOGs on this list of AASFE award winners.. Kruse, Colleen Kenney, Allyson Bird, Cindy Lange-Kubick, Mark Johnson, Todd Frankel, Lee Hill Kavanaugh, John Barry, Lane DeGregory.

Congrats to one and all. Post the links for the stories, please.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Props]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2527</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2527</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tons of FOGs on this list of AASFE award winners.. Kruse, Colleen Kenney, Allyson Bird, Cindy Lange-Kubick, Mark Johnson, Todd Frankel, Lee Hill Kavanaugh, John Barry, Lane DeGregory.

Congrats to one and all. Post the links for the stories, please.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Top Secret America]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2526</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2526</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:36:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Reading this? Thoughts?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Top Secret America]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2526</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2526</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Reading this? Thoughts?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[To Die For]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2524</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2524</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: PINELLAS PARK

Sarah Ludemann couldn't stop crying.

All through lunch that Tuesday, while the other seniors at Pinellas Park High chattered in the cafeteria, Sarah slumped over a corner table, sobbing.

He did it again, Sarah told her best friend.

Her boyfriend, Josh, kept saying she was the only one. He'd been telling her that the whole time they'd been together. More than a year.

But that day she found out he had been hanging out with his ex — this girl named Rachel.

All mo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man Who Would Fall To Earth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2523</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2523</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Luke Dittrich: He was alone when he discovered she was gone.

His son and the other children, along with the other husbands and the other wives, were down the hall, in the large briefing room where their NASA escorts had told them to wait. The escorts had hustled them from the landing strip to the briefing room shortly after it became clear that the shuttle had missed its scheduled arrival time. They wouldn't answer any questions, just stood there grim and silent. And so he slipped out the first]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun With Tiger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2522</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2522</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright's in Scotland: My assignment today was to buy $12 worth of newspapers, sit in a pub at 10 in the morning and spend some time reading Tiger "putter" jokes and looking at soft-core pornography.

Ah, breakfast with the British tabloids.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Zoo Story Pub]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2521</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2521</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Tom French on NPR. As always, you can get Zoo Story: Life In The Garden of Captives and lots of other cool shit at The Shoppes at Gangrey.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Holy Henry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2511</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2511</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:09:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Some smart sons of guns there at the Washington Post are republishing old (mostly '80s) stuff from Henry Allen, thank god.

Here are a few. Beware: Reading them all at once is like looking directly at the Ark of the Covenant.

Bus station: an urban elegy: The Greyhound station at 12th and New York closes today, and downtown Washington loses another monument to the common man.

The last bus scheduled to arrive tonight is the 11:40 from New York; the last to leave is the 11:50 for Atlanta, unless ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Paradise Lost]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2510</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2510</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:15:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for so few posts the last few days. Got a lot of good stuff queued. Let's start with this one, from Wright (and check out the television version on Outside The Lines, Sunday at 9 ET):

HOUMA, La. —

The greatest tarpon fisherman who ever lived sits in a house on the side of a forgotten bayou, stuck in a blue recliner, watching his world die on live television. Oil gushes out of the well, every lost barrel another line in his obituary.

Though he's only 55, Lance "Coon" Schouest is about to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gitmo Rocks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2509</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2509</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:58:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[S.I. Rosenbaum: (June 27) — On a sweltering January afternoon in 2008, Kelly Keagy — aging rock star, drummer for Night Ranger, the guy who belts MOTORINNN' on that one power anthem from the '80s — found himself in the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

He and his bandmates walked alongside a chain-link fence topped with rolls of razor wire. On the other side, a group of men in head-wraps and loose-fitting white clothes stood in a small yard paved in gravel. They were prisoners — men de]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story That Toppled A General]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2508</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2508</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:56:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Hastings: "How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United Sta]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Detailing Death]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2507</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2507</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:59:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Kirby (thanks, Matt): Shortly before midnight on Jan. 25, 1996, five men gathered at a table in a darkened room at the Utah State Prison and prepared to kill a sixth.

They watched the clock and waited. In just moments, John Albert Taylor would die for the 1989 murder of Charla Nicole King, an 11-year-old Washington Terrace girl he raped, then strangled with a telephone cord.

Convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to die, Taylor spent a decade on death row before abruptly ending hi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Losing Leeville]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2506</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2506</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:56:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: LEEVILLE, LA. — Their eyes are bloodshot. Their scraggy skin glows reddish-brown. They clutch cans of beer. On the wooden deck of Griffin's Marina and Ice, they recoil when approached, like a nest of vipers.

"We used to be fishermen," one sneers, drunk, seething with wounded pride. "But now we work for BP."

They won't say more than that. From their perch, they glare across the silent street at the gorgeous marshland now closed to fishing. At dusk they screech away in pickup trucks, ba]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dad's Gift]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2505</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2505</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:37:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl: KANSAS CITY, Kan. — It was my Uncle Jim who told us my Dad was going to die.

He stopped my brother and me in the hallway as we arrived outside Dad's hospital room, and led us to a set of worn cushion chairs in the lobby at the University of Kansas Medical Center hospital. Uncle Jim lit a cigarette, which I thought was a bit much, lung cancer being the subject at hand. He sucked in the smoke and told us that all medical efforts were useless.

"He'll be gone by Christmas."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dad's Gift]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2505</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2505</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl: KANSAS CITY, Kan. — It was my Uncle Jim who told us my Dad was going to die.

He stopped my brother and me in the hallway as we arrived outside Dad's hospital room, and led us to a set of worn cushion chairs in the lobby at the University of Kansas Medical Center hospital. Uncle Jim lit a cigarette, which I thought was a bit much, lung cancer being the subject at hand. He sucked in the smoke and told us that all medical efforts were useless.

"He'll be gone by Christmas."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Losing Leeville]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2506</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2506</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: LEEVILLE, LA. -- Their eyes are bloodshot. Their scraggy skin glows reddish-brown. They clutch cans of beer. On the wooden deck of Griffin's Marina and Ice, they recoil when approached, like a nest of vipers.

"We used to be fishermen," one sneers, drunk, seething with wounded pride. "But now we work for BP."

They won't say more than that. From their perch, they glare across the silent street at the gorgeous marshland now closed to fishing. At dusk they screech away in pickup trucks, b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Detailing Death]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2507</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2507</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Kirby (thanks, Matt): Shortly before midnight on Jan. 25, 1996, five men gathered at a table in a darkened room at the Utah State Prison and prepared to kill a sixth.

They watched the clock and waited. In just moments, John Albert Taylor would die for the 1989 murder of Charla Nicole King, an 11-year-old Washington Terrace girl he raped, then strangled with a telephone cord.

Convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to die, Taylor spent a decade on death row before abruptly ending hi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking For Answers, Finding One]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2504</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2504</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:05:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: WASHINGTON — On the 58th day, an outraged nation summoned the man it holds responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. He walked through the oversize wooden doors, shed the protective cocoon of his dark-suited entourage and took his place at a long table.

Sitting there, alone, with a microphone pointed at his face like a long finger of accusation, the oil titan looked so small — diminished, it seemed, by the immensity of the environmental, economic a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[T.G.I.H.A.F.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2503</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2503</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:57:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Henry Allen: We were putting up the tents when Pakistani police pulled up and told us we might get killed if we camped there.

Four guys in a British lump of a car, they'd driven out from Peshawar to warn us. No "fees" or "permits" were demanded, though doubtless they worried about the political implications of a dozen or so British and American corpses showing up between Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, where we were headed in our decrepit little Mercedes bus.

"Very dangerous to camp here," one s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking For Answers, Finding One]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2504</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2504</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: WASHINGTON — On the 58th day, an outraged nation summoned the man it holds responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. He walked through the oversize wooden doors, shed the protective cocoon of his dark-suited entourage and took his place at a long table.

Sitting there, alone, with a microphone pointed at his face like a long finger of accusation, the oil titan looked so small — diminished, it seemed, by the immensity of the environmental, economic a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Homeskillet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2502</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2502</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:09:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Something not covered in this interview is that S is his favorite edition of the encyclopedia, for obvious reasons. Nieman Storyboard with Tom: We spoke by phone this week with Atlanta magazine senior editor Thomas Lake about his story, "The Golden Boy and the Invisible Army," our latest Notable Narrative. Lake, who also freelances for Sports Illustrated and is a regular commenter over at Gangrey.com, has previously worked at the St. Petersburg Times and The Florida Times-Union. His stories have]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Homeskillet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2502</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2502</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Something not covered in this interview is that S is his favorite edition of the encyclopedia, for obvious reasons. Nieman Storyboard with Tom: We spoke by phone this week with Atlanta magazine senior editor Thomas Lake about his story, "The Golden Boy and the Invisible Army," our latest Notable Narrative. Lake, who also freelances for Sports Illustrated and is a regular commenter over at Gangrey.com, has previously worked at the St. Petersburg Times and The Florida Times-Union. His stories have]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Graduate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2499</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2499</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love this story because it uses serious reporting techniques to illuminate a subject that's pure fun.

Ben Montgomery and Alexa Volland:

ST. PETERSBURG — Brett Maddox graduated from Seminole High School on Wednesday night. Now it's Thursday, and he's already bored.

"What are you doing tonight?" he asks his friend Ari.

"Going to St. Pete High," Ari says. "My cousin is graduating."

They look at each other.

"What if," says Brett, "we graduated from St. Pete High, too?"

No. No way.]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Not Dead Yet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2493</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2493</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[They will pay for news if they think it has value.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nothing New To Report]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2492</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2492</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Somebody needs to get TV Land a new paper. Check this out. More here. Thanks, Andy.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In A Boat, On The Oil]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2490</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2490</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Craig Pittman: ABOARD THE PATROL VESSEL ORION -- Lt. Rama Shuster pulled the boat's throttle back to idle speed as his two crewmen peered at the mess in the water.

Ten miles off Pensacola Beach on Sunday afternoon floated what looked like the biggest swirl of peanut butter in the world. It was 7 feet in diameter and several inches thick. Fish flitted in and out of its shadow, even though its edges oozed a silvery sheen that coated the waves. Small pieces had broken off, so it appeared to be sur]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bobbing, Waiting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2491</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2491</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: MOSS POINT, MISS. -- Three dollars'll get you the "gulf oil spill shot." Blue Curacao polluted by black vanilla vodka and Bailey's. The shot goes down sweet, which means it's downright medicinal in these parts, where oil bitters every boat ride, every sunset.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story Behind Ocala's Most Popular Mugshot]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2487</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2487</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Fred Hiers: Before May 13th, Robert Morgan had never had a run-in with the law.

The 39-year-old unemployed warehouse worker had lived a mostly quiet life for the past seven years with his 37-year-old girlfriend, Tammy Hulon.

They rarely fought, adored their children and grandchildren from previous marriages, and planned to grow old together.

Until May 13th, the only place you'd find pictures of Morgan would have been in the couple's family photo albums and on the walls of their home in Northe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pipes And Machetes And Kids]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2488</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2488</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy: The boy and his friends played on the frozen pond in Newburgh's Downing Park, chipping the ice with a bat and kicking the shards across the surface. He was usually the youngest among his friends and had taken on the nickname La Bebe — the Baby — as a result.

Kids leaving school that Wednesday, Jan. 13, headed toward the bus stop at the edge of the park. Bebe had been out all day, a no-show for his seventh-grade classes at South Junior High School.

He looked up as a group of girls]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Golden Boy And The Invisible Army]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2489</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2489</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: When Angela thinks about viruses, which is every day now, she sees herself at Costco, pushing a shopping cart. They could have swarmed from the handlebar to her fingers as she walked past the cornflakes.

Or maybe they were floating through the ductwork at her office, and when she opened her mouth to yawn—

Or did it happen at the gym, as she furiously pumped the elliptical machine and wiped the sweat from her cheek—]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Better]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2484</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2484</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Stockman's asking for feedback. He writes: Memorial Day pieces have an uncanny ability to slide over the line into schmaltz and sentimentality and I was desperately afraid that would happen here. It'd be nice to know whether I hit it or not.

Here's his story: FORT WAYNE – There is a model fighter jet, a television-VCR combo with a model of an M1-A1 tank on top, books with titles like "The Snake," "Animals" and "Lizards in Captivity," a statue of Saint Francis and two tae kwon do trophies.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Basically, We Need A Storyteller']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2485</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2485</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We've been asked to post this:

Description: The Virginian-Pilot, a 180,000-circulation daily serving Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina, is seeking a reporter to help cover the beautiful and growing Outer Banks of North Carolina. The successful candidate will be expected to out-hustle print, radio and television competitors.

Essential Functions: -- Writes compellingly, precisely and accurately for both the North Carolina section and the mainsheet, including the Hampton Roads]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Wild Tale From Alaska]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2486</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2486</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joshua Saul from the Alaska Dispatch shared this fascinating deadline crime story that features one of the most candid jailhouse interviews I've ever seen.

Is there room for improvement here? He'd be glad to read your suggestions.

The link: Around noon on April 30, two Alaska State Troopers advanced on a remote log cabin in Skwentna, Alaska. It was cloudy and only a few degrees above freezing.

Trooper Terrence Shanigan took cover behind a birch tree while his partner, Wildlife Trooper Mark Ag]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tough Choice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2480</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2480</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 May 2010 11:18:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers (thanks, Justin): KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan — Five-year-old Sadiq was not a casualty of war. He was simply unlucky. The boy had opened a sack of grain at his home early on Wednesday morning, and a pit viper coiled inside lashed up and bit him above the lip.

His father, Kashmir, knew his son was sure to die. With no hospital anywhere nearby, he rushed the boy to an American outpost to plead for help. By midafternoon, Sadiq's breathing was labored. Respiratory failure was not long off]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Below The Surface, More Clatter Than Cheer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2479</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2479</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 May 2010 10:29:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This was written around Christmas 2004, but it might as well have been Memorial Day. Dan Barry: THE songs and carols tell us that it is Christmastime in the city, with children laughing and people passing, greeting smile after smile. They implore us to say hello to friends we know, and everyone we meet. They ask us: Do you hear what I hear?

So let us accept that challenge, and set out to hear the sounds of Christmas Eve 2004 in this city. Let us meander by way of an express subway line whose sy]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tough Choice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2480</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2480</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers (thanks, Justin): KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan — Five-year-old Sadiq was not a casualty of war. He was simply unlucky. The boy had opened a sack of grain at his home early on Wednesday morning, and a pit viper coiled inside lashed up and bit him above the lip.

His father, Kashmir, knew his son was sure to die. With no hospital anywhere nearby, he rushed the boy to an American outpost to plead for help. By midafternoon, Sadiq's breathing was labored. Respiratory failure was not long off]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hole]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2478</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2478</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 May 2010 14:51:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[M.I.A. tweeted Lynn Hirschberg's phone number as payback for Hirschberg's Times Magazine piece and because of all that I found this cool profile of Courtney Love: Courtney Love is late. She's nearly always late, and not just ten, fifteen minutes late, but usually more than an hour past the time she's said she'll be someplace. She's late for band rehearsal's, she was late when she used to strip, she was even an hour late for a meeting with a record company executive who wanted to sign her band, H]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Another Sad Farewell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2477</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2477</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 May 2010 11:44:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeb Phillips: A new Lima Company leaves Columbus this morning.

It's the company of Lance Cpl. Brandon Schoen, 25, whose pregnant wife is due June 1. He has never deployed.

It's the company of Lance Cpl. Dwayne Thompkins, who turns 23 today. He has never deployed, either.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Happened To The Miami Herald?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2476</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2476</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 09:36:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Winning a Pulitzer prize is allegedly awesome. Being a Pulitzer finalist gets you 18 "almost" emails and, if you're me, drinks after work on Tuesday with Neil Brown, the very talented, very cool man who runs the newsroom here.

He was talking Tuesday about working in the newsroom of the Miami Herald in the early '80s, a decade in which the paper won eight Pulitzers and was certainly the preeminent paper in Florida, arguably all of the Southeast.

He started rattling off the names of people who w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Spillcam]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2475</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2475</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 08:26:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: For all the gunk on television, it's hard to think of a more depressing show these days than the "spillcam," the live, continuous underwater footage of the broken BP pipe that has been gushing away deep, deep down in the Gulf of Mexico for more than a month now.

Spillcam combines the dread of horror films with the monotony of Andy Warhol's eight-hour silent movie of the Empire State Building. There is no sound and nothing happens, except the inexorable, unending flow. You watch a ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bad Writing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2474</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2474</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 May 2010 11:44:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[When he was a boy, Vernon Lott wanted to be the next great poet. Alas, no dice. Years later, he found a box of his genius and realized that it was horrible.

That set him on a quest for answers about writing — bad writing, good writing and the process in between (h/t Hank).

Bad Writing – Official Trailer from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo.

He talks to host of folks, including David Sedaris, Nick Flynn, Margaret Atwood and George Saunders, who says in Lott's documentary:

My sense is that it ha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Snitch]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2473</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2473</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 May 2010 08:12:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Newall (thanks, Mara): In Courtroom 801, Maurice Ragland began to shake. The drug dealer who shot him twice in the head had just been led in for a May 6 sentencing hearing.

Ragland's nerves were raw. The tremors began in his shoulder, rippled to his fingers – a lingering effect of his wounds.

Ragland was left for dead nearly four years ago in a puddle of blood beneath a West Philadelphia streetlamp.

"I'm not dead," he told the police officer who found him.

Ragland recovered – aside from]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Price Of Fame]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2472</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2472</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 May 2010 16:51:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I found this story today on Longform.org, and I can't get it out of my mind. Anyone with an ego should give it a careful read.

Lisa Belkin: It was fame that killed Robert O'Donnell, killed him as surely as that shotgun blast he fired into his brain on a dark, dusty, West Texas road, miles and years away from the thing that made him famous in the first place. Technically, it was the bullet that did it — a .410 shell, the kind his mother kept at the ranch house to shoot rattlesnakes and warn tres]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In Chattanooga, A Choice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2471</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2471</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 May 2010 09:10:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joan Garrett: For days he lived in the background of the train yard, hiding behind boxcars and lingering near brushy areas within view of the tracks.

Nails is a veteran among the traveling kids. Still, he hates waiting for the freight trains to come, sitting quiet and sober for hours on end, listening for rumbling down the steel rails.

Then he hears it, the engine, the whistle coming. He struggles off the ground and gets ready.

He throws his heavy backpack over his shoulder and puts a strong ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How Empty Their Lives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2464</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2464</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Henry Allen: O,the stained souls, the small-hours doubts, the troubled manhood of so many American men who didn't go to Vietnam when they could have -- the strange guilt they seem to feel when they confront Vietnam veterans.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Required Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2465</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2465</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gene Weingarten's best, finally bound. Giant yay. (h/t Hank)

Order it now from the Shoppes at Gangrey.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Go, Monkey ... Er, Uh ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2466</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2466</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How was Michael Kruse able to slip so far inside the monkey's head? Maybe because he's half rhesus macaque. His monkeybusiness is Storyboard's Notable Narrative.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories That Should Never Go Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2462</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2462</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I remember stories. I remember titles, first sentences, initial paragraphs, sometimes fragments of entire sections within—and lines from the ending, too. That's the way my memory has worked, as a reader, and as a writer, since I was a kid. And some of the stories that have affected me, shaped me, just aren't accessible on the Internet, and specific memories are all I have left of them—a sentence or two. Since I graduated college, I have occasionally searched online for some of these stories, hop]]></description>
      <author>Justin H.</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Anatomy Of A Teen Tragedy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2459</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2459</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mari A. Schaefer, Maria Panaritis, and Joelle Farrell (thanks, Mark): Vanessa Dorwart was out the door in a flash.

The Interboro High School sophomore seldom went anywhere without first considering, "How do I look?" But on this late February morning, the 15-year-old got out of bed, pulled her hair into a ponytail, threw on some clothes, and zipped out.

No primping. No purse. No Burberry perfume.

It was just Vanessa, her BlackBerry, and a 11/2-mile walk to the Norwood train station.

"I'm goin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Six Degrees]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2458</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2458</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[S.I. Rosenbaum: (May 15) -- On Thursday, the FBI raided a Mobil station owned by the guy who bought my last car.

We watched him on TV, at my mother's house: Elias Audy, a small, neat man, walking with his head up as a rabble of reporters dogged his heels. "Dignified," my mom said, a little teary with concern. "Probably he gave a break to the wrong person."]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Go, Monkey. Go.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2457</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2457</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: He's fast, he's strong, he's smart. He's uncaged and to this point he's uncatchable. The monkey on the loose around the Tampa Bay area for the last year and a half is a young adult male rhesus macaque. He's been everywhere from East Tampa to Temple Terrace, Oldsmar to Gulfport, Clearwater to south St. Petersburg, backed by Twitter chatter, late-night TV talk, tens of thousands of fans on Facebook and a catchy community-wide battle cry:

"Go, monkey, go!"

Raves the rooting public:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gangrey Book Gang]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2453</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2453</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alright. Wright's idea, so he gets first pick, and it looks like it's going to be Barry Hannah's Pulitzer-nominated short story collection High Lonesome.

Mr. Hannah died a few months ago.

The author Richard Ford, Hannah's friend, told The A.P.:

"Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gangrey Book Club]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2452</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2452</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 May 2010 23:41:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Who's down?

Wright's idea. We all read the same book and get on here to take it apart.

He's suggesting new fiction, perhaps a short story collection. Something unfamiliar. Thoughts on that?

Who should we read?

Has anybody done Tom Franklin's Poachers?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letter To A Young Reporter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2451</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2451</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 13:21:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ten years ago, Justin Heckert emailed Walt Harrington a few clips and asked for some advice. Justin was a sophomore at Missouri and had just finished "Intimate Journalism." He was blown away by Walt's writing, and the other work in the book.

As Justin explains via email: A few months went by and I forgot that I'd done this. You can imagine my surprise when I got a response from him, especially a response like this. … I read it today, a decade on, and he's right about so much, especially about t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[After All These Years]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2450</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2450</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 10:26:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Cullen (thanks, Mark): Fifty-nine years ago, Ginny Adams was 20 years old, pregnant, about to become a mother for the first time, but something went dreadfully wrong.

She went into the hospital and then she went into a coma and when she woke up a month later there was no baby by her side.

Instead, there was her husband, her first husband, and he said their baby boy was stillborn and he didn't want to talk about it anymore.

And so they didn't.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letter To A Young Reporter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2451</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2451</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ten years ago, Justin Heckert emailed Walt Harrington a few clips and asked for some advice. Justin was a sophomore at Missouri and had just finished "Intimate Journalism." He was blown away by Walt's writing, and the other work in the book.

As Justin explains via email: A few months went by and I forgot that I'd done this. You can imagine my surprise when I got a response from him, especially a response like this. ...

I read it today, a decade on, and he's right about so much, especially abou]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Last Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2447</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2447</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 May 2010 10:21:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few years back, when I was working at the Times Herald-Record up in New York, I had a hot story. A millionaire pizza-chain owner got whacked in his own mansion on the banks of the Hudson and I thought I knew who did it before the cops figured it out. It was one of those stories that kept me up until 2 a.m., and I poked into the office in Middletown to put some thoughts into a computer.

The place was dark save one terminal on the city desk. In my memory, it was a Wednesday and the carpet was s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Last Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2447</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2447</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few years back, when I was working at the Times Herald-Record up in New York, I had a hot story. A millionaire pizza-chain owner got whacked in his own mansion on the banks of the Hudson and I thought I knew who did it before the cops figured it out. It was one of those stories that kept me up until 2 a.m., and I poked into the office in Middletown to put some thoughts into a computer.

The place was dark save one terminal on the city desk. In my memory, it was a Wednesday and the carpet was s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Little More Betty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2448</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2448</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: Apple pie, apple Betty. The sweetness, the spacey granny thing. The twinkle, the dimples, the cotton-ball coif. It's the simplest sort of television-era algebra: Let Sue Ann Nivens equal x. Let Rose Nylund equal y. Take the square root of all the love America has left to give. (Take those nights spent watching "Golden Girls" reruns on the Hallmark Channel, with the tray of microwave brownies and the fuzzy blankie -- don't pretend you don't know.) For this equation alone, the comedy actr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eating Jack Hooker's Cow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2446</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2446</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2010 10:08:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Let's talk about this one. From the archives. Michael Paterniti (h/t Wright): Go with him. Go out into the feed yards with Jack Hooker. His daddy was a cattleman, he was a cattleman, his son today is a cattleman. Go out to the feed yards near Dodge City, Kansas, out into the stink of manure and the lowing slabs of cow, into the hot sun and rain and driving snow with Jack Hooker and know what it means to be a man.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At Least There Is Boom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2445</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2445</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2010 08:01:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: ON EAST BAY, La.

With the Gulf of Mexico oil spill prompting clients to cancel their plans to get themselves some redfish, the charter captain agreed, for a price, to head out in search of another sea creature. The mere sight of it sends hope and fear colliding into each other like unfastened cargo.

The captain's 24-foot Pathfinder skimmed for 20 miles through luscious backwaters. He turned down the Southwest Pass, took a cut into East Bay and, boom, there it was: Boom. With dull-or]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At Least There Is Boom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2445</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2445</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: ON EAST BAY, La.

With the Gulf of Mexico oil spill prompting clients to cancel their plans to get themselves some redfish, the charter captain agreed, for a price, to head out in search of another sea creature. The mere sight of it sends hope and fear colliding into each other like unfastened cargo.

The captain's 24-foot Pathfinder skimmed for 20 miles through luscious backwaters. He turned down the Southwest Pass, took a cut into East Bay and, boom, there it was: Boom. With dull-or]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eating Jack Hooker's Cow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2446</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2446</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Let's talk about this one. From the archives. Michael Paterniti (h/t Wright): Go with him. Go out into the feed yards with Jack Hooker. His daddy was a cattleman, he was a cattleman, his son today is a cattleman. Go out to the feed yards near Dodge City, Kansas, out into the stink of manure and the lowing slabs of cow, into the hot sun and rain and driving snow with Jack Hooker and know what it means to be a man.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Dividing Line]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2443</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2443</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The man who died is buried in an unmarked grave. The digger worked fast that night. Business was good. He jammed the coffin into the opening at the bottom of the above-ground crypt, and when it got stuck, he covered the end in a half mound of quick-set cement. Before going on to the next grave, he scratched "Died on 12 2010" into the wet concrete. Just a day and a year. No month. No name. No epitaph. When the sister of the man who died sees the shoddy job for the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rages On]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2444</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2444</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeb Phillips: One night in early 2009, Ohio National Guard medic Daniel Hutchison felt that he'd just had enough - enough of the drinking, the nightmares, the memories of Iraq - and put a pistol in his mouth. It rattled against his teeth.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Loving The Sea, Then Torn From It]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2440</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2440</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: VENICE, La.

Where the world runs out of road and into bayou, and all that is left beyond is the Gulf of Mexico, dozens of docked shrimp boats bob in place, restless. They should be out right now, green nets trawling for cash in crustaceans. But here they sit, their dry nets not even catching the air.

Among these many boats — actually, between the Capt. Andy and the Capt. James — there rocks the St. Martin. And on the St. Martin, there lives its owner, a small, muscular Vietnamese-bo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Changed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2441</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2441</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow: SHELL BEACH, LA. -- Johnny Nunez left for work at 5 a.m. out of habit, even though he feared he might never work again. He put on rubber boots, jeans and a T-shirt and drove a mile to the same dock where he had tied a fishing boat for 35 years. The air still smelled like sea salt. The marsh still glistened a crisp blue. The wind still knocked the boats from left to right, left to right, as seagulls circled above. But everything else had changed.

"What am I going to do?" Nunez said.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Laziest Twits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2442</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2442</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Gawker (h/t Joan): Reporters everywhere are in love with "crowdsourcing," in which sources magically come to them, saving the reporters several backbreaking telephone calls. But some correspondents have gotten embarrassingly addicted to this journalistic crack cocaine. And it's time for a intervention.:

And their three annoying habits.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Props]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2439</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2439</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big congrats to these guys:

Andy Meacham, who took top honors in the Body of Work and Best obituary that goes beyond summing up a life categories from the Society of Professional Obit Writers. Stories here.

Wright Thompson won a sports Emmy in the Long Feature category for Catfish Hunters.

And Michael Kruse, who claimed Gold for Best Feature in the Magazine Association of the Southeast for the second time, for his story After the Crash.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gloves Off]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2435</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2435</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:57:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[OK, so Ben and I were just having an e-mail conversation about Gangrey, and we were talking about how many stories go by without comment.

The ones that get the most comments are usually the best ones. Which is excellent. Credit where credit is due and all that.

But if we're all here to help each other improve, maybe it should be the other way around. Maybe we should tell each other how the work could be better.

I'll quote Ben's e-mail on this one:

"Not every posting is an endorsement. Some a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2434</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2434</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:52:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson on the following story from Mike Berger: It's about 60 years old, but is the best piece of deadline writing I think I've ever read. According to the explanation, Meyer Berger was assigned to the story shortly before 11 a.m., caught a train from N.Y. to Camden, N.J. and turned in 4,000 words by 9:20 p.m., an hour before deadline. One account has it that Berger interviewed 50 people that day for his story and wrote it in 2 hours. However he did it, it is amazing.

However he did it, i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Like]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2433</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2433</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:35:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to Bill for pointing us to LongForm.org. And the backstory.

And to Hank, for showing us where we can check it. (This needs to spread.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Like]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2433</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2433</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to Bill for pointing us to LongForm.org. And the backstory.

And to Hank, for showing us where we can check it. (This needs to spread.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2434</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2434</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson on the following story from Mike Berger: It's about 60 years old, but is the best piece of deadline writing I think I've ever read. According to the explanation, Meyer Berger was assigned to the story shortly before 11 a.m., caught a train from N.Y. to Camden, N.J. and turned in 4,000 words by 9:20 p.m., an hour before deadline. One account has it that Berger interviewed 50 people that day for his story and wrote it in 2 hours.

However he did it, it is amazing.

Here's Mike Berger']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Long Road]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2432</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2432</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Apr 2010 07:50:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kaustuv Basu: CANAVERAL GROVES — The last time he came out here, Officer Vann Streety ran from a gunman who shot him six times.

The last time, on this dirt road called Satellite Boulevard west of Cocoa, he ducked into a thicket among the Brazilian pepper trees and the wax myrtle shrubs, hoping to lose his assailant.

The last time, he lay bleeding in the back of a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission pickup truck, a tourniquet on his left arm, before being flown to the hospital in ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Long Road]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2432</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2432</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kaustuv Basu: CANAVERAL GROVES — The last time he came out here, Officer Vann Streety ran from a gunman who shot him six times.

The last time, on this dirt road called Satellite Boulevard west of Cocoa, he ducked into a thicket among the Brazilian pepper trees and the wax myrtle shrubs, hoping to lose his assailant.

The last time, he lay bleeding in the back of a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission pickup truck, a tourniquet on his left arm, before being flown to the hospital in ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ready. Aim.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2431</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2431</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:19:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: BUCKINGHAM COUNTY, VA. — He emerges from the woods, a vision in wool. His walking stick leads and his black boots follow. Underneath a tricorn hat, his white hair flows into a powder bag and rests on the shoulders of his frock coat. His waistcoat is navy, his britches yellow, his nose Roman, his bearing presidential. From their sagging camp chairs next to scuffed coolers — somewhere off Route 610, down a dirt road that coils into the sticks, past the sign that reads "END STATE MAINTENAN]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Still Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2430</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2430</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:33:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The 2010 National Magazine Award for feature writing goes to Skip Hollandsworth: Compared with the glistening two-story mansions that surrounded it, the house looked like something from another time. It was only 2,180 square feet. Its redbrick exterior was crumbling, and its gutters were clogged with leaves. Faded, paint-chipped blinds sagged behind the front windows. Next to the concrete steps leading to the front door, a scraggly banana plant clung to life.

Built in 1950, it was one of the la]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Ferret In The Mail]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2429</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2429</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:37:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jorge Valencia: Stamps the ferret was shipped from a Lynchburg post office in a cardboard box stuffed with food, toy cars and a doll. The destination was a town near San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Stamps may have made it there — had he stopped wiggling.

A postal inspector, David McKinney, got the call about it at his Roanoke office on the afternoon of Monday, April 5, hours after Stamps and the package had been deposited and $63.55 was paid for overnight delivery.

"The box was dropped off at 2 p.m]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Ferret In The Mail]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2429</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2429</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jorge Valencia: Stamps the ferret was shipped from a Lynchburg post office in a cardboard box stuffed with food, toy cars and a doll. The destination was a town near San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Stamps may have made it there -- had he stopped wiggling.

A postal inspector, David McKinney, got the call about it at his Roanoke office on the afternoon of Monday, April 5, hours after Stamps and the package had been deposited and $63.55 was paid for overnight delivery.

"The box was dropped off at 2 p.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Still Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2430</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2430</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The 2010 National Magazine Award for feature writing goes to Skip Hollandsworth: Compared with the glistening two-story mansions that surrounded it, the house looked like something from another time. It was only 2,180 square feet. Its redbrick exterior was crumbling, and its gutters were clogged with leaves. Faded, paint-chipped blinds sagged behind the front windows. Next to the concrete steps leading to the front door, a scraggly banana plant clung to life.

Built in 1950, it was one of the la]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ready. Aim.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2431</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2431</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: BUCKINGHAM COUNTY, VA. -- He emerges from the woods, a vision in wool. His walking stick leads and his black boots follow. Underneath a tricorn hat, his white hair flows into a powder bag and rests on the shoulders of his frock coat. His waistcoat is navy, his britches yellow, his nose Roman, his bearing presidential. From their sagging camp chairs next to scuffed coolers -- somewhere off Route 610, down a dirt road that coils into the sticks, past the sign that reads "END STATE MAINTEN]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA["Get The Fuck Down"]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2428</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2428</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:56:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers' video from Marja, Afghanistan.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Life In Zippers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2427</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2427</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:47:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ralph Blumenthal (thanks, Craig): What, you need a zipper? O.K., Eddie Feibusch is going to sell you a zipper. Brass? Nylon? Swarovski rhinestone crystals? What color? Mystery orchid? Big or little zipper? For a purse? Or a hot-air balloon cover? How many? One? A thousand?

Doesn't matter. Mr. Feibusch is sure that he has the zipper for you. It's somewhere in his store, ZipperStop, at 27 Allen Street between Hester and Canal Streets, among three floors of shelves with boxes of zippers in 502 col]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Life Without Bush]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2426</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2426</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:36:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[James C. McKinley Jr.: The first thing you see when you arrive in this minuscule town is a defunct curio store where people once bought souvenirs of their visit to President George W. Bush's adopted hometown.

Only one of the five shops that used to sell memorabilia to Bush admirers remains open — The Red Bull, down the street. Popular items include magnets and coasters that say "The Western White House." Phony dollar bills with Mr. Bush's face on them also sell well. But the biggest demand has ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Death of the American Century]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2424</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2424</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Henry Allen: The dream is dying.

It was this: a belief that the world has a special love for Americans, for our earnest innocence and gawky immediacy, for our willingness to share the obvious truth and light of democracy with people still struggling in the darkness of history, for our random energy, syncopated music and lopsided, baseball-playing grins. Throw in a little purple mountains' majesty and amber waves of grain, and you get the idea.

It's hard to say just when the dream was born. Wit]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Jobless, Hopeless, Young]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2425</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2425</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy: The girl kept her feet under her as long as she could. A crowd had pushed into the intersection of Dubois and South streets — 40 or 50 teens shoving, flailing and punching.

A young man at the edge of the melee pulled off his orange sweater, tossed it onto the hood of a pickup and waded back in. The girl went down in the middle where other girls slapped her, kicked her and tore at her braids.

Police sirens sounded as the first of four squad cars popped over the hill.

"Let's go! L]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Life Without Bush]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2426</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2426</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[James C. McKinley Jr.: The first thing you see when you arrive in this minuscule town is a defunct curio store where people once bought souvenirs of their visit to President George W. Bush's adopted hometown.

Only one of the five shops that used to sell memorabilia to Bush admirers remains open — The Red Bull, down the street. Popular items include magnets and coasters that say "The Western White House." Phony dollar bills with Mr. Bush's face on them also sell well. But the biggest demand has ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Life In Zippers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2427</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2427</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ralph Blumenthal (thanks, Craig): What, you need a zipper? O.K., Eddie Feibusch is going to sell you a zipper. Brass? Nylon? Swarovski rhinestone crystals? What color? Mystery orchid? Big or little zipper? For a purse? Or a hot-air balloon cover? How many? One? A thousand?

Doesn't matter. Mr. Feibusch is sure that he has the zipper for you. It's somewhere in his store, ZipperStop, at 27 Allen Street between Hester and Canal Streets, among three floors of shelves with boxes of zippers in 502 col]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA["Get The Fuck Down"]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2428</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2428</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers' video from Marja, Afghanistan.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[First Round's On Ben]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2423</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2423</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[...this cash prize.

(Either that or about a week's worth of the kids' college education.)]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inseparable]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2422</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2422</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Meacham: CLEARWATER — Jimmy Wise, a retired railroad engineer, was out of bed at the first suggestion of sunlight. He threw on an old pair of shorts and hit the beach right outside his condo.

Mr. Wise walked three or four miles beneath the seagulls and in a cool breeze, his metal detector sweeping over the sand. He saved the loose change for his grandson.

He set up several beach umbrellas for the gang of friends who would be there by 9. Then he walked back to the condo, woke up his wife, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Read It Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2420</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2420</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This new Pulitzer winner by Gene Weingarten is worth another look:

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Awesome]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2421</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2421</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["Our business now, too many times, is a fat kid in a T-shirt in his mother's basement, eating Cheetos and writing his blogs — and we make it news."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hero Who Vanished]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2418</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2418</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alexander Wolff (h/t Narrative Digest.): The men running at Joe Gaetjens wanted to grab him and make him theirs. Terrified, Gaetjens and other members of the 1950 U.S. World Cup team at first looked to flee, not realizing that the mob wanted only to hoist them on its shoulders.

After the Americans defeated England 1--0 that June evening in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, there seemed to be nothing but beautiful horizons before soccer in the U.S., and before Gaetjens himself, a Haitian &eacute;migr&eacu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tune In]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2419</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2419</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A conversation between Finkel and Doug Stanton starts at 4 today. Listen in as they discuss the art of narrative nonfiction, the state of writing today and much, much more. Thanks, Raja.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finding Melissa]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2416</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2416</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Samuels: ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. -- They lost their child somewhere in South Florida.

The last time her mother held her was 44 years ago, as she raced through the doors of a hospital in Homestead. Two-year-old Melisa Manlangit left in a hearse.

They buried her hastily. Her mother broke down; her father sailed with the Coast Guard and, over time, the parents lost track of where their daughter was buried.

They never received a death certificate or kept a funeral program. And as the Miami th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pulitzer finalists]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2417</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2417</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben, Waveney Ann and Edmund, and edited by Kelley: For Their Own Good. "You know what they say about second place," Ben just said over root beer floats in the office. "First loser." No. Just no. Their work here was world-class.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['I Did Wrong Things']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2414</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2414</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: The teens hid their bicycles in the bushes and approached the house in the dark on the dead-end road.

The 19-year-old kicked the door in. The 17-year-old followed the 19-year-old. And the 14-year-old, Tim Kane, Timmy to his family, a high school freshman, followed the 17-year-old. It was late on a Sunday night, Jan. 26, 1992, and they were inside the house in Hudson.

The oldest teen ordered a man who lived there onto the ground, held a sawed-off shotgun a quarter of an inch from]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Three Hours In The Dark]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2415</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2415</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Talking about mine explosions here today, and I was reminded of this one, from Vanessa Gezari: SAGO, W.Va. - No one could say who started it. All they knew was that someone in the crowd at the Sago Baptist Church that night hollered, "There's 12 of 'em alive!"

For 41 hours, since an explosion early Monday trapped 13 miners underground, the church had been a refuge for relatives, friends and anyone else in search of a piece of fried chicken or the latest news. Now, as Tuesday night gave way to W]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Waiting For Tiger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2413</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2413</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Three dudes with earpieces stand at the bottom of the stairs. They're dressed golf casual, but their square jaws give them away. It's early Monday morning. The sun just rose. The whole area smells like bacon, what with white-jacketed waiters scurrying back and forth with silver trays of crispy pork fat.

These three -- ex-military types -- are Tiger Woods' bodyguards, one wearing a white shirt, one wearing baby blue, one wearing red. They're in a triangle formati]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Top Ten Of The Decade]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2409</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2409</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[They picked.

"The faculty of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, has selected 'The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States.'"

I'm a little embarrassed that I haven't read the books on the list. That said, I have trouble believing there were four non-fiction books this decade better than Finkel's.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Framework]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2406</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2406</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As I mentioned earlier, I'm mining Blake Snyder's screenwriting book "Save The Cat" for some J tools.

Snyder says there are 10 types of movies. Most are self-explanatory:

Monster in the House -- Jaws, Tremors, Alien, The Exorcist, Fatal Attraction, etc.

Golden Fleece -- Quest movies, like Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, Back to the Future.

Out of the Bottle -- "Wish" and "What if?" stories, like Liar, Liar, Bruce Almighty, Flubber, etc.

Dude With a Problem -- Titanic, Die Hard, Schindler's Lis]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bolt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2407</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2407</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Enjoy this one. I did.

Luke Dittrich: The low snap of a single gunshot bursts from eight speakers at once. Each speaker is positioned behind a single man, and each man is positioned more or less identically in a sprinter's crouch: his feet in the starting blocks, his legs slightly bent, his rear end higher than his shoulders, his fingers splayed on but not beyond the white chalk of the starting line. The color schemes of their Lycra uniforms are different — the blue and white of the United Stat]]></description>
      <author>T.Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Str8t]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2404</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2404</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In the next few weeks I'll periodically post the first paragraph or two of a straight news story by a well-known writer. The first person to correctly identify the author gets a point. The first person with five points gets a free, lightly worn, limited-edition Gangrey T shirt.

One rule: You can't use a search engine.

Ready? Go.

CLEARWATER - A faint trail of blood led police late Friday to an injured man suspected in the fatal stabbing of a 48-year-old Clearwater man. Police followed the trai]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Str8t]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2405</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2405</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Without the benefit of a dateline, who wrote it?

There will be no more desk warriors of draft age in the naval reserve as soon as an order issued by the bureau of navigation this morning goes into effect. By the order, all naval reservists of draft age who have had six months' training are at once ordered to sea duty unless they are physically disqualified. Reservists on recruiting duty, holding publicity jobs, doing any inland work, must leave at once for sea service.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Mr. President …]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2403</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2403</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:44:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow (thanks, Wright): The black binder arrived at the White House residence just before 8 p.m., and President Obama took it upstairs to begin his nightly reading. The briefing book was dated Jan. 8, 2010, but it looked like the same package delivered every night, with printouts of speeches, policy recommendations and scheduling notes. Near the back was a purple folder, which Obama often flips to first.

"MEMORANDUM TO THE PRESIDENT," read a sheet clipped to the folder. "Per your request, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rebel Monkeys]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2402</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2402</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:53:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And that's how you do that. Stuever: Somewhere between hard science and the Banana Splits, television has this insatiable need to apply human story lines to the lives of animals, and increasingly more animal channels on which to do it. I get the appeal, for I, too, felt a tiny pang in my cold, cold heart when Flower the Meerkat met her end on Animal Planet's successful "Meerkat Manor."

But something's wrong with "Rebel Monkeys," a pseudo-reality series about a gang of 60 or so rhesus macaques w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rise And Fall]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2401</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2401</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:44:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: TAMPA — On Saturday morning, not 24 hours after the state announced a record-high unemployment rate, business students from the University of South Florida stood in the lobby of the sleek Regions building downtown, ready to work on skills to land jobs that might not exist.

Alan Alford asked his wife to get in the elevator with him for one last practice run before USF's second annual elevator pitch competition.

The 34-year-old lives in Valrico, works full-time selling car insurance for G]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rebel Monkeys]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2402</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2402</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And that's how you do that. Stuever: Somewhere between hard science and the Banana Splits, television has this insatiable need to apply human story lines to the lives of animals, and increasingly more animal channels on which to do it. I get the appeal, for I, too, felt a tiny pang in my cold, cold heart when Flower the Meerkat met her end on Animal Planet's successful "Meerkat Manor."

But something's wrong with "Rebel Monkeys," a pseudo-reality series about a gang of 60 or so rhesus macaques w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Mr. President ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2403</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2403</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow (thanks, Wright): The black binder arrived at the White House residence just before 8 p.m., and President Obama took it upstairs to begin his nightly reading. The briefing book was dated Jan. 8, 2010, but it looked like the same package delivered every night, with printouts of speeches, policy recommendations and scheduling notes. Near the back was a purple folder, which Obama often flips to first.

"MEMORANDUM TO THE PRESIDENT," read a sheet clipped to the folder. "Per your request, ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA["My Editor Won't Let Me Do Narrative!"]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2400</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2400</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:22:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We've talked about The Editor Wall before (here and here), but I still hear from folks who say they're not allowed to write STORIES for the paper.

Do you have this problem? How do you deal with it?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Public Triumph, Private Torment]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2399</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2399</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:42:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Goffard: In late April 2007, Mike Penner published an article unlike any of the thousands he had written for the Los Angeles Times. It was brief, just 823 words, and placed without fanfare on the second page of the Sports section that had been his home for 23 years.

Under the headline "Old Mike, new Christine," Penner explained that he would soon assume a female identity and byline, a decision that followed "a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy."

It was "hearta]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Swan Project]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2398</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2398</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:17:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: LAKELAND

They had just finished lunch, were just crumpling paper napkins into trash bins, when the call came through the school speakers:

"Will the following girls please report to the conference room . . . "

The teenagers looked at each other. What was going on?

"Lindsey," said the voice coming through the speaker. A girl with green bangs hung her head.

"Spring," the voice continued. In the corner of the lunchroom, a 15-year-old huddled behind her black curtain of hair. Dar]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Confessions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2397</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2397</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:26:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You'll want to read this, I think.

Frank Deford: There are many roles a man plays in life. Son, Husband, Father, Breadwinner. If he is successful: Star, Boss, Grand Old Man. But nothing, I believe, is quite so thrilling as getting to be The Kid. That is, you, as a novice, are accepted by your elders into their privileged company. You are not quite their peer. You are on trial, tolerated more than embraced, but at least you are allowed to step into the penumbra of the inner circle, to sniff the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[After Fort Hood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2396</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2396</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:24:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Wan: At 2 o'clock on a Monday morning, the sound of angry pounding sent Army Spec. Zachari Klawonn bolting out of bed.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

Someone was mule-kicking the door of his barracks room, leaving marks that weeks later — long after Army investigators had come and gone — would still be visible.

By the time Klawonn reached the door, the pounding had stopped. All that was left was a note, twice folded and wedged into the doorframe.

"F— YOU RAGHEAD BURN IN HELL" read the words scraw]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Counted]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2395</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2395</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:15:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: SAN ANTONIO, Fla.

Ten years have passed since the country last tried to meet the essential, constitutional and all-but-impossible mandate to count everybody; the whole lot of us. Ten years since it last attempted something akin to counting the granules in an ever-filling, ever-leaking bucket of sand.

A decade, then, since the Bureau of the Census undercounted the number of residents here in San Antonio, a very small community in central Florida that is named after — of all the saint]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How To Write]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2394</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2394</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:38:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Mamet: THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN'T, I WOULDN'T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Three Starbucks, One Corner]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2393</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2393</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Liked this video from the Houston Chronicle.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Save The Cat]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2388</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2388</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm reading a screenwriting book by Blake Snyder called "Save The Cat," hoping to tease out some lessons for journalism. Found one I really like in the introduction: Save the cat.

I call it the "Save the Cat" scene. They don't put it into movies anymore. And it's basic. It's the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something -- like saving a cat -- that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.

In the thriller, Sea of Love, Al Pacino is a cop. Scene One finds him in the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Headliners]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2389</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2389</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lots of friends and Gangreyers took home National Headliners this year. I'm seeing Roy Wenzl, Zack McMillin, Todd Frankel, Neil Swidey ... who else?

Congratulations, one and all.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tagged]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2390</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2390</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG

Here is Julian Grimes' fantasy:

He lives in New York City, a splattered Bohemia where both street art and rules have gray areas. By day, he and his girlfriend run a "culture shop" where people buy art, vinyl records, vintage clothes or nothing if they're broke.

At night, sneaking outside and rattling a spray paint can isn't out of the question.

Here is Julian Grimes' reality:

At 22, he spends 75 hours a week inside Central Deli, a minimart on Central Avenue. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Colors Your Work]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2387</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2387</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Last year, at the Auburn Chautauqua, we were joined by Stephen Knudsen, a narrative artist and professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He told us his work as an adult is colored by a short story he read as a child: Jack London's To Build A Fire.

Wondering if anyone else can point to a single story that has influenced what you do?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Your First Oyster]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2385</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2385</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rick Bragg: The first one I ate tasted like river mud.

It was not that earthy, pungent, essence du monde that well-traveled people like to go on about over their quenelles aux hu&icirc;tres. It tasted like wet dirt, only slicker, fishier, like what a tadpole would taste like if you sucked it right out of the ditch, or a wet hoofprint.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Top Ten]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2386</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2386</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tall order, right? NYU is narrowing this list of nominations down to ten.

What would you pick?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I Will . . .]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2381</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2381</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this photo essay by John Pendygraft.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Bow'ry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2382</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2382</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Dan Barry: Open the door to a small hotel on the Bowery.

A small hotel, catering to Asian tourists, that used to be a flophouse that used to be a restaurant. That used to be a raucous music hall owned by a Tammany lackey called Alderman Fleck, whose come-hither dancers were known for their capacious thirsts. That used to be a Yiddish theater, and an Italian theater, and a theater where the melodramatic travails of blind girls and orphans played out. That used to be a beer hall where a man ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Grande Dame Of The Dog Park]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2383</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2383</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Drew Harwell: DUNEDIN — Big Bruce Simmons was a deputy at the Pinellas County jail.

Little Jean Lea was all of 5-foot-2.

They were strangers then, four years back, just watching their dogs run at the Happy Tails Dog Park.

Bruce had brought his pug Brutus; Jean, her beagle Bill. When the dogs met, Brutus, as he often did, sprinted behind Bill and began to hump.

This could have been awkward, especially for Jean, a retiree in her 80s with a pageboy cut of bone-white hair.

Bruce said, "Guess I ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Goalie]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2365</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2365</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: CEDAR PARK, Texas – Game night, and the goalie paused in his doorway – 6 feet 4 inches, 212 pounds and a faithless left knee backlit against the amber glow of a townhouse leased for seven months to last the hockey season.]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End Of Bigger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2364</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2364</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse, again: PALMETTO

Jeremy Dean had to have the Hummer.

He saw the ad on Craigslist for the black '03 H2 a little more than a month ago and raced to the small lot with the big trucks near Orlando to buy it before another guy got there first.

Steve in sales at Rob Bruce Auto asked him if he wanted to take it for a test drive. No thanks. No need.

Jeremy wrote a check for $15,344 and rumbled off in the 6,466-pound, four-door, V-8 military machine turned sport utility vehicle.

Along I-4, the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Obit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2363</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2363</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:17:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Kruse: CLEARWATER — The obituary was only the beginning.

It read like this: Czernia, Oren, 34, of Clearwater, passed away on Jan. 16, 2010. A University of Miami graduate, he is survived by parents; daughter; sister, nieces and nephews. Mitchell Cremation Chapel.

A post then appeared on a message board for Bruce Springsteen fans at Backstreets.com. It was written by someone called MrBaseball907. That was Oren's screen name.

Hello, the post began.

My name is Michael — the name of one of ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Obit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2363</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2363</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Kruse: CLEARWATER — The obituary was only the beginning.

It read like this: Czernia, Oren, 34, of Clearwater, passed away on Jan. 16, 2010. A University of Miami graduate, he is survived by parents; daughter; sister, nieces and nephews. Mitchell Cremation Chapel.

A post then appeared on a message board for Bruce Springsteen fans at Backstreets.com. It was written by someone called MrBaseball907. That was Oren's screen name.

Hello, the post began.

My name is Michael — the name of one of ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chasing Jose]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2362</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2362</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:52:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pat Jordan (thanks, Eric): I have been pursuing Jose, like the Holy Grail, for three months now, trying to nail him down for a magazine profile he'd agreed to do in January, partly because, as his lawyer/agent had told me, "Jose's on the balls on his ass," and partly because Jose was trying to interest a publisher in his second steroids-tell-all book, which existed only as a two page proposal of typos that had yet to interest any publisher. This second book would be titled "Vindicated," and it w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Exercise In Narrative Reconstruction]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2361</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2361</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:29:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Your assignment for today, students, is to write a narrative lede for this wonderful report about a stunt gone wrong. Assume you have spoken to at least five party guests and are equipped with authority.

Ready?

Go.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Buddhists And The Cats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2360</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2360</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:05:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Lake: On a dusty corner in North Las Vegas, there is a Buddhist temple. On that temple's property, there are cats. Many, many cats. Dozens of cats, in fact, have been known to congregate there.

These are feral cats, meaning they live wherever they darn well please. Apparently, the Buddhist property in the sparsely populated residential neighborhood at Gowan Road and Simmons Street suits them.

The Buddhists, being people to whom all life is sacred, care for the cats. They feed them, giv]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chasing Jose]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2362</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2362</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pat Jordan (thanks, Eric): I have been pursuing Jose, like the Holy Grail, for three months now, trying to nail him down for a magazine profile he'd agreed to do in January, partly because, as his lawyer/agent had told me, "Jose's on the balls on his ass," and partly because Jose was trying to interest a publisher in his second steroids-tell-all book, which existed only as a two page proposal of typos that had yet to interest any publisher. This second book would be titled "Vindicated," and it w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Killface]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2359</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2359</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:17:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's an old one from Justin Heckert that's unlike just about anything else I've ever read. Check it out.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rules For Writing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2358</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2358</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:59:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Guardian asked 29 writers to list their rules for writing, and it's pretty freaking wonderful.

Like …

Jonathan Franzen's No. 4: Write in the third person unless a &shy;really distinctive first-person voice &shy;offers itself irresistibly.

And 5: When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

And 9: Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

Esther Freud's No. 2: A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tip Jars Remembered]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2357</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2357</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:37:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember this bit of genius about tip jars?

Fail.

The Miami Herald tried for two months but has decided to discontinue the voluntary pay program.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Holding It To The End]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2356</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2356</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:23:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check this one out. Did it work?

Bill Stevens: NEW PORT RICHEY

John Maccarelli awoke to a Pasco County sheriff's detective knocking on his door. What happened to the baby? Maccarelli, a 33-year-old construction worker renting a house in Holiday with his longtime girlfriend and her 9-year-old daughter, knew right away what Detective Janet Raybuck was talking about. Or so he thought. The night before, he had watched a 3-month-old named Joshua for an acquaintance. Sometime during the night, Lola,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Border Towns]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2355</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2355</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:58:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: EL PASO

At the foot of a bridge that helps bind El Paso and Ciudad Ju&aacute;rez, a United States Border Patrol officer warns two pedestrians not to stray once they reach the Mexican city. Stay on the main road. Avoid side streets. Very, very dangerous city. O.K.?

The pedestrians nod and join the back-and-forth human flow between one of the safest cities in the United States and one of the most violent in the world — getting worse by the month. Including a pause to take in the Rio G]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Search For Finality]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2354</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2354</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:06:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meg Laughlin: PETIONVILLE, Haiti

Jan. 12 was a happy day for the new American chef at the Villa Therese Hotel. Wearing a white chef's coat with his first name embroidered in black over his heart, he walked through the wrought-iron gates at the elegant 14-room hotel, past mangos and palms, to the kitchen.

Rodney Rightenburg, 51, had moved to Haiti in 2009, after his divorce. Just two days earlier, he had called his former wife and 5-year-old son, who live in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and told th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Search For Finality]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2354</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2354</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meg Laughlin: PETIONVILLE, Haiti

Jan. 12 was a happy day for the new American chef at the Villa Therese Hotel. Wearing a white chef's coat with his first name embroidered in black over his heart, he walked through the wrought-iron gates at the elegant 14-room hotel, past mangos and palms, to the kitchen.

Rodney Rightenburg, 51, had moved to Haiti in 2009, after his divorce. Just two days earlier, he had called his former wife and 5-year-old son, who live in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and told th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Jenny Sanford Comes Homes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2351</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2351</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Christopher Borrelli: Jenny Sanford came home to Chicago. Specifically to Winnetka, where she grew up as Jenny Sullivan. She came home for the most spectacular of reasons: She left her husband. You've heard about this. She left Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, because he disappeared in June for five days and spent the week with his "soul mate," as he explained later. At first, his aides claimed he wasn't around (on a Father's Day weekend, no less) because he was "hiking the Appalach]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Reporter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2352</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2352</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I've got it on good info that we should all be parked in front of HBO tonight at 9:30 for "Reporter."

Stuever's take: The world feels big and yet way too small in "Reporter," Eric Daniel Metzgar's ennobling, intentionally depressing documentary about the relentless work ethic of Nicholas D. Kristof, the New York Times op-ed columnist who writes firsthand about the worst situations every hemisphere has to offer.

"Reporter," which airs Thursday night on HBO, follows Kristof, 50, and two young id]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Burden of Being Myron]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2353</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2353</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gosh, Wright: OXFORD, England -- Oxford at first light is an ode to potential.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rebellion]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2347</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2347</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Barstow: SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Punching Bag]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2348</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2348</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: His eyeglasses perched just above his nostrils, Fred Askew sipped tea and scanned the morning newspaper. His long legs stuffed beneath a table at the downtown McDonald's, he steers clear of the breakfast groups of men who hold court every morning at opposite ends of the restaurant.

"This is how I unwind, get my mind clear for the day," he said.

He's spoken to them plenty before, on other days.

When Askew has shared stories of his past, sometimes, they believe him. Other times, not ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Young Lives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2349</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2349</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy: Twelve people have been killed in Newburgh since Jan. 1, 2008. Collectively, it's a crisis of violence in a small city. Thousands have packed funeral masses. Friends have held vigils. City leaders have held summits.

Each name eventually fades into the subconscious of Newburgh's tragic character. But those who have been slain remain close for a growing number of relatives and friends. The mourners struggle in small and personal ways to remember their lost loved ones. They study pic]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[His Words Have Never Stopped]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2350</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2350</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Jones: For the 281st time in the last ten months Roger Ebert is sitting down to watch a movie in the Lake Street Screening Room, on the sixteenth floor of what used to pass for a skyscraper in the Loop. Ebert's been coming to it for nearly thirty years, along with the rest of Chicago's increasingly venerable collection of movie critics. More than a dozen of them are here this afternoon, sitting together in the dark. Some of them look as though they plan on camping out, with their coats, bl]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Souls On Ice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2346</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2346</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Zak: Voices carry. They bounce off buildings. They come from just beyond the plane of visibility, behind the churning haze. No one's around, yet there are sounds now and then -- sharp laughter, garbled shouting, detached, coming out of nowhere, coming over roofs. It's a gray-white echo chamber out here. Spooksville. Lunar. Plains-y. A winter episode of "Little House on the Prairie," with the hatches battened down. Dark figures fade in and out of view. (Zombies?)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good Intentions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2344</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2344</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery: DELMAS, Haiti — If it had all gone according to plan, Jared Brown would not be standing here, tennis shoes planted on 5,500 pounds of American rice on a truck in the poorest country in the West, struggling to apologize.

If the plan had worked, if they had caught the first flight or the second, if all their boxes of donated tents and generators had wound up in Port-au-Prince, they might not be so angry and scared of what they're about to do.

"I apologize to everybody for the bad]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Marines of Company K]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2345</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2345</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chivers: The helicopters landed before dawn Saturday in a poppy field beside a row of mud-walled compounds. The Marines ran into the darkness and crouched through the rotor-whipped dust as their aircraft lifted away.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Free Services]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2335</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2335</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:11:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Excerpts from "A Free Shave," by Ernest Hemingway, from The Toronto Star Weekly, March 6, 1920:

If you want to save $5.60 a month on shaves and hair cuts go to the barber college, but take your courage with you.

For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death. If you don't believe it, go to the beginner's department of the barber's college and offer yourself for a free shave. I did….

…Just then I noticed that my barber had his left han]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Iceberg Sources]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2334</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2334</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:19:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A question regarding long-term reporting projects.

With as many interviews as you're likely to do, you probably can't (or shouldn't) quote everyone.

So is there a good way to tell the person who just gave you an hour of their time that they probably won't appear in the story?

Should you inform them of that possibility beforehand?

These days especially, certain people give interviews about someone else or something else specifically because they want publicity for themselves.

Is it our job t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salinger Dead At 91]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2333</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2333</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:58:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charles McGrath: J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Coulee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2332</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2332</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:40:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gary Smith: Maybe, if you were lucky, you had one too. Maybe you had your own patch of earth where your legs and mind might roam and you could make a sport your own.

I once had such luck. It came in the unsightliest of forms, a crater bulldozed in a field of weeds where workers at the cemetery behind our house dumped the browning wreaths and flowers that had been left upon the graves. What else, to my 12-year-old eyes, but a baseball stadium?

The embankments created by the earthmover became my]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[State Of The Union]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2331</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2331</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:04:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Best thing out there. Charles Pierce: It's a wonder he didn't laugh out loud.

Looking out over the frauds and lightweights and bland hunks of man-cheese that make up the assembled political establishment, and beyond them to a spavined and impotent political culture that would embarrass any self-respecting monkey house, and beyond that to a country willing to abandon almost anything it once deemed important to the first huckster who turns up weeping on cable television, Barack Obama must have be]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2330</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2330</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:25:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Get those applications in, friends. Deadline is Feb. 7.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2330</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2330</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Get those applications in, friends. Deadline is Feb. 7.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[State Of The Union]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2331</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2331</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Best thing out there. Charles Pierce: It's a wonder he didn't laugh out loud.

Looking out over the frauds and lightweights and bland hunks of man-cheese that make up the assembled political establishment, and beyond them to a spavined and impotent political culture that would embarrass any self-respecting monkey house, and beyond that to a country willing to abandon almost anything it once deemed important to the first huckster who turns up weeping on cable television, Barack Obama must have be]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Coulee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2332</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2332</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gary Smith: Maybe, if you were lucky, you had one too. Maybe you had your own patch of earth where your legs and mind might roam and you could make a sport your own.

I once had such luck. It came in the unsightliest of forms, a crater bulldozed in a field of weeds where workers at the cemetery behind our house dumped the browning wreaths and flowers that had been left upon the graves. What else, to my 12-year-old eyes, but a baseball stadium?

The embankments created by the earthmover became my]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salinger Dead At 91]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2333</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2333</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charles McGrath: J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[24-Hour Cycle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2329</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2329</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:14:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[N.R. Kleinfield (thanks, Scott): At the laundromat, irregular things happen. People square off over washers — mine; no, mine. They sit on the counters where you were planning to fold T-shirts. Women conveniently forget a negligee in a dryer so you'll find it and marry them. Street people try to sell utterly unnecessary things. Pesky process servers visit bearing summonses. People stare without mercy.

Charles Johnson has a 10-second rule. Mr. Johnson is 44, an occasional personal trainer with lo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[24-Hour Cycle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2329</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2329</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[N.R. Kleinfield (thanks, Scott): At the laundromat, irregular things happen. People square off over washers — mine; no, mine. They sit on the counters where you were planning to fold T-shirts. Women conveniently forget a negligee in a dryer so you'll find it and marry them. Street people try to sell utterly unnecessary things. Pesky process servers visit bearing summonses. People stare without mercy.

Charles Johnson has a 10-second rule. Mr. Johnson is 44, an occasional personal trainer with lo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Benjamin, The Bunny]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2328</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2328</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:53:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Reid Forgrave: Walk into Donna Toombs' apartment on the ninth floor of Plymouth Place, a retirement community in Des Moines, and you can almost feel the ghost of Benjamin the Bunny around you.

The first thing inside Toombs' door is a framed photo of Benjamin, who died earlier this month. And that's only one of a fistful of photos scattered about her place. Dozens of rabbit statues and stuffed animals adorn the apartment. There's a rabbit head cover on a golf bag, plates decorated with rabbits, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Along The River]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2327</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2327</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:49:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Missed this way back when. Here's Chris Goffard: After the killings, the people on the river slept with their knives closer. They leashed guard dogs outside their tents and cardboard lean-tos. They listened for strangers' footsteps above the thrum of traffic on the bridges overhead. They got used to the sight of police stepping carefully along the big white rocks of the embankment. Below, in its concrete jacket, the dirty river crawled.

Violence is common and often unreported along the 51-mile ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Benjamin, The Bunny]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2328</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2328</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Reid Forgrave: Walk into Donna Toombs' apartment on the ninth floor of Plymouth Place, a retirement community in Des Moines, and you can almost feel the ghost of Benjamin the Bunny around you.

The first thing inside Toombs' door is a framed photo of Benjamin, who died earlier this month. And that's only one of a fistful of photos scattered about her place. Dozens of rabbit statues and stuffed animals adorn the apartment. There's a rabbit head cover on a golf bag, plates decorated with rabbits, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Haiti]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2326</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2326</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:05:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Two stories about searching.

First, from Theola Labb&eacute;-DeBose and Wil Haygood (thanks, Mark): At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his tiny Silver Spring basement apartment to get ready for work. By 2 o'clock, he had finished at his job installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda and returned home for a bite. A short while later, he left for a 4:45 appointment at Montgomery County Community College to meet with an academic counselor about ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[We Thought We Knew Him]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2323</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2323</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Have you read Jason Fagone's investigation of Marvin Harrison in GQ? It's stunning.]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Emptiness Echos]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2324</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2324</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: DAYTON, Ohio

Every 15 minutes the chiming bells of the Deeds Carillon mark time's passage in Dayton. Their ever-repeating song reminds the city of its deep connection to the NCR Corporation, formerly known as National Cash Register, for generations known here as The Cash.

The carillon, a 151-foot tower of limestone and steel, was a gift from a former NCR chief executive and his wife. It sits beside a boulevard named after the eccentric man who founded NCR, not far from other NCR tou]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Spirit World]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2325</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2325</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Mozingo (thanks, Raja): Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - The night was filled with voices, murmuring then gathering together then rising into hymns and chants that carried far in the balmy air.

This was the time for God and for spirits.

On a road next to the central cemetery, residents of a small slum were lying on mattresses and pieces of cardboard set out on the broken pavement. A woman started to hum a Christian song, and soon rallied a chorus, singing and dancing and clapping for rhythm.

"Kem ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Haiti]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2326</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2326</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Two stories about searching.

First, from Theola Labb&eacute;-DeBose and Wil Haygood (thanks, Mark): At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his tiny Silver Spring basement apartment to get ready for work. By 2 o'clock, he had finished at his job installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda and returned home for a bite. A short while later, he left for a 4:45 appointment at Montgomery County Community College to meet with an academic counselor about ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Without My Leg, I Am A Freak]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2320</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2320</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meg Laughlin: JIMANI, Dominican Republic — At the public hospital in this border town, no one can say how many amputations have been done since the earthquake. One surgeon says he did 32 yesterday. Another says 22 in the two days before. Mostly legs. Mostly from infection.

They come in truck beds, the backseats of taxis and police vans. Tuesday, a tap-tap, one of the small colorful Haitian buses, showed up full of people, most of them from Petionville, the exclusive enclave of Port-au-Prince.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Norwegian Newspaper Commercials]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2321</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2321</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Funny Norwegian Newspaper Commercials - Click here for more blooper videos]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[And The Beer Was Gone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2322</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2322</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erin Sullivan: NEW PORT RICHEY – Eighteen months ago, a 40-something man began a pen pal romance with a woman in prison. Her name is Theresa Jones. She's 49 and this was her fourth stint in prison. She'd had convictions of cocaine and cocaine again. Prostitution. This sentence was for escape.

On Wednesday afternoon, Jones' two year, eight month sentence ended. Her pen pal was there outside Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala to pick her up, authorities say. Both Jones and her friend are fr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Repo Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2317</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2317</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: Crickets at three in the morning on Chica&shy;mauga Avenue in West Atlanta and the fog had lifted enough so that Ken could see the blue BMW naked in the driveway and he figured he could snatch it if he moved fast. He parked his truck on the fractured asphalt and walked toward a shotgun house with brick-red shutters and geraniums along the front walk. When he reached the BMW he saw a small red light above the dash, flashing like a firefly, warning of an alarm to wake the dead. And throu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bag Boy With An MBA]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2318</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2318</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: LAND O'LAKES — Don Gould clocked in at the Publix here in central Pasco County. The green computer font on the small black screen told him to BEGIN SHIFT.

Gould is 46, has been married 21 years and is the father of three boys. Three years ago, he was living in Indiana, managing a small design company and making a six-figure salary.

Now he's living in Wesley Chapel making $8.25 an hour. Publix calls him a front service clerk.

"I used to be a big shot," he said one day last week. "Now I']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Levine Workshop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2312</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2312</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check it here and get your applications in.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pulls Apart]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2308</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2308</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: ORLANDO — In the dark doorway of the airport hangar, he held her. It was warm inside, with all the other soldiers and their families. But she couldn't stop shivering.

"Don't cry," he said, pulling her close against his camouflage jacket. "It'll be okay. We've done this before."

She didn't nod. Wouldn't look up at him. Just squeezed his waist more tightly.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Name That Shirt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2307</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2307</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stop what you're doing and help us design some 2010 Gangrey paraphernalia. Got an original j-inspired slogan you'd love to see on a snug T? Great. Itching to drink coffee in the newsroom from a clever mug? Now's your chance.

You've already seen your narrative heroes pimping 2008's charcoal T with the sweet-ass-but-very-hard-to-see anti-inverted pyramid logo. What will they be wearing this year?

Drop your ideas in the comments and, if the Board of Directors approves, it could wind up on the she]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Secret Call]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2306</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2306</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: TAMPA — The 911 call came in like many do: Nothing to hear but background noise.

People bump their speed dials. Little kids don't know who they're calling. Operators must decide whether to consider the call an error or to send help. At that point, it's their mistake to make.

On New Year's Day, police say, 911 operator Ve'Etta Bess made the right choice, one that led officers to the home of a sexual predator they say had disabled his ankle monitor, met a woman at a bar and brought h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Interviewing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2304</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2304</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In his new book Eating The Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman talks with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris about interviewing.

Morris: If people were entirely reasonable, they would avoid all interviews, all the time. But they don't.

Klosterman: And why don't they?

Morris: Because perhaps something interesting will transpire. They think, "Maybe this person will present me in a way that will be interesting. Maybe this person will present me in a way that I would like to be seen."

***

My two questio]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Year Breslin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2305</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2305</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Many thanks to Ramsey for this ...

People I'm Not Talking to Next Year

By Jimmy Breslin New York Herald Tribune

All these people today, they run around and put their arms around each other's shoulders and they say how much they like each other and they hope the new year is better than the old year. And all during 1965 they were trying to kill each other and now today, because of a calender on a wall, they think everything should be nice.

This is not my game. I can remember too well. And I re]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Strikes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2303</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2303</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:21:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Adam Bosch: Mary Taylor starts her Friday night routine by arriving at the bowling alley one hour early, dropping her bag near one of the lanes and heading outside for a smoke.

She walks down the dim corridor toward the double-door exit and passes the cluttered trophy case where her name is pegged twice in little white letters for high scores. She goes past the plaques that celebrate her as a league champion and past the oiled lanes where she has rattled pins since 1955.

Outside Pat Tarsio Lan]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Strikes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2303</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2303</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Adam Bosch: Mary Taylor starts her Friday night routine by arriving at the bowling alley one hour early, dropping her bag near one of the lanes and heading outside for a smoke.

She walks down the dim corridor toward the double-door exit and passes the cluttered trophy case where her name is pegged twice in little white letters for high scores. She goes past the plaques that celebrate her as a league champion and past the oiled lanes where she has rattled pins since 1955.

Outside Pat Tarsio Lan]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story Of A Footnote]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2302</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2302</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:43:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anthony Shadid: THULUYAH, IRAQ — Recitation of the Koran, mournful but consoling, played from a scratchy cassette as the men gathered in the funeral tent for condolences. They sipped bitter Arabic coffee, only enough to leave an aftertaste. As they smoked cigarettes, an American helicopter rumbled overhead, its rotors sounding the familiar drumbeat of war.

The men had arrived on this day in June 2003 to pay their respects to Hashim Mohammed Aani, a chubby 15-year-old who was one of three people]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Best Narrative Christmas Song Ever?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2301</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2301</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:04:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Have I missed anything? Cast your vote in the comments …]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[That Time Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2300</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2300</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:51:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Mike Levine Journalism Workshop is April 29 to May 2, in Livingston Manor, N.Y.

The MLJW is a bit of a throwback, named after a dear friend, mentor, and one of the best story guys ever. It's more of a gathering than a conference.

We stay in the Shandalee Lake Inn in Livingston Manor, N.Y., for a long weekend, talking shop and getting better at journalism. Writers bring reported material with the goal of working one on one with a coach and getting the story in publishable shape.

Two shinin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Murky Realm]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2299</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2299</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:59:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Bowden in Vanity Fair: Detective Michele Deery works in a cubicle in the basement of the Delaware County courthouse, in Media, Pennsylvania. The only window is high on the wall, over a tall filing cabinet, and opens into a well, below ground level. The space feels like a cave, which has always struck Deery as about right, because her job is to talk dirty online to strange men.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Human Bones]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2298</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2298</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:55:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The relentless assault continues: MARIANNA — Boys are buried on the little hilltop. That much is certain.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Typewriter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2297</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2297</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:18:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: TAMPA — For the first time in history, it allowed a human to tap a backspace key and make a mistake go away.

Called "Selectric II," it was conceived when Richard Nixon was president, when IBM made typewriters and when a hand-typed card catalog tracked every book at Tampa's downtown library.

Librarians got machines for the public, giving each a room of its own with walls the shade of an avocado. The workhorses spit out labels for spines of books and stamped Dewey decimals on paper c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fires Burn Longer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2296</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2296</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:35:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: SACRAMENTO

At 7:56:59 on a Sunday night in November, a citizen known only as Steve called 911 to report a fire in the Curtis Park neighborhood. Flames were rising from the back porch of a handsome old house, burning so hot that the tall bamboo shoots in the backyard were popping like warning shots.

The alarm abruptly ended the light after-dinner conversation inside Station 6, propelling its firefighters into another race against a voracious opponent that doubles in size every minute]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Remains]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2295</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2295</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:11:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: BUSHNELL — The two teenagers got to the cemetery first.

He wore his dark green dress uniform from the National Guard. She wore a long black dress.

They stood on the edge of the road, across from rows of matching military headstones, waiting for the funeral of the man they had never met.

Mike Colt, 19, and his girlfriend, Carol Sturgell, 18, had driven more than an hour from their Tampa homes on Wednesday to be at Florida National Cemetery.

They weren't really sure why they ha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Miracle Of Father Kapaun]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2294</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2294</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:16:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doctors said Chase Kear's survival was impossible.

After he hit his head on the ground in a pole vaulting accident last year, they sawed off a third of his skull to relieve the pressure on his swelling brain.

They told his family that all hope was lost.

But Chase's family lives near Wichita, where a farm kid named Emil Kapaun was ordained a priest 69 years ago. The Kears prayed thousands of prayers to the soul of Father Kapaun, asking him to bend the ear of God. They chanted his name like a m]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Welcome, Moscow Mauler]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2283</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2283</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:38:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: TAMPA

The Moscow Mauler couldn't sleep Sunday. On the night before one of the biggest days of his life, the 37-year-old professional wrestler lay in bed in his South Tampa home, staring at the ceiling, replaying scenes from his boyhood in the USSR: roughing up his buddies, discovering a golden-haired American hero on TV, hatching a dream. And now, on the eve of everything coming true, he was anxious. Excited. Maybe even — it was hard for him to admit it — nervous.

This 6-foot-6]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The $16 Newspaper]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2284</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2284</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dave Eggers is selling it.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Yes, Miky, There Are Rabbis In Montana]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2282</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2282</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:32:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eric A. Stern (thanks, Todd): HELENA, Mont. — In Montana, a rabbi is an unusual sight. So when a Hasidic one walked into the State Capitol last December, with his long beard, black hat and long black coat, a police officer grabbed his bomb-sniffing German shepherd and went to ask the exotic visitor a few questions.

Though there are few Jews in Montana today, there once were many. In the late 19th century, there were thriving Jewish populations in the mining towns, where Jews emigrated to work a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Morning Breslin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2281</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2281</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:51:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Giant thanks to Ramsey, who's typing up old Jimmy Breslin stuff so we all may share. He brings up a good suggestion, btw: "I'd like to see more people doing this. That is, finding things that exist in print, only in print, only hardcopy, and getting them onto the web. I think we've lost a lot when we went digital. That is, I don't think we've taken enough with us yet. There are tons of great magazine and newspaper stories that simply can't be found on Nexis or in the web archives. And I know peo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Behind His Plan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2280</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2280</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:45:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Baker (thanks, Ramsey): WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.

How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human tol]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Behind His Plan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2280</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2280</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Baker (thanks, Ramsey): WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.

How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human tol]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Morning Breslin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2281</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2281</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Giant thanks to Ramsey, who's typing up old Jimmy Breslin stuff so we all may share. He brings up a good suggestion, btw: "I'd like to see more people doing this. That is, finding things that exist in print, only in print, only hardcopy, and getting them onto the web. I think we've lost a lot when we went digital. That is, I don't think we've taken enough with us yet. There are tons of great magazine and newspaper stories that simply can't be found on Nexis or in the web archives. And I know peo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Yes, Miky, There Are Rabbis In Montana]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2282</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2282</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eric A. Stern (thanks, Todd): HELENA, Mont. — In Montana, a rabbi is an unusual sight. So when a Hasidic one walked into the State Capitol last December, with his long beard, black hat and long black coat, a police officer grabbed his bomb-sniffing German shepherd and went to ask the exotic visitor a few questions.

Though there are few Jews in Montana today, there once were many. In the late 19th century, there were thriving Jewish populations in the mining towns, where Jews emigrated to work a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Untold Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2279</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2279</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:21:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Melissa Lyttle's new project.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[And The Pursuit Of Happiness]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2273</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2273</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:42:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't seen it yet, check out Maira Kalman's work for NYT.com. Cool stuff. Thanks Ted.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Thirteenth Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2272</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2272</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:24:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Robbins: COLLEGE STATION — Long tables draped with maroon linens held the portraits of the dead. Other photographs were displayed Tuesday at G. Rollie White Coliseum, including images depicting the progression of the Texas A&M University sacrament known as Bonfire: cut, stack, burn. One section of pictures portrayed the events of Nov. 18, 1999.

But John Comstock was drawn to the portraits in the black frames. He gazed at the eyes looking back.

"Hi, John."

Comstock turned.

"Darrin Allen]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Ballad Of Billy Ray]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2271</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2271</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:18:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wes Ferguson: LINDEN — Whatever happened to Billy Ray Johnson?

For years, the middle-aged, mentally challenged black man was a familiar face around town. But on a September night in 2003, four young white men gave Johnson beer at a pasture party and told him to dance while they laughed and used racial slurs. Then one of them beat him.

The beating and dumping of Johnson's unconscious body and the town's reaction drew national outrage.

"Old South racism lives in Texas town," read one headline i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Father]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2270</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2270</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:13:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hey, Gangrey friends,

The Wichita Eagle has an unusual story project set to launch Dec. 6.

It will include an 8-part serial narrative and our first-ever hour-long narrative news documentary. We spent six months on it; we even put a musical score to the documentary.

Father Emil Kapaun was a priest who died as a U.S. Army chaplain in the Korean War. The peg for this is that there is a good chance Kapaun will become the first person awarded the Medal of Honor, and sainthood in the Catholic churc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Point A To Point B]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2269</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2269</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:31:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Farhi: Bob Marbourg never wanted to spin records or read the news on the radio. One thing, and maybe only one thing, fascinated him: the mad struggle of a few million people trying to get from Point A to Point B each day.

And so for 30 years — he celebrated his on-air anniversary this week — Marbourg has sidled up to a microphone at radio station WTOP and narrated the breakdowns, slowdowns and fender benders that make up Washington's so-called rush hour (not much rush, and a lot longer tha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Killing Time]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2268</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2268</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:28:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: COLUMBIA, S.C.

In the down time before another head count, two prisoners play cards. One inmate shuffles and the other flicks his hand, a mystical cutting of the deck. The dealt cards land on the lid of a garbage can used as a table, falling on top of one another, face down.

A form of gin rummy breaks out in the courtyard of the Campbell Pre-Release Center as the inmates, Mark and Mario, toss their unwanted cards into the discard pile. But from deuce to ace, nearly every card is a f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Can One Man Redeem A Nation?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2267</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2267</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:09:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Junod: On December 7, 2006, a new jail opened in Guant&aacute;namo. It was, and is, called Camp 6. Guant&aacute;namo is located at the arid eastern end of Cuba, plagued with iguanas and surrounded by the endless indigo desert of the Caribbean. The detention center there, opened in 2002, had always been a provisional thing, defined by its infinities of razor wire and its guard-towered skyline. Camp 6 was different. Built by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root to duplicate a jail ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Auburn Chautauqua]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2266</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2266</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:26:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It took a minute to recover, but heavens this was fun. Read all about The Auburn Chautauqua here:

Atlanta Magazine reporter Thomas Lake recently hosted an unusual narrative conference at his family's homeplace in rural Ludowici, Georgia.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Auburn Chautauqua]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2266</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2266</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It took a minute to recover, but heavens this was fun. Read all about The Auburn Chautauqua here:

Atlanta Magazine reporter Thomas Lake recently hosted an unusual narrative conference at his family's homeplace in rural Ludowici, Georgia.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Interview With Cormac]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2265</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2265</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:55:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cormac McCarthy: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Openers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2264</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2264</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:48:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

–Jeffrey Eugenides, first sentence of Middlesex

The big man lived in the janitor's closet behind the bar, and through the night you could hear him building birdhouses.

–Christopher Goffard, first sentence of Snitch Jacket

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[T.G.I.H.A.F.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2263</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2263</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Washington Post February 17, 1997

Punches to Punch Lines; At 75, Former Middleweight Champ Jake LaMotta Still Knocks 'Em Dead

Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

Jake LaMotta, at 75, says: "I still do 10, 15 minutes shadowboxing every morning. I get up, I throw thousands of punches, thousands. Naked in front of the mirror."

This is during an afternoon at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, where Jake is sitting absolutely still at a table, watching his old fight films on a TV by the bar -- ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Openers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2264</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2264</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

--Jeffrey Eugenides, first sentence of Middlesex

The big man lived in the janitor's closet behind the bar, and through the night you could hear him building birdhouses.

--Christopher Goffard, first sentence of Snitch Jacket

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia w]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Interview With Cormac]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2265</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2265</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cormac McCarthy: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tuesday Morning Breslin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2248</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2248</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big thanks to Ramsey for spending his Friday night (?!) typing up some classic Jimmy Breslin. Breslin did three columns on the assassination of JFK. We all know the gravedigger, of course, but the other two are fine stories. Here's one of them:

Everybody's Crime

Washington -- The Spanish Ambassador was on his knees. The people who were in line behind him walked around him. The coffin was draped with an American flag. But at the bottom, just before the black velvet started, a little bit of maho]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dangerous Time For Democracy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2249</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2249</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charlie Pierce: Toward the end of September, a couple in Fredericktown, Ohio, named Richard and Jacqueline Ruhl decided to build a float for the annual Fredericktown Tomato Show Parade. Apparently, the Ruhls had been bothered over the previous nine months by the activities of President Obama, whose three hundred and sixty-three days since we elected him have broken open the fibrotic lesions holding back the old infections of the body politic, the way tuberculosis can lie dormant in the lungs for]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fight In The WP Newsroom Over A Charticle!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2247</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2247</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm breathless.

From Washintonian.com's Capital Comment blog: Details are sketchy, but numerous witnesses report that veteran feature editor Henry Allen punched out feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia on Friday....

According to many sources, the incident began when Style editor Ned Martel assigned a semi-political story to Monica Hesse and Roig-Franzia. Playing off of an inadvertent disclosure last week that many congressmen are being investigated for ethics violations, Martel asked the two Sty]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Redemption Of Billy Cannon]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2243</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2243</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:26:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: ANGOLA, La. –The prison dentist walks slowly down the gravel road past the warden's house. He is stooped, with a big belly, two white tufts of hair and a bald spot. He's got a bulbous nose and a creak in his step. But look closer. There are still pieces of the man he used to be. He moves with a subtle feline grace. He's got the deepest blue eyes, familiar somehow, like an old photograph. They seem to only absorb information, never giving anything away. He's alone, carefully maki]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Reasons You Should Read Tinsel]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2242</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2242</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:45:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[First in a continuing series of nuggets from Hank Stuever's book Tinsel, which you should get, if you know what's good for you. If there are typos, they're mine. Page 67:

People sometimes go to the mall twice a day. On weekday mornings and afternoons it is the "Strollerbriar" of its nickname, filled with bored moms who visit over and over again, eddying out by the play area, and watch carefully as their children maniacally romp on toys in the shapes of a giant, smiling plastic cell phone and a ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['I Still Do']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2241</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2241</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:11:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Meacham: ST. PETE BEACH — Julius Stewart and Angie Lee Burnham were childhood friends who moved away and married other people.

Both their spouses died young, and of unusual causes — his wife to a gas leak; her husband to a German U-boat.

The old friends reunited and wed shortly after World War II. They were together 64 years, until death separated them last week.

They died a day apart. Mr. Stewart, who was 90, died Saturday. Mrs. Stewart, who was 92, died Sunday.

"I think they decided t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Vestigial Tale]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2240</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2240</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:20:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joel Achenbach: Gary Smith writes very long stories for a living. They run 8,000 words. He crafts four of them a year for Sports Illustrated. He is a throwback, a spinner of yarns in what we will call for the millionth time the Age of Twitter. Narrative these days competes against incrementalized information — data, chatter, noise. Smith doesn't think he's a dinosaur, but he does fear that the long-form narrative doesn't quite work on a computer screen.

"You're on the Web and the Internet all d]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Poppy's Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2239</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2239</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:10:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Grondahl with Poppy's Story in seven chapters (thanks, Brendan). Here's the first: ALBANY — "I ain't nobody, boss. I ain't nobody."

The man was wrapped in three layers of thermal wear: coveralls, snowmobile suit, down jacket. He wore a wool hat with earflaps.

He had come to a South End food pantry for a free lunch on a Saturday in January. Outside, it was wicked cold. A biting wind knifed up from the Hudson a few blocks away — lip-chapping weather.

He'd spent the night outside, he said, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['I Have No Tolerance For Being Bored']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2238</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2238</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:04:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[… over at Nieman Storyboard. Good stuff. Like this: Is there anything narrative journalism does that can't be done by some other type of print or online story?

Narrative journalism is not about delivering information. It's about delivering the experience of something. That's what other kinds of journalism, with sidebars and timelines and hypertext and graphics and mapping—all the wonderful things that journalism can do to convey information—none of those things even attempts to deliver the sens]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ghosts In The Trailer Park]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2237</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2237</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:18:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Wes Ferguson: There will be tears tonight.

There will be voices in the cemetery — a child's laughter, a whispered threat.

On a cool, damp night in Longview, paranormal investigator Misty Richardson says she will not fear the spirits she expects to encounter during research of a local burial ground.

"Me, what I believe is that I have the Lord with me," she says. "We say a prayer and feel that He protects us. Some of them do try to possess you, so you have to do it with a clear head. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Ballgame]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2236</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2236</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:25:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: NEW YORK — I am a man of the people, which is why I generously tipped the guy who shined my shoes in a suite near the home plate of Yankee Stadium. Actually, that's a lie. I didn't tip him. Why should I? He gets to be in the presence of me and my fellow masters of the universe. Maybe he'll catch success by osmosis, and that's tip enough. Someday, if he works hard, he can grow up to be like me: a man who enjoys a beautiful fall day by spending $1,200 of other people's money on a ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2235</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2235</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:44:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congrats to the folks at the York Daily Record, which posted the highest circulation gains this go-'round.

I don't know much about the paper, but I know they have an intense focus on writing. (Lots to learn on there, btw.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Misadventures Of Tom Sawyer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2234</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2234</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:14:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: Tom Sawyer is in jail.

Again.

He's well known at the Hillsborough County lockup: trespassing, drinking in public, resisting arrest. Alkie crimes. It's petty stuff, but the record fills 83 pages. And that's just in Florida, since 1993.

At 77, he's one of the oldest guys in the Falkenburg Road Jail. In his mug shots, he's always wearing overalls. Sometimes his thin chest is bare beneath the dingy denim. Sometimes he wears an undershirt. But always, those overalls — except, for s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rocking, At 85]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2215</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2215</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:07:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sean Daly: LARGO — Jim Priebe will never forget how he found out: Nine years ago, he called home to check on his mother, a routine how-ya-doin' in the middle of the day. Margaret Priebe — in her mid-70s at the time — was just fine…in the garage, car doors open, stereo cranking.

Jim shouted into the phone:

"What's that noise, Mom?!"

She shouted back:

"Metallica!"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seven Deadly Sins]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2214</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2214</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:38:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wired (via Kansas State) maps the seven deadly sins.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Maxed Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2213</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2213</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:05:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory and John Pendygraft:

Much of the debate about health care reform has centered on the nation's 47 million uninsured. But those pushing the nearly $1 trillion plan are also concerned about families who have insurance but find that it runs out or becomes prohibitively expensive when they need it most.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Runner]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2212</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2212</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:56:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gary Smith: She's the water boy on the football team. She's president of the National Honor Society, a year from graduating as valedictorian. She can bench-press 180. She hunts deer with a bow and arrow. Anything might arise from this land. Something that never has in the history of U.S. sports is about to.

A freckle-faced ranch girl from the very heart of Texas is going to win the state track team championship.

All by herself.

Twice.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Life Alone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2211</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2211</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:25:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Soul of Athens: For 63 years, Tom Rose and his wife, Mary, built a life together on his family farm on Canaanville Road. Then last year Mary passed away, leaving Rose to face the future alone, surrounded by a lifetime of memories.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Already Read]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2210</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2210</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:12:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Artist Tracey Falcon: "As the roots and the rings on teh trees offer information on the land over time, the pages of the newspaper are steeped in human history. Information, truth, opinion, fact, lies, propoganda; fed through the thin pages for all to contribute to and all to feed on. … History echoing around the walls. The writing in the wall. Newspaper has everything, the rythm of life, land and people."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tough Bitch]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2209</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2209</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:50:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG — Alexandra Kensler had been working weird hours, not sleeping well.

The imposing teen with the blond ponytail and iron grip was awake at 6 a.m., alone in the house while her mother was out of town.

She trudged to the kitchen wearing a sports bra and boxers. She grabbed a bottle of water, hung a cigarette between her lips and turned for the front porch.

Then, she saw him.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Weed Warriors]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2208</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2208</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:42:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: MONTGOMERY, Ala.

The State of Alabama has just dedicated $6 million in federal stimulus money to combat a certain invasive weed, and the two men chosen to lead this ground war can already hear you laughing. Millions of dollars to kill some weeds? Sounds like another good-old-boy boondoggle. Heh-heh-heh.

But we're not talking dandelions here. This weed is the killer weed, the nearly indestructible weed, The Weed From Another Continent — a weed that evokes those old science-fiction mo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Scribes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2207</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2207</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:33:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[P.J. Huffstutter: The latest edition of the Budget had just hit newsstands and Amish family mailboxes, and already fresh updates were pouring in.

"Canning is coming to a close," one person reported from Salem, Mo. "The weather is very humid to hot today," wrote another from Grabill, Ind.

The big news from Cottage Grove, Tenn.: "Thomas Hostetler hurt his ankle while loading grain onto the truck from the grain cart."

The Budget is not your typical newspaper. Since 1890, it has served as the pri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Aftermath]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2206</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2206</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:48:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ever watch football?

Then read "Game Brain," from GQ, by Jeanne Marie Laskas.

It's got me fired up to do better work.

Here it is: On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Kennedy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2180</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2180</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:40:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Von Drehle: A story told around Arlington National Cemetery holds that John F. Kennedy paid a visit around Veteran's Day in 1963. As he stood near the mansion that once was home to Robert E. Lee, taking in the sweeping view of the Potomac River down below and the National Mall rolling out toward the distant Capitol, he remarked, "I could stay here forever."

Within three years, that serene and stirring spot had been visited by some 16 million people, for it had become, by a terrible stroke]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Kennedy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2180</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2180</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Von Drehle: A story told around Arlington National Cemetery holds that John F. Kennedy paid a visit around Veteran's Day in 1963. As he stood near the mansion that once was home to Robert E. Lee, taking in the sweeping view of the Potomac River down below and the National Mall rolling out toward the distant Capitol, he remarked, "I could stay here forever."

Within three years, that serene and stirring spot had been visited by some 16 million people, for it had become, by a terrible stroke]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New and Improved]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2179</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2179</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2009 18:21:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse said the blog is looking a little outdated, a little behind the times. So I've tinkered with it a bit and I sort of like the changes. Take a look.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[If I Ran The Paper …]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2178</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2178</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2009 05:34:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm awake. What the hell.

1. Today's Drink on the 1A rail. 2. Every non-major league local sports story must contain at least 30 names of athletes. 3. We bring back delivery boys on bicycles. 4. And kids who sell papers on the corners. 5. And kids who sell subscriptions door to door. 6. We rip off Extra! afternoon editions for any crime, accident or natural disaster within 100 miles of the headquarters in which six or more people die. 7. No more teases in the print edition to yournewspaper.com.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Putting It Out There]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2177</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2177</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:07:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[My wife said the other day that she is cake's No. 1 fan.

I am the No. 1 fan of front page editorials.

I wish there were more of these.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In All Its Glory]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2176</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2176</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:37:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Erskine: Santa Monica Pier juts out into the Pacific like Jay Leno's jaw, a defiant, whimsical and improbable landing pad. Just 100 feet below, sharks are at play, scarfing the occasional hot dog and Coke cup that plop into their Sunday soup. Up on deck, L.A. is at play too. Here, on SoCal's splendid splinter.

Passing woman: "I just need to decompress."

Male companion: "How'd you get so compressed?"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadly Choices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2175</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2175</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:51:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sheri Fink: The smell of death was overpowering the moment a relief worker cracked open one of the hospital chapel's wooden doors. Inside, more than a dozen bodies lay motionless on low cots and on the ground, shrouded in white sheets. Here, a wisp of gray hair peeked out. There, a knee was flung akimbo. A pallid hand reached across a blue gown.

Within days, the grisly tableau became the focus of an investigation into what happened when the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina marooned Memorial Med]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Too Much Convenience]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2174</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2174</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:08:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I needed this. Hank Stuever: Wawa in the morning, Sheetz at night.

Sheetz in the morning, Wawa at night.

They're just convenience stores, you shouldn't think too hard about them. (Fair warning: This story thinks too hard about them.)

By late July, this much came clear: Some of us were going no place exotic in this, the bummer summer. There wasn't the time or there wasn't the money. Things keep not happening, or the wrong things happened. We never got farther than the Sheetz convenience store ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[She Sighs, He Cries]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2173</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2173</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:47:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Lake: It's hard to pinpoint when the trouble began, but that doesn't matter now. On Monday, my hands were shaking, and they wouldn't stop. This made note-taking difficult.

Maybe it all began to sink in at a school event Friday, when my daughter's new principal made one of those jokes you're supposed to laugh at when you're in public. And we did, all 200 or so adults in the sweltering heat.

"Daddy," Carleigh whispered in my ear, "I don't understand why everyone is laughing."

You will, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Whom To Believe?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2172</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2172</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:59:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Josh Tyrangiel, managing editor of TIME.com, says that long form journalism is not working on the web.

But NYT Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati, says "contrary to conventional wisdom, it's our longest pieces that attract the most online traffic."

Maybe it's the writing that matters.

(via Romenesko)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Generation Gap]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2171</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2171</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:41:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Netzel: The lunchroom is half-full, but the din sounds like it's packed past capacity.

Two Lincoln-West High School staffers hang at the edges to keep an eye on things, calling out to those passing in the halls to get back to class and tuck in their shirts.

A student catches assistant principal Kate Sergent's eye. Ruben Rosado is hard to miss. He has long, bushy hair pulled back in a ponytail, but the black frizz doesn't cover up the collar, which is a different color than the rest of the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Community, Under A Bridge]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2148</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2148</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:12:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: PROVIDENCE, R.I.

The chief emerges from his tent to face the leaden morning light. It had been a rare, rough night in his homeless Brigadoon: a boozy brawl, the wielding of a knife taped to a stick. But the community handled it, he says with pride, his day's first cigar already aglow.

By community he means 80 or so people living in tents on a spit of state land beside the dusky Providence River: Camp Runamuck, no certain address, downtown Providence.

Because the two men in the figh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stealing Knowledge]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2147</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2147</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:53:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Giant thanks to Lena Price for taking notes at The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference last weekend, then structuring them in this nifty top ten tips list, just for you:

1. Get away from home. The more you see, the more reasons you'll have to write. Wherever you go, take books with you. – Paul Theroux, travel writer

2. Reporters can be pretty intimidating to "normal" people. Bridge the divide by having a drink with the person you're interviewing, or by offering them a cigarette. (But don't ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Quick Thought]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2146</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2146</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:00:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You saw it here first. A boring story?

A snory.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Truth About The Naked Cowboy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2145</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2145</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:23:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jennifer Fermino (thanks, B): The latest candidate to throw his 10-gallon hat into the race for mayor is a Nietzsche-spouting semi-nudist who lives in New Jersey, twice posed for Playgirl and regularly rakes in $300 an hour crooning off-key in Times Square.

The Naked Cowboy's panty-prancing around the Crossroads of the World has made him a hit with camera-snap ping tourists all over, but it's his off-hours persona that's really bizarre.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[To The Death]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2144</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2144</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:21:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Barstow: WICHITA, Kan. — It did not take long for anti-abortion leaders to realize that George R. Tiller was more formidable than other doctors they had tried to shut down.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Editing Sarah Palin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2143</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2143</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:04:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Vanity Fair gives the cold gov's resignation speech a hard read.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Conquering The World]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2142</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2142</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:29:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Great to see so many familiar faces on the list of AASFE winners. Congrats, one and all.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Chase]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2141</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2141</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:53:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I loved this behind-the-curtain look at a robbery investigation from John Barry: TAMPA — In blurry videos of three convenience store robberies last week, one detail got everyone's attention — a big, black, blunt gun. It looked like a sawed-off shotgun. The way the robber pulled it out of his shirt and aimed it gut-level looked unforgivingly lethal, a murder in the making.

It turned out to be the strangest of cases, a jewel of police work.

One long day last week, a detective swore he wouldn't g]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thanks, Elderly!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2140</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2140</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:05:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So the over-65 crowd has long been the most dedicated newspaper readership demographic.

It's high time we forgive them for calling to complain about the word "suck" appearing in print and for referring to our 80-inch narrative as "that ad you put in the paper."

And we should get them something. Anything. A pillow? Blood pressure pills? Lipitor?

You saw this new report from the Census bureau?

For the first time, people aged 65 and over are expected to outnumber children under age 5 (Figure 2-]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Beer Was Still There]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2139</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2139</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:43:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bragg in Kalamazoo.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fourth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2117</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2117</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Have a great weekend.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Holding Firm Against Plot By Evildoers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2116</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2116</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: ... But a request to talk to people who had recently joined the cause was met with resistance by James Fitzgerald, the national director of field activities, who began the conversation by criticizing a New York Times article about the society from 1966. The best he could do, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to suggest a visit to a Sunday street fair in Union, N.J., where members would have a booth.

The tip was solid: there, near a funnel-cake operation, a foldout table covered with Birch Soc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Spirals]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2115</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2115</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:28:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Steve Persall: She wanted to be a dancer or an actor and was lovely enough to be either. Instead, she became a newspaper reporter and a damn fine one.

But she looked nothing like the woman I once knew as she sat next to me the other evening at the Hub, the inveterate bar in downtown Tampa; puffier, sadder, disheveled, speaking in jumbled threads of thought that only another drug addict or a patiently sympathetic ear can understand. She fumbled in her purse for lord knows what, knocking over the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At The Mercy Of Her Mind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2114</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2114</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:49:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Shari Roan (thanks, Raja): It's been a rough week. A few days ago, at UCLA's Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, 6-year-old Jani toppled a food cart and was confined to her room. She slammed her head against the floor, opening a bloody cut that sent her into hysterics. Later, she kicked the hospital therapy dog.

Jani normally likes animals. But most of her animal friends — cats, rats, dogs and birds — are phantoms that only she can see. January Schofield has schizophrenia. Potent psychiatric dru]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[This Is Their Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2113</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2113</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:38:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow (thanks, Mara): He heard the familiar whine of a Metro train approaching the platform, and Tom Baker decided to run for it. The next train was scheduled to arrive at Takoma Station in two minutes, another in six minutes and yet another in 10. But it was the first Monday of summer, and Baker had left work early with a weightlifting routine to complete and an overgrown garden to tend. A doctor at Walter Reed with an emergency pager affixed to his waist, Baker had learned to schedule and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[This Is Their Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2113</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2113</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eli Saslow (thanks, Mara): He heard the familiar whine of a Metro train approaching the platform, and Tom Baker decided to run for it. The next train was scheduled to arrive at Takoma Station in two minutes, another in six minutes and yet another in 10. But it was the first Monday of summer, and Baker had left work early with a weightlifting routine to complete and an overgrown garden to tend. A doctor at Walter Reed with an emergency pager affixed to his waist, Baker had learned to schedule and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At The Mercy Of Her Mind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2114</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2114</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Shari Roan (thanks, Raja): It's been a rough week. A few days ago, at UCLA's Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, 6-year-old Jani toppled a food cart and was confined to her room. She slammed her head against the floor, opening a bloody cut that sent her into hysterics. Later, she kicked the hospital therapy dog.

Jani normally likes animals. But most of her animal friends -- cats, rats, dogs and birds -- are phantoms that only she can see. January Schofield has schizophrenia. Potent psychiatric d]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Jacko Reader]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2112</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2112</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:29:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On his life and death:

Geoff Boucher and Elaine Woo: Michael Jackson was fascinated by celebrity tragedy. He had a statue of Marilyn Monroe in his home and studied the sad Hollywood exile of Charlie Chaplin. He married the daughter of Elvis Presley.

Jackson met his own untimely death Thursday at age 50, and more than any of those past icons, he left a complicated legacy. As a child star, he was so talented he seemed lit from within; as a middle-aged man, he was viewed as something akin to a vi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Freedom To Trivialize]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2111</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2111</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William McKeen on the impact of information overload on a new generation:

Novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe is among those who arch eyebrows over the time and labor-saving devices granted us by technology. Such things as iPhones and Twitter "waste more time than anything else in American life," he says. "The computer and the Internet are the contemporary versions of knitting and badminton in the backyard, except that they have nothing to show for it afterward, the way knitting does, and lead]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Jacko Reader]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2112</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2112</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On his life and death:

Geoff Boucher and Elaine Woo: Michael Jackson was fascinated by celebrity tragedy. He had a statue of Marilyn Monroe in his home and studied the sad Hollywood exile of Charlie Chaplin. He married the daughter of Elvis Presley.

Jackson met his own untimely death Thursday at age 50, and more than any of those past icons, he left a complicated legacy. As a child star, he was so talented he seemed lit from within; as a middle-aged man, he was viewed as something akin to a vi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Freedom To Trivialize]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2111</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2111</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:17:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William McKeen on the impact of information overload on a new generation:

Novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe is among those who arch eyebrows over the time and labor-saving devices granted us by technology. Such things as iPhones and Twitter "waste more time than anything else in American life," he says. "The computer and the Internet are the contemporary versions of knitting and badminton in the backyard, except that they have nothing to show for it afterward, the way knitting does, and lead]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salud!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2110</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2110</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:33:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Show him some love.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Than Case No. 09-01458]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2109</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2109</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:44:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ian Shapira: YaVonne and Erwin DuBose stepped outside the D.C. medical examiner's office yesterday to take in the fresh heat. They needed a reprieve. They had just seen a photograph of their 29-year-old daughter, Veronica DuBose, one of nine people killed in this week's Metro train crash, her face yellowed, bruised and swollen.

Asked to identify her body, they pinpointed the mole on her lip and her finely arched eyebrows. Their daughter's life was now boiled down to a bureaucratic moniker — Cas]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Than Case No. 09-01458]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2109</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2109</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ian Shapira: YaVonne and Erwin DuBose stepped outside the D.C. medical examiner's office yesterday to take in the fresh heat. They needed a reprieve. They had just seen a photograph of their 29-year-old daughter, Veronica DuBose, one of nine people killed in this week's Metro train crash, her face yellowed, bruised and swollen.

Asked to identify her body, they pinpointed the mole on her lip and her finely arched eyebrows. Their daughter's life was now boiled down to a bureaucratic moniker -- Ca]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Withers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2108</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2108</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:00:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Anton: An hour before dawn in the camp of last resort. Dozens of men and a few women are asleep in the beds of pickup trucks, in the back seats of cars or on flattened cardboard boxes in the dirt behind the Toro Loco market. The air is cool, but the terrible sun is close at hand.

Martin Zavala is wrapped in a blanket, his head resting on a Scooby-Doo pillow, a pack of Marlboros under his neck. Thieves prowl at night and will snatch what is not secured. Drunks and meth-addled tweakers tease]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Withers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2108</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2108</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Anton: An hour before dawn in the camp of last resort. Dozens of men and a few women are asleep in the beds of pickup trucks, in the back seats of cars or on flattened cardboard boxes in the dirt behind the Toro Loco market. The air is cool, but the terrible sun is close at hand.

Martin Zavala is wrapped in a blanket, his head resting on a Scooby-Doo pillow, a pack of Marlboros under his neck. Thieves prowl at night and will snatch what is not secured. Drunks and meth-addled tweakers tease]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Truth Rundown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2107</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2107</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:16:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Wow. Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin: Part ONE of THREE

The leader of the Church of Scientology strode into the room with a boom box and an announcement: Time for a game of musical chairs.

David Miscavige had kept more than 30 members of his church's executive staff cooped up for weeks in a small office building outside Los Angeles, not letting them leave except to grab a shower. They slept on the floor, their food carted in.

Their assignment was to develop strategic plans for the church.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thoughts?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2106</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2106</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:08:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lawrence Weschler: I want to get rid of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The class I teach at NYU is called "The Fiction of Nonfiction," and it is less a class about reporting methods than it is about the fictional methods that can be applied to nonfictional writing. It presupposes that the writer will try to be fair, but also acknowledges that there is no such thing as objectivity, and revels in that fact. Then we get down to business and talk about all the stuff that's interesti]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Who's Got Next?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2104</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2104</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: WASHINGTON -- Baron Hill is in training, working on his jumper, pumping iron, doing rep after tedious rep on the weight machines to strengthen his bum knee. He swore 15 years ago that he'd never play competitive basketball again, but here he is at his health club, 55 years old, shooting baskets alone. Once, he was an Indiana high school legend, a member of the state's hall of fame, but those pictures are in black and white.

Just your typical bourgeois midlife crisis, right? Not]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Redneck Yacht Club]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2100</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2100</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: The people in the trucks were mechanics, roofers, wrecker drivers, current and former military men. Inside, they parked RVs, pitched tents, hammered in horseshoe pits and pulled the tabs on the tops of beers. They said they were here for the competition, the camaraderie, the feeling of freedom, the smiles on the faces of kids, the . . .

Two ATVs zipped by with girls in tank tops and short shorts, riding on the backs with their legs spread, their thighs jiggling and their breasts bouncing]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Third Category]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2099</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2099</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As Roy Peter Clark says, most nonfiction writing falls into one of two categories: the story and the report. Many articles are hybrids. They use elements of both. They have narrative lines and long expository sections. Anyway, a while ago I read something that I wouldn't put in either category. Matter of fact, I think it needs its own category: the painting.

The piece, by Justin Heckert, is called Our Man Skip:

Again, his dogs are at the door. Pawing, whimpering, scratching at its wooden frame]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Send The Reporters Home]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2098</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2098</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the New Yorker's Book Bench: Yesterday, Ha'aretz — Israel's oldest newspaper — sent home all of its regular reporters and contributors, and replaced them with famous literary scribes. It might sound like a gimmick to woo readers (and it is, in part), but the results yielded unexpected delights.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hug High]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2082</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2082</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2009 15:29:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sarah Kershaw: There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type:

There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out.

There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace.

There's the shake and lean; the hug from behind;]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How? Why? How? Why?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2081</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2081</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2009 12:55:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Le Batard (thanks, Nigel): The grass has browned around this haunted house in Davie. The lower half of the front door is covered in smudges that let you know the hands and feet of young boys live here. Inside the small rental, from the laundry strewn on the floor to the scared father struggling to keep it all together, everything is a turned-upside-down mess. The appearance of order isn't high on the priority list when you feel like you are drowning.

"I'm out of money," Jim Leyritz says.

B]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mine]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2080</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2080</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2009 16:31:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Farhad Manjoo:

When I signed up for Mine a couple of months ago, I was mainly looking for a laugh. The new magazine from Time Inc. seemed like a gimmicky, goofy effort to save a beleaguered industry: Time wanted to print a magazine just for me! First, I had to choose several popular Time publications and answer a few odd questions about my interests. ("Which do you crave more—sushi, or pizza?") Then, every two weeks, I would get an issue, curated just for me, filled with articles from different]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Risks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2079</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2079</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2009 12:45:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lee Hill Kavanaugh: Her phone rings at 10 p.m. The voice on the other end is quiet, uncertain.

I just got picked up by the police. … Do you hate me?

Donnette Siems takes a deep breath and looks down at Victoria's baby cradled in her lap.

Maddie. Seven pounds of hope.

Big eyes and silky curls. A near copy of her mother. Innocent. Vulnerable.

Helpless.

No, Victoria, I don't hate you, Donnette says. What happened?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Emotional Cease-Fire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2078</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2078</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2009 12:12:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Denise Gamino: ABOARD A TROOP PLANE — Flight attendant John Bechtold keys the public address mike just moments after this wide-body jet swooshes into the humid Texas sky.

His message is not the usual seatbelts-fastened advisory.

He lectures on chew.

Smokeless tobacco is banned. But Bechtold's been flying with soldiers since America invaded the Middle East after 9/11. He knows dip is on board.

Don't spit into the seat back pockets, he warns. Don't leave it in the seats. Above all, don't spit ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deepest Wound]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2077</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2077</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2009 14:58:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bruce DeSilva: My father's ankle-length, black-and-white tweed Mayfield, the first fine piece of clothing he bought for himself when he returned from the war, hangs still in my crowded closet. Once a year I slip it from the hanger and try it on, always astonished that I cannot squeeze into the giant's coat.

I picture him draped in it, towering over me as we stand beside his robins-egg blue 1948 Plymouth coupe, a snap-brim fedora pulled low over his twinkling eyes, his mouth curled in the confid]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Final Note]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2076</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2076</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2009 15:14:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ron Matus: … One day, the band meekly begins what should be a raging funk jam, Jungle Boogie. Mr. T tells the baritone sax player, "You got to be angry." He scrunches his face in mock fury as he bobs to the beat.

"Angry at somebody?" Mr. T shouts over the music. The boy laughs and shakes his head.

"Angry at your mom?" Another shake.

"Angry at Nazis?"

This time the boy nods and dives into the riff.

The kids still talk about the time, about a month ago, when they were working on Come Thou Fou]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eggers And The Rewrite]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2075</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2075</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2009 03:24:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Interesting.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Booney]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2074</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2074</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 14:04:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ashley Clark and Karla Ward: At 336 Hollyhill Drive, he was Leslie J. Burns Jr., the man who lived in a modest 1 1/2-story brick house before he died.

At a dimly lit bar and restaurant a few blocks away, he was affectionately known as Booney, the man who loved marshmallow Peeps and old-time Bluegrass music.

Booney was a man who spent hours settled in a tall wooden chair at The Ketch, off Southland Drive, where groups of patrons often share stories over cold Budweisers and hot sandwiches.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beat Sweeteners]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2073</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2073</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 13:37:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We should have a conversation about beat sweeteners. I hear so many people ripping them and, frankly, this is one of the most interesting stories I've read out of the WH. Has anyone ever considered that readers WANT these stories?

Jeff Zeleny: WASHINGTON — Have you met Rotus?

This is a question President Obama has taken to asking some of his visitors to the White House. In a bureaucratic world awash in abbreviations and acronyms, this one in particular seems to amuse him.

Mr. Obama, of course]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beat Sweeteners]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2073</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2073</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We should have a conversation about beat sweeteners. I hear so many people ripping them and, frankly, this is one of the most interesting stories I've read out of the WH. Has anyone ever considered that readers WANT these stories?

Jeff Zeleny: WASHINGTON — Have you met Rotus?

This is a question President Obama has taken to asking some of his visitors to the White House. In a bureaucratic world awash in abbreviations and acronyms, this one in particular seems to amuse him.

Mr. Obama, of course]]></description>
      <author>Wright</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Booney]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2074</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2074</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ashley Clark and Karla Ward: At 336 Hollyhill Drive, he was Leslie J. Burns Jr., the man who lived in a modest 1 1/2-story brick house before he died.

At a dimly lit bar and restaurant a few blocks away, he was affectionately known as Booney, the man who loved marshmallow Peeps and old-time Bluegrass music.

Booney was a man who spent hours settled in a tall wooden chair at The Ketch, off Southland Drive, where groups of patrons often share stories over cold Budweisers and hot sandwiches.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Word By Word]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2072</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2072</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: TAMPA — The Chair is one of those ugly gray Office Depot things. It faces the long messy desk of Cantor Moshe Friedler at Rodeph Sholom. All the kids in religious school have heard about it, even the little ones. They know that one day they'll take a turn in the Chair, squirming, twisting their tongues into granny knots of pitiful excuses and horrible Hebrew. And their tears will come, certain as God's justice.

Shelbi Dominguez was 10 when she started worrying about the Chair. Her o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Different Ending]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2070</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2070</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG — Ted Dahlem settled into bed every night.

He talked to his wife. She died in 2005.

He talked to his children. Three of his four died, one by one, in 2007.

He talked to God.

What had he done wrong? Was he being punished for something? What else could possibly happen?

He thought about his only surviving child — a 50-year-old St. Petersburg firefighter with a life of her own, open to uncertainty.

"I don't know what I would do if I lost her," he said. "The four]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Run]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2071</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2071</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Goffard: Before dawn that morning, they clambered onto an empty boxcar at the Union Pacific yard and rode it out of Bakersfield into the Tehachapi Mountains. There were six of them, a pack of drifters and runaways taking snapshots of one another and sharing bottles of McCormick vodka as the train climbed the chaparral slopes in the summer dark.

Traveling kids, they called themselves, a makeshift, ever-changing family that shared the hard floor of an empty junk train or the windy porch of ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[U.S.A 2.0]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2069</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2069</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cool idea from Paper Magazine. They invited a band of visual communicators to rebrand America. Take a look: Right now America is like a company teetering on bankruptcy -- we have lost so much credibility and brand currency over the past eight years. And so we invited some of the best visual communicators we know (from ad gurus to artists) to create original advertising concepts that could redefine our country's image. Welcome to U.S.A. 2.0.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2068</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2068</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: We live in the age of extreme niche fandom. Even more extreme is the quibbling.

I was commanded by Paramount's publicists -- the Legion of Women With Clipboards -- to come alone to an advance, clandestine screening of "Star Trek" a couple of weeks ago. I expected the theater to be sadly semi-private, with just a few entertainment writers and all those empty chairs. But when I got there, it was packed with serious Trekkers who had all been there for hours and hours (of course they ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Parasite Is Slowly Killing The Host]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2067</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2067</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the newspaper hearings, David Simon: It requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. For a relatively brief period in American history -- no more than the last fifty years or so -- a lot of smart and talented people were paid a living wage and benefits to challenge the unrestrained authority of our institutions and to hold those institutions t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving Soles]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2066</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2066</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[P.J. Huffstutter: As the morning Wall Street crowd rushed past Minas Shoe Repair, a group of women in dark business suits stepped inside, sorry-looking pumps in hand.

The shoe-shine stations along one wall were full. There was a line of tapping toes and shuffling feet a dozen deep, waiting before the black marble counter.

It was 9 a.m. Trading at the New York Stock Exchange, a couple blocks away, would start in half an hour.

Slowly taking a drag on his cigarette, Minas Polychronakis ignored t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stepping Aside]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2065</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2065</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anna Quindlen: ... But my second response to reading over the stories was delight. They were so thoroughly reported, so well written. Whether local, national or international news, they were just what journalism ought to be. The next time anyone insists the business won't survive I may bash him with one of these binders, which are heavy with hope for the future.

They also made me think again about my own future. These clippings thoroughly ratified a decision I began to make a year or so ago, th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stuever On Frisco]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2062</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2062</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:32:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Mayborn]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2061</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2061</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:51:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you want to get better …

George Getschow, writer in residence of the nationally renowned Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, is inviting journalists and other nonfiction writers interested in the narrative craft to the 5th annual conference, July 24-26 at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine, TX., five minutes from the DFW Airport. This year's conference features a diverse group of storytellers from genres unexplored in previous years, including travel writing, b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Family, Divided]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2060</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2060</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:21:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Gonzales (thanks, Raja): For the father, the choice was obvious: An engineer with several jobs yet little money, he saw no future for his daughter and son in their struggling country, Ecuador. Eight years ago, he paid coyotes to smuggle him into Texas, then headed to New York, where his wife and children flew in as tourists, and stayed.

But the consequences of that clear-cut decision — the immigrant's perennial impulse to uproot for the sake of the next generation — have been anything but]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hunting Justice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2059</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2059</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:14:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin George: In his black SUV, he rolled through the darkness before dawn. He drove past shuttered buildings and fried fish shacks, toward the housing projects of West Tampa and Robles Park, to a row of subsidized rental duplexes shaded by oak trees and overpasses. He had done this scores of times, scanning the corners for drug dealers and dropouts, for anyone who might know something about the men who murdered his son. On this morning, he looked out his window and saw only empty streets. Just]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers Is A ^%#$& Baddass]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2058</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2058</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:18:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here: ALIABAD, Afghanistan — The two Army lieutenants crouched against boulders beside the Korangal River. Taliban gunfire poured down from villages and cliffs above, hitting tree branches and rocks and snapping as the bullets passed over the officers' helmets.

An American platoon was pinned in the riverbed, which had blossomed into a kill zone. One squad and the radio operator were trapped in a wheat field on the far side. An improvised bomb had just exploded in their midst. The blast wave had]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hungry Girl]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2057</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2057</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:13:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — The country's best-selling cookbook right now is for people who don't really cook, written by a hyperkinetic 43-year-old former TV producer named Lisa Lillien, who once upon a time hated the fact that she couldn't fit into her skinny jeans. "I was that person who would sit at the computer and eat an entire bag of fat-free pretzels and think I was doing a good thing," Lillien says. "I wasn't."

She lost 25 pounds eight years ago, and in 2003 she started send]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Painting His Recovery]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2056</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2056</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:10:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall: Brian Duff sat in the corner of the homeless shelter courtyard, scribbling in a spiral notebook.

He drew faces in black pen but averted his eyes from those around him, focusing instead on circling insects, warbling birds and dandelions on the lawn.

Duff, 28, has bipolar disorder. He lives in a two-story red brick building in Fountain Square called the First Home Program. The facility is run by Wishard Health Services for people who have persistent mental illness and nowhere to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beyond The Walls]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2055</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2055</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:07:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meghan Murphy: In the hallway of his apartment building, Solomon Davis is trying on postures like new clothes. He stares into the mirror. He squints through black-framed glasses. First, he holds out his hands for emphasis. Then he brings his fingertips to his chin.

Davis has put away his street stance. He's no longer slouched under a hooded sweatshirt. He is rehearsing for his future as a mentor to Newburgh's struggling teens, an ambassador to its adults who don't understand.

"Coming up, you k]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Heavy Footfalls of Doc Hullender]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2054</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2054</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:04:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go, now, and find a copy of Atlanta Magazine for T. Lake's latest. Well worth the hunt, friends.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Heavy Footfalls of Doc Hullender]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2054</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2054</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go, now, and find a copy of Atlanta Magazine for T. Lake's latest. Well worth the hunt, friends.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Not To Brag]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2053</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2053</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:17:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Breaking: St. Pete Times wins two Pulitzers. Lane DeGregory, and PoltiFact. More to come.

… And John Barry, finalist, for Winter's Tale!

Check it here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Netherworld]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2032</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2032</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:52:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leonora LaPeter Anton: ST. PETERSBURG — Walk into Starbucks. Look around. The coffee grinder is grinding, the milk is frothing, and the barista is announcing a pair of half-caf lattes.

Here, in a place that has been replicated 12,000 times the world over, it is easy to believe that nothing is going on. At the tables, people sip, stir, chat. They peck at laptops, at phones, and at those devices in between. It all seems so ordinary, even boring.

But something else is happening here, in a place w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where Jobs Ride On Luxury]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2031</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2031</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:44:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: COBURG, Ore. — The winding steps of granite lead to a dark hardwood floor as polished as the mirrored ceiling above. Together they reflect only luxury, from the dining area's subtle elegance to the bedroom's costly coziness. Granite kitchen counter. Granite shower stall. Fine upholstery that isn't granite, but goes with granite.

And everywhere you look, high-definition televisions: descending from the ceiling, sliding out from behind the cabinetry, appearing just outside the front do]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Splashdown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2030</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2030</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 02:58:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: JACKSONVILLE — On his way to the airport, pulling his suitcase across the dark parking lot, he gives himself the speech: Everything is fine. Nothing's going to happen. Don't worry. What is there to worry about?

It doesn't work any more.

He wheels his bag into the terminal, past the ticket counter, through the long security line. In the door of the US Airways plane, he stops the flight attendant.

"Good morning. I want to introduce myself," he says, thrusting out his right hand.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finkel To Lead]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2029</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2029</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:41:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I missed this earlier, but here's a memo:

David Finkel, one of The Post's most creative writers and thinkers, is returning to the newsroom after a successful book leave to take on a new role as leader of a National reporting team. The group will operate under the broad header, "The Times We're Living In," allowing it room to explore in provocative, fresh ways the ongoing transformation of America.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lafcadio Hearn]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2028</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2028</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:06:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Buy this new compilation, reviewed by Jamie James (thanks, Bill): … Hearn had a rare gift for bringing a place to bustling, scented, gorgeously tinted life. Anyone who has spent time along the Gulf of Mexico in the summer, for example, will instantly feel the rightness of this passage, about a thunderstorm in New Orleans: "A packed herd of low-bellying clouds lumbered up from the Gulf; crowded blackly against the sun; flickered, thundered, and burst in torrential rain — tepid, perpendicular — an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Subway Hero]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2027</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2027</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:59:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Wilson: Subway heroes, as they are inevitably tagged even before the grease from the tracks is rubbed off, come along every now and then — indeed, as the story of Chad Lindsey suggests, perhaps more often than we know.

Minutes after rescuing a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks at the Penn Station stop on Monday, Mr. Lindsey managed to melt back into the anonymity of the city, escaping the notice of the police, paramedics and subway workers.

"I'm of many minds of being in the sp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tip Jar]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2026</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2026</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:47:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm sure this isn't new, but let me float something here: Why not add something like a tip jar to every story that runs on a newspaper website? Something like this (upper right). We've all written stories that people appreciate. Think of the best email you've recieved from someone who stumbled onto your story online, then took the time to let you know how much they appreciated you profiling a midwife, or you busting some political balls, or whatever. Now ask yourself this: Would that person — wh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2025</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2025</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:08:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: FERNDALE, Calif. — In the verdant Eel River Valley of Northern California, where everyone is tied by blood or business, a dairy farmer named John Vevoda does his part. Though the roars of tractors have deafened an ear, and decades of nudging cows while milking have ruined a shoulder, he accepts his role and fulfills it.

He and his family keep a herd of 600. He employs Alan, Alberto, Dave, Edgar, Jesus, Jose and Umberto. He pays his bills. He recycles. And every two days, he forwards ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[National Mag Awards]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2024</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2024</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:45:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big ups to Jones for finalisting at the NMAs. If you haven't read his story, do it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Let There Be Light]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2023</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2023</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:16:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry about the blog, but it's back, so shut up and read this: HARRIMAN, Tenn. — After watching and reading about the legend of Ken Mink again and again, and after getting inside of it myself for months, it should make sense to me. I should know who he is. Only it doesn't and I don't.

I do, however, know the story of its creation by heart: Five decades after being kicked out of school and off his team for a prank he did not commit, a 73-year-old former junior college basketball player decides t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pumped]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2022</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2022</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: ST. PETERSBURG

The container looks like a bacon-bits shaker. It contains Ray Fennessy's Magic Bullet formula. It's the stuff he says will keep him alive until he's 120. He just turned 80.

Fennessy is on his screened front porch, just before noon, polishing off two plates of leftover corned beef and cabbage. Needless to say, Fennessy's snack is well seasoned with the Magic Bullet. But before he tells what's in it, Fennessy must retell his Shultzie joke. The boys at Lifestyle gym nea]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Turning 12]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2012</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2012</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Neil Swidey: Adele steps on her scooter and glides down her flat dead-end street of neat single-family homes. Kids emerge from their backyards and through their front doors, following her lead with the bouncy instincts of wedding guests joining a conga line. The younger kids on this block in the Roslindale section of Boston love Adele. That's partly because she doesn't look much older than they are. Although she has a strikingly beautiful face that could belong to a teenager, Adele is short for ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Withholding Information]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2013</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2013</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Daniel Zalewski recently wrote a profile (not available online for non-subscribers) for The New Yorker about the great novelist Ian McEwan. I found some of the thoughts on writing really useful:

*"McEwan said that one of his goals was to 'incite a naked hunger in readers.'"

*"Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information," he said.

*"McEwan is a connoisseur of dread, performing the literary equivalent of turning on the tub faucet and leaving the room; the flood is forseeable, b]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Hanging On]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2011</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2011</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: CLEARWATER

They were anchored about 38 miles offshore Saturday afternoon when high waves flipped their small boat.

The four football players, who had been fishing for amberjack, were thrown into the frothy Gulf of Mexico. Frigid, 6-foot seas crashed over their heads.

Struggling in their life jackets, they somehow managed to make it back to the boat. But the 21-foot Everglades fishing craft was upside-down. And though the men were in their 20s and strong — two played for the NF]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Look Narrative Digest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2009</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2009</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Paul Harvey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2010</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2010</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert D. McFadden: ... Like Walter Winchell and Gabriel Heatter before him, he personalized the radio news with his right-wing opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland, family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around the dinner table on Sunday.

"Hello, Americans," he barked. "This is Paul Harvey! Stand byyy for Newwws!"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[T.G.I.H.A.F.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2008</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2008</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:04:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Notebook; The Pleasant Pause of Expectation

January 20, 1989

Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

It was George Bush.

It was the weather, 58 degrees at 3 o'clock, that had you looking for crocuses out of the corner of your eye.

It was 9,000 high school kids nice enough to put their hands over their mouths when they yawned during some of the speeches at the Looking Forward gathering at the D.C. Armory.

It was the flags lolling in a south wind, the ice melting on the rink in front of th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[T.G.I.H.A.F.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2008</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2008</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Notebook; The Pleasant Pause of Expectation

January 20, 1989

Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

It was George Bush.

It was the weather, 58 degrees at 3 o'clock, that had you looking for crocuses out of the corner of your eye.

It was 9,000 high school kids nice enough to put their hands over their mouths when they yawned during some of the speeches at the Looking Forward gathering at the D.C. Armory.

It was the flags lolling in a south wind, the ice melting on the rink in front of th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rocky Mountain News To Close Friday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2007</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2007</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:23:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Seriously. Wow. I don't know what to say about this.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rocky Mountain News To Close Friday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2007</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2007</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Seriously. Wow. I don't know what to say about this.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ghosts Of Mississippi]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2006</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2006</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:27:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go, now, and read Wright Thompson: I came upon a box containing two small notebooks used by the soldier tasked with guarding James Meredith, the first African-American student at Ole Miss. They were Nifty brand, cost a dime and were filled with descriptions of suspicious characters, of license plate numbers and names. I flipped through the pages … until a familiar name stopped me cold.

My great-uncle, the e-mailer's brother. Last name: Wright.

Two questions went through my mind:

What is the c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Reminder!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2005</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2005</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:24:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Apply now. Deadline is Sunday.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Reminder!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2005</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2005</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Apply now. Deadline is Sunday.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ghosts Of Mississippi]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2006</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2006</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go, now, and read Wright Thompson: I came upon a box containing two small notebooks used by the soldier tasked with guarding James Meredith, the first African-American student at Ole Miss. They were Nifty brand, cost a dime and were filled with descriptions of suspicious characters, of license plate numbers and names. I flipped through the pages ... until a familiar name stopped me cold.

My great-uncle, the e-mailer's brother. Last name: Wright.

Two questions went through my mind:

What is the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Baby Mangino]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2004</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2004</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:12:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dugan Arnett (thanks, Nigel): Wichita — Not long ago, it came to light that Baby Mangino — the rotund infant who recently earned a great deal of national attention for his Halloween costume depicting Kansas University football coach Mark Mangino — did not actually go trick-or-treating as a college football coach.

This was revealed on a Tuesday evening last month, as Baby Mangino was lounging on the carpet of his family's home, sucking on his fingers. Baby Mangino, who is actually 8-month-old Bo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Battle Mountain Battles Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2003</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2003</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:56:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Lake: Several weeks ago, a story written by a free-lancer ran on page 11 of the main section in the New York Times.

It was not groundbreaking, nor particularly revelatory.

It concerned the small town of Battle Mountain in Northern Nevada, halfway between Reno and Utah in Lander County.

The town, whose main industry is gold mining, seems to be weathering the worldwide economic collapse just fine, thank you.

Gold prices are very high right now, which means unemployment in Battle Mounta]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Baby Mangino]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2004</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2004</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dugan Arnett (thanks, Nigel): Wichita — Not long ago, it came to light that Baby Mangino — the rotund infant who recently earned a great deal of national attention for his Halloween costume depicting Kansas University football coach Mark Mangino — did not actually go trick-or-treating as a college football coach.

This was revealed on a Tuesday evening last month, as Baby Mangino was lounging on the carpet of his family's home, sucking on his fingers. Baby Mangino, who is actually 8-month-old Bo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Death Beat]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2002</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2002</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:00:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: The week before I started the job, I sat at the kitchen table with my grandpa. I explained what I'd be doing, the best I could. Truthfully, I wasn't totally sure.

Dead people. Obituaries.

He had just the gift for me! He went to the basement and brought back a rusty old biscuit tin. I flipped it open, a mushroom of must and news clips swelling out.

A box of death.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[25 Things]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2001</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2001</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:56:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse: The "25 Random Things About Me" phenomenon on the social networking site Facebook.com seemed to come out of nowhere, peaked in late January and then began to fade away.

People wrote 25 things about themselves and then tagged 25 friends. It took off. What did it mean? Was it a silly fad? Viral spam? Or was it something more? What did the burst of miniature autobiographies say about us, and our intimacy, our urges or our digital identities? What did it say about the way we live in the earl]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Onstage, Laboring to Brighten a Dim Picture]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2000</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p2000</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:54:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 22 — Jai ho, you Oscar slumdogs, which we think translates loosely as: Shout hallelujah, c'mon get happy!

But how happy? After all, the movie that won Best Picture at the 81st annual Academy Awards here Sunday night is supposed to be the "upbeat" one, and it's the one where orphans get acid spooned into their adorable eyes. (But at the end, they dance! Jai ho!)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Onstage, Laboring to Brighten a Dim Picture]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2000</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-2000</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 22 -- Jai ho, you Oscar slumdogs, which we think translates loosely as: Shout hallelujah, c'mon get happy!

But how happy? After all, the movie that won Best Picture at the 81st annual Academy Awards here Sunday night is supposed to be the "upbeat" one, and it's the one where orphans get acid spooned into their adorable eyes. (But at the end, they dance! Jai ho!)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shane]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1999</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1999</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:41:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This story limps a little coming out of the gate, but stick with it and you'll get a tremendous reward. It's packed with true, deep, surprising insight on a topic that tends to inspire volumes of meaningless bloviation. (Michael Lewis specializes in this.) Before I die, I'd love to write one thing that explains a complex topic as well as this story does.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bloodied]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1998</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1998</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Filkins and Paul Grondahl: BECKET, Mass. Bodies hurtled through the air as windows smashed.

"Guys were flying around like ping-pong balls," Albany River Rats left wing Joe Jensen said of the team's bus wreck around 3 a.m. Thursday.

Announcer John Hennessy flew from his seat and crashed into equipment manager Jason McGrath, the force of the blow blasting both men through the air and onto the Massachusetts Turnpike.

"They went right through the window," forward Ryan Weston said.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shane]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1999</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1999</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This story limps a little coming out of the gate, but stick with it and you'll get a tremendous reward. It's packed with true, deep, surprising insight on a topic that tends to inspire volumes of meaningless bloviation. (Michael Lewis specializes in this.) Before I die, I'd love to write one thing that explains a complex topic as well as this story does.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cleaning Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1997</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1997</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Treweek is looking for feedback on a story he wrote about a town's volunteerism after a January ice story : The lunch line backed out far into the gym at the activities center. About two dozen restaurants had donated food from hot dogs to barbecue to salsa.

After a hard morning's work, lunch was a time of rest and storytelling.

Cameron Godsey was there because the Heritage High School football team was there. Actually, almost all of the athletes from both Rogers high schools were there. Go]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Incest Victim Talks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1993</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1993</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rebecca Green: The woman at the heart of the recent incest case wants people to know what happened to her.

And, more than anything else, the 30-year-old wants them to know she is a good mother, that her sun rises and sets on her children, and that that is why she was finally able to get something done.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Quality vs. Quantity]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1995</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1995</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the book Art & Fear via Kevin Kelly: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Solace]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1975</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1975</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:34:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeff Wiehe: Rhonda Berger won't talk about the phone call, other than to say, "I was on the phone with her the whole time."

The call came early Friday from her daughter, who was trapped in a bathroom – smoke and gas attacking her lungs. Berger's daughter was with her two roommates as the Willows of Coventry apartment around them burned so intensely the floor began to fail.

At some point, the 19-year-old college student suffered a heart attack, Berger said, and later her heart would suffer furt]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[LeDuff Finds Body In Ice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1974</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1974</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:52:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A real body. In ice.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Imagine The Possibilities]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1973</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1973</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:49:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[That this little tool could offer us.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[This Could Cause A Ruckus]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1972</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1972</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:54:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I enjoyed this little snippet from Wikipedia's entry on narrative journalism:

Also, Narrative journalism has not yet found a definite home in the newsroom due to the nature of news reporting. Long-form writing is something that most journalists are not trained for, and incredible hard-news beat reporters are not necessarily great storytellers.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Appreciation: Appreciation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1971</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1971</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:36:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erik Wemple: Everyone knows big changes are afoot in Style and its thematic cousins at the Post. A new co-managing editor, Raju Narisetti, was recently hired to oversee these fiefdoms—Style, Weekend, Washington Post Magazine, etc. (Narisetti did not respond to interview requests for this item.) There's no telling what Style will look like after Narisetti is finished with it.

But why start out with Appreciations? Is that where new management wants to make a statement?

If so, here's what's at st]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story Behind One Line]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1970</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1970</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:47:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: INVERNESS

He found it four years ago when he was cleaning out closets. His sheet music: Chopin, Beethoven, Debussy, all buried inside a dusty box. He hadn't seen those songs in almost 50 years.

The pages were torn and taped; the dog-eared corners had yellowed. But Bill Lotz, now 71, could still read every note.

"Come with me," he told his wife, Suzi. "We're going to buy a piano."

Suzi looked at him, surprised. They had been married six years and she never knew he played.

Whe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Question]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1969</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1969</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:18:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mailbag: I'm looking for great sports features/narratives/stories about a father and son or a coach and player in a similar relationship.

Anyone know of any?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wary, In Arkansas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1968</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1968</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:41:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anne Hull: BRINKLEY, Ark. — Wayne Loewer's truck reveals a lot about his life. A 12-gauge shotgun for duck hunting rests on the floorboard. A blue thermal lunch bag containing elk meat is shoved under the seat, left in haste that morning by his teenage son rushing to catch the school bus.

Binoculars in the console help Loewer scan his 2,900 acres of rice, soybeans and corn.

The dashboard radio is set to classic rock, playing the same Lynyrd Skynyrd tunes from Loewer's high school days, when Br]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Big Guns]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1967</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1967</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:37:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Maraniss: In taking the oath of office as the first African American president in the nation's nearly 233 years, one man reached a singular achievement. But at four minutes after noon yesterday, Barack Hussein Obama was inevitably transformed — no matter what happens during his administration — from an individual, a politician, to an icon and a symbol. Here was history at its most sweeping and yet intimate.

Wil Haygood: Eugene Allen, who worked for more than three decades as a White House]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fizzle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1938</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1938</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:49:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Looks like Inara Verzemnieks cracked the Atlantic:

Time was running out for Fizzle the rooster. Four weeks ago, he had announced his sex to the world, or at least to his Portland, Oregon, neighborhood, crowing so vociferously that there was no denying his masculinity. And that was the problem, because while Portland law allows up to three hens in a resident's backyard without a permit—making the city a particularly appealing place for those who wish to try their hands at the growing pastime of ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rampage]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1937</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1937</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:45:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This story, by David Samuels, really picks up speed as it goes:

With two minutes left in his workout, Rampage mounts a final assault on the heavy bag. An invisible string seems to connect the fighter and the trainer who controls his daily rhythms. Both men are born-again Christians with an overpowering hunger for love, and each uses that weakness to manipulate the other throughout the six weeks of training camp. They speak in their own shorthand about a prospective hire at one of their gyms. "H]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unseen Iraq]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1936</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1936</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2008 09:10:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Washington Post photographer Andrea Bruce (thanks, Ramsey). This is beautiful.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[To Be A Butcher]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1935</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1935</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:28:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Chiarella (thanks, Casey): The sink is full of tongues. Beef tongues, each as big as a man's shoe, frozen into one icy clump the size of a propane canister, defrosting for an afternoon pickup. There's a lot of mouth, too, I guess, or palate — I'm not sure, because the top tongue is unfrozen enough that I can see a bone that looks like a little saddle. But right now the guys in back are breaking cows — sawing the hindquarters down with a handsaw, cutting the hip on the band saw, then the shan]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Then And Now]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1934</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1934</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:24:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David A. Fahrenthold (thanks, Kevin): The Chesapeake Bay is not tar-black and dead. It is not bright-green and toxic. It looks just as beautiful as ever, come a sunrise in Annapolis or a sunset over Tangier Sound. (Series, multimedia.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Collaboration]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1933</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1933</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:27:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The next big thing. Wow. (Thanks, Alex.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eff The Web]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1932</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1932</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:41:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Almost missed this: Finally, I thought, a story about a print organization that has found a way to tame the Web and come up with a digital business approach that could serve as a model. Except that TriCityNews of Monmouth County, N.J., is prospering precisely because it aggressively ignores the Web. Its Web site has a little boilerplate about the product and lists ad rates, but nothing more. (The address is trinews.com, for all the good it will do you.)

"Why would I put anything on the Web?" as]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Legacy Of A Lost Kid]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1931</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1931</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:12:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: We've never been more safe.

We've never been more afraid.

That's the paradox we're left with now that police have finally named a killer in the murder of Adam Walsh.

For 27 years, it seemed that the freckle-faced 6-year-old was snatched by the bogeyman Out There Somewhere. Last week, we got a name: Ottis Toole, drifter and serial killer, who died in 1996 while in prison for other crimes. But since 1981, when Adam was kidnapped from a Sears at a South Florida mall, we've become ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[At The Edge Of Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1930</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1930</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:04:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lee Hancock, part one of five: Min Patel huddled in a fourth-floor hallway with Dr. Edward Taylor near an intensive care unit, where the trauma surgeon's patient lay tethered to a ventilator. Seven intravenous pumps pushed a cocktail of chemicals into his body to fight infection and keep his heart pumping.

The stakes didn't get any higher than in Baylor University Medical Center's 4 West ICU. Inside its fluorescent bullpens of beeping, whirring machines lay the most complex trauma and transplan]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nicky Pari Gave Up A Ghost]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1929</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1929</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:55:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I.

They came for the gravely ill racketeer last month, appearing at his North Providence home around dawn. His time was near, but not as near as the police officers at his door. He went peacefully.

Soon he was at state police headquarters, where veteran detectives knew him well: Nicholas Pari, once the smart-dressing mobster whose nickname, "Nicky," had clearly not taxed the Mafia muse. Now 71, with gauze wrapped around his cancer-ruined neck: Nicky Pari.

The arr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[News Flash!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1925</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1925</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery wonders why so many stories he reads use a common newspaper cliche to suggest plurality.

He's not alone.

A Gangrey request: Let's (... is not alone) all (... is not alone) think (... is not alone) of (... is not alone) better (... is not alone) ways (... is not alone) to (... is not alone) explain trends (... is not alone).

(Glass house.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nose to Nose]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1926</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1926</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Langewiesche: What were the odds? There were so many chances for the accident not to occur—so many ways to break the chain that led to it—that a crash investigator later told me it seemed the Devil himself was at play. The men responsible were American pilots and Brazilian air-traffic controllers working the high-altitude jet routes above the Amazon basin in central Brazil. If these were not the sharpest guys around, they were ordinary for the type, until then functional enough, and not ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Twas The Night ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1927</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1927</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Snow fell in Vegas. And it's almost Christmas.

Poetry time!

See what you think:

'Twas the week before Christmas, when all up the Strip

Not a sunbeam was shining, not even a bit.

The towers were shrouded in a gray, foggy cloud

As slushy snowflakes gently fell all about.

The tourists were bundled, their cheeks rosy red

While visions of jackpots danced in their heads.

Those hoping for sunshine could do nothing but mourn

As Las Vegas was hit with a rare winter storm.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Longest Night]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1905</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1905</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:09:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[GQ's Sean Flynn has a gripping narrative on the Alaska Ranger sinking on Easter Sunday. This is a long story, but beautifully told. The detail is cinematic. Flynn makes readers feel as if they are out there in the 32-degree water waiting to die or be rescued.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bankrupt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1904</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1904</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:04:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rick Reilly (tx, Justin): With apologies to Harper's Index …

Amount jailed star quarterback Michael Vick spent from July '06 to July '08, according to recent bankruptcy papers: $17.7 million.

Amount of that time he was in prison: 8 months.

Total amount of checks he wrote his mother, Brenda Boddie—not counting all her bills he paid—even while in prison: $21,400.

Amount he donated to her church: $327,900.

Amount he gave her for an Easter egg hunt: $700.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thanksgiving's Greatest Hits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1903</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1903</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:28:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Top 10 Thanksgiving Stories? I'll start.

Dan Barry: THEY deserved New York. Those who have willingly donned the maroon-and-gold uniforms of the Pinson Valley High School marching band, who have lived to the tweets of their director's whistle, who have played so much upbeat music that they can bring pep to "Ave Maria." Yes, these children of Alabama deserved to participate in that glorified commercial known as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

But none deserved New York more than their five s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Crime Blogging]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1902</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1902</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:10:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[One of our friends is meeting today to talk about launching a crime blog at his paper. He's looking for some good ones out there and any advice on making it successful.

Seems like a tough thing to make work.

I'm familiar with the LA Times Homicide Report (on hiatus?), Behind the Yellow Tape at the Palm Beach Post and The Crime Blog from the Tampa Trib.

What else? Any ideas?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hearts and Minds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1901</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1901</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:09:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Salopek (tx, Nigel): IN THE AFAR TRIANGLE, Djibouti – The desert is a war.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Cynthia Ramirez roared through it in an unmarked Land Cruiser, projecting the awesome might of the U.S. military into a wasteland little seen, much less penetrated, by outsiders. The landscape was like a slap—an eye-stinging waste of salt pans and glass-blue mountains that was still inhabited by Muslim warrior-nomads, the Afar, tough customers who long ago had swapped their traditional spears fo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All The News That's Fit To Record]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1900</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1900</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:08:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It's uncanny the number of things Hanna-Barbera Production's The Jetsons correctly predicted. Flying cars. Carwash-like showers. That a black man would be elected president of the United States.

And that one day we would have our news delivered on vinyl by a boy on a sky-scooter.

(REMOVED)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[All The News That's Fit To Record]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1900</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1900</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It's uncanny the number of things Hanna-Barbera Production's The Jetsons correctly predicted. Flying cars. Carwash-like showers. That a black man would be elected president of the United States.

And that one day we would have our news delivered on vinyl by a boy on a sky-scooter.

(REMOVED)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bad Sex]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1899</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1899</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:12:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[When I was a boy, I used pull the covers over my head and read the sex scenes in my granny's romance novels. I just typed granny and sex in the same sentence. I did it again.

Anyway, the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction awards shortlist is out. And, surprisingly, it includes some fine writers.

Some of the honored purple prose, from new age novelist Paulo Coelho's novel Brida:

At last, she could no longer control the world around her, her five senses seemed to break free and she wasn't stron]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Holding His Own]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1898</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1898</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:00:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Emily Nipps: When the Tampa Police Department needs a touch of compassion, someone who can roll into any situation and defuse it with a calm, tolerant demeanor, they know just the guy.

He's like a superhero of sorts, a man of many powers. His specialty is children, especially those who have been abused, as he has a knack for dealing with them, literally, eye to eye. His mere presence can calm a thrashing, fighting criminal. Thugs just don't feel like taking a punch when they see him.

His super]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Holding His Own]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1898</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1898</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Emily Nipps: When the Tampa Police Department needs a touch of compassion, someone who can roll into any situation and defuse it with a calm, tolerant demeanor, they know just the guy.

He's like a superhero of sorts, a man of many powers. His specialty is children, especially those who have been abused, as he has a knack for dealing with them, literally, eye to eye. His mere presence can calm a thrashing, fighting criminal. Thugs just don't feel like taking a punch when they see him.

His super]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bad Sex]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1899</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1899</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[When I was a boy, I used pull the covers over my head and read the sex scenes in my granny's romance novels. I just typed granny and sex in the same sentence. I did it again.

Anyway, the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction awards shortlist is out. And, surprisingly, it includes some fine writers.

Some of the honored purple prose, from new age novelist Paulo Coelho's novel Brida:

At last, she could no longer control the world around her, her five senses seemed to break free and she wasn't stron]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Pleasures Of A Really Good Beer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1897</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1897</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:54:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tonight I read a story that reminded me why, despite all its surplus commas, The New Yorker is still indispensable: Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Critic At 12]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1896</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1896</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:52:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Susan Dominus: Everyone's a critic, and apparently it's never too soon to start.

That's why David Fishman, an Upper West Sider who turned 12 last month, decided to take himself out for dinner one night last week. His parents had called him at home to say they were running late, suggesting that he grab some takeout at the usual hummus place.

Hummus, again? David thought he could do better than that.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Esquire's Best]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1895</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1895</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[What do you think of this list?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1892</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1892</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Steve Lopez: It's 90 degrees in November, the full glory and perennial curse of Southern California on fierce display. Devil winds, hill-hopping infernos, smoked mansions, torched trailers, barren freeways, and brilliant sunsets lingering in low-hanging canopies of burnt dreams.

Are we all crazy? Don't live here, says the wind, the trembling earth, the parched land whose natural inclination is to explode in flame every year about now.

But we do.

Dan Barry: SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

As Election Nigh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Henry Allen Friday!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1890</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1890</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[November 11, 1992, Wednesday, Final Edition

Vietnam: Hazy Images And Searing Memories; The Drama of The Absolutely Ordinary Soldier

BYLINE: Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

SECTION: STYLE; PAGE B1

LENGTH: 1353 words

When I was in Vietnam in 1966, we had no idea what the war was, or who we were supposed to be. Were we like World War II GIs smiling lopsided smiles as they gave chocolate to urchins in Naples? Were we frozen in the existential hell of a Korean stalemate? Were we New Fr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vets, Too]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1888</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1888</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Neely Tucker: It was a short ceremony, and not that many people came. Maybe 25, and one small white dog. People gathered around the grave. There was the American flag and the rainbow-colored gay movement flag. There was the singing of the national anthem and poetry and the remembrance of fallen soldiers and the playing of taps on a trumpet in the brisk winter air.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hidden Hurt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1887</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1887</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the Washington Post: Hundreds of uninsured and underinsured Americans flock to Wise County, Va., every year to seek treatment at a makeshift field hospital operated by the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps. For three days in this isolated corner of Appalachia, a small army of health-care professionals offers medical attention to patients who are not likely to see another doctor or dentist all year. The annual clinic saves lives and alleviates suffering, but in the face of a growing nation]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Frontier]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1872</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1872</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:22:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wil Haygood: TEIGEN, Mont.

Cattle ranchers in the high plains of central Montana sometimes come across square rock formations just beneath the ground's surface. They have no doubt about their origins.

"They're the foundation of old one-room schools," says Dan Teigen, pointing to a spot where he recently made just such a discovery.

Teigen's family settled in these parts more than 100 years ago. The dot-size town carries the family name. There's little in Teigen now but the husk of an old hotel]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Consumer Problem]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1871</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1871</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:10:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If there's any question about why things are what they are, and why that's scary, read this: The difference between print dollars and digital dimes — or sometimes pennies — is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Aesthetics]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1870</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1870</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:45:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I used to think boring your audience was the greatest sin a storyteller could commit. Maybe I still do. But here's another one that may be just as bad: confusing your audience.

Look. Sometimes we like to get fancy, to play around with the structure a little, to dabble in the second-person, to try a new voice, to play with the order of scenes. Sometimes this works (21 Grams, Memento, Michael Clayton). Sometimes it's infuriating (Donnie Darko). All I'm saying is that when you make a decision to t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Coach Comes Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1869</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1869</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:00:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bill Reiter: CHARLOTTE, N.C. | Before hitting the links, Marty Schottenheimer offers a warning.

"The coach in me always comes out," he says, his big blue-grey eyes bearing down with a sudden intensity. "I can't help myself."

Then he's out the door, shaking hands with people who call out, "Coach! Coach!" as he steps into a golf cart and zips off, past the tennis courts, toward the driving range.

This is where a man goes after 20 years as a NFL head coach, after 200 regular-season wins but none]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What A Fantastic Job We Have]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1868</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1868</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:29:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Some stories cry out for narrative. Others don't.

Like this story from Doyle Murphy about … ah … read it your damn self: A Newburgh firefighter became an ad hoc surgeon Friday, called upon to use a pneumatic saw to cut a piece of steel pipe off a 73-year-old man's penis. Firefighters were dispatched to the Newburgh campus of St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital shortly after 9 p.m. for a public service call, Assistant Fire Chief Scott Mandoske said. Hospital personnel asked them for tools to cut off a ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I Will Vote]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1867</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1867</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:17:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Scott Anderson's series on first-time voters.

From Part I: It was September 1975, and Luis Granados entered the United States under a cover of darkness.

He was 26 years old, living a dead-end life in Mexico City.

"I decided to just go, because some of my friends started getting married," he said. "I was single. I felt left out. I just took off. With no money or nothing — not even a penny when I came."

He was young, with long black hair, a strong will and empty pockets.

Now, at 60 ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Party Block]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1866</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1866</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:04:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sean Daly: On a Party Block, a neighbor is always outside, drink in hand.

On a Party Block, this neighbor might be you. But more than likely it's Chuck, a great guy — two tween kids, attractive wife, solid short game — who keeps a cold case of Miller Lite on call.

On a Party Block, you're not allowed to stroll inside your house after a brutal day at work. Not even on a Tuesday. Don't even think about it. Instead, upon pulling into your driveway, you sling your bag onto the roof of your Mazda a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dying, Sorta]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1865</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1865</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:26:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Blaine Harden: TOKYO, Oct. 24 — Due to a shrinking population and an expanding Internet, the decline and fall of newspapers in Japan is all but guaranteed.

"I am in a dying industry," laments Kenichi Miyata, a senior editor and writer at the Asahi newspaper, a national daily with a circulation of 8 million. "Young people do not read newspapers, and our population is getting very old very rapidly."

But something unexpected is happening en route to the ink-stained graveyard.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Surrogate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1864</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1864</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:03:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leonora LaPeter Anton: She's walking up the sun-streaked sidewalk in front of her doctor's office, trying to be positive.

I have a baby inside me, Carolyn Zinn tells herself. Ten days ago, a doctor placed two embryos in her uterus. I must have at least one growing in there.

But as she nears the beveled glass door, her confidence drains away. In the last week she has taken a dozen home pregnancy tests, and every one has been negative.

Now she is at the doctor's office to get the official word.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Surrogate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1864</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1864</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leonora LaPeter Anton: She's walking up the sun-streaked sidewalk in front of her doctor's office, trying to be positive.

I have a baby inside me, Carolyn Zinn tells herself. Ten days ago, a doctor placed two embryos in her uterus. I must have at least one growing in there.

But as she nears the beveled glass door, her confidence drains away. In the last week she has taken a dozen home pregnancy tests, and every one has been negative.

Now she is at the doctor's office to get the official word.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dr. B]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1863</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1863</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:20:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: Jill Biden still teaches Monday through Thursday back in Delaware in the frantic last days of the presidential campaign.

Her students may know who she is, or they may not. She tends to think not. They are busy people, community college students, many of them holding down jobs and raising kids while they put themselves through school. And if they've Googled her and figured out who she is, they've mostly been too polite to say. When asked if she is Joe Biden's wife, Jill always ha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Obama's Fantasy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1862</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1862</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rick Reilly: I have the absolute worst fantasy league football partner. Just try to get the guy to return a call. Or a text. You need a damn court order.

He's Barack Obama. And, yeah, I guess he's busy, but why was I the one who had to fly to Dayton, get frisked and have bomb dogs drool on my bags just so I could meet him getting off his tricked-out, chartered 757? He can't meet a guy halfway?

I asked each candidate to be my running mate for one week in a fantasy league, just to see what kind ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dr. B]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1863</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1863</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: Jill Biden still teaches Monday through Thursday back in Delaware in the frantic last days of the presidential campaign.

Her students may know who she is, or they may not. She tends to think not. They are busy people, community college students, many of them holding down jobs and raising kids while they put themselves through school. And if they've Googled her and figured out who she is, they've mostly been too polite to say. When asked if she is Joe Biden's wife, Jill always ha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Road To November]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1860</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1860</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check it out.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Men From Haiti]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1861</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1861</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall:

The weathered man stares through the screen door from his third-floor concrete block apartment, out onto the old industrial core of Jacksonville. But his eyes are fixed beyond the horizon.

A metal fan stirs left and right at his feet, pushing heavy air around a dusty linoleum floor. Coping with the temperature in slacks, a singlet and bare feet, Lexiuste Cajuste sighs and faces southeast.

He faces Haiti.

That is where he endured more than half a life of dictatorial rule, whe]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stay Hy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1858</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1858</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Filkins: Mike and Lindy Slingerland made their way around the dark barroom, shaking hands, embracing old friends, holding it together when they could and breaking down when they couldn't.

Nearly three weeks earlier, their 16-year-old son, Ryan, died when the car he was riding in went off a dusty rural road a few miles away and crashed into a tree. A benefit Saturday night at the Township Tavern helped offset the costs from his funeral.

A share of the grief cost $10 at the door. Family, f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Uncommon Equation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1859</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1859</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: TAMPA — Michael Rodeman, a growing boy who has not eaten breakfast, would very much like to harvest the wind. He might build a water-powered car, if he knew anything about cars, and he is working on the mystery that confounded Albert Einstein. • Michael thinks many barriers would fall if he could prove Einstein's Theory of Everything. We could sail from one galaxy to another. We could read minds. We could even teleport.

Michael would need to teleport 1.9 miles to get from his house, i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sexecutive]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1857</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1857</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Claire Hoffman: It's close to midnight, and Dov Charney, the 39-year-old founder of American Apparel, lies in his bed staring at a massive flat-screen TV. A pair of boat shoes and a white electric muscle massager are on the floor nearby. Behind him, a huge window is lit up with a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Inside his gated, marble, gold-encrusted mansion on a hill, Charney is insulated from the chaos below. His fleet of weathered Mercedeses and Cadillacs, parked bumper to bumper, fil]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Passionate Observers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1855</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1855</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Fascinating take here, from the Times-Picayune's Chris Rose:

(I wonder, should we all follow?)

Q and A:

...

SD: Did the voice of other reporters at the paper change as well? CR: There's no question that from the day it came down, the notion of objective journalism was washed away with everything else in this town. I don't think the paper has ever pretended to be objective since. We write with a really interesting edge and a real gripping tone, which is why I think we're the most relevant loc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gray Vote No Longer Red]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1856</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1856</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anne Hull: SUN CITY CENTER, Fla. -- The sign over the woodworking shop says "Sawdust Engineers," and there was a time when the men now bent over the tools used to put on ties or make sales calls, building their pensions so they could one day leave the rat race for this warm world of unbroken sunshine.

"Retirement is the best!" says Jerry Decker, 73, one of the Sawdust Engineers tinkering in the wood shop at this over-55 retirement community of 19,000 residents outside Tampa.

But the tranquilli]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unmasked]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1854</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1854</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: TAMPA — In the dark of night, the masked man soars across the Howard Frankland Bridge, his cape streaming behind his Batcycle.

"Batman!" people yell when he enters the Castle nightclub in Ybor City. He gives a fist-bump to the near-naked Senator, an Ybor veteran often seen in lingerie. He catches up with Peter Pan. And he poses for pictures with drunken women while showing off his retractable wings.

At least — that's usually the mission for the Caped Crusader. But last weekend, he ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Brown Grass, Orange Jumpsuit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1851</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1851</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erin Sullivan: BAYONET POINT — Andy Law was eating breakfast with his girlfriend, Mary Dinan, at their Hudson home Saturday morning when she pushed the newspaper at him.

"Read this," she said.

It was a story in the St. Petersburg Times about a 66-year-old grandfather, Joseph Prudente, who was jailed without bail on Friday because his lawn was brown. For nearly a year, he ignored letters from his Beacon Woods homeowners' association and a court order because, he said, he barely had the money to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Victory Starts With A Pee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1852</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1852</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: BOSTON

Max Dougherty, an otherwise sane 28-year-old American male, has a tattoo of the Red Sox logo on his left chest and two cats named after members of the Red Sox team, and he never wears anything other than red socks.

He also once wet himself after a Red Sox win in the playoffs.

On purpose.

This was in 1999. There were 30 people at his apartment. His sister said she was so nervous she could pee her pants, and he told her that he would if the Red Sox won. Max Dougherty is a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Uncertainty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1853</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1853</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. — In another charming suburban house, with another old Subaru Outback in the driveway and another pair of squirrel-nibbled pumpkins on the steps, another of us reaches for his laptop computer to check. If a piece of machinery can feel pain, then this laptop winces as it opens.

With less than an hour before the stock market closes at 4 on Friday afternoon, Tyler Pappas is once again searching the dull glow of his computer's monitor for something, anything, that can ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[24-Karat Party]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1840</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1840</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2008 11:14:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: It's gold parties now, here in the de-gilded age. The women who used to invite all their girlfriends over to their fantastic homes for good wine and catered nosh on the pretense of selling merchandise to one another (Pampered Chef! Rolls of fancy wrapping paper for school charity!) are now inviting one another over to their fantastic homes for parties where everyone turns their gold into cash (ca$h!!) and winds up convulsing with giddy laughter over such treasures as wedding bands ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Moment of Truth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1839</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1839</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:46:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[At Salon: You're pretty accomplished as a long-form magazine writer. You're kind of "the guy." Do you ever think, "Maybe I'm complacent here. Maybe I should be writing books or movies, something where I don't have that confidence"?

Yeah, I've put my hand at, done some fiction on the side. I don't think it's good enough yet to do anything with, but I've hammered away at that. I've played around with a screenplay. So it's not a matter of not exploring different forms. Decent chance I will, at som]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chongo, The Monkey Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1838</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1838</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:22:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: SACRAMENTO — He was known as the king of the Yosemite lifers, that proud band of rock climbers, tightrope walkers and seekers who made camp on the margins of the law, sleeping under the black oaks and sequoias and California stars.

On his shoulders he carried an 80-pound constellation of canvas stowage, books and sweatpants, bottled water and mushy food, a sleeping bag and a reserve sleeping bag meant for some encountered companion of the road.

To the government, he was Charles ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[This Is Water]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1837</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1837</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:09:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out his commencement address in 2005 at Kenyon College: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1836</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1836</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:40:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I made it back to Tampa last night. When I rented the Chevy Aveo, it had 193 miles on the odometer. I turned it in with 4,412. It's a big country.

Some good stuff for your Thursday reading pleasure:

Henry Allen: If utter reversals in the name of revelation and truth are good enough for God, they're good enough for Richard Avedon, the late photographer and Manhattan figure whose "Portraits of Power" are on view at the Corcoran Gallery.

In the manner of Jehovah making the crooked straight and t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Filkins]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1835</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1835</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:18:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From The Forever War: The green hoods appeared busy, and one of them stood up. He held the man's severed right hand in the air, displaying it for the crowd. He was holding it up by its middle finger, moving in a semicircle so everyone could see. The handicapped and the women. Then he pulled his hood back, revealing his face, and he took a breath. He tossed the hand into the grass and gave a little shrug.

I couldn't tell if the pickpocket had been given any sort of anesthesia. He wasn't screamin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Stadium]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1834</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1834</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:43:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The first time I went to work at Yankee Stadium, not the first time I went to Yankee Stadium, but the first time I went to work there, with a pen and a pad and a press pass, was Opening Day 2003. It was cold, and had snowed the day before, and so there were men, late that morning, a few hours before the first midday pitch, melting snow in the dugout with hot water from hoses. Steam slinked from the dugout and into the tunnel and down toward the concrete corridor outside the Yankees' clubhouse. I]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Red]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1833</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1833</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:13:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Heckert, for Esquire: Steak when you were four years old, cut up into strips on a paper plate in the kitchen of your parents' first house, steak bound by tribunals of carrots and peas. Steak when you were a little older, at Golden Corral and Ryan's, meat gray and slick as the back of an eel. Steak pooled in ketchup, mustard, gravy. Steak buffet at the behest of your friends' parents, who gossiped and coughed in the smoking section. Big, flat, alien steak under the aegis of a high school lunchroo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[David Foster Wallace]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1832</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1832</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:35:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm told the guy was a great American novelist, although I admit I've yet to read Infinite Jest. He was also a world-class reporter.

This is one of my favorite Wallace stories: Mr. John Ziegler, thirty-seven, late of Louisville's WHAS, is now on the air, "Live and Local," from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. every weeknight on southern California's KFI, a 50,000-watt megastation whose hourly ID and Sweeper, designed by the station's Imaging department and featuring a gravelly basso whisper against lick]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The New Gary Smith Collection]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1831</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1831</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:30:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Get it here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In A World ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1816</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1816</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: In a world of people who all coyly say "In a world . . ." and everyone gets the joke . . .

In a world where the trailers are almost always better than the movies . . .

In a world where everything sounds pompous, intense, serious, heart-stopping, but narrated. . .]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Friday Night Lights]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1817</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1817</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The NYT is guiding a discussion about the Bissinger book here with a series of essays on the book's 20th. Pretty cool idea. Check out Dan Barry: Could the Odessa, Tex., of 1988 be anywhere in this country? I don't know, anymore than I know whether only Cawker City, Kan., could obsessively create the world's largest ball of twine, or whether only San Francisco could embrace Barry Bonds.

A few months ago I visited Crandon, Wis., where the community banded together to tear down – the initial plan ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[White Bread]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1814</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1814</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love it when I have a passing thought, then wake up in the morning and read about it. Eli Saslow and Robert Barnes: ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 3 -- Organizers conceived of this convention as a means to inspire, but some African American Republicans have found the Xcel Energy Center depressing this week. Everywhere they look, they see evidence of what they consider one of their party's biggest shortcomings.

As the country rapidly diversifies, Republicans are presenting a convention that is almost ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[My Friends]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1815</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1815</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: John McCain is a man with many friends, and many more on the way.

"My friends," he says frequently in public appearances, to emphasize a point or buy time or forge a connection with his audience. Sometimes he says it to signal bad news he regrets having to share: "My friends, our borders are broken."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bridezilla]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1813</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1813</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Never read an ending like this one before.

Not sure I could have written it, myself.

Pow.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why We Love A Good Yarn]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1810</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1810</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeremy Hsu: When Brad Pitt tells Eric Bana in the 2004 film Troy that "there are no pacts between lions and men," he is not reciting a clever line from the pen of a Hollywood screenwriter. He is speaking Achilles' words in English as Homer wrote them in Greek more than 2,000 years ago in the Iliad. The tale of the Trojan War has captivated generations of audiences while evolving from its origins as an oral epic to written versions and, finally, to several film adaptations. The power of this stor]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Called A Play]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1811</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1811</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'll read anything Michael Lewis writes: NEW ORLEANS — When the storm finally passes and the wind ceases to blow, the only evidence of property damage for many blocks around us is in our front yard. A part of my sister's white picket fence has fallen out onto the sidewalk. I call my brother-in-law who says that his fence does that all the time — he never nailed it back together after Katrina. Give it a nudge and the thing collapses. A few hours later, a video crew from "The NewsHour" with Jim Le]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Paid By The Word?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1812</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1812</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Somebody's been busting his ass.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Outrage]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1809</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1809</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:50:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I actually caught myself smacking my fist into my palm while reading this story:

BARTOW — In the dead of night six years ago, a Volkswagen Passat ran off a dark country road, hit a pine tree and split in two.

The 18-year-old driver, with alcohol in his system, survived. The 16-year-old passenger, Miles White, was killed.

The Polk County Sheriff's Office concluded that it was a single-car crash, the fault of the 18-year-old drunk driver.

But a Polk sheriff's deputy — who, it turns out, was a ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beginnings]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1808</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1808</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:15:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Justin Heckert: 7:25 a.m. He takes the long way to work. Straight down Peachtree Street, into the heart of the city where he was born. It's the first morning of July, and from the middle lane of this famous passageway he reads the street names wistfully—Peachtree Battle, Ponce de Leon, Sweet Auburn Avenue—and stares at the Atlanta landmarks in his earliest hour as the first head football coach of the Georgia State Panthers. A gray coffee mug in the cupholder, motivational books and framed]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beginnings]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1808</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1808</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Justin Heckert: 7:25 a.m. He takes the long way to work. Straight down Peachtree Street, into the heart of the city where he was born. It's the first morning of July, and from the middle lane of this famous passageway he reads the street names wistfully—Peachtree Battle, Ponce de Leon, Sweet Auburn Avenue—and stares at the Atlanta landmarks in his earliest hour as the first head football coach of the Georgia State Panthers. A gray coffee mug in the cupholder, motivational books and framed]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Outrage]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1809</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1809</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I actually caught myself smacking my fist into my palm while reading this story:

BARTOW — In the dead of night six years ago, a Volkswagen Passat ran off a dark country road, hit a pine tree and split in two.

The 18-year-old driver, with alcohol in his system, survived. The 16-year-old passenger, Miles White, was killed.

The Polk County Sheriff's Office concluded that it was a single-car crash, the fault of the 18-year-old drunk driver.

But a Polk sheriff's deputy — who, it turns out, was a ]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Democrats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1807</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1807</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:19:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anybody see any stellar DNC coverage in the papers? Stuff you wouldn't expect? Stuff like this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Relentless]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1806</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1806</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:21:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Political narrative series by Roger Simon:

… The campaign would improve as time went by, becoming more coherent, better planned and much less arrogant. But by the time it improved, it was already too late. Barack Obama had wrapped up the nomination, cleverly, skillfully, relentlessly. Always relentlessly.

Both campaigns made mistakes. But whenever Obama suffered a setback, he always had a Plan B ready, waiting and often already under way. "It was a game of chess, and we thought methodically," ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Edge Of History]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1805</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1805</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:16:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: PHILADELPHIA

Her guests began arriving around 8:30 Thursday night, in anticipation of the moment. They told the doorman they were here to visit Doris Smith in 21-Q, and he sent them up to her well-appointed condominium, where African artwork sat beside a nicked statuette of William Penn she received years ago as an award for something or other.

Ms. Smith, 69 and stylish, with manicured nails and short, auburn hair, offered cups of homemade rum punch and invited people to sit anywher]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Edge Of History]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1805</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1805</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: PHILADELPHIA

Her guests began arriving around 8:30 Thursday night, in anticipation of the moment. They told the doorman they were here to visit Doris Smith in 21-Q, and he sent them up to her well-appointed condominium, where African artwork sat beside a nicked statuette of William Penn she received years ago as an award for something or other.

Ms. Smith, 69 and stylish, with manicured nails and short, auburn hair, offered cups of homemade rum punch and invited people to sit anywher]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Relentless]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1806</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1806</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Political narrative series by Roger Simon:

... The campaign would improve as time went by, becoming more coherent, better planned and much less arrogant. But by the time it improved, it was already too late. Barack Obama had wrapped up the nomination, cleverly, skillfully, relentlessly. Always relentlessly.

Both campaigns made mistakes. But whenever Obama suffered a setback, he always had a Plan B ready, waiting and often already under way. "It was a game of chess, and we thought methodically,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Democrats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1807</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1807</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anybody see any stellar DNC coverage in the papers? Stuff you wouldn't expect? Stuff like this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mr. Montgomery]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1804</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1804</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:30:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meghan Murphy: MONTGOMERY &shy;— There was a strange quiet in Clinton Street Cafe Wednesday. At the Walden Bank. And Eddie's Deli.

Richie Reynolds wasn't there.

For decades, the man known as Mr. Montgomery made his rounds every day, stopping in each restaurant, bank or shop — often two, maybe three times — to see what was happening, what the weekend would bring, swap stats on his favorite topics: sports and firefighting.

Richie walked downtown so often in his 59 years, village officials dedic]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fire On The Mountain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1803</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1803</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:15:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Series from Shauna Stephenson: It was 1988, a year seared into the memories of many: the smoke, the roar of the fire, airplanes buzzing like gnats around mushroom-shaped clouds of smoke, the nightly news headlines declaring that Yellowstone National Park – America's collective firstborn wilderness – was burning down.

And there was nothing anyone could do.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fire On The Mountain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1803</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1803</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Series from Shauna Stephenson: It was 1988, a year seared into the memories of many: the smoke, the roar of the fire, airplanes buzzing like gnats around mushroom-shaped clouds of smoke, the nightly news headlines declaring that Yellowstone National Park – America's collective firstborn wilderness – was burning down.

And there was nothing anyone could do.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mr. Montgomery]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1804</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1804</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meghan Murphy: MONTGOMERY &shy;— There was a strange quiet in Clinton Street Cafe Wednesday. At the Walden Bank. And Eddie's Deli.

Richie Reynolds wasn't there.

For decades, the man known as Mr. Montgomery made his rounds every day, stopping in each restaurant, bank or shop — often two, maybe three times — to see what was happening, what the weekend would bring, swap stats on his favorite topics: sports and firefighting.

Richie walked downtown so often in his 59 years, village officials dedic]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Regular Joe]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1802</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1802</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:15:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: WILMINGTON, Del., Aug. 26 —

The strangest thing happened Monday morning at the train station here.

"Joe came in here with a motorcade," says Daniel Thorpe, 44, a cab driver at the Amtrak station. A motorcade? For ol' Joe? Everybody here is used to seeing Joe Biden by himself, on his way to and from the train — used to being able to go up and shake Joe's hand, talk about the grandkids.

Anyway, on Monday there he was. Big photo-op and a huge crush of press and Secret Service all]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For Worse]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1801</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1801</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:10:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: The end of the world is here: Lizardbreath has married Blandthony. Grandpa Jim is on his deathbed, with pitiable second wife Iris at his side. Our protagonist, Elly Patterson, is a Kleenex-clutching mess, as ever. She can't believe how the years have gone by a wrinkle at a time, blah blah blah, and worse, she can't shut up about it.

Somebody says something disgustingly pithy every panel now. You can feel the comic-strip family saga known as "For Better or for Worse" (known to some]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For Worse]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1801</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1801</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: The end of the world is here: Lizardbreath has married Blandthony. Grandpa Jim is on his deathbed, with pitiable second wife Iris at his side. Our protagonist, Elly Patterson, is a Kleenex-clutching mess, as ever. She can't believe how the years have gone by a wrinkle at a time, blah blah blah, and worse, she can't shut up about it.

Somebody says something disgustingly pithy every panel now. You can feel the comic-strip family saga known as "For Better or for Worse" (known to some]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Regular Joe]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1802</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1802</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: WILMINGTON, Del., Aug. 26 --

The strangest thing happened Monday morning at the train station here.

"Joe came in here with a motorcade," says Daniel Thorpe, 44, a cab driver at the Amtrak station. A motorcade? For ol' Joe? Everybody here is used to seeing Joe Biden by himself, on his way to and from the train -- used to being able to go up and shake Joe's hand, talk about the grandkids.

Anyway, on Monday there he was. Big photo-op and a huge crush of press and Secret Service a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Like A Butterfly]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1800</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1800</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:22:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: Her tennis dress was red and her shoes were red and the space in between was all bulging muscle. Li Na used it to power serves conjured solely from forward motion. Her left toe and fingertips traced a line perpendicular to the earth, giving her the appearance of an incarnate flagpole until she lunged in to deliver the ball over the net at close to 100 miles an hour.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Like A Butterfly]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1800</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1800</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: Her tennis dress was red and her shoes were red and the space in between was all bulging muscle. Li Na used it to power serves conjured solely from forward motion. Her left toe and fingertips traced a line perpendicular to the earth, giving her the appearance of an incarnate flagpole until she lunged in to deliver the ball over the net at close to 100 miles an hour.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Backup As A Fixture]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1798</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1798</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry from New Orleans: On the seventh-floor parking garage of a Holiday Inn that calls itself the "jazziest hotel in New Orleans," soldiers dressed for combat wait for the evening's call to fall in. They chat, smoke and gaze out upon an American city still in need of their armed presence.

At a sergeant's bark, these two dozen men and women, all members of the Louisiana National Guard, stand at attention for their nightly pep talk. The sergeant instructs them to drive carefully, to be alert]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Newspaper Songs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1799</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1799</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Help us cobble together the best songs about/referring to newspapers. Here's a start.

The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece Tracy Chapman, Across the Lines Beatles, A Day In The Life Pete Seeger, Newspaper Men Billy Joel, New York State of Mind Don Henley, Dirty Laundry 88 Fingers Louie, Newspaper Ben Folds, Fred Jones Part 2 Wishbone Ash, Front Page News Paul Simon, Me and Julio Tom Waits, In The Neighborhood Dr. Hook, Cover of Rolling Stone Loudon Wainwright, They Spelled My Name Wrong Joe Ja]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Butterfly Effect]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1797</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1797</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Southerland: In July last year, a butterfly landed on my shoulder while I was taking a break from my office for a few minutes one afternoon to talk business with a colleague. I was sure the butterfly would soon fly off. We were walking through an L Street canyon near 19th Street NW that was surrounded by granite, concrete and glass. I had never seen a butterfly in this part of the city before. Now I had one clinging to me. It migrated to my shirt collar and stayed there.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Guns, Money, Sexual Violence]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1792</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1792</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake, Elizabeth Dyer, Saundra Amrhein: Three men went on a rampage. It involved guns, money and sexual violence. It lasted at least seven weeks, stretching from downtown St. Petersburg to Apollo Beach.

The authorities got together Thursday and said they had put a stop to it. Three suspects were in jail.

St. Petersburg police intend to file more charges against the three today in connection with a rape and robbery of a downtown restaurant.

The suspects are Mexicans who live in eastern Hill]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eating Penis]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1793</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1793</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our friend Kevin Pang eats some penis with Bill Plaschke. Seriously. In the name of journalism. Watch this now.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Curious World of the Last Stop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1794</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1794</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Newman: At the end of the line, the subway creaks to a stop a few yards short of the yellow crash bumper. A few stragglers, or a lurch of homebound commuters, head for the street.

Train cleaners wielding worn-sided corn brooms and generic spray bottles marked "lemon" or "Windex" amble onto the cars, rousting any sleepers and drunks unmoved by the conductor's voice grating through speakers:

"This is the last stop on this train."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Big Fish]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1795</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1795</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Friedman: David Hayes has been fishing since he could walk, and his weapon of choice is an open-face spinning reel with a 6-foot rod.

But Hayes, 56, is a doting grandfather. And that's how he ended up reeling in a 21-pound state record channel catfish with a hot pink 2 1/2-foot Barbie doll rod and reel.

Hayes' 3-year-old granddaughter, Alyssa, leaves her Barbie doll fishing rod and a pink tackle box on his porch so they're handy. She's always asking him to take her fishing, Hayes said.

A]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[My Long War]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1796</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1796</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't wait until Sunday: And so with the fighting over, it seemed as if finding that body was the thing to do. I was a reporter, and I needed a corpse for the newspaper. Ashley asked Capt. Read Omohundro, Bravo's commander, and he gave us a dozen guys. They liked us now; we had been through hell with them, seen their buddies die. They wanted to help us. So we took a dozen guys and walked back up the street we had come down the day before. By then, you hardly noticed the wreckage, there was so mu]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Homicide 37: Seeking justice for Lance]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1761</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1761</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:51:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brendan McCarthy: "We need to chat with the people inside that house," he tells Wischan.

As Pardo approaches, a young woman in the door's threshold curses him. "Fat bitch," she calls the stocky detective. And people here won't talk to some cop, she assures.

Teens appear in the doorway, slam the door and scurry inside. The officers set up a perimeter around the block and wait.

Ten minutes later, several teens storm out defiantly. The detectives corral them.

A scream erupts from inside. Someon]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tommy Tomlinson's Tumor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1760</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1760</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:39:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm late on this, but say a prayer if you're inclined for our friend Tommy Tomlinson, who is recovering from a surgery to remove a tumor from his heart. He writes: You're not going to believe this, but it has nothing to do with me being a fat guy. I've got low cholesterol, low blood pressure, all that stuff. This tumor – it's called an atrial myxoma, Google it sometime – is almost always benign. It shows up for no good reason in a very small number of people. One of the studies I found says the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Who's Good?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1759</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1759</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:55:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We talk a lot on here about good writers, but we've spent not a lot of time talking about good editors. I found myself the other day trying to list the best editors I've had, and I feel pretty lucky to have worked with some great ones. So let's open the floor. Who out there in EditorLand is good? Let's name some names.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Extreme Failure]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1758</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1758</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:07:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: Symbolic to our era like a sledgehammer to drywall, the biggest house that ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" ever made over — a sprawling, four-bedroom starter castle, a three-car garage mahal with a turret and all — has gone into foreclosure, in the 'burbs south of Atlanta.

In that particular episode of the hyper-benevolent reality show, which first aired in February 2005, it took 1,800 volunteers a week to demolish the house with the overflowing septic tank that belonged to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[If You Were A Nut …]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1757</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1757</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:49:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charlie LeDuff looks like he's having fun. Check out these Detroit News videos. Part I and Part II. I love his expression when the camera first flashes to him in Part II. And this line of questioning is beautiful:

Are you concerned some voters might consider you a nut?

If you were a nut — IF you were a nut — what kind of nut would you be?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thunderman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1756</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1756</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:41:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeff Klinkenberg: Tad Staples savors summer, especially afternoons when the cumulus clouds pile up like dumplings before turning gray and ugly. He likes when the atmosphere above Florida develops late afternoon indigestion. First there are the little rumbles, then the dramatic rolls. When the main course arrives he can hardly contain himself. He attaches two microphones to the screen front door. He clicks on his tape deck. He listens to what he is recording through headphones. As the tempest pea]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[FOIA Works!!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1755</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1755</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:06:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Somebody buy the government a beer. Those guys work their asses off, toiling for years to get us important information:

If anyone is still wondering about the safety of a circus that came through Norfolk more than six years ago, we now have the answer. A computer file of nearly decade-old federal inspections of a business that no longer exists, addressed to a reporter who no longer works at The Virginian-Pilot, arrived this week. The records show that Sterling & Reid Brothers Circus, which was ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[So Long]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1754</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1754</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:01:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andrew Adam Newman (Anybody know if this Andrew Adam Newman is really Andy Newman?): There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a "dear friend." Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Postville]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1753</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1753</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:24:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Nigel Duara: Ten weeks after the largest workplace immigration raid in U.S. history, this is the new Postville:

Drunken brawls. A food pantry that is almost bare. Women afraid to walk alone at night.

Postville is now home to hundreds of men and women from tough towns and tough lives, brought to this northeast Iowa community by recruiters who entered homeless shelters in dusty Texas border towns offering $15 and a one-way bus ticket.

The impact is evident: New laborers are changing Postville. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tip Of The Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1752</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1752</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:50:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Candice Millard last weekend at The Mayborn narrative nonfiction writers conference in Texas: You want your characters to be so good that readers miss them when the story is over.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The FUN-O-METER]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1747</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1747</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This has nothing to do with writing (well, maybe). A guy in New York buys vending machines off the Web, fills the capsules with ideas and plants them around the city. Fifty cents buys you a toy, an idea, and a map to the location for your idea. He also gives back a quarter.

Read more here and here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Civic Center Blues]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1744</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1744</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[James Meadow in Part I: She is half-naked and friendly. Probably clean, too, since she is merrily soaking in the Seal Pond - where, by the way, there are no real seals. Just two statues that spit water at each other and are lucky they are made of bronze because that means they don't have to worry about accidentally catching a glimpse of the woman who, FYI, is naked from the waist down and sharing the pool with them even as she sings out to a passing unlucky non-statue, "Hi! What's your name?"

Y]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Would Lon Wagner's Twitter Look Like?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1745</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1745</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It would look like this: Twelve hours ago: Called wife on way home. Wondered if I should pick something up for dinner.

Eleven hours, 59 and a half minutes ago: Listened to wife's cell ring and ring and ring.

Eleven hours, 59 minutes ago: Didn't feel like hearing voicemail woman explain calling options, hung up.

Eleven hours, 30 minutes ago: Arrived home without incident.

Eleven hours, 29 minutes ago: Wife and three kids got home from mud-puddle-splashy walk.

Eleven hours, 28 and a half minu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Perfect Part]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1746</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1746</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: Cindy McCain might yearn to be invisible sometimes, or at the very least, not surrounded by the Secret Service and photographers and gawking people. The scrutiny seems too much to bear. Something about that half-apologetic manner.

"I appreciate you disrupting your day," she tells one of the administrators of a Harlem charter school during a June visit to New York, even though it's a big coup for this little school to score a visit by a potential first lady.

"I'm sorry to interr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More With Less?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1738</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1738</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[AP: The many and deepening cuts at newspapers across the country are starting to take a toll on their content, according to a study being released Monday.

The challenge newspapers must meet immediately is to find more revenue on the Internet, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's study, called "The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America's Daily Newspapers."

Newspaper managers need to "find a way to monetize the rapid growth of Web readership]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Price Of Valor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1739</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1739</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: GULFPORT — She looks young and petite, waiflike in T-shirt and shorts. The only clue to who she really is, or was, is a slight toughness in her voice, a commanding directness, a clear vibe that this is someone who could, under certain circumstances, pull the trigger.

The girl in the T-shirt was the lieutenant colonel who trucked duffel bags of cash around Baghdad, who fed donkeys to Saddam's lions, who brought home a Bronze Star, who also brought home a strange illness and a whole l]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Senator's Last Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1740</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1740</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Irene Jay Liu: Joseph L. Bruno had wandered off again. Walking through the Albany International Airport, with a crush of staffers, media and well-wishers in tow, Bruno was supposed to be headed toward the observation deck that bears a bust that honors the former Senate majority leader, and now former senator.

Bruno was saying goodbye Friday, the last of many "lasts" over the past few weeks, and he couldn't resist the stares from people at the Colonie airport. He bee-lined toward anyone at all -]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shocking]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1741</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1741</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Kix (thanks, Dan): This is the machine.

It is a gray square of hard plastic, looks like a garage door opener but is perhaps double the size of one. Inside this square is the circuit board and all that is evil and beneficent and contentious about the machine. But the square itself couldn't be more pedestrian. Fastened to it, by Velcro, is another casing of hard plastic, another square, which houses a 12-volt battery. Dangling from the machine's corners are wires, and at the ends of these wi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where Did She Go?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1742</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1742</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: LITHIA

She slept late last Sunday.

After her daughter and grandbaby had moved back to town, after her sister had flown in — surprise! — from Italy, her husband figured she was exhausted.

"I didn't think anything of it," he later told the police.

Margherita "Meg" Tanner woke just after noon and pulled on an old pair of jeans, a blouse with pink flowers, and flip-flops. She walked into the living room of their mobile home and slumped onto the sofa.

Their son's girlfriend was t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Call For Nominations]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1743</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1743</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Roy Peter Clark:

Chip Scanlan and I have been asked to do a third edition of the Bedford book: "America's Best Newspaper Writing." The first edition was a historical anthology of the best of the best from the ASNE Writing Awards competition and books.

This go-around, Chip and I would like to expand the pool of potential stories beyond ASNE winners. So we are looking to add about 15 stories from these categories:

deadline writing local reporting and beats business and explanatory obituari]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bugs Bunny, Superstar]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1737</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1737</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So look at this. Derek Zumsteg, who writes for a baseball site called Ussmariner.com, recently became the first blogger to have his work included the annual Best American Sportswriting book. The story, a forensic analysis of Bugs Bunny's baseball greatness, made me laugh very loudly on the airplane tonight on the way back from the Mayborn conference in Texas. It illustrates a point that speaker and author Candice Millard made so well this morning: In writing, the idea is everything.

Read it her]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Even You?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1736</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1736</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: ELDORET, Kenya -- He slips into the backseat of a parked taxi and hides behind its darkly tinted windows. What he is about to say could get him killed.

Two of Lucas Sang's sons walk ahead of their father's coffin during his funeral near Eldoret, Kenya, on Jan. 10. Sang's death remains a source of controversy throughout the country.

He won't give his name. On the way over, he couldn't shake the thought this might be a police sting. If he didn't trust the human rights activist w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get That Man A Drink]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1734</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1734</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our friend Tim Logan is all over the In-Bev takeover. Here, here, here and here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Indifference]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1735</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1735</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[DeNeen Brown (thanks, Richard): A woman sits alone on a gray chair in a psychiatric ward in a Brooklyn hospital. When we first see her, we do not know how long she has been sitting there. Suddenly, the woman collapses on her face onto the dirty floor.

We watch through a surveillance camera as she lies there, her blue gown above her knees, her legs convulsing. We watch as a guard comes into the room, puts his hand on his hip, looks at the woman, then looks up at the television hanging from the c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Money, Sex and Lawyers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1733</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1733</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Colleen Jenkins and Tom French: TAMPA — In front of the jury, the case played like a cross between Peyton Place and Bleak House. There were whispers of extramarital affairs, accusations of straight-faced betrayal, stories of files secretly copied and computer records surreptitiously altered, and reams of testimony confirming the worst stereotypes about ambulance-chasing attorneys.

It began with one lawyer — the old man of the firm, his hair gone white, but his name still well-known after years ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Her Father's Footwork]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1729</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1729</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leonora LaPeter Anton: It's fight night at the A La Carte Event Pavilion and Jenna Shiver is pulling a satin skirt on over her shorts. On the other side of the dressing room curtain, her opponent — nicknamed the Predator — is throwing punches into her coach's leather mitts, sounding like a hammer pounding nails.

Bam-bam-bam, bam-bam-bam.

Jenna's pink cell phone keeps beeping with text messages from her friends:

Knock her out

Go get her kill her]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Band of Brothers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1730</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1730</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: Lately, in the maintenance garage at the Danbury rest stop just off Interstate 84, the topic of conversation can shift suddenly from grass-cutting and litter pickup to death. What happens afterward? Where do we go? When I die, will you remember me?

Is there coffee in heaven?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Who Killed Chandra Levy?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1731</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1731</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Washington Post's Sylvia Moreno, Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham: It was above 80 degrees, the start of another steamy summer day in Washington. At 8:58 on the morning of July 25, 2001, three D.C. police sergeants gathered 28 cadets along Glover Road in Rock Creek Park. They were looking for any trace of a government intern named Chandra Ann Levy.

The 24-year-old woman from California, with hazel eyes and a head full of unruly brown curls, had left her Dupont Circle apartment and then simply ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sex At The Library]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1732</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1732</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Lake: Live Action Sex!

Delivered Right to You!

Available Any Time!

At the Library!

Huh?

Turns out, anyone with a library card, a shuddering lack of shame and an IQ just high enough to click a mouse can plop his butt down at one of the local library's computers and do whatever the heck he feels like doing. So long as it's legal.

Porn, of course, is legal. It is also available online, we hear.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Guy Sues Paper For Cutting Staff]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1728</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1728</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Leah Friedman: RALEIGH - A News & Observer subscriber is suing the newspaper for cutting staff and the size of the paper. Keith Hempstead, a Durham lawyer, filed the suit last month in Wake Superior Court. He says he renewed his subscription in May just before the paper announced on June 16 the layoffs of 70 staff members and cuts in news pages.

The paper, he says, is now not worth what he signed up for and therefore the cuts breached the paper's contract with him.

"Plaintiff alleges fraud in ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Singing Shea's Dirge]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1727</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1727</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: SAG HARBOR, N.Y.

SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark rises just yards away. But that someone must be able to convey emotions specific to the place, emotions beyond the sadness of many lost Mets summers and the euphoria of two World Series championships. There is so much more.

The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Investigator Investigated]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1712</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1712</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:10:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Oliver Mackson: GOSHEN — Mabel Waingrow outlived her husband, her only son, all five of her brothers and her sister. She closed up her coffee shop out on Route 94 in Blooming Grove and lived alone as she entered her 90s, bedeviled by loneliness and convinced that someone was stealing from her.

Ten years ago, her complaints about the thievery fell upon the ears of Nick Stagliano Jr., a veteran criminal investigator for the Orange County District Attorney's Office.

Stagliano investigated the com]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fire of God]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1711</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1711</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:08:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[T Lake: On the 84th night of the revival, the air was charged with collective energy and the floor shook from pounding feet. A spine-tingling roar rose from the crowd. They were calling to God for oil and fire. • Eight thousand people filled the tent. They had come from all around the world, bringing walkers and wheelchairs and chronic pain. They were here for the Florida Outpouring in Lakeland, the hottest thing going in religion these days, and some wore T-shirts that said It's Hell Without Je]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Top of the Heap]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1710</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1710</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:50:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: TEMPLE, Pa.

The only satisfying thing left to do on television is clean up people's houses.

In a half-baked, slovenly era of sub-accomplishment, organizing closets can feel like God's work. Symbolic outsiders (sassy black women, gay men) swoop in and sort the "keep" from the "toss."

These houses you see on cable makeover shows all seem to have the same kind of blobby Americans living in them — shopaholic victims helpless in the face of their own affluenza, people you can judge a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[250 guitars]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1709</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1709</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:45:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lon Wagner: Man, Greg Sipe can't just start off with his best guitar story.

Stories are like rock songs, man, every layer's important. You need the drums and bass to push that baby forward, and the guitars… Dude, don't even start.

Greg loves guitars, especially Gibson guitars. Loves them so much, he's got 250 of them stashed in his Chesapeake house, and they're worth a few million bucks.

When a friend asks to see Greg's collection, his wife, Susan, warns: "There's a story for every one, and i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vaseline-Colored Breakers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1708</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1708</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:36:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery: Melissa Parrot drains her Coors Light, slips out of her T-shirt and hops off the tailgate of her Texas Edition Ford F-150. The pickup gets 20 miles per gallon of gas, which costs $3.96 at Exxon, which gets petroleum from the earth beneath the brown saltwater she's about to step into. "You're going to get in?" asks her friend. "Why not?" Melissa says. "Look at it," he says. "We drove all the way down here," she says. They live north of Houston, 70 miles away. "Might as well get in]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Right Guy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1707</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1707</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:54:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: LUTZ — In the church on the stage by a tall white cross stood a man with a red guitar. He flexed his facial muscles as he played, the way guitarists do when they reach a crescendo, and the sound was swift and warm, like a solar wind. In his abandon he jerked the neck so hard that the capo went flying and bounced at his feet.

The man was Jeff Calhoun. He had searched a long time for the fleeting transcendence that comes when musicians lock together just right. He had tasted it in jazz ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Price Of Gas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1706</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1706</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:32:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Someone asked a while back about new looks at the lame gas prices story. Here's Tom Hallman (thanks, Audrie): From his perch behind the gas station's cramped counter, Austin Egland looks out the window at the empty pump islands. He wonders whether he has time to run to the bathroom before a customer arrives.

The Arco station, at Southeast 39th and Belmont, is one of the city's busiest, selling an average of 9,000 gallons a day. Egland has learned to seize slow moments.

He grabs a key from a wa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In A Bar With Chiarella]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1705</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1705</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:41:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall of the Indy Star recently scored a pretty cool Q&A with Tom Chiarella of Esquire.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Graves]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1704</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1704</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:33:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Weinreb (thanks, Nigel): It's true, what she says about the graves. I went to see them not long after I heard Lonise Bias tell an incredible story to a group of South Carolina high school students: While witnessing the burial of her son Jay, she looked down and realized she was standing on the grave of her eldest son, Leonard. I had assumed it was a rhetorical flourish, a metaphor crafted for effect by a guest speaker who was getting paid to whack some sobriety into a room of spaced-out ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unraveling]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1703</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1703</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:48:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Claire Hoffman: It's dawn on a hot sunday morning in June, and Amy Winehouse is inside her North London home, staring at her reflection in a dark tinted mirror, looking the tiny little body in front of her up and down, assessing the emaciated tattooed limbs, the jungle of a black beehive weave, the hallucinatory glow of her transparent green eyes. All around her, Winehouse's home is in disastrous disarray: Discarded bags of potato chips, crumpled nuggets of tinfoil, beer bottles, lingerie boxes ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Solidified By Sandbags]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1689</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1689</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ken Fuson (thanks to newsgems): Cedar Falls, Ia. - It was the raging river vs. a sea of volunteers.

Winner take all.

The frantic battle to save this city's downtown began early Tuesday.

New forecasts predicted the Cedar River would crest at 103 feet, 15 feet over flood stage and nearly 7 feet above the previous record of 96.2 feet, set in 1999.

About 15 blocks, including downtown businesses, were evacuated. City officials put out a desperate call for help: They needed sandbaggers, and a lot ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Carrying On]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1688</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1688</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I pulled out a copy of the Jan. 15, 2007 Times Herald-Record the other day. I do this from time to time. The Record is a tab up in New York, and it used to be run by a fine man named Mike Levine. If you read this site, you've probably heard of him, and you probably know he died unexpectedly last year.

I don't know who runs the place now. But I know it's been a tough few weeks for the folks still there. They've fired good people and they've closed a bureau in one of the most interesting, despera]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Anatomy of a Meltdown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1687</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1687</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out the Washington Post's three-part series on the housing crisis: The black-tie party at Washington's swank Mayflower Hotel seemed a fitting celebration of the biggest American housing boom since the 1950s: filet mignon and lobster, a champagne room and hundreds of mortgage brokers, real estate agents and their customers gyrating to a Latin band.

On that winter night in 2005, the company hosting the gala honored itself with an ice sculpture of its logo. Pinnacle Financial had grown from ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Whoosh]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1668</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1668</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's one from Michael Graff (thanks, Laura):

He wouldn't run. All those thoughts racing through his mind, and never once did he consider running.

Lew McDonald stood in the front yard. All alone. Just 10 years old. His mind, not his legs, sprinting.

His mother, younger brother and baby sister were inside the house, waiting to die.

His mother's boyfriend had flipped. Wanted to burn the whole family. Instructed Lew to go outside and find the gasoline.

But Lew knew it was inside. He'd put it ]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It's Personal]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1666</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1666</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom French: TAMPA — Inside the slightly dusty Mazda 626, carpooling it across Tampa Bay, the conversation kept turning to Hillary's motives and Hillary's flaws and the eclipse of the dream that Hillary had come to represent.

Behind the wheel, Susan Lockwood — a 64-year-old unreconstructed feminist — was mourning the end of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's historic campaign. But on Wednesday morning she was also trying to pierce the mystery of why the senator had not formally conceded. As usual, Lo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How She Beat The Big Boys]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1667</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1667</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paige Williams, deputy editor of Atlanta magazine, recently beat finalists from GQ, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker to win the 2008 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.

She did it with You Have Thousands Of Angels Around You, the inspiring story of a girl from Burundi and all the people who saved her life.

Read the story, then read our e-mail conversation.

Gangrey: Where did you get the idea for this story?

Paige Williams: In planning our first International issue (October 2007), Reb]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Footprints, In A Courtroom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1656</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1656</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 31 May 2008 22:59:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: The single set of footprints in the sand — as millions of inspired souls now know — was that time when the Lord picked you up and carried you. It's a metaphor, people: He is there when you need Him most, and so is the ubiquitous poem known as "Footprints in the Sand," shared around the world on posters, plaques, Bible covers and all things decoupage.

But who wrote it? God only knows, but after years of debate that used to confine itself to the Internet, "Footprints" could be heade]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[True Romance, 15 Years Later]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1654</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1654</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 May 2008 10:14:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How it all came to pass: On September 10, 1993, a major motion Picture—penned by future hotshot Quentin Tarantino, directed by action pro Tony Scott, and starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette—hit theaters with a brash fusion of stylized violence and whip-smart dialogue. It bombed. But True Romance was born again when it was released on video, achieving cult status among film geeks, rock stars, and regular Joes who got hip to Tarantino after 1994's Pulp Fiction. Now, on the iconic flick]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Back To Who He Was]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1653</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1653</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 May 2008 09:34:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa.

Down halls where cigarette smoke perfumes the air and shuffling slippers give the floors an extra buff, there resounds an intercom announcement: Head to the dining room for the American Idol program! Come support your friends!

Those who answer the call find the dining room transformed, with a night-blue curtain concealing the buffet table, the coffee canisters and the sign saying, "Remember Your Napkin." No trace of the shepherd's pie served for lunch two hours be]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Man vs. Bear]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1652</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1652</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2008 09:13:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is so ridiculous, yet so watchable. ESPN.com (thanks, Justin): Could an NFL kick returner score a touchdown against a bear?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Desperately Seeking Plan B]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1651</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1651</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2008 09:08:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[T.M. Shine: The exodus began with the word "Bob."

"Bob, can I see you for a minute?" the boss had asked.

Within minutes, Bob was exiting the office with a wave and a "Nice working with everybody."

What the . . . ?

Instinctively, several employees followed Bob out to the parking lot.

"They told me not to say anything, but I'm not going to work with people for 13 years and not wave goodbye," Bob said as co-workers surrounded him before he could reach his car. Bearded, disheveled and wearing s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Slipping Away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1650</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1650</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 May 2008 10:31:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: It's never too soon to regret the summer we didn't have. Those pangs start now, on Memorial Day, as summer already slips away, like losing your favorite sunglasses again, and wearing a new pair that never feels right, that you regret buying. Let's not wait and do this in the last week of August, let's regret summer now: All the nights we meant to eat outside, until we saw how long the wait was for a table. All our dirty furniture on the deck, which is really only a balcony, which we reg]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Reminders]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1649</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1649</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2008 10:44:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Adam Bosch and Alexa James: Brandy Williams knew that one day, "Daddy's in heaven" wouldn't be enough.

They were sitting in the grocery store parking lot when she heard the question, posed by a 6-year-old, from the backseat of the car.

"How did Daddy die?"

Brandy looked at her daughter in the rearview mirror.

"Mya, are you ready to hear what Mommy's going to say?"

"Yes," she squeaked.

Deep breath.

"Daddy was fighting in the war."

"Yes."

"There was a bad person, and Daddy was working on ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Burned, Not Broken]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1648</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1648</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2008 10:40:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: The little girl who walked through fire wants to show her pictures.

She opens a binder with her stiff, taped hands. One photo shows her posing in her cheerleader uniform, and another shows her grinning beside her mother, surrounded by Pooh bears. Then she shows a newspaper photo of a bedroom that is no longer a bedroom, just a black ashen hole.

She points out a heap of soot on the floor.

"This was my bed."

She is 9 years old. She likes Hannah Montana, lip gloss, tiaras, macaroni ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Dugout]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1647</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1647</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 May 2008 04:26:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dugan Arnett: PORT CHARLOTTE — At any given moment, the dugout of the Murdock Little League Yankees smells like a mixture of sweat, bubble gum and farts.

It is a cramped space — you can't walk more than a few steps without tripping over a loose helmet or glove or bat — and it is hectic, filled with 11- and 12-year-old boys in plastic cleats, click-clacking their way back and forth, digging in their bags, checking the batting order, trying to find some bubble gum to pack inside their cheeks.

It]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Feedback]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1639</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1639</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Dan Stockman: You think the folks on Gangrey could offer a critique? I faced a lot of challenges - the story was six years old, parts of it had been previously reported elsewhere, though never here, etc. I guess I'm wondering if the mix of narrative and traditional reporting worked, or if people would have done things differently? I tried several different approaches, but this was the only one that felt right. Maybe others have ideas I didn't think of.

Here's the story: They were lining up]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Wizard's Snowball]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1640</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1640</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is rad. Jeff Solochek: LAND O'LAKES — Marge Whaley has been called her share of names during her 16 years on the Pasco County School Board.

But nothing compares to the vitriol of Whaley's correspondence from the past two weeks.

"I've been called the worst things I've been called as a School Board member," said Whaley, who has received as many as 50 angry calls and e-mails a day from all over the country. "I got called an 'effing' idiot on my voice mail. … I got called an incompetent turd.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Weekend Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1638</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1638</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pete Iorizzo: Austin, Texas -- Hours before he broke the four-minute mile, Darren Brown thumbed through a novel, keeping his bookmark, a worn color photograph of his father, visible on the facing page.

He drank coffee from a mug decorated with photos of him and his father, running together. The symbolism struck him. In a sense, Darren always ran with his father -- and against him.

A generation ago, Barry Brown broke the four-minute mile, too. Hundreds have. But never before had an American fat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Friend To Animals]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1636</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1636</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Meacham: TAMPA — Robert Patrick, who collected roadkill with priestly benevolence, died on Friday of pancreatic cancer. He was 38.

People who Mr. Patrick and his wife met socially often paused when he told them what he did for a living as an animal control officer for Hillsborough County.

"Usually their response was, 'Well, somebody's got to do it,' " said Katy Patrick, 37. "And he'd say, 'Yes, and that somebody is me, and that's okay.' "]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Fer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1637</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1637</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Published on: Wednesday, 4/21/1982, Style section, edition, zone, B07

The 'Chariots' Are Driving Me Crazy! By Henry Allen

Da deedle-ee dum dum.

It's the song of the year, the anthem of '80s uplift, the synthesizer soundtrack for Reaganomic resurgence, whenever that might happen to be. It is, in short, the theme from the movie "Chariots of Fire," and it's pumping out of car radios, clattering through apartment walls, and cluttering up television sound tracks during the New York Marathon and th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Out Of Gas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1634</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1634</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gas is over $4 in some places which means editors are trolling newsrooms looking for reporters to send out on a gas story we've all written dozens of times.

Here's a clip from The Daily Show yesterday where host Jon Stewart pokes fun at what's more painful than paying for high gas prices: covering the story.

What's to be done with a story that a) must be covered but b) has been covered to death? How do the creative minds of Gangrey think we can write about high gas prices in a new way that doe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Gem In The Great Debate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1635</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1635</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So there's a post on Creative Loafing about the newspapers on Tampa Bay, how the Times and Trib are making cuts to continue to breathe in a two-paper market. And most of the discussion is typical. Then there's a post from "Ed":

Happens that I have been reading 19th Century newspapers for a project I'm involved in, and you know what, they're great. Lotsa news stories and a color newsfeature from time to time but not every day. The other thing that is remarkable is that all this journalism was do]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Other People's Stuff]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1632</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1632</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Inara Verzemnieks: Perhaps the clearest view of who we are as a people can be found through the double doors of a warehouse at the edge of North Interstate Avenue. Inside, the air smells of dust and time, the exhalations of hundreds of old possessions stacked on shelves and propped against the walls — sofas and mattresses, clocks and frying pans, dining room tables and easy chairs, electric skillets and mismatched mugs.

Every day, new things arrive at the warehouse, carried by a diese]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Movement]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1633</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1633</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congratulations to Raja Abdulrahim, a fine reporter at the Times Herald-Record and a consistent Gangrey voice, for earning a gig at the LA Times. She says she's headed to a newsroom full of passion and talent, and she'll contribute to that mix, for sure.

Here's to Raja.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Comes True]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1628</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1628</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember this? Here's the rest of the story: ST. PETERSBURG — Under the harsh hospital lights in Room No. 9, a make-up artist wearing a paper mask brushed mascara onto Stacey Karavokiros' long lashes. A stylist curled her dark hair into loose ringlets. Her mom clipped a rhinestone bracelet around her left wrist.

"Okay," her mom, Irene, said just before 7 p.m. Saturday. "It's time for the dress." She helped Stacey out of her green hospital gown, into the flowing red dress that had been made espe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Do Readers Want?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1629</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1629</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joseph Lelyveld: "How do we know exactly what the reader wants? I think you should give the reader a fresh and original paper that's very well-written and covers all sorts of things -- social trends, fashion, the works but I think you are at your best when you give the reader something the reader wants that the reader didn't know he or she wanted it till you gave it to her."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[They're Nuns. Not Writers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1630</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1630</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Cullen (Thanks, Tim): When I was a cub reporter at the late and much-lamented Transcript-Telegram, I got sent to cover a homicide in one of the less salubrious sections of Holyoke, which is so far west of Boston that some people in Beantown think it's in Montana.

There was a subdued crowd outside a tenement. A cop told me there was a party, and a gentleman by the name of Antonio Sierra had taken liberties with the host's wife. The host had responded by plunging a very large knife into Sie]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Storms]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1631</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1631</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Treweek: BENTONVILLE - The flag changed direction.

One moment, it was waving toward the south, southeast, maybe east. Then, it snapped the other direction.

That was Chanci Osborne's first indication that the weather was not getting better right away.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Of Our Livingston Finalists]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1627</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1627</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Craig Kapitan's incredible series on a sniper with PTSD: In this case, the suspect was a teenager - 14, 15, 16 ... who knows - who had ridden his motorcycle day after day down a road commonly used by U.S. forces, always pausing suspiciously for a moment at the same spot before moving on. Hancock - positioned in his camouflaged nest roughly four football field lengths away - knew something was amiss, but he needed proof.

So he waited, motionless as the days passed, watching "the kid" develop a p]]></description>
      <author>Reiter</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[T.G.I.H.A.F.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1623</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1623</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[December 27, 1994 Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

This, say the pundits, is the Year of the White Male. We just had the Year of the Woman, but apparently it didn't take. Now the most powerful person in America is a man named Newt Gingrich -- a name and a man that are everything you think of when you think of white males, particularly the angry kind that are causing such concern.

Who are these creatures with skin the color of hairy Silly Putty, with tendencies toward proclaiming medie]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thank You, And Good Night]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1624</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1624</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: LARGO — He couldn't drive a block without gawks.

He couldn't walk five steps without posing for a photo.

He couldn't eat lunch in peace.

Then again, neither could Elvis.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Red]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1625</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1625</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How to cover pop culture.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Cynic Will Need To Be Convinced]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1626</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1626</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this. Charles P. Pierce on Barack Obama: The cynic knows he'll never make Oshkosh. He took the wrong exit and went too far north, and now he has to double back. He gives up, finally, and turns down County Road S in central Wisconsin, looking for a place where he can park and listen to the speech on the radio. It has warmed up well into the double digits, and the snow is sliding slowly off the roofs of the barns along the way.

The speech is not going to be anything the cynic hasn't heard ov]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Something More Than Murder]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1622</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1622</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy: CITY OF NEWBURGH — A tall, slim 15-year-old died with a bullet in his body late Tuesday night, three years after the same thing happened to his brother.

Jeffrey Zachary was talking to friends in front of 27 Dubois St. about 10:20 p.m. when a car drove past. A gunman fired through the window. One bullet hit a tree. Another hit Jeffrey.

Jeffrey's sister, Tova, had just finished doing a friend's hair when she heard the shots. She came outside to find Jeffrey lying on the sidewalk an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Prom Wish]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1621</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1621</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: The dress should be long, to the floor. All the girls at Tarpon Springs High are getting long dresses this year, Stacey Karavokiros told the designer. It should have halter straps and something sparkly, maybe sequins or beads.

The back should dip low, she said. The front has to be high.

"At least high enough," she said, "to cover my scar."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Teetering]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1618</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1618</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: MUNCIE, Ind.

In the 1920s, two amateur sociologists went searching for a city that was singularly unexceptional. They wound up here.

They made a study of Muncie, asking its children how often they read, and its women how often they ironed. Then more sociologists came, and market researchers and documentarians and journalists, poking and prodding over the decades, measuring Muncie with the calipers of their trades.

And the people here took it with characteristic good humor, exc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Woman In The Window]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1619</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1619</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Lake: HOUSTON — Tuesday evening, it is warm. The old man mows the lawn in the twilight. Darkness has not yet arrived, but it is coming.

The old man is out of gas now, almost through. He heads toward the garage for more, which is when he sees her. He gazes.

She had been talking to him all afternoon as he mowed, which he calls sweet and which comforted him. But now, in this moment, in the waning daylight, Mary Bounds looks upon her husband from inside their home. The bedroom window frame]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Behind The Smile]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1620</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1620</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephen Deere and Doug Moore: Kirkwood — In his hands were a bank ledger, an envelope of money and a photo album.

He knocked on the door of Chuck Runnels' home and flashed that wide, toothy smile that made everyone feel comfortable calling him "Cookie."

It was Feb. 7, three hours before Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton walked through the doors of City Hall carrying two handguns. Three hours before six people would be dead, Thornton among them.

"I need you to do me a favor," Thornton said.

Runne]]></description>
      <author>Reiter</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Newspaper Can't Love You Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1612</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1612</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm sure you've read this by now. I just got caught up. Thoughts on this? David Simon: ... At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet -- at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology -- newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share p]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Things The Storm Did]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1613</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1613</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lon Wagner: Ruth Silberholz pointed at the can of Diet 7UP on her kitchen counter Friday morning, and the one detail she hadn't noticed until then.

"It seems like every time I come in here, I see something different," she said.

She had just taken the soda out of the fridge and put it on the counter Monday afternoon when she looked out the back window of her Hillpoint Farms home and saw a funnel of boards, bricks and siding plowing toward her.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chasing Rumors In Fairhope]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1614</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1614</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Ferrara: FAIRHOPE They were here for the film festival.

Everyone knows someone who saw them.

The story goes like this: Brad worked with an actor who lives in Fairhope. The actor invited the megastar to see this adorable little town, and told him about the festival. He and Angelina and the kids would love it. Everyone loves Fairhope. Brangelina would love it, too. Besides, the festival featured a movie called "Forgotten Coast," and Brad donated loads of time and money to Hurricane Katrina]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Filling Orders]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1615</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1615</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: Another special request came in the other day to the old brick factory on Gallagher Avenue, where pride — if not much profit — is taken in being the country's last maker of washboards. A worker, one of only four, all women, reached for an empty box and began to fill the order.

One metal washtub

One coil of clothesline

One pack of clothespins

Two bars of soap

Six tins of foot powder]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shoppes at Gangrey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1616</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1616</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We've added a new feature here at Gangrey: The Shoppes At Gangrey, via Amazon. We'll add all the books we're reading and talking about to the list. Check it often. Support your friends.

UPDATE: You can now find The Shoppes at Gangrey planted permanently in the rail on the right side of the page. I'm a genius.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beyond Rape]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1617</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1617</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joanna Connors: On Oct. 27, 1984, a headline on Page 14A in The Plain Dealer read: "Disgusted judge gives repeat offender 30 years for rape."

The story followed standard newspaper protocol: In it, the victim was anonymous.

In this version, the victim has a name. I am Joanna Connors, and I am telling the story I kept private for 23 years. I'm doing it for all of the others who have survived sexual assault in silence, ashamed and afraid to tell their stories.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Henry Allen Fridays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1610</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1610</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2008 09:33:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[DEATH of the SALESMAN; We're Not Talking Loaded With Options Here. We're Talking Bottom Line on Wheeler-Dealers. Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

Everybody hates car salesmen. Fine. Everybody hates everybody nowadays.

Politicians, bank tellers, funeral directors, doctors — when's the last time a car salesman amputated the wrong leg? Journalists, telemarketers . . . What's the difference between a dead lawyer and a dead skunk in the road? Skid marks in front of the skunk. You haven't h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Henry Allen Fridays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1610</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1610</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[DEATH of the SALESMAN; We're Not Talking Loaded With Options Here. We're Talking Bottom Line on Wheeler-Dealers. Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

Everybody hates car salesmen. Fine. Everybody hates everybody nowadays.

Politicians, bank tellers, funeral directors, doctors -- when's the last time a car salesman amputated the wrong leg? Journalists, telemarketers . . . What's the difference between a dead lawyer and a dead skunk in the road? Skid marks in front of the skunk. You haven't ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Livingstons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1611</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1611</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congrats to the finalists for the Livingston Awards. Some gangreyers on here. Reid. Konrad. Wright. Peter. (Am I missing anybody?)

Well done, folks. Here's to $10,000.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Air]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1608</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1608</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go, now, and check out our friend Jim Sheeler getting grilled by Terry Gross. And buy his book, which went on sale today.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tornado on Deadline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1609</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1609</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A tornado hit Virginia, if you didn't hear. Check out some good stuff from the Pilot.

Kristin Davis: SUFFOLK

Jennifer Schmack is wearing her only pair of shoes. They are brown and lace up. Her husband found them on the front porch Monday, just after.

Richard Schmack has not shaved in three days, and he is in a golf shirt instead of his work uniform because it was the first thing he could fish out of the rubble. A fat bee buzzes through the room, but nobody moves toward it.

Diane Tennant: Bef]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Detainee and the Judge]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1607</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1607</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:21:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Glaberson:GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — The first indication that the afternoon's hearing in the case of Salim Hamdan was going to be different came when he showed up in war crimes court in his prison khakis, a loose-fitting outfit that looked like yesterday's pajamas. The flowing white robe and the checked blazer he wore in Tuesday morning were gone. A curious prosecutor asked the judge to inquire. The judge, a Navy captain with something of a soft touch, said Mr. Hamdan could wear whatever he]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Charles Hillinger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1606</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1606</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:38:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Obit: Charles Hillinger, the Los Angeles Times' retired roving feature writer and columnist who traversed the highways and byways of California, America and beyond in pursuit of colorful characters and human-interest stories, has died. He was 82.

…

As a Times reporter, Hillinger had his share of interesting assignments.

He covered the Beatles during their visit to Los Angeles in 1964 to perform at the Hollywood Bowl, providing a behind-the-scenes report on the "mop-haired Liverpudlians" as th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP Charles Hillinger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1606</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1606</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Obit: Charles Hillinger, the Los Angeles Times' retired roving feature writer and columnist who traversed the highways and byways of California, America and beyond in pursuit of colorful characters and human-interest stories, has died. He was 82.

...

As a Times reporter, Hillinger had his share of interesting assignments.

He covered the Beatles during their visit to Los Angeles in 1964 to perform at the Hollywood Bowl, providing a behind-the-scenes report on the "mop-haired Liverpudlians" as ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Detainee and the Judge]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1607</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1607</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Glaberson:GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — The first indication that the afternoon's hearing in the case of Salim Hamdan was going to be different came when he showed up in war crimes court in his prison khakis, a loose-fitting outfit that looked like yesterday's pajamas.

The flowing white robe and the checked blazer he wore in Tuesday morning were gone. A curious prosecutor asked the judge to inquire. The judge, a Navy captain with something of a soft touch, said Mr. Hamdan could wear whatever h]]></description>
      <author>Ramsey</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Casting A Spell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1605</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1605</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:32:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: NEW ORLEANS — At 26, Danny Wimprine lives with his parents, not far from his old high school, in a room full of timeworn football posters and state championship rings. His father has a dog named Boots, and Boots likes chasing squirrels. Sometimes Boots will catch a squirrel and eat it, and other times the squirrel will get away.

Last Wednesday afternoon, there was a righteous chase, but the squirrel reached the chain-link fence ahead of Boots. So Wimprine followed along and laugh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Casting A Spell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1605</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1605</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: NEW ORLEANS — At 26, Danny Wimprine lives with his parents, not far from his old high school, in a room full of timeworn football posters and state championship rings. His father has a dog named Boots, and Boots likes chasing squirrels. Sometimes Boots will catch a squirrel and eat it, and other times the squirrel will get away.

Last Wednesday afternoon, there was a righteous chase, but the squirrel reached the chain-link fence ahead of Boots. So Wimprine followed along and laugh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Narrative Songs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1604</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1604</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:21:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[That narrative songlist we collected back in the day is evergreen. At least a few people a day land on Gangrey via a "narrative songs" search on Google. So, here's the list, thanks to imeem, if anybody cares to listen. Enjoy. And post others if you've got 'em.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eulogy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1603</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1603</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:16:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you can write, you can write. Bruce Springsteen on Danny Federici: Let me start with the stories.

Back in the days of miracles, the frontier days when "Mad Dog" Lopez and his temper struck fear into the band, small club owners, innocent civilians and all women, children and small animals.

Back in the days when you could still sign your life away on the hood of a parked car in New York City.

Back shortly after a young red-headed accordionist struck gold on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and he a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Last Word]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1602</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1602</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:14:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tim Botos: In death, Agnes "Aggie" Meyer got the last word.

She had plenty to show for her 85 years on this earth, most of it enjoyed before she entered Manor Care nursing home. And long before Alzheimer's disease took her mind, and pneumonia ultimately took her life last Fourth of July. Then her body was laid to rest in Sunset Hills Burial Park.

Near the end, it was so bad that Aggie didn't recognize her son. Her replies to simple questions were nonsensical utterances of "7, 8, 9, 10." In the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving Newspapers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1601</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1601</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:50:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We owe a great deal of thanks to the authors and illustrators of children's books for trying desperately to reinforce the notion that the newspaper is a source of enjoyment and interest. Seriously. Ever notice how many of the illustrations include newspapers? Here are a few. The first two are from Ira Sleeps Over (and notice that even though the readers are next door neighbors, he's got a tab called Town News, while she's reading an unnamed broadsheet), the second is from Andrew Henry's Meadow, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tower Of Solitude]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1600</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1600</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:33:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery: Johnny Foens paid $548,200 to get into heaven.

He rode an elevator into the sky, unlocked a door and stepped onto the balcony of his new three-bedroom, three-bathroom condominium.

Behold, to the west, the majesty of a downtown skyline sparkling in the sun. To the south, the posh pulsations of Harbour Island. And you smell that? That salty stretch of Tampa's blue-black bay drifting toward the horizon?

"This is why I bought the place," Johnny says.

At first he had company.

Fiv]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bananas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1599</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1599</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:35:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom French: ST. PETERSBURG— The temple of forgotten songs — secret mecca of joy and mystery and Elvis 45s — waits at the end of the earth, which happens to be just a few blocks north of downtown.

A pilgrimage to its doors requires perseverance, even if you have the address, because the place remains hidden within a maze of dead-end streets, in a faded industrial park tucked between some railroad tracks and a quiet residential neighborhood where no one would dream of looking for one of the plane]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hank Allen Fridays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1598</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1598</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:46:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[That's right. Every Friday (if I remember, and you bet I will). Right here on Gangrey. All ages. No cover. Retro Henry Allen.

April 14, 1995

Nobody understands the white shoe thing.

Nobody understands much of anything, actually, but that's too grim a thought for spring, which is here, along with white shoes.

You ask: What white shoe thing?

Think of the white bucks on a New Orleans cotton broker. Think of white babydoll ankle-strap spike heels on an 18-year-old watching her date lose at bacc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1590</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1590</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Hallman: It's just a dress. Only a few yards of limp fabric on a hanger. Take the finest, most expensive silk ever spun and there's still no life. And certainly no magic.

What a dress always needs is a girl.

A girl in a dress takes a father's breath away. He turns from the television when his daughter walks into the room and is struck by how quickly the years have slipped away, gone in a heartbeat when he wasn't paying attention to all the changes.

Nigel Duara with a weather story: We sti]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Behind The Analysts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1585</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1585</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Barstow: In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guant&aacute;namo Bay. The detention center had just been branded "the gulag of our times" by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration's communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normal]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sticker People]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1586</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1586</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: It's a tiny thing, but you notice it anyway, walking around the city. On a brisk, sunny day in Georgetown, there it is again: a coat bearing a worn, wrinkled Obama sticker.

Look -- another one! You can see them all around town.

In this, the campaign that goes on and on, why would anyone be inclined to hold on to something so transient, so fragile, as an aging campaign sticker? (And why, in our travels about town -- a survey of sorts that's hardly exhaustive -- do we not see wel]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dying Without God]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1587</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1587</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: Some of Steven Gey's students have asked his permission to pray for him, to beg God to spare him, to pray for the only thing that may save him — an Old Testament, open-the-heavens miracle.

Gey has Lou Gehrig's disease. He is 52. His ability to move and speak, even to eat and breathe, has eroded for almost two years. The disease has begun to starve and strangle him. Three days ago, he was taken to the hospital for insertion of a feeding tube.

He has arrived at the moment when people]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seeing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1588</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1588</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeb Phillips: The wounded soldiers arrived during the relay race yesterday morning. Three of them rolled on wheelchairs. The fourth walked with a cane and wore shorts, his prosthetic left leg shining blue.

The relay was part of the Tri-Service Olympics, a competition among Ohio State University's Navy, Army and Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps. They run, they do sit-ups, they have a tug of war in the French Field House for bragging rights.

The students who sprinted around the track m]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Blood, Reconsidered]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1589</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1589</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I watched the movie There Will Be Blood for the first time last night, and it made me think hard about storytelling. I had recently seen No Country For Old Men as well. These films have a long list of similarities. Both are set decades ago against the color-sapped backdrop of the Southwest. Both have a certain majesty in their cinematography. Both are studies in greed and bloodshed. Both have murderers as main characters. And both were nominated for Best Picture, which, of course, No Country won]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dialogue]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1583</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1583</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Celina Ottaway: We are having a discussion here (Albany T-U)about using dialogue in narrative reconstructions. Would love to hear thoughts on standards, use, etc...

For example, if a fire chief tells you about an exchange he had with a victim, but you don't have it from the victim.

Does it matter how far back in time you are going, deadline narrative or 20 years ago reconstruction, etc...

I've got my own opinions (of course), but I'd like to hear others.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Between Medieval and Folk]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1584</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1584</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: Catholics don't argue about abortion or the death penalty nearly as much as they argue about what music is sung (or not sung, or used to be sung) at their local Sunday Mass. It was ever thus -- at least since the 1960s, when Sister first shortened her habit, strummed a G7 chord and, to hear some Catholics tell it, all heck broke loose.

Among his more fastidious devotees, Pope Benedict XVI is valued most for the fact that he is not Casey Kasem, and Mass is no place for a hit parade, and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Year Later]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1581</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1581</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out the Roanoke Times work on the VT shootings, one year later. And take a peek at this smart Facebook page.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Cry In The Night]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1582</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1582</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In 1988, Tom French broke new ground with a 10-part serial narrative he later turned into a book. The serial is finally online thanks to a recent update in the case. Take a look.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Don't Be Next]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1578</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1578</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I hate to start the week like this, but, whatever. Grab a hanky. Click play. Keep reading. (If you're in the newsroom, it might be cool to unplug your headphones and let everybody in on this one, assuming you still have folks sitting around you.)

We're shrinking. After years of mildly reassuring numbers tracking the size of newspaper newsroom staffs, the latest American Society of Newspapers Editors' annual census leads with a bombshell. Fulltime professional news staffs fell by 2,400 last year]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Aria of Chris Matthews]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1570</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1570</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Leibovich (thanks, Raja): Whenever Chris Matthews says something he likes, which happens a lot, he repeats it often and at volumes suggesting a speaker who feels insufficiently listened to at times. "Tim Russert finally reeled the big marlin into the boat tonight," Matthews yelled — nine times, on and off the air, after a Democratic debate that Russert moderated with Brian Williams in late February at Cleveland State University. Matthews believed that Russert (the fisherman) had finally suc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good Luck, Little Fellas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1571</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1571</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Frank Ahrens: After our big Pulitzer win on Monday, there was some melancholy around the newsroom along the lines of, "Oh, this will be the last year this kind of thing will happen."

I said just the opposite.

I bet the Big Three -- us, the Times and the Journal -- will most likely increase our dominance of the Pulitzers in coming years. Why? Because it's the mid-sized papers that have been/will be so hard-hit by cuts they will no longer be able to produce Pulitzer-caliber journalism.

...

You]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inside The Mind Of A Genius]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1568</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1568</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is cool (Thanks, Sean): People have long wondered what goes on in Bob Dylan's mind. But if you pay attention to what the recent Pulitzer Prize-winner says and plays on his XM satellite-radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour, you can actually get a pretty good idea. Here, by cataloguing the themes has chosen for the episodes, the artists he has favored, and Dylan's other preferences and quirks, Vanity Fair has constructed a revealing portrait of America's most enigmatic musician. Below is a ne]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Smooth Like Jazz]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1569</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1569</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: The mistress of this trailer home is music. The blue and white trailer has no living room or dining room, really. It has music studios. Shelves of music scores and framed images of men in tuxedos, hands full of brass, overtake what could have been a living room. What might have been a dining room belongs to a keyboard and more shelves of scores.

One man lives here with three saxophones. He represents a half-century of jazz virtuosity and also what talent and single-minded passion of]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Searching For R. Kelley]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1566</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1566</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm so glad Charlie LeDuff is back (thanks, Russell): DETROIT -- Blowing through the grand foyer of the decrepit Michigan Central Depot was a memento from a grander time.

It was a piece of paper, no bigger than a waitress's ticket, a scrap more or less; a remnant of a man's life.

The docket tells the story of a train that pulled into the northern yard on a hot and humid evening on Aug. 23, 1968, at precisely 7:15 p.m.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Things That Carried Him]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1567</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1567</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brilliant structure on a story that most of us think we've seen before, and several of us have written, but not like this.

Chris Jones: Don Collins stood in the sun and mapped out in his mind a rectangle on the grass, eight feet by three feet. He is forty-nine, wears a handful of pomade in his hair, and no longer needs a tape to take the measure of things.]]></description>
      <author>Jim Sheeler</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Treasure Without A Country]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1564</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1564</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: BROWNSVILLE, Tex.

At the very bottom of this country, where the Rio Grande loops up and down as if determined to thwart territorial imperatives, there sits a natural wonderland called the Sabal Palm Audubon Center. Rare birds of impossible colors dart about the rustling jungle, while snakes slink, tortoises dawdle and the occasional ocelot grants a rare sighting.

After decades of reclamation and preservation, and after millions of public and private dollars spent, this has become a ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Pulitzers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1565</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1565</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Get it all here.

Links to winning stories here.

2008 Pulitzer Prize winners in journalism and the arts

JOURNALISM: Public Service: The Washington Post Breaking News Reporting: The Washington Post staff Investigative Reporting: Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker of The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune Staff Explanatory Reporting: Amy Harmon of The New York Times Local Reporting: David Umhoefer of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel National Reporting: Jo Becker and Barton Gellman of The Washingto]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Can't Let Go]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1562</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1562</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse: Lauren Ortiz died alone on a concrete porch behind the home of a man she barely knew.

Last Sept. 1, on a dark street sometime between 10 and 10:30 p.m., Ortiz, 24, got into a white F-150 truck with shiny rims driven by a 34-year-old man she had heard about through a mutual friend.

Back at his house, on a private road east of Brooksville, she drank four or five shots of Bacardi 151 and a cocktail of Everclear and orange juice, then went out to the porch to vomit. The man rolled h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[K Stands For Klass]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1563</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1563</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl: SAN ANTONIO - Ill will toward Roy Williams isn't universal

In a better world, Jayhawk fans would feel sweeter. Oh, they feel sweet already. But it's sweet with sour. Their blood is up, and some of it is bad blood. KU's basketball team plays Roy Williams tonight. Or is it North Carolina they play? With the sour talk about Roy, you'd think it was Roy.

Roy coached the Jayhawks for 15 years. Then he left for North Carolina in 2003.

Judas, many fans said.

There are sour fans like that.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Atop a Hallowed Mountain, Healing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1552</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1552</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.

The members of the 2:20 tour follow their guide up the front steps of Monticello, past those iconic white pillars and into the domed building's aura of wonder. The wooden floor creaks like the knees of an aged host rising from his seat to explain a few things.

The guide speaks in present tense of the home's most famous occupant — Mr. Jefferson, as he is often referred to around here — while leading the tour into the family sitting room, where his daughter Martha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seeking UFOs, Underground]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1553</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1553</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tomas Alex Tizon: Harrington, Wash.

"That door," he says with dramatic pause. "That door weighs 4,000 pounds. It's been reinforced to withstand a nuclear blast."

Peter Davenport has a radio voice, the kind of exaggerated baritone that cuts through walls and most doors, but not this one. This is solid steel and a foot thick.

It is Davenport's door, which opens into a tunnel leading below ground to what was once a nuclear missile complex here in the desert of eastern Washington.

The Air Force ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dancing, Just Not At The Dance]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1554</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1554</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Inara Verzemnieks: There's no way to get scientific about it, to quantify the minutes of lost sleep, the number of Buffalo wings gobbled during an all-you-can eat bracket-party frenzy, the strangers who shout good luck from windows -- the collective joy of a team that's tumbled into the strange reality of March Madness for the first time. But we can zero in on one player from Portland State's basketball team.

Four days after he learned that his team is bound for the NCAA Tournament -- one day a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Journal of a Journalist]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1551</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1551</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:06:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Russell Nichols, a freelance writer and poet who used to pound a city beat at the Boston Globe:

with a kiss, i interviewed your soul your smile was an inverted pyramid telling me the good news before a single word was uttered you didn't miss a beat and i kept coming back for another scoop scattered articles of clothing gave away the story you liked me because my methods were old-fashioned i was networking with your mind, body and spirit making contacts with your eyes but i was unethical ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Brothers In Arms]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1550</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1550</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:35:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Cullen: BURLINGTON – They were brothers, and they grew up in a small, white house, on a small side street, in a section of town the locals call The Flats.

more stories like this James Russell, 78; owned company Boston parades its Irish pride Marines to honor fallen comrade with St. Patrick's Day visit 22 Marines to salute comrade with visit Mark MacDonald couldn't hear, so his parents and siblings were his ears.

Greg MacDonald learned many things from his big brother, Mark, but if he lea]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Brothers In Arms]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1550</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1550</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Cullen: BURLINGTON - They were brothers, and they grew up in a small, white house, on a small side street, in a section of town the locals call The Flats.

more stories like this James Russell, 78; owned company Boston parades its Irish pride Marines to honor fallen comrade with St. Patrick's Day visit 22 Marines to salute comrade with visit Mark MacDonald couldn't hear, so his parents and siblings were his ears.

Greg MacDonald learned many things from his big brother, Mark, but if he lea]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Journal of a Journalist]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1551</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1551</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Russell Nichols, a freelance writer and poet who used to pound a city beat at the Boston Globe:

with a kiss, i interviewed your soul your smile was an inverted pyramid telling me the good news before a single word was uttered you didn't miss a beat and i kept coming back for another scoop scattered articles of clothing gave away the story you liked me because my methods were old-fashioned i was networking with your mind, body and spirit making contacts with your eyes but i was unethical ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Taking on the Trust]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1549</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1549</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:21:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[WSJ Review:

A Reporter at the Ramparts By PAUL E. STEIGER March 28, 2008; Page W5

Taking on the Trust By Steve Weinberg (Norton, 304 pages, $29.95)

In 1901, John D. Rockefeller had reason for optimism.

His Standard Oil empire dominated the global petroleum business. His products had found satisfied customers in every nook and cranny of business and household life. The year before he had covered half the $500,000 in campaign expenses incurred by William McKinley, the recently re-elected Repub]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Death Of Ernie Pyle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1548</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1548</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:19:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery: If the old man is to be believed, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, then when Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese bullet on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, on April 18, 1945, inside his satchel were notes the respected war reporter had taken the day before.

These notes contained the name of a soldier and a hometown: John Smit, Chicago.

An unfinished story.

Here's the rest of it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Delayed Props To Konrad]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1547</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1547</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:14:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our apologies, and congratulations, to Konrad Marshall, whose stories, In Full View and Looking Back, should also have been mentioned as finalists in the Long category of the 2008 Goat Awards.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Death Of Ernie Pyle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1548</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1548</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery: If the old man is to be believed, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, then when Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese bullet on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, on April 18, 1945, inside his satchel were notes the respected war reporter had taken the day before.

These notes contained the name of a soldier and a hometown: John Smit, Chicago.

An unfinished story.

Here's the rest of it.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Taking on the Trust]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1549</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1549</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[WSJ Review:

A Reporter at the Ramparts By PAUL E. STEIGER March 28, 2008; Page W5

Taking on the Trust By Steve Weinberg (Norton, 304 pages, $29.95)

In 1901, John D. Rockefeller had reason for optimism.

His Standard Oil empire dominated the global petroleum business. His products had found satisfied customers in every nook and cranny of business and household life. The year before he had covered half the $500,000 in campaign expenses incurred by William McKinley, the recently re-elected Repub]]></description>
      <author>Wright</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Home Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1546</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1546</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:38:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: TAMPA — They arrested Audie Grogg one night in January, for no good reason, and one bad thing led to another. Jail is expensive. He was in his motor home, out of gas by the side of the road. He had a Coke and a Hershey bar. He had a flare gun beside him, painted black, in case of robbers. That was the first felony charge.

A few things to know about Grogg: He's a Georgia boy, 52 years old, Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots. He welded for a living till his eyesight deteriorated, and then a c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hoops To Hipsters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1544</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1544</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:26:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: Half the history of Converse is about basketball, and the rest is about something far more complicated, about the ways a plain sneaker is consistently adored by anticonsumer consumers. A Converse on a teenager now is about remaining authentic and cool, while selling out in every possible way. It is perhaps the neatest trick in footwear history, and who would have thought it, when Marquis Mills Converse first started making simple, rubber-soled work shoes at a factory outside Boston]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Like This, But Huge]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1543</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1543</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:10:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[S.I. Rosenbaum: You're living in the Vermont woods in a four-story dome you built yourself. Well, the third floor is really a trampoline. You're not sure if that counts as a floor.

So you're living in your dome, working on all your little robots — the one like a slug, and the one like a turtle, the one that swims and the one that climbs walls — and you decide it would be cool to have a giant robot, big enough to ride around in.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hope]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1542</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1542</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:59:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If we could clone this youngster like 14 million times, we could all sleep easier. Johnny … Son — can I call you son? — please let your light shine.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More (Or Less)]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1541</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1541</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:55:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wowzers. Memo to the Mercury News: That means we need to provide a wide assortment, in terms of subject matter, tone, emotional appeal, length and appearance. Yes, it means we will still run in-depth projects. But with a smaller staff and greater demands from readers, it means we must revamp our processes and we must produce more and shorter stories – and this includes more enterprise stories. These are my expectations of all of you. We want to have the highest quality but we also need to consid]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The 2008 Goat Awards]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1535</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1535</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[SHORT

Caryn Bush Baird, Here's 8 Years of Change.

Other finalists in this category were Brazen Meets Kind in a Courtroom, by Colleen Jenkins; and Scharf's Last Act: A Call to 911, by Cindy Lange-Kubick.

MEDIUM

Cindy Lange-Kubick, Zach and the Reading Thrones.

Other finalists in this category were Not the Same Old Song, Dance, by Doyle Murphy; and The Princess Inquries, by William Booth.

LONG

Jennifer Brown, Healing & Mercy.

Other finalists in this category were Journey of Love Through Me]]></description>
      <author>Gangrey.com</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[March Madness]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1533</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1533</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brady McCollough, who turns this story in a day.

Shawn Windsor, who gets unheard of access and shows us an inside look at the life of a college basketball coach.

And Dirk Chatelain, who outlines a game where scars can sometime stack up against blue-chip, NBA-level talent.]]></description>
      <author>Reiter</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Year's Worth Of Eli Saslow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1504</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1504</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[For money: "By offering a chance at instant money and athletic glory, the Ultimate Game had created dozens of awkward unions between poor golfers who wanted to be rich and rich businessmen who wanted to be golfers."

For tradition: "He took a swig and handed back the flask. Then he lifted himself up over a wall and dropped back into the riot."

And for curiosity, ego, opportunity, community, adrenaline and identity. That's what Eli explores through eight great stories . Enjoy.]]></description>
      <author>Reiter</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Color Of Blood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1503</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1503</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Calvin Trillin: What happened at the foot of the driveway at 40 Independence Way that hot August night in 2006 took less than three minutes. The police later managed to time it precisely, using a surveillance camera that points directly at the street from a house a couple of doors to the north. The readout on the surveillance tape said that it was 23:06:11 when two cars whizzed by going south, toward the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. At 23:09:06, the first car passed back in front of the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Take Sides]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1499</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1499</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Angry journalists.

Happy journalists.

Which are you?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Match, Over Coffee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1500</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1500</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Yardley: TACOMA, Wash. — Annamarie Ausnes is known for holding up the line at her favorite Starbucks here, carefully counting out her coins to pay for her "short drip, double-cupped" daily jolt. Over the years, Sandie Andersen, a friendly barista behind the counter, might have rolled her eyes once or twice but she has also taken these morning moments to make conversation, to make friends.

Grandchildren? A favorite topic. That tan Ms. Ausnes brought in one day? A vacation souvenir. And t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Frank Deford]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1501</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1501</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Clark: I learned that Deford likes to work on paper of different colors. All writers struggle with imagining and constructing the big parts of the story, an architecture often hard to see in advance. To help him organize his material, Deford uses the colored paper trick. Notes and quotes for his opening scene might go on robin blue; the historical background on marigold; the conclusion on hot pink. Deford perked up when I told him that Esquire magazine had published not only the text of Gay ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Advice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1502</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1502</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Reid Forgrave at the Des Moines Register: In our newsroom, we're having discussions about what are the best ways to do storytelling online. Some have argued that there's no place for "narrative" storytelling online, that people won't take the time to sit down and read true "stories" online, that storytelling must take a different (and presumably less time-intensive) form when it's done online. I, of course, demurred. I think there's surely a place for long-form narrative storytelling online]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dark Highway]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1491</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1491</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:57:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Coming Sunday. This has me teased. Thoughts?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Spill]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1490</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1490</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:38:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tomas Alex Tizon: CORDOVA, ALASKA — By way of telling his story, and the story of this fishing village, Mike Maxwell — born, raised and hoping to die here — wants to talk about what happened to the herring.

They were the little kings of the sea in these parts. They ran so thick in Prince William Sound that some days, it was said, you could walk on the water stepping on their silvery-blue backs.

When the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil in March 1989, the world saw images of blackened seabirds and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sheeler Splits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1489</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1489</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:12:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Professor Sheeler. I'd take his class. Congrats, Jim. Too bad for newspapers.

At the same time, Sheeler believes that the art of storytelling will be as important tomorrow as it is today. "No matter what medium we're reporting in, somebody's got to be there to write the stories," he says, "and I think that's where journalism is going to be headed. You need to give people a reason to really invest their time in a story, and to do that, you have to write it well."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1488</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1488</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:34:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[BENNINGTON, Vt. (AP) — W.C. "Bill" Heinz, a sportswriter and author who witnessed the Normandy invasion on D-Day, covered some of the greatest sports events of the 1940s and helped write the book "MASH," has died. He was 93. His daughter, Gayl Heinz of Amesbury, Mass., said he died early Wednesday in Bennington. The cause of death was not released. A New York native, he attended Middlebury College in the 1930s and then went on to become a reporter at the New York Sun. During World War II, he rep]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ups]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1487</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1487</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:09:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Just wanted to let everyone know: Bill Reiter of the KC Star has four top tens in the APSE contest currently being judged in Florida, which is a truly astounding number of awards, and further proves that he is one of best sports projects reporters in the country.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tiny. Evil. Everywhere.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1486</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1486</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:06:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Segal (thanks, Raja): NEW YORK — Nobody had seen one in decades. Then, five years ago, they started showing up in homes and hotels across the country, prompting a flood of calls to pest control professionals. And nothing, it seems, can stop them.

No, not bedbugs. Bedbug newspaper stories. Since the return of Cimex lectularius, as the bedbug is formally known, more than 400 articles have wriggled into print, all making roughly the same point: The bloodsucking critters are back, and in numb]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Just Isn't Fair]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1485</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1485</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:13:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here: If nature abhors a vacuum (not that anyone in this town knows what a vacuum is), does Hollywood abhor the absence of a Vanity Fair Oscars party? Oh, stop the whining. So what if it feels like a school night? We're still crashing, whatever we can, however we can. Party reporters can't spell "pride."

The Governors Ball is held in a mall, we discover. It is at the Kodak Theatre, but not in the Kodak Theatre. So there is no valet. Instead the guests arrive by . . . escalator. At the entrance,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Capt. Kearney's Quagmire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1484</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1484</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:57:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Elizabeth Rubin: WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan's northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1483</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1483</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:44:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank in Hollywood: Wouldn't it be great if they just walked in, blew right past everyone, like they were late for something, and nobody cared? If they did not stop to talk about their clothes, their morning wakey-wakey-eggs-and-bakey and what sort of breath mints they're contractually obligated to carry along in their bejeweled clutches? What if they simply used the red carpet as a conveyance, a path, from the limo to their Kodak Theatre chair? Wouldn't the world honestly be a better place?

Dan]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Breslin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1482</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1482</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:45:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Interview via WAMC.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1481</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1481</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This almost made me cry. If somebody saves this paper, please let me on board.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[2008 ASNE Awards]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1472</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1472</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's the list.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fetching Doggedness]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1456</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1456</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: The king of doggedness, who excels at biting his lip and biding his time, waits out the last hours guardedly. Onstage, he projects victory. Offstage, he knocks on wood, or more precisely, the woodlike table of his campaign bus. On a plane in Newark, just before taking off for San Diego yesterday, John McCain says he's nervous, in his McCainian way: "I'm always nervous and I'm always superstitious and I'm always a pain in a certain part of the anatomy to most of my friends and ass]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Recruit Who Wasn't]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1457</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1457</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: Before an assembly of his high school classmates last week, with all the fervor and high dudgeon only a pep rally can conjure, a football player from Nevada announced his commitment to play for the University of California. Then the university announced it had made no such offer.

Now the player, his coach, the schools and a shadowy recruiting figure are the focus of investigations concerning two main questions: Who duped whom? And how did it get this far?

"I've heard of kids com]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson In Uncivil Civics]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1458</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1458</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: A longing for reform, for fresh faces and new ideas, has overtaken Knox County, so much so that many people here cannot wait to vote in the Super Tuesday primary. And it has nothing to do with who might be the next president.

You would understand this desire if you had attended last week's meeting of the Knox County Commission; that is, if you had the seven hours to spare. But since you probably weren't there, and be thankful for that, here is a quick primer on local, uncivil civics ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Life In The Shadows]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1459</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1459</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's a column with a sharp lede and a strong voice. Kevin Cullen has the makings of a great metro columnist. See what you think.]]></description>
      <author>Mark Johnson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Guy Behind The Guy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1454</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1454</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: PHOENIX -- You don't notice Ernie Adams at first, but he's always there in his own peculiar way. Walking the halls in the Patriots' complex, lost in his own thoughts, he will often ignore co-workers. In meetings, he has been known to fall asleep. After practice, he is almost always the first person Bill Belichick consults. On game day, he's in the press box with a headset on, running numbers, computing percentages and, some around the league insinuate, overseeing more insidious ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA["Find me someone like that"]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1455</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1455</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's an Encounters from John Barry.]]></description>
      <author>Mike</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Deadline Looms]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1453</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1453</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[...to enter The Goats, which to my knowledge gives you a deal never before seen in the history of newspaper awards: ten bucks and a minimum of paperwork gets your work read by a jury of some of the profession's best writers and editors.

Be bold.

And remember that 100 percent of your entry fee will go to a good cause.

In other words:

You can't lose.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Things The Little Girl Said]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1451</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1451</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael Kruse: On the evening of Aug. 22, 2005, a camcorder clicked on in a gated community called Pristine Place.

Natalie Shelton, bleached blond and 25 at the time, sat on a couch wearing a tight white tank top and a blue denim miniskirt.

To her left was her daughter. The 6-year-old girl with brown, shoulder-length hair slouched on the couch with her arms crossed and looked at her mother.

"Okay," Natalie's neighbor friend Patti said from behind the camera.¶ "Okay," Natalie said."Will y]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Harry's Tales]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1452</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1452</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jim Sheeler: When the intelligent man in the thrift-store clothes parked his rickety bicycle outside a restaurant or bar, the customers heard him before they saw him, and everyone knew to prepare for another round of Harry.

With his commanding voice, the tall, athletically chiseled man would immediately edge his way into conversations, stirring debate, often just for the sake of debate. If anyone listened, he would eventually steer the conversation toward his favorite subject: himself. He would]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In The End, Goodbye With Love And Dignity]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1450</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1450</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Newman: "It's not a joke," said the tall man in the F.D.N.Y. hat as he left the funeral home. "I mean, it's somebody's life, that just happened to pass away. Same thing's going to happen to all of us."

The somebody was Virgilio Cintron, last seen, and forever to be remembered in the public imagination, being wheeled down Ninth Avenue in an office chair, dressed in a T-shirt and unbuttoned pants, as two of his friends tried to keep his corpse from sliding to the sidewalk.

Monday was Mr. Ci]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Distinguished Panel]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1449</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1449</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:12:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As if you didn't have enough reason already to submit your stories to The Goats, here are some of the people who have agreed to help judge the contest.

Christopher Goffard, Pulitzer finalist, reporter, Los Angeles Times, author of Snitch Jacket.

Hank Stuever, Pulitzer finalist, reporter, purveyor of the conceptual scoop, Washington Post, author of Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere.

Luke Dittrich, freelance writer whose work has appeared in Esquire.

Jan Winburn, ent]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Entering Sector D]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1448</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1448</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Jan 2008 09:06:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Henry Allen: There's something about the word "disembowel." Or "depravity," or "disfigurement" — about so many words that begin with the letter "d." Divorce, destitution, doubt, drugs, dirt, dwindle. So many of them are on our lips just now — though not "disembowel," and we should be thankful for that much. Once more, as a nation, we have entered Sector D.

As in: debacle, depression, debt and debauchery.

Which is to say: mission unaccomplished in Iraq, world stock markets on tumble-dry, subpri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Marrow Of The Bone Of Contention]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1447</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1447</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:53:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jake Adam York: Until I had moved to New York, the phrase "good barbecue" meant nothing to me.

In Alabama, there was only barbecue — and a food either was or was not barbecue. Barbecue was ultimate good, and there were no degrees to perfection.

For years, we ate only at Bar B Q Bob's, a large A-frame joint as far across town as a place could be. It looked as though it been an International House of Pancakes at some point, and someone should have remembered or asked, but nothing — not the stran]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Spook]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1446</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1446</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:01:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Meacham: The first time the manager of Clock Family Restaurant in Zephyrhills offered Wilfred "Spook" Wyman a refill on his coffee, he was soundly rejected.

"He said, 'G– d— it, leave me alone,'" recalled Al Asenavage, 36. "It blew me away."

He learned that the cardinal rule of restaurant work – that one must give respect in order to receive it – did not always apply.

"With Spook," he said, "you had to give disrespect to get respect." Today, Asenavage considers Mr. Wyman his favorite cus]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Old Men And The Sea]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1445</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1445</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:39:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Goffard: Like the other old men at this Costa Mesa boatyard, where the hulls of peeling sloops and half-made cutters rot on their wooden posts, Karl Markvart can't be certain he'll live long enough to reach the water.

Again and again, he's watched the boat builders around him lose their race to the sea, their unfinished vessels hauled off to the junkyard to make room for another boat, another mad dreamer.

At 69, Markvart knows it's dangerous to dwell on the size of the task before him, a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1444</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1444</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:11:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: Two of Washington's airports — Dulles and Reagan National — will soon be part of the federal government's Registered Traveler program, which offers passengers the happy prospect of getting through security lines faster, swifter, better. (Ninety thousand of them and counting have enrolled.) All you need do is pay an annual fee — $100 to start, plus a $28 shakedown so the government can make sure you're, you know, okay. Next you submit all sorts of personal information, fingerprints ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eight Days Left]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1443</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1443</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:01:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't be scared. Submit your stories to The Goats.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Gorgeous Porcelain Tiger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1442</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1442</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:23:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This story is very, very long. I suggest you print out and read it before bed.

Satisfaction is guaranteed.

But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petrole]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Friday Clicks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1441</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1441</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:11:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland with the snow birds: BOCA RATON, Fla. — The best place to meet the Floridians who could save Rudy Giuliani's hide is here at the Flakowitz Bagel Inn, where just about everybody is from New York, and just about everyone remembers how the former mayor either: (a) cleaned up their city, or (b) turned out to be a real jerk.

"He's a very, very smart guy," says Carl Liss, 79, a transplant from Queens who's sitting at the long counter, eating a bagel with low-fat cream cheese. (Choleste]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Don't Forget]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1440</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1440</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:09:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't forget.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Burying The 'Leder']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1421</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1421</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It was only a matter of time: On Jan. 9, Wall Street Journal bureau chiefs from around the world gathered for a night of cocktails and dinner at the Marriott Hotel on West Street in the Financial District.

It was the annual bureau chiefs' meeting, and it gave Rupert Murdoch his first chance to speak to bureau chiefs and senior editors at Dow Jones en masse, and to answer some questions.

It didn't take long for Mr. Murdoch to start some controversy. At the meeting, according to three people who]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Reminder]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1422</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1422</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Scene I: Foggy, mid-town Manhattan street. Woman #1 (wild, bloodshot eyes) is running down the blacktop, zigging, zaggin, checking over her shoulder, shouting with fear. She runs into Man #1, who catches her in his arms for a beat, then stares into her maddened face.

Man #1: Calm down, lady. (Shakes her violently) What are coming?

Woman #1: The Goats! The Goats!

Man #1: (Baffled) The goats?

Woman #1: Yeah! The *&%$# Goats!

Man #1: Run for your lives!]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lebrew Jones]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1419</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1419</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this investigative multimedia package from Christine Young at the Times Herald-Record.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Question That Almost Wasn't Asked]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1414</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1414</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Holding the bombshell. Saving the last bite of cake. Whatever you call it, read this one to the end.

Here's Andy Netzel's take: My first reaction was: I love it. Wow! I can't believe they waited until the end for that bomb.

Upon further review, though, I wonder how many people actually got there. This story also ran on 1A in the Plain Dealer today, and of the three people I mentioned it to, I was the only one who read the last sentence. These are all people who read most things in the paper ev]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1409</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1409</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: The trick is to watch TV as if your mother never allowed you to watch all the TV you wanted (or never allowed it at all), and she is about to come into the room and tell you to turn it off and go outside. In that frame of mind, all television becomes so much more enticing, because a television with junk on it looks great compared with the horror of a television that is off.

An ode to a copy editor, by Phill Casaus: My favorite journalist in The Trib newsroom is leaving us Monday, and I]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Goats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1408</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1408</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is it, folks. The time has come. Gangrey.com is sponsoring a new kind of writing contest.

We're calling it The Goats. For each winner, we will donate a goat to feed a hungry child.

We are seeking the finest newspaper work from the calendar year 2007. We will not classify these stories by publication size or subject matter. We will have just three categories: Short (under 700 words), Medium (700 to 2,000 words), and Long (over 2,000 words.)

As Ben wrote in a previous post: "We're going to]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Drunken Night In Iraq]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1407</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1407</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Donna St. George: The sun had not yet risen in Taji. A young Army soldier lay alone in the dirt. She was alive, but barely. Her ribs had been crushed; her spleen, ruptured. Her right side was marked by the angular tread of a tire.

Pfc. Hannah Gunterman McKinney was 20 years old, the brown-eyed mother of a toddler son, when she was spotted in the headlights of a passing Humvee on a perimeter road at one of the largest U.S. military camps in Iraq.

Thirteen hours later, in Redlands, Calif., Barbi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1403</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1403</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:39:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane Degregory: SARASOTA — Every morning, Susan Stanton wakes early and takes three pills. They help her suppress who she was and become the person she believes she should be.

At 9 a.m., still in her pajamas, she climbs the stairs in her Sarasota bungalow, clicks on her computer and goes to work. Looking for a job.

"I miss the 16-hour days, working with so many bright people, leading the city. I still love Largo," she says.

"I think I'm suffering from 'Pretty girl syndrome': People assume I'm]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[His Battle Was Hers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1402</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1402</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Dec 2007 13:20:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erin Sullivan: SAN ANTONIO — David Roth had a simple Christmas; at home with his mom and dad andhis older brother who flew in from New Jersey, sharing good food, playing outside with his golden retriever, Callie. The Roth home is set far back off a dirt road in San Antonio. It's serene and smells of burned leaves and earth. David, who is 14, likes being outside, breathing deep under a blue sky. It's pure, he says.

He doesn't want people stressed over the holidays. There will be burned turkeys. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vision Of Truth, Guided By God]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1401</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1401</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:59:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to Baird for passing on the following essay by James Lee Burke, whose recent book, The Tin Roof Blowdown, is supposed to be pretty good.

Check it out: I have never thought of my vocation as work. I never had what is called writer's block, nor have I ever measured the value of what I do in terms of its commercial success. I also believe that whatever degree of creative talent I possess was not earned but was given to me by a power outside myself, for a specific purpose, one that has littl]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Stories From The Middle Of The Country:]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1400</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1400</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:40:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lee Hill Kavanaugh introduces us to a woman who escaped a death sentence in Iraq.

Shawn Windsor profiles the new man at Michigan.

Reid Forgrave goes for a narrative on deadline.

Maura Lerner finds the family that fell when the I-35 bridge collapsed.

J. Brady McCollough on faith and a famous athlete.

Jim Tankersley, an accomplished narrative-writer-turned-political-reporter, takes a look at a transformed John Edwards.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Inconvenient Rock]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1399</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1399</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:46:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Back in my Jacksonville days, I used to play poker with a rookie reporter named Brad Schmidt. He was the smartest player in our group, although, for some reason, that rarely translated into victory. Funny how games of chance work. (He also played for the Times-Union Freebirds, a spirited but outmanned rec-league hoops team, and I seem to recall him hitting a baseline jumper or two.) Anyway, Brad's at the Oregonian now, and I think he's beginning to hit his stride. Check out this piece:

CASCADE ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Whopper Gets Old]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1398</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1398</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:32:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Somehow, this story manages to be touching and hilarious all at once. In fact, on balance, I think I like it better than the one about taquitos.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mike Levine Workshop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1397</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1397</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:37:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please consider making a donation to this fundraiser to help get the Mike Levine Journalism Workshop off the ground. And spread the word. (The site accepts donations via PayPal).

Beloved newspaper columnist and former Times Herald-Record editor Mike Levine died suddenly in January of 2007. The Mike Levine Column Read-a-Thon is a special event in memory of Mike and it's the first major fundraiser for the inaugural Mike Levine Journalism Workshop – a workshop aimed at keeping the principles and p]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Staying Married Was The Hard Part]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1396</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1396</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:14:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy described writing this gem of an obit thusly: "Like trying to put a playing card between two wood blocks. The one wood block is easy praise of the dead, the other is being unnecessarily catty. And you're trying to find something in between."

Did he succeed?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Classifieds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1395</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1395</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Dec 2007 09:19:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Ferrara: This is a collection of stories from the sometimes cyclical world of consumerism. Stories about getting what you paid for, about what it means to have something other people want. It's also about letting go of memories. Stories of change, family and home.

They were found in the Press-Register's own classified section.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Writing Too Much]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1394</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1394</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Dec 2007 08:47:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Clark Kauffman (thanks, Nigel): Unbridled lust! Unspoken passion! Unemployment!

A Sioux Center woman has been fired from her job at an industrial equipment manufacturer for working on a romance novel on company time.

In August, Tanja Shelton, 35, began working at Sioux Automation in Sioux Center, where she was given a desk job as a production control scheduler. After a few weeks, her supervisor, Cindy Altena, noticed Shelton was typing almost constantly.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Late Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1371</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1371</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the Chicago Trib's Rex Huppke comes Jamie's Story.

From the Plain Dealer comes Holiday letters dissected.

Cindy Lange-Kubick in Lincoln on Gary Scharf's last act: He was antsy at lunch Wednesday.

His girlfriend still had 10 minutes before she had to be back at work, but Gary wanted to get going.

And a rant against the anecdotal lede: I am sick to death of the anecdotal lead, that annoying habit of news writers to start a straightforward story by painting a quaint little picture of every]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[MIA]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1372</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1372</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dave Tarrant at the Dallas Morning News with a story: In Sallie's dream, Chuck stands behind a chain-link fence. He tells her that he will be gone a long time, but ultimately they will reunite. When the night is darkest and fear creeps into her soul, she revisits the dream and holds it close.

This is one of those times.

It is early, before sunrise. Or as her husband, the Air Force navigator, might have said, "Zero dark hundred."

Today – Jan. 27, 1973 – the governments of the United States, No]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gatorade]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1360</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1360</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery, now in Floridian: The man who brought us Gatorade, that kick, that burst of something in the fourth quarter, died of kidney failure last week at 80. His name was Dr. J. Robert Cade, and even as his clock ticked down, he drank orange Gatorade every morning, as if extra electrolytes could push him past the final buzzer, into overtime.]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Songbird]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1361</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1361</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy: Those in the karaoke crowd still stretching last call in the lounge don't see Joe leave, and they didn't see what brought him here, either. They didn't see him five years ago when he barely left the house and didn't want to.

A young blonde woman at the bar asks, "Why are you writing a story about him? What's so special about him?"

The answer had just buttoned his second cardigan over his first and groped blindly into the night.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Love Song Of Dennis Kucinich]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1362</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1362</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: HART'S LOCATION, N.H. -- One day last spring, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Democrat and long-shot presidential candidate, and his young British wife, Elizabeth, were sitting in an Italian restaurant in Dupont Circle.

They were by the window. They were holding hands. Elizabeth Kucinich was looking lovely, as usual -- the red hair, the luminous skin, the green eyes, the fine cheekbones. Dennis was looking, as usual, like Dennis Kucinich.

This guy passed by the window. He stoppe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Framed By Assasins]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1358</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1358</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: On trial for three killings connected to a strip parlor in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a bouncer told jurors yesterday that he was being framed by a squad of police assassins acting on orders from a corrupt detective who was out to shake down the bouncer's private security business while his martial arts students conducted countersurveillance black ops against the Police Department.

He vowed to prove this just as soon as his mother arrived at the courthouse with a secret notebook of e]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Principal's Son]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1359</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1359</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joe Posnanski: They bow to Trey Hillman. And they bow. And they bow. He walks through the winding tunnels of the Sapporo Dome, and it is a concrete maze — it took him two years as manager of the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters to figure out where he was going. He passes so many people bowing, it looks as if everyone has spontaneously decided to do the wave.

He pauses briefly in his walk to bow his head to each person. It's an American bow, more of a nod, really. Walk. Nod. Walk. Hillman has never ]]></description>
      <author>Reiter</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cop Works In Shadow Of Doubt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1355</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1355</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: On a warm fall night two years ago, as the moon rose over Lake Tarpon, a silver Nissan Pathfinder rolled down a boat ramp and plunged into water the color of dark chocolate.

No one was inside as the Pathfinder sank. Its registered owner was Robert Scott Gattuso, a resident of New Port Richey. He said it had been stolen.

Gattuso was a Pasco County sheriff's deputy. He was paid to investigate others. Now he found himself under investigation.

Again.

In two decades with the agency, Gat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Zoo Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1356</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1356</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Be sure to read Tom French's series, Zoo Story: Eleven elephants. One plane. Hurtling together across the sky.

The scene sounds like a dream conjured by Dali. And yet here it is, playing out high above the Atlantic.

Inside the belly of a 747, 11 elephants are deep into a flight from South Africa to Florida. These are not circus elephants, accustomed to captivity. All are wild, plucked from game reserves in Swaziland. All are headed for zoos in San Diego and Tampa.

The date is Aug. 21, 2003 - ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trouble on a Vital Road]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1357</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1357</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chivers: The ruined Afghan police truck smoldered on the highway in the village bazaar, flames rising from its cargo bed. The village was silent. Its residents had hidden themselves before an American patrol arrived.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1352</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1352</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Smith: As the children swarmed toward the glowing windows of the school, the van drivers, mostly fathers just off third shift, stepped out to admonish them to zip up coats and to listen to the teachers.

Speaking in Maay Maay, the language of the Bantu of Somalia, they reminded the children to watch out for one another until they returned to get them. Only then did the men depart, one task finished in a daily, exhausting progression of making it in America.

The van pool emerged last year]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Go, Now, To Pittsburgh]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1353</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1353</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Segal(thanks, Celina): Looking for a perfect little weekend vacation this fall? Here's a travel tip you don't hear very often: Head to Pittsburgh. Right away.

Seriously, get in the car and read this story later, because when you're done reading, you'll wish you'd left 10 minutes ago. There are towns with better vistas, sure, and there are getaways with more sunshine. But only Pittsburgh is the scene of the fabulously tawdry and surpassingly vicious spectacle that is the divorce of Richard]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Caught In A Storm, Eyes Wide Open]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1354</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1354</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: A boy named Isaiah Polk went off one day to see what he could see. He scaled a chain-link fence at the back of his tired FEMA trailer park, where fetid water gathers, and escaped into woods declared off-limits by his mother after reports of poisonous snakes.

On that hot July afternoon, Isaiah and two friends hunted for tiny crabs, threw dirt bombs and visited the cemetery across the creek where his grandfather, who used to give him firecrackers, is buried. They also found treasure: a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ian's Peace]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1351</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1351</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:52:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Watch this (thanks, MEM): On June 23, News & Observer photojournalists Travis Long, Takaaki Iwabu, Ethan Hyman, and Juli Leonard visited the Eno Quarry in Durham to shoot video and still images for an in-house project on the quarry. The group had envisioned a light piece on swimming hole culture.

A few weeks later, they were contacted by the family of 19-year-old Ian Creath, who had drowned in the quarry on July 9. The family sought the last-known video and photographs of him.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eros' Spell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1350</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1350</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:35:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: YBOR CITY – Long ago at the Columbia Restaurant, a waiter made his way through the tables, flaming cocktail teetering aboard his tray.

The drink was called "Spanish Flag on Fire." It had been invented by Columbia's flamboyant violinist/owner, Cesar Gonzmart. It was a mix of green Spanish Licor 43, red grenadine and Bacardi 151 rum – green, red and white, like the flag of Basque.

Waiters darkened the room and set the thing ablaze before they served it.

On this fateful night, the wa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eros' Spell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1350</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1350</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: YBOR CITY - Long ago at the Columbia Restaurant, a waiter made his way through the tables, flaming cocktail teetering aboard his tray.

The drink was called "Spanish Flag on Fire." It had been invented by Columbia's flamboyant violinist/owner, Cesar Gonzmart. It was a mix of green Spanish Licor 43, red grenadine and Bacardi 151 rum - green, red and white, like the flag of Basque.

Waiters darkened the room and set the thing ablaze before they served it.

On this fateful night, the wa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ian's Peace]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1351</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1351</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Watch this (thanks, MEM): On June 23, News & Observer photojournalists Travis Long, Takaaki Iwabu, Ethan Hyman, and Juli Leonard visited the Eno Quarry in Durham to shoot video and still images for an in-house project on the quarry. The group had envisioned a light piece on swimming hole culture.

A few weeks later, they were contacted by the family of 19-year-old Ian Creath, who had drowned in the quarry on July 9. The family sought the last-known video and photographs of him.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Doing The Math]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1349</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1349</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:59:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: TAMPA — The arena was cold and quiet and full of children. Nearly 400 of them, heads down, pencils in hand, deep in thought. It was nothing less than a thinking contest.

These were the Hillsborough County's brightest students, or at least a good fraction of its future engineers and rocket scientists, and they came to the USF Sun Dome on Wednesday morning for something called the Winter Math Bowl. Each one had a story. Especially the boy with the sleepy eyes and the mountainous Afro.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Doing The Math]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1349</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1349</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: TAMPA -- The arena was cold and quiet and full of children. Nearly 400 of them, heads down, pencils in hand, deep in thought. It was nothing less than a thinking contest.

These were the Hillsborough County's brightest students, or at least a good fraction of its future engineers and rocket scientists, and they came to the USF Sun Dome on Wednesday morning for something called the Winter Math Bowl. Each one had a story. Especially the boy with the sleepy eyes and the mountainous Afro.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inside The Surge]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1348</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1348</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:35:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jon Lee Anderson: Joint Security Station Thrasher, in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, is housed in a Saddam-era mansion with twenty-foot columns and a fountain, now dry, that looks like a layer cake of concrete and limestone. The mansion and two adjacent houses have been surrounded by blast walls. J.S.S. Thrasher was set up last March, and is part of the surge in troops engineered by General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq. Moving units out of large bases and into Joint S]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Storming The News Gatekeepers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1347</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1347</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:59:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jose Antonio Vargas: NEW YORK — Aboard the crowded D train, rumbling into Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, the inevitable rant explodes. A rant courtesy of Faye Anderson, whom we'll call Ms. CJ, a.k.a. Citizen Journalist. A rant directed at us, Mr. MSM, a.k.a. Mainstream Media, for all our perceived faults.

"It's not you, the journalist, it's the institution," Ms. CJ tells Mr. MSM. "You're not telling the whole story. . . . You've lost your credibility."

We listen, take notes, check if the ta]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Storming The News Gatekeepers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1347</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1347</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jose Antonio Vargas: NEW YORK -- Aboard the crowded D train, rumbling into Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, the inevitable rant explodes. A rant courtesy of Faye Anderson, whom we'll call Ms. CJ, a.k.a. Citizen Journalist. A rant directed at us, Mr. MSM, a.k.a. Mainstream Media, for all our perceived faults.

"It's not you, the journalist, it's the institution," Ms. CJ tells Mr. MSM. "You're not telling the whole story. . . . You've lost your credibility."

We listen, take notes, check if the t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Brass Balls and Infinite Patience]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1346</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1346</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:06:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dorsey Kindler with William Langewiesche: Back in Davis, Langewiesche was about to finish his second Heineken when he mentioned one of his pet peeves – the mini-industry that had crept up around telling people how to write. It was mostly geared toward novelists, but it didn't matter. The books could all be boiled down to one sentence: write well.

"There is no special club," he said. "It doesn't matter who your friends are. It doesn't matter where you went to school. It only matters what you're ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hunting For Militants]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1345</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1345</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2007 08:20:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chivers: First Lt. Aaron W. Childers stood before a doorway inside a mud-walled compound while an Afghan and American patrol searched behind him. Paratroopers swept metal detectors over the dusty ground, looking for buried weapons and ammunition.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Happy Thanksgiving]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1344</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1344</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Nov 2007 07:41:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's to getting better, and to helping each other along the way. Happy Thanksgiving.

Dar Williams:

Amber called her uncle, said "We're up here for the holiday, Jane and I were having Solstice, now we need a place to stay." And her Christ-loving uncle watched his wife hang Mary on a tree, He watched his son hang candy canes all made with red dye number three. He told his niece, "It's Christmas Eve, I know our life is not your style," She said, "Christmas is like Solstice, and we miss you and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Happy Thanksgiving]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1344</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1344</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's to getting better, and to helping each other along the way. Happy Thanksgiving.

Dar Williams:

Amber called her uncle, said "We're up here for the holiday, Jane and I were having Solstice, now we need a place to stay." And her Christ-loving uncle watched his wife hang Mary on a tree, He watched his son hang candy canes all made with red dye number three. He told his niece, "It's Christmas Eve, I know our life is not your style," She said, "Christmas is like Solstice, and we miss you and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Humanitarian Crisis]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1343</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1343</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:44:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gettleman: The people here are hungry, exposed, sick and dying. And the few aid organizations willing to brave a lawless, notoriously dangerous environment cannot keep up with their needs, like providing milk to the thousands of babies with fading heartbeats and bulging eyes.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trojan Force]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1342</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1342</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:32:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eric Neel: "At some point — maybe after your parents have died and you're not trying to please them anymore — at some point you have to decide what truly matters to you and what you believe in. And then you have to have the balls to commit to it."

There's something testimonial about the way he says it, plainly, over a bowl of chocolate ice cream, straight-up, as if it were something already said. I don't know whether we're talking about him or me.

"Meeting's at 3 tomorrow. See you there," Carr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[So Long, Mr. Whipple]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1341</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1341</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever: Even now -- in the era of erectile-dysfunction television commercials, or teenage girls extolling the latest in cardboard-applicator tampons -- we still don't quite know how to advertise something as simple as toilet paper. That whole area remains the great conundrum of Madison Avenue, which is how we wound up with singing toilets that just got super-scrubbed, and the Ty-D-Bol man, and the depiction of any and all bodily fluids as being bright blue. All sorts of anthropomorphic creature]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trojan Force]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1342</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1342</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Eric Neel: "At some point -- maybe after your parents have died and you're not trying to please them anymore -- at some point you have to decide what truly matters to you and what you believe in. And then you have to have the balls to commit to it."

There's something testimonial about the way he says it, plainly, over a bowl of chocolate ice cream, straight-up, as if it were something already said. I don't know whether we're talking about him or me.

"Meeting's at 3 tomorrow. See you there," Ca]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Privacy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1339</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1339</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Would you name her?

From Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times Union:

I'm doing something here that's not very nice: I'm letting you know that I know something you don't know. And while I'll tell you why I'm keeping this secret, I will not tell you what I know.

I know -- in fact, several of us in the Times Union newsroom know -- who was riding in the car with ex-U.S. Rep. John Sweeney when he was driving drunk on the Northway last Sunday morning. A lot of people are curious about the woman, b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Versimilitude]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1337</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1337</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In the department of Books That Have Been Out A Long Time But That I Just Discovered How Awesome They Are, I would submit a Richard Preston title called The Hot Zone. It was not a bestseller because it pandered to the masses; it was a bestseller because it showed us how brilliant and page-turning the best nonfiction narrative can be. The first chapter alone -- in which a man in Africa goes deep in a cave and comes out with an almost unimaginable sickness -- is worth the price of the book. Here, ]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Locked Down]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1338</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1338</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the Post and Courier in South Carolina, Glenn Smith, Tenisha Waldo and Schuyler Kropf: A chorus of flushing toilets fills the silence as inmates wake for breakfast. At 6:31 a.m., the darkness dissipates when the fluorescent lights in the dayroom buzz to life and flicker on. Two women emerge from their cells to clean.

Like clockwork, at 6:35 a.m., the breakfast trays arrive. Officer Davida Breschers calls for the bottom floor inmates to eat first. Most rush to the line with bundles of soile]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mrs. G]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1336</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1336</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: Politics and Judi Giuliani have not always gone well together.

In recent months, as her husband's presidential campaign heated up, Giuliani was pilloried in the New York press as a social climber. A Vanity Fair profile accused her of demanding a separate seat on planes for her Louis Vuitton handbag. The former mayor's campaign started pulling her back from public events.

But as she proved yesterday during a women's fundraiser downtown, Judi Giuliani -- or "Mrs. G," as she calle]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sheds Light On Night Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1334</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1334</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: The definitive history of New York night life may one day make note of Stephen Sakai in a short chapter called Downtown Bouncer Violence.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Springsteen, The Writer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1335</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1335</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dwight Garner channels Richard Ford on Springsteen: It is a uniquely American celebrity, rewarding excellence that's unquestionably native, prizing an apparently natural phenomenon that turns out to be wonderful, as if a kid could sign up for metal shop and in a few semesters produce a Henry Moore. We like our excellence even better with history, confident that what we're seeing and liking so much is a product of years' work performed in obscurity, of dues-paying. In Springsteen's case, this let]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hard Act To Follow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1332</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1332</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Yesterday was the Great American Teach-In. Roll-your-eyes assignment, right? Check out Leticia Stein's story: TAMPA - Betty Boudreaux admits she panicked a little when she saw the military paratroopers in the main office. She thought the Great American Teach-In was a day to "come in and talk about what you love."

Then she learned how three members of the U.S. Special Operations Command Parachute Team showed what they do for a living. They jumped from a plane 13,000 feet above Lowry Elementary S]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[War's Assault On The Mind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1333</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1333</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Paul Salopek: MOGADISHU, Somalia — Abdulrahman Habeb was a man with problems, the most pressing of which involved a barrel of tranquilizer pills.

The barrel — containing 50,000 capsules of fluphenazine hydrochloride, a potent anti-psychotic drug ordered from America—was boosting his patients' appetites. This was not good. Patients at Habeb Public Mental Hospital were scaling the facility's mud walls to scavenge for food outside, in the war-pocked streets of Mogadishu. One had been shot.

"They ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Garbage Collectors]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1329</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1329</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["Of course, in the first half of the 20th century, we added some important inventions so that the burdens of information scarcity were removed once and for all. But in doing so, we created a new problem never experienced before: information glut, information incoherence, information meaninglessness ... (W)e have transformed information into a form of garbage, and ourselves into garbage collectors. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we are awash in information without even a broom to help us get rid]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Telling Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1330</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1330</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't yet, grab a copy of Earl Swift's The Tangierman's Lament. Put it in your own stocking. It's a great collection of Earl's tales. Like this one:

THE CLUB IS PACKED. Two hundred heads are nodding to a cover band's take on ZZ Top's "LaGrange." It's near the end of the song, the part where the tick-tick-ticking whirls into a sonic tornado. Guitars are screeching. The bass is thumping and growling.

And the drums - the drums are totally out of control. You can hear them outside. You ca]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Casual Cruelty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1331</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1331</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[With the recent discussion about wild comments on our news sites, I thought this was apropos. Teresa Wiltz: "I don't know what it is about this particular moment in human history which lends itself to the sanction of miscellaneous and casual cruelty," says cyber-guru John Perry Barlow, vice chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cyberspace, he says, "has a way of making us feel like other people are informational artifacts. If you cut data, it doesn't bleed. So you're at liberty to do a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[His Last Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1327</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1327</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Catherine Shoichet: Squirrels are scampering in the ceiling. The sewing machine won't stitch straight. Nine naked mannequin torsos stand in the display windows, beside sale signs that say "Last Days."

After nearly four hours on the last day, no customers have come through the doors of Arnold's Men's Wear.

In September, Arnold Argintar sold his Central Avenue building and decided to retire, seven months after his 90th birthday.

It is not how he expected to leave the store he built from scratch]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Whirlwind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1328</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1328</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Filkins wrote a story about a man who likes to speed: It's 3 p.m. on a recent Friday and Robinson climbs behind the wheel. He sticks his key in the ignition and fastens his seat belt. Then turns the key.

The starter whirls and the engine, which he's outfitted with $10,000 worth of high-performance parts, begins to roar and rumble. Robinson checks his gauges. Then he steps on the clutch, shifts into gear and takes off toward the road.

Robinson flips on the radio as he pulls out of the par]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On the bottle, off the streets, half way there]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1325</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1325</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry: The Moocher introduced them years ago down by the ferry terminal, near that "No Loitering" sign scratched up to read "Know Loitering." It was Ed, meet Daryl, Daryl, Ed, between sips and slugs of bottom-shelf whiskey and high-octane beer.

Soon, in the blathering small talk that kills time, Ed Myers and Daryl Jordan identified a bond beyond a shared dislike for the Moocher, who drank but never bought. They both had survived the same firefight in Vietnam, it seemed; brothers now, in blo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Lives Blurred]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1326</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1326</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this, watch this, like right now: "I have to ask you something, Blake," I said. "If I'd gone down in Fallouja, would you have carried me out?"

"Damn straight," he said, without hesitation.

"OK then," I said. "I think you're wounded pretty badly. I want to help you."

He looked at me for a moment. "All right," he said.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Dead Bird]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1318</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1318</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erin Sullivan: A sea gull of no known age, gender or name died Wednesday afternoon as it warmed itself on the asphalt at Pine Island.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ben Watches Jenna]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1319</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1319</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here: Some whispers went up from the press pen. Just then, a Books-A-Million employee approached another, who approached another, who walked to a shelf near the podium and quietly whisked away two copies of the Bad President Countdown Calendar featuring George Bush.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where The Money Went]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1320</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1320</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: Back to our scandal in progress: The affidavit was written by a total man, who doesn't go into exact detail about what Walters actually purchased at Neiman's. He's all about the bottom line. FBI agents are sometimes like those husbands you distract by putting dry-cleaning bags over things you just bought, so he doesn't think you went shopping again. Eventually he figures it out, but in the intervening, a whole other retail economy transpires in the trunk of one's car.

(And don't g]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1321</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1321</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick: With his long legs stretched out to cross at the ankles, his gaze like a vacant lot, Allan Cameron was sentenced yesterday to life in prison with no chance of parole for murdering a police officer during a midnight car chase through the streets of Flatbush.

Mr. Cameron, 29, protested his fate.

"The only thing I'm guilty of today, Your Honor," he told the judge just before the sentence was handed down, "is being young, black and poor."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Waterboarded]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1322</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1322</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kaj Larsen, a journalist and former military officer, paid $800 to endure being "waterboarded" for a video on Current TV. (Watch the video).

Raja wonders: How far is too far for a journalist to go? Is there something to be gained by going through it?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Defending Dillinger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1316</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1316</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[P.J. Huffstutter: MOORESVILLE, IND. -- When it comes to protecting the memory of his great-uncle, Jeffrey Scalf sees himself as a lone sentinel.

Admittedly, it's not easy to defend the name of John H. Dillinger, a man once referred to as Public Enemy No. 1.

"For good or ill, this is my family's legacy and no one is going to take that away from me," says Scalf, 50, who readily admits his childhood fascination with the infamous outlaw has become a crusade.

He says he has been ripped off by the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It's Not The Way They Tell You]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1317</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1317</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He's back, kinda. Charlie LeDuff (thanks, Richard): It was never a dream of mine to raise a baby. Sometimes, when Claudette is asleep, I find myself staring into the rearview mirror of my career. There was that time in Iraq when I wandered into a city hall that had been taken over by a radical cleric and his followers. It was Good Friday, and in the spirit of brotherhood we prayed together. By the end, the holy man's supporters were chanting with thumbs raised high: "Charlie good! Charlie good!"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[You Have A New Friend Request]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1314</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1314</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: America, Facebook has sent you a confirmation request, and it's from France: How do you "know" Nicolas Sarkozy?

Well, we don't know him know him, and anyhow, the French president friended us first.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gun Shine State]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1315</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1315</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Montgomery showed us another side of Black Reign today. The story was the most-read on Tampabay.com, the Web site of the St. Petersburg Times. I'm not sure how many of the readers got it. Their comments seemed to fall mostly into two categories:

1. Ha ha ha. He's trying to be all hard and really he's soft.

2. This article is garbage. Why was it in the newspaper?

You can judge for yourself. But I'm convinced Ben didn't set out to embarrass anyone or capitalize on the sensational. What I go]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where Promises Disappear]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1309</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1309</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin George: For 25 years, Art and Pat Fuxan took Communion to Catholics in nursing homes.

They slipped broken bits of wafers onto the tongues of the infirm. Strangers barged in on them with incoherent rants. Everyone seemed lonely. Lifeless eyes stared back.

Art and Pat feared they were looking into their own future.

They promised never to send each other to such a place.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Sunny Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1310</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1310</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erin Sullivan: Saturday morning, inmate 147760 waxed the floors of the county jail in Land O'Lakes and overhead some deputies talking. They needed an inmate to walk behind the Pasco County Sheriff's Office mounted patrol and clean up the horse manure during the Flapjack Festival parade, which was starting in a few minutes.

Robert Allen Noodwang, a 44-year-old New Port Richey man serving time for felony DUI, walked over.

"Let me do it," he said.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Taking It Off]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1311</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1311</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lon Wagner: VIRGINIA BEACH --Whew, their clothes are on. But maybe not for long.

"We're going into the back room," says Marion Keeler, "to take 'em off."

Now, now, ladies.

Marion, Betty, Iris, Lib, Ethelyn and Ruth Lee range in age from 73 to 83, more or less and not necessarily in that order. They have gathered in Ruth Lee's apartment at Westminster-Canterbury retirement community to explain why they got naked to make a calendar.

To explain precisely how nude they were when they dragged dow]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Battling Hypochondria]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1312</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1312</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Per this conversation, here's Gene Weingarten: When I was 12 years old my classmate Kenneth told me that if your urine smelled funny after you ate asparagus it meant you had cancer of the larynx. This frightened me, even though I did not, technically, know where the larynx was. Kenneth said it was the "stomach bone."

After worrying in silence for a week, and probing gingerly for signs of an enlarged stomach bone, I finally screwed up my courage and asked my mom, who informed me that some people]]></description>
      <author>Mark Johnson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Of Fires and Flaws]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1313</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1313</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers (thanks, Nigel): Sergei Babayan was trapped. Minutes before, wisps of smoke had begun flowing through cracks in his classroom door at the private Moscow Institute of Government and Corporate Management.

There had been no other warning, he recalled, not even an alarm. Now smoke filled the room and flames roared in the corridor, where the steel door to the sole fire exit was locked. The only escape was out the windows, four stories above the street.

Students jostled at the sills and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Adrenaline]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1307</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1307</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This narrative grabbed hold of me and compelled me to read to the end. Stories like this force me to put the rest of life on hold for a few minutes.]]></description>
      <author>Mark Johnson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Incredible Journey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1308</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1308</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kevin Gleason on a lost boy finding baseball.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[(Late) Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1306</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1306</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cristina Silva with the story behind the suicide of a politican.

Lane Degregory with one family's choice to let a kid go.

One team was 0-8. The other team was 0-8. Someone had to win.

Dirk Chatelain with a man looking for a dog.

Dan Barry on the Desert Princess.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Standing In Line]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1302</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1302</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: Comes now the newbie, the freshman senator, the bean counter with a nose for following the money. And at the moment she's following it -- not big money, not earmark money -- down a marbled hallway on the Hill to the poor schlubs who are paid $10 an hour to stand in line. In the morning, well-paid, sharp-suited lobbyists arrive and glide into the Senate hearing rooms, taking choice seats that the schlubs saved for them by waiting all night.

Money polluting the rivers of democracy]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[That Voice In The Shower]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1303</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1303</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever on Robert Goulet: In the shower, any man is Robert Goulet.

On a clear day, rise and look around youuuu, and you'll see who you arrre. . . . Somewhere, my love, there will be songs to sing. . . . No never would I leave you, at allll. . . .

Out of the shower, though, no man is Robert Goulet, because there isn't that kind of singing star anymore, or really even that sort of man. They don't make them that tall, that blue-eyed, that sunny; they don't all have preternaturally black must]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fact O' The Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1304</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1304</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This can't be a good thing, but if you Google "examples of fancy writing," guess what the first hit is? That's right.

Try it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What's Wrong With Sports Illustrated?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1305</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1305</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Josh Levin (thanks, Jamal): In August 1994, on the occasion of the magazine's 40th anniversary, Sports Illustrated ran a 22,000-word story called "How We Got Here." Steve Rushin's sprawling, multipart essay on integration, the rise of television, and the encroachment of corporate interests was the kind of story that the magazine had built its name on—playfully written long-form journalism that pinned down where sports had been and where they were going. Thirteen years later, you would never find]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Witch Of L Street]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1301</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1301</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:08:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cindy Lange-Kubick: Her neighbors filled the courtroom, the air heavy with hate and dread.

The alleged witch sat before them on the witness stand, shrunken as an old apple.

Tillie Lauber opened her mouth to show her long yellowed teeth.

The mob of mothers and housewives listened, hushed, waiting to hear the case of Matilda Lauber vs. Anna Small.

"We live down there right next door to each other," explained Lauber of 615 L St., in the bottomland west of the city.

"This morning I threw some a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Life Resumed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1300</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1300</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:20:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We all read the AP briefs. Here's the rest. Wright Thompson: POWDER SPRINGS, Ga. — Genarlow Wilson is lounging on his bed, watching a college football game. An old high school buddy has come over to watch it with him. They don't talk about prison. They talk about much more important matters.

"I really don't think any team is gonna go undefeated," Genarlow announces. "I think the team that had the best chance was LSU. They have a lot of talent."

His cell phone rings. He has had it for only, lik]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man Who Went To Jail Eighty-Eight Times]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1299</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1299</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:25:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hey, remember that haunting piece from a few months back about the guy who publicly soiled a building in downtown Jacksonville?

Well, as several of us requested, Konrad Marshall of the Florida Times-Union finally filled in the backstory. Check it out.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[City Lights]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1298</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1298</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:46:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Go, now, and pre-order Dan Barry's City Lights. From the sousaphone playing tourist from Alabama to the monk whose bag was stolen in New York to the story of Anne Nelson's lapton, this is a collection of stories from one of the best of our time. Anyone who is trying to tell stories should know these by heart. This book belongs on every desk in every newsroom in America.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Watching A Man Die]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1297</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1297</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:40:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Lake is scheduled to watch a man face death tomorrow. Naturally, he's apprehensive. He's looking for advice. Anyone ever do this? Any tips? Any examples of when it was done right?

I like this one, from Rick Bragg:

With the sting of a needle in his right leg, Timothy J. McVeigh was sedated, injected with poison and executed today by the government he so despised, a quiet end for the man who sent 168 people to their deaths in screams, flames and crushing concrete. Mr. McVeigh, who was pr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Bee Keepers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1296</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1296</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:13:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This story by The Chicago Trib's Louise Kiernan got my attention Sunday. It's the first of a four-part series. The quality of the writing in Part 1 had me looking for Part 2 today. See what you think.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Bionic Reporter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1295</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1295</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:38:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A couple years back, my sister Liddy and I were driving up I-95 in a rented Chevy Cavalier on our way back from a Seven Mary Three concert in the Florida Keys when we got to talking about how to create the Perfect Rock Frontman. I've forgotten some of the conversation, but we agreed that he would have the fingers of Jimi Hendrix, the torso of Lenny Kravitz, the head of Jim Morrison, the hips of Elvis, the voice of Chris Cornell, the soul of Bono, and probably some other things.

Anyway, what wit]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1294</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1294</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:30:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry at the tryouts for the Mormom Tabernacle Choir.

Reid Forgrave in Des Moines starts a three-part series on meth.

Peter Slevin on brothers shipping out.

Andy Meacham watching the dog track fade away.

Vanessa Gezari with a class in Liberia studying Romeo and Juliet.

Scott Barancik tracks a thief.

What are you reading?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1294</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1294</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry at the tryouts for the Mormom Tabernacle Choir.

Reid Forgrave in Des Moines starts a three-part series on meth.

Peter Slevin on brothers shipping out.

Andy Meacham watching the dog track fade away.

Vanessa Gezari with a class in Liberia studying Romeo and Juliet.

Scott Barancik tracks a thief.

What are you reading?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Bionic Reporter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1295</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1295</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A couple years back, my sister Liddy and I were driving up I-95 in a rented Chevy Cavalier on our way back from a Seven Mary Three concert in the Florida Keys when we got to talking about how to create the Perfect Rock Frontman. I've forgotten some of the conversation, but we agreed that he would have the fingers of Jimi Hendrix, the torso of Lenny Kravitz, the head of Jim Morrison, the hips of Elvis, the voice of Chris Cornell, the soul of Bono, and probably some other things.

Anyway, what wit]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why I Write]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1293</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1293</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:52:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Adam Bosch is working on an essay for grad school and he's looking for some help.

He's taking George Orwell's essay "Why I Write" and comparing it to the persuasions of current-day newspapermen and other writers.

Orwell contends there are four motivations for writing:

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Inside Job]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1292</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1292</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:33:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Neil Swidey (thanks, Mackson): Just after 4 o'clock, when John Ferreira was looking the other way, a prankster pushed him into his pool. It's a gorgeous pool, rimmed by smooth boulders and an elaborate waterfall, and surrounded by golf course-quality turf, all set against the backdrop of 120 acres of his private forest. Still, it's no fun being tossed into the water fully clothed.

But Ferreira emerged a few seconds later, flashing a big grin. Standing on the patio, a puddle forming around his f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Inside Job]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1292</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1292</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Neil Swidey (thanks, Mackson): Just after 4 o'clock, when John Ferreira was looking the other way, a prankster pushed him into his pool. It's a gorgeous pool, rimmed by smooth boulders and an elaborate waterfall, and surrounded by golf course-quality turf, all set against the backdrop of 120 acres of his private forest. Still, it's no fun being tossed into the water fully clothed.

But Ferreira emerged a few seconds later, flashing a big grin. Standing on the patio, a puddle forming around his f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why I Write]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1293</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1293</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Adam Bosch is working on an essay for grad school and he's looking for some help.

He's taking George Orwell's essay "Why I Write" and comparing it to the persuasions of current-day newspapermen and other writers.

Orwell contends there are four motivations for writing:

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Queen of Mean]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1291</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1291</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erik Hedegaard in Rolling Stone: As a child, Mario Lavandeira spent most of his time in bed, watching TV. He watched Friends, Melrose Place, She-Ra, He-Man, G.I. Joe, The Wuzzles, Snorks, Transformers, Thundercats, The Facts of Life, Diff'rent Strokes, the talk shows, the soaps and all the MTV he could. He glued himself to the tube for hours on end, usually dressed in just a T-shirt and shorts. His parents allowed this. He didn't even have to get up for dinner. His dad, who hung wallpaper for a ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Is God Smiling On The Rockies?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1290</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1290</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Vince Bzdek: "I believe in the Church of Baseball," Annie Savoy says at the beginning of the great epistemological movie "Bull Durham." "I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball."

The Colorado Rockies believe in the Church of Baseball, too, and right now, many of the players and staff think God has smiled on their particular congregation. After winning 21 out of the last 22 games and ascending to the World Serie]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shav Glick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1286</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1286</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bill Dwyer (thanks, Doyle): A death often brings talk of the person's era. Shav Glick's triggers the plural. Eras.

The career of the veteran Times sportswriter, who died early Saturday at age 87, spanned Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Dennis Keith Rodman. And beyond. He was there before television and after TiVo.

For 54 years, he worked for the Los Angeles Times, and he had a few stops at smaller papers before that. He wasn't an editor, never a big shot, never a guy on a ladder to higher things.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Rat Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1287</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1287</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stacey Stowe: THE rat took a nose dive on Third Avenue, pooling on the sidewalk like a downed parachute. Chaz Rynkiewicz swung into action.

"Uh-oh," said Mr. Rynkiewicz, assistant organizing director of Local 79, the union representing construction and building laborers. "Technical difficulties."

"Get me a new fan," he shouted, and began gathering the vinyl remains of the 15-foot balloon that is put up in front of job sites and corporate offices to shame developers and contractors who use nonu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Against The Odds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1288</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1288</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Diane Tennant's new series. Part I: VIRGINIA BEACH

On the luckiest day of the year, a turtle crawled out of the ocean at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

On 7-7-07, a spotter on a dawn drive down the beach saw a huge swath in the sand where flippers had dug in and pushed, where a belly had dragged. It was a sign that a sea turtle had dodged fishhooks and boats and pollution and poachers long enough to lay a nest.

Some say only one turtle out of 1,000 eggs will survive to do so, will live pa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A City of Fear]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1289</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1289</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There are delayed ledes and then there are ledes that slam the reader head-on. Check out The Chicago Tribune's Salopek on Mogadishu Here are the first few paragraphs:

There are so many ways to die in Mogadishu.

You can walk, as an old lady here recently did, into the path of a roadside bomb planted by Islamic rebels. The insurgents haven't perfected their timers. They missed the passing government patrol. The grandmother was decapitated.

Just as likely -- and lucklessly -- you might cross pat]]></description>
      <author>Mark</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hitotoki]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1266</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1266</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A Narrative Map of the World: "The parking lot gate was open, and we ran in with the skateboard. As I whipped around while holding my husband's hand and he showed me how to ollie, I was filled with the freedom I felt when I first moved to the city; the fact that everything could be found on such a small island. Anything could happen on any given day."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Yeah, That Guy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1267</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1267</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[J.A. Montalbano (thanks, Hank): One of the first things Don Schrader points out the first time he welcomes me into his apartment is that it measures 12 feet by 14 feet and that when you subtract the wall space his livable area is 151 square feet, or just 1 square foot bigger than Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond.

For the record.

Schrader, a model of simple living, is nothing if not a completist — a stickler for facts and numbers. A purist in every sense of the word.

You might know him. If you r]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Observant Outsider]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1263</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1263</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Nancy Franklin in the "On Television" column on "Friday Night Lights" in this week's New Yorker: Berg, who wrote and directed the first episode and is also one of the series' executive producers, gets you right down in the middle of it all. The show is filmed documentary style with a handheld camera, meaning that you're always aware of a sensibility and an intelligence at work. A lot of scenes are shot from a car -- not establishing shots that indicate whose house the next scene will take place ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What's Hot?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1262</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1262</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[VH1's Michael Hirschorn in Rolling Stone's 2007 Hot Issue: "There's been all this apologizing for TV, people saying that it has to be more like the Web. But one of the overall trends in TV is that complex long-form narratives have been doing well. Look at Heroes and American Idol -- both have a long story arc. For all the hype around YouTube, which is warranted, TV viewing is not only going up, the increase in viewing is accelerating."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mistakes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1257</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1257</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm so glad no one rushed this with a lame third-graph nut. "The sense of dread in this story is amazing," a colleague just said. Read Rebecca Catalanello's story: RIVERVIEW - Blacky was a fine dog.

The Alvizo family inherited the black mixed-breed pooch from a friend who stayed a short while with them on rural Edgeknoll Drive.

The family didn't mind when their friend left Blacky behind six months ago. He was good protection for their large plot of land. He barked at strangers at night. He ate]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Face Of Parental Involvement]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1258</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1258</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Lena Price, one of Corey's students in Lewisville, Texas, writing about Mom: The price for a 16-ounce cup of French vanilla coffee at 7-Eleven is no longer $1.29.

Maybe it's because an exceptionally complicated supply-and-demand rule that I won't be able to comprehend until after I finish macroeconomics. I don't have a clue.

But I know for a fact that the price has increased by a solid dime.

I was probably one of the first people to receive the news.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Assassination of Chauncey Bailey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1259</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1259</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[San Fransisco Chronicle: Journalist Chauncey Bailey infused black pride into his work for more than three decades, writing hundreds of stories about Oakland's African American community, developing relationships with the city's key players and hosting black cable television news shows.

When he landed the job as editor of the Oakland Post in June, the African American newspaper seemed the perfect fit for Bailey's signature outspoken and crusading style.

Then on Aug. 2, two weeks after he wrote ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Buy It]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1254</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1254</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ira Glass in his introduction to the new anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction: I don't see anything wrong with a piece of reporting turning into a fable. In fact, when I'm researching a story and the real-life situation starts to turn into allegory ... I feel incredibly lucky, and do everything in my power to expand that part of the story. Everything suddenly stands for something so much bigger, everything has more resonance, everything's more engaging. Turning your back on that is rejecting to]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Audacious. Profane. He Won.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1255</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1255</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Diane Carman (thanks, Bill M.): Twenty-year-old J. David McSwane is the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious. Opinionated. Brief.

Very brief.

He writes tight.

Short sentences.

Readers can finish an editorial in three seconds.

Its impact lasts weeks.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letting Go]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1249</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1249</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry: A hospital call awakened Sue Schramek at 2:15 a.m. Eighty-year-old Hildy Werner had passed away.

Sue got up, padded through the dark house, made coffee. She couldn't stop thinking about John, Hildy's baby. He was 42 years old, had Down syndrome, was as innocent as a toddler. All John's life, his mother had brushed his teeth. They'd slept side by side in twin beds.

Now John belonged to Sue.

At 9, Sue drove to her office and called Hildy's cousin. "I can make the funeral arrangement]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Glimpses Into The Divine]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1250</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1250</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Katie in Kathmandu: When you imagine the future, there are certain things you picture: places, people, types of work, etc. Yet, lately I have had several moments when I stop, pause, and shake my head, thinking: I never expected to do something like this. One of those recently was as I stood in a woody area, with sitar music drifting by, helping to dig a grave for a little boy.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Aicuna Is Not An Albino Town]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1247</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1247</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[To&ntilde;o Angulo Daneri (thanks, M): Every so often someone shows up in Aicu&ntilde;a asking about "the mysterious albino town." The curious or nosy make a twenty-hour bus ride from Buenos Aires to the almost secret hamlet in La Rioja Province of Argentina.

It's Monday morning, and someone has just arrived.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Garden]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1245</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1245</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dwyer: More than most sports arenas, Madison Square Garden is the palace of a feudal-state, and its lords fly the flag of entitlement. They pay no property taxes on most of a square block in Midtown Manhattan, thanks to a deal made 25 years ago. They get low-cost electricity, paid for by other utility customers. And the chairman of the fiefdom, James Dolan, was paid $15.8 million last year, when his arena was losing money on paper and his basketball team was losing two games out of every three o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In The Clouds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1246</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1246</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jesse McKinley: ON SADDLEBACK MOUNTAIN, Calif. — Walk into Mike Gates's summer home here and the first thing you notice — the only thing you could possibly notice — is the view.

With a wraparound vista broken only by the occasional hummingbird, Mr. Gates has 25-mile visibility on a decent day and more than twice that on a superlative one. The sunrises are pretty enough to make the cold worthwhile, and the sunsets would make a vampire sad to see the day go.

But Mr. Gates doesn't really come to ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Black Dress With Pink Hearts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1240</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1240</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:35:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read to the end of this little gem from Ben. It won't take you long.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1239</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1239</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:08:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Peter Clark in the men's room.

Dan Barry in Wilcox County.

Michael Kruse at the idea festival, part one.

Washington Post's Left of Boom.

Steve Lopez with paths crossed.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bottom Lines and Headlines]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1238</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1238</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Sep 2007 21:16:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The New York Times takes a look at SPT's model: DURING the next year or so, The St. Petersburg Times plans to continue pursuing deeply reported, long-term features about such topics as Florida's property insurance crisis, complex tax issues, public education at all levels, and wildlife and endangered species. It will balance this slate of stories against all the other bread-and-butter issues it covers everyday for its readers: politics, business, sports, community affairs, culture and more. "We']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Iron Fist]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1237</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1237</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Sep 2007 20:43:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers: GROZNY, Russia — In the evenings, unexpected sights appear in this city, which less than two years ago seemed beyond saving and repair. Women stroll on sidewalks that did not exist last year. Teenagers cluster under newly installed street lights, chatting on cellphones. At a street corner, young men gather to race cars on a freshly paved road — a scene, considering that this is the capital of Chechnya, that feels out of place and from another time. Throughout the city, local offici]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In All Fairness]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1236</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1236</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2007 10:33:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gangrey.com has become a consummate inventory of off-beat articles about fairs. We all gotta cover them at some point, right? Keeping with that tradition, here's Richard Lake: It is, in short, the lust for life that nothing but 100 acres of rides and games and deep-fried goodness can satisfy. This is not news, of course, to the hundreds of thousands of Magnolia Staters who attend the Mississippi State Fair every year. These people already know the fair kicks off Wednesday and will run for 12 day]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wedding and Spaghetti]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1235</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1235</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2007 10:15:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex Zayas: The flier taped to the door of a small Italian deli on Florida Avenue says it all: Mixing it Up At Merino's. Come join your neighbors and business owners at a FREE!! FREE!! FREE!! spaghetti dinner. Bluegrass music. Caricature artist. Prize drawings. And tucked on the bottom, right corner, something else. Wedding? Jennifer Whitehead to Jose Ortiz, it says, above clip art of two doves. "It's going to be the Today show on Florida Avenue," owner Mike Merino promises. The aisle will stret]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['With Eyes Wide Open']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1234</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1234</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:41:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tyler Kepner is one of the very best on the baseball beat, and this is from yesterday's NYT — just a really, really fine example, I thought, of deadline work on a game story that wasn't just a game story, showing people moments they didn't see on TV while giving all of it context and meaning.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Great Joy In Coney Island]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1233</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1233</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:23:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andy Newman: On June 12, 2007, at 4:17 p.m., on a concrete floor behind the Sea Cliffs exhibit at the New York Aquarium, a strapping, 115-pound male Pacific walrus calf entered the world.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A 9/11 Tale]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1232</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1232</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:48:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this now. David W. Dunlap: Tania Head's story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to ground zero, was a remarkable account of both life and death. She had, she said, survived the terror attack on the World Trade Center despite having been badly burned when the plane crashed into the upper floors of the south tower. Crawling through the chaos and carnage on the 78th floor that morning, she said, she encountered a dying man who handed her his i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Ballgame]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1231</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1231</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:44:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Rays play their last home game tonight. Reminded me of this classic by Dan Barry, which Kruse and I have relived many, many times: MR. MET does not have the ability to speak. This could be related to his hydrocephalic condition, or to fear among his handlers that if he ever brought foam tongue to palate, he might sound like Anna Nicole Smith, or some tapped-out denizen of a Flushing boardinghouse who gargles with gin. Whatever the reason, it is probably best that he remain mute. For if Mr. M]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Passing of Marcel Marceau]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1223</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1223</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I've always found mime a chuckle, but when I heard that Marcel Marceau had died I wondered how someone would find words to describe what he did without them. I thought this AP obituary had some beautiful descriptions. The lede for one. Also the description of his routine, "You, Maturity, Old Age, Death."]]></description>
      <author>Mark Johnson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cheryl Wehlau's Iron Fist]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1222</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1222</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 23 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'd like to direct your attention to a report by Jeff Testerman of the St. Petersburg Times:

PALM HARBOR -- With hundreds of loan closings a month, business boomed at Gulf Coast Title, and the perks were plentiful: Hummers and Escalades for travel, shopping sprees for staffers who wanted outfit upgrades, lavish holiday office parties that included all-expense-paid hotel rooms.

But under the iron-fisted rule of Gulf Coast founder Cheryl L. Wehlau, the perks came with a price.

Loan closers work]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Answer Me This]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1221</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1221</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In the book Telling True Stories, which you ought to buy if you haven't yet, Susan Orlean asks five questions of the would-be nonfiction writer:

"Why do you want to be a writer? It seems simplistic, but it's a question worth asking yourself over and over. Did you become a writer because you like talking to people? Or because you like telling stories? What is it? Writing isn't the world's easiest profession, and it's certainly not the most lucrative. It works only when done with a high degree of]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[City Lights]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1192</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1192</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Out next month. Pre-order Dan Barry's new book here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Coming Early]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1187</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1187</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andrea Ball (thanks, Richard): Adrienne Nash writhes on a gurney in a speeding ambulance, gasping her way through another contraction. Take deep breaths, the emergency medical technician tells her; I know it hurts. Adrienne is 24 weeks pregnant and in full labor. It's too soon. The boy in her belly — with his immature brain, primitive lungs and translucent skin — isn't ready for life outside the womb.

It's Dec. 28, 2003. The baby isn't due until April 12.

But tonight, he will be born. And toni]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Story Begats Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1188</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1188</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember this discussion about unicorns? Well Andy Netzel asked Matt Tullis to turn his comment into an essay for Cleveland Magazine. It's fun to read.

Check it out: In 1985, I truly became country. My family moved our trailer out of the trailer park and onto a piece of land just outside the tiny village of Apple Creek, near Wooster. Our new home was about 15 feet away from corn and soybean fields that were, in the spring, sprayed with liquid fertilizer. The smell of manure, not surprisingly, s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tackling Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1189</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1189</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check this out (thanks, Doug): On the day they posed for the team photo in their black and silver football uniforms, the boys were still champions.

That autumn of 1992, the south Sacramento Raiders Junior Midgets were mostly 12 and 13 years old. They hadn't lost a game.

Yet today, Tyrone Rhinehart isn't reliving childhood triumph. He's sitting in Meadowview's community center, a few miles from the football field his team once ruled, scouring the faces of his long-ago friends. They stare back f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[X]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1190</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1190</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Somehow this got deleted earlier. Here's Dan Barry: DARYL Holton shaved his head clean a couple of months ago. He thought he could retain some control in this small way.

But he also wanted to save the corrections officers the trouble. "I wouldn't want them to leave with a feeling of guilt," he says. "As far as I'm concerned, it's just a job. They're just a bunch of guys trying to pay their rent."

His head needs to be shaved, and his legs, too. That is because, not long ago, he marked an "X" be]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Roanoke's Corner Shots]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1191</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1191</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pete Dybdahl: Bluetooth cellphone headsets -- small devices perched on the ear -- may be convenient for the heavy mobile phone user, but they have created a modern conundrum.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Baby]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1184</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1184</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: Baby died Sunday, April 29, at home. She was 42.

Purchased March 29, 1965, at Walker Ford on Treasure Island, the Mustang Fastback was well loved, but not well traveled. She was resold and restored in the late 1980s and bought for a third time in 1990. In her later years, she won a dozen trophies at Tampa Bay car shows. She is preceded in death by most of the 77,000 Fastbacks produced that year. She is survived by her loving owner of 17 years: Robert "Bear" Kemerer. Cremation ha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Facing Forward]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1185</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1185</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This looks great. (Thanks, Andy.) Rachel Dissel: Johanna Orozco's grandmother clasped a bath towel to the darkening pit where the 18-year-old's jaw was supposed to be.

Blood seeped through the older woman's worn fingers.

A rusty-edged Honda Accord bulleted them toward MetroHealth Medical Center, blowing past corner bodegas, sagging wooden porches, 10 stop signs and three traffic lights.

The Orozcos' longtime neighbor, Maritza Santiago, never let off the horn.

Afternoon rush-hour traffic on W]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finally, Fred]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1186</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1186</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland: STRATHAM, N.H. -- If New Hampshire can offer Fred Thompson some advice, it's that he'd better start spending some time with New Hampshire. New Hampshire has a lot of questions for Fred and it doesn't like to be kept waiting.

Ah! Here he is, finally, pulling up to the farm in a big bus on this Saturday evening, making his way to the stage.

"I understand some people have been looking for me," Thompson tells a crowd of 200 or so folks who are here to eat chili and see the tall, th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Return To Darkness]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1183</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1183</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this: The dead disappear into the muddled minds of old caretakers, in a graveyard where roses rust.

The funeral flowers are made from tin so they can be used again and again. Vilason Dorvilier wanders the cemetery searching for his father, but there have been so many dead since September the caretakers can't remember where they put them all.

"The ground is full," one old caretaker said.

Crypts rise from the old graves, four to eight caskets high. Dorvilier steps to the top of one and cli]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story of Dirty Red]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1182</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1182</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you've never read Dirty Red, do it now: The neighborhood has low rent and no trees, a leaky bucket of a place where dreams seem to run right on through. Dirty Red's mother pries the boy's fingers from the hem of her dress and tells him a hundredth time: "Baby, it's okay to play."

Dirty Red knows if he goes outside children will call him names and punch and pinch him, like the day before and the day before that. To please his mother he walks outside, but instead of going to play he doubles ba]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[They Climbed Up Their Lives With Jokes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1180</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1180</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So maybe I'm a little late to this book, but I'm glad to be here nonetheless. Here's an excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I think it applies to us:

The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement. Sometimes amusement lay in speech, and they climbed up their lives with jokes. And it came about in the camps along the roads, on the ditch banks beside the streams, un]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Making Them Look]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1179</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1179</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Tommy Tomlinson (thanks, Ted): Look at this picture.

What do you see?

Maybe it depends on who you are.

This picture was taken the morning of Sept. 4, 1957 -- almost exactly 50 years ago. That week four black students integrated the Charlotte schools. Three of the four made it to class peacefully. The fourth was Dorothy Counts at Harding High.

That's Dorothy in the middle, headed for Harding's front door. She's 15 years old. Her grandmother made that red-and-yellow dress. Dorothy's grand]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Things Last]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1174</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1174</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Final from Celina Ottaway's series:

LOVE, PRIDE AND SHAME FROM SHIRLEY TEMPLE TO AFROS AND CORNROWS -- A HISTORY TOLD BY HAIR May 9, 1999

Miss Madeline Seel stepped off the bus, walked up the steps of her front porch and checked her mailbox. Bills, junk mail, that was it. She flipped through the pile looking for an envelope from Philadelphia but it wasn't there.

Maybe tomorrow, she thought. She stopped briefly in her bedroom, and then as she did every day when she got home, she headed to the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rescue Me]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1175</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1175</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy goes beyond a brief: Warwick — Maureen Segota, her husband and three children picked their way along the path toward the water.

A group of teenagers already had a spot on the shore, so the family hiked farther along. The Segotas had a busy weekend already. Saturday night they'd hosted a big party. They'd planned Labor Day afternoon at Cascade Lake as a way to slow down — a day for fishing and to relax a little. Eventually they came to the top of a hill and looked down on the water.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Good Writer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1176</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1176</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this passage from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, a book even nonfiction writers ought to read:

Sanity in a writer is merely this: However stupid he may be in his private life, he never cheats in writing. He never forgets that his audience is, at least ideally, as noble, generous and tolerant as he is himself (or more so), and never forgets that he is writing about people, so that to turn characters to cartoons, to treat his characters as innately inferior to himself, to forget the]]></description>
      <author>Tom Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Just Saying]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1177</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1177</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I was reading an AP story this morning about President Bush's comments on the status of U.S. operations in Iraq, and the same piece contained the predictable counters and debate, and I had this rewarding thought that, maybe, says something about why many of us are evangelists when it comes to doing what we do: I wish David Finkel would write something soon so we could really know what was going on.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Duckworth File]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1178</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1178</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Earl Swift's series on who shot the Norfolk mayor: IT CAME IN AS A 10-39. A body found.

Sounded routine, so Ralph Mears rolled west on Little Creek at the speed limit, no lights or siren, and turned his unmarked cruiser onto Major Avenue.

A couple of patrolmen were already on hand, standing at the edge of a vacant lot on the corner. On the ground near the curb lay an old man.

Mears walked over for a look. Guy was flat on his back. Eyes open. A little jowly. Gray hair, clipped short.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sweatin' and a Pantin']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1173</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1173</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Happy Labor Day, everyone.

The Front Porch Song (Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett)

This old porch is a big ol' red and white Herford bull Standin' under a mesquite tree in Agua Dulce, Texas He keeps on playin' hide and seek with that hot august sun Sweatin' and a pantin' cause his work is never done Oh no, with those cows and a red top cane

This old porch is a steamin' greasy plate of enchiladas With lots of cheese and onions ans a guacamole salad You can get them at the LaSalle Hotel in old ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dismembered]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1168</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1168</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: VERNON - Nothing binds a town together like a powerful story: the Giants win the pennant, for example, or a mother wolf rescues twin boys from the riverbank, or a silversmith and a borrowed horse conspire to foil the Redcoats.

In this town, the story is broken.

The characters are not heroes. They are not even villains. They are merely conniving mercenaries with a tolerance for gore.

If you have heard of Vernon, population 780, an old steamboat port between the red hills of Alabama a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Things Last]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1167</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1167</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:15:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember the discussion of The Master Marrative a few weeks ago? Celina Ottaway mentioned a story she stumbled into while parked in a braid shop. Her editor encouraged her to pursue it, and she wound up with the following three-part series. There are lessons in her journey. I'll post one a day, so we don't get overwhelmed.

Here's Celina with some background: I often use these stories as examples of how sourcing can work. I've never really talked about them in terms of writing. I found the idea ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Things Last]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1167</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1167</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember the discussion of The Master Marrative a few weeks ago? Celina Ottaway mentioned a story she stumbled into while parked in a braid shop. Her editor encouraged her to pursue it, and she wound up with the following three-part series. There are lessons in her journey. I'll post one a day, so we don't get overwhelmed.

Here's Celina with some background: I often use these stories as examples of how sourcing can work. I've never really talked about them in terms of writing. I found the idea ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The South's Favorite Season]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1166</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1166</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:25:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: I love air conditioning, and I love cocktails in the gloaming on the City Grocery balcony, and I love a plate of shrimp and grits when the sun finally goes down. I love honking at Faulkner's grave on the way home from the bar. I love cruising 18 miles an hour through campus, the speed limit set in honor of Archie Manning's college number, passing pretty blondes driving foreign cars, courtesy of Daaaaddy, and seeing a boy sporting khakis and an SEC haircut and realizing our fathe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back To New York]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1165</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1165</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 08:05:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: PORT RICHEY – First they stole his license plate. Then they burned his flag. Fred Slaven is convinced this makes him the victim of a hate crime. And after six years in Florida, he's going back to New York. Yankees – and their fans -are generally welcome there. The opposite may be true on Blackstone Drive in Embassy Hills, where Slaven lives.

Fred Slaven is convinced this makes him the victim of a hate crime. And after six years in Florida, he's going back to New York.

Yankees – and t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Storm Tossed]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1164</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1164</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:11:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kruse's story: PORT RICHEY – At 3:49, in the driver's seat, Laurene Warner opened her eyes and wiped her face. She yawned. She lit a cigarette. The glowing tip was a brief bit of light. Jake Warner woke up in the passenger seat. "I gotta go to the bathroom," Laurene told him. She climbed out of the little Daewoo, put her black purse over her shoulder and walked toward the 24-7 Wal-Mart Supercenter. The husband and wife, 46 and 50, respectively, moved from here to Bayou La Batre, Ala., two w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back To New York]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1165</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1165</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Lake: PORT RICHEY - First they stole his license plate. Then they burned his flag.

Fred Slaven is convinced this makes him the victim of a hate crime. And after six years in Florida, he's going back to New York.

Yankees - and their fans -are generally welcome there.

The opposite may be true on Blackstone Drive in Embassy Hills, where Slaven lives.

(Check out the comments. Yikes.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The South's Favorite Season]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1166</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1166</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson: I love air conditioning, and I love cocktails in the gloaming on the City Grocery balcony, and I love a plate of shrimp and grits when the sun finally goes down. I love honking at Faulkner's grave on the way home from the bar. I love cruising 18 miles an hour through campus, the speed limit set in honor of Archie Manning's college number, passing pretty blondes driving foreign cars, courtesy of Daaaaddy, and seeing a boy sporting khakis and an SEC haircut and realizing our fathe]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eat Pray Love]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1163</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1163</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:10:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this. Seriously. Elizabeth Gilbert profiled Hank Williams III in GQ in 2000, and that was a special story, but Esquire, GQ, the NYT mag, one of her books, whatever — when her name's on the top of a bunch of words, I'm reading them, because just about every sentence she writes makes me want to read the next one. And really what else is there?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Life Of A Newspaper Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1162</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1162</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Aug 2007 13:11:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Seen this?

UPDATE: Cartoon me, courtesy S.I. Rosenbaum.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Still Burning]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1161</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1161</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:07:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lon Wagner: In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. By 1905, the bulbs were being sold in stores, and a family in Norfolk bought one. What they did with it at first is not known, but sometime around 1914 the bulb was screwed into the porch lamp of a house on 37th Street, and someone flipped the switch. They left that light on, burning night and day every day, until they sold the house in the early 1940s to a family that included a little boy who grew up to become a lawyer in Virginia Bea]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Obits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1160</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1160</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:01:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matt Tullis: The words tumbled out of a speaker above Patty Keller: Georgia, Georgia The whole day through Just an old sweet song Keeps Georgia on my mind. The voice was sweet — a bit gravelly but sweet nonetheless. "That's him right there singing," she said.

Georgia, Georgia

The whole day through

Just an old sweet song

Keeps Georgia on my mind.

The voice was sweet — a bit gravelly but sweet nonetheless.

"That's him right there singing," she said.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The City As A Character]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1159</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1159</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:41:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm digging this, from Wooster Collective.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The City As A Character]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1159</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1159</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm digging this, from Wooster Collective.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Obits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1160</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1160</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Matt Tullis: The words tumbled out of a speaker above Patty Keller:

Georgia, Georgia

The whole day through

Just an old sweet song

Keeps Georgia on my mind.

The voice was sweet -- a bit gravelly but sweet nonetheless.

"That's him right there singing," she said.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inventory as Biography]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1158</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1158</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:27:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: Ten boxes of stuff. That's all Brooklyn Carr figured she'd have room for in her dorm room. She bought the biggest plastic tubs she could find, deep rectangular bins in black and yellow. "Target didn't have pink." She carted them to her bedroom in her parents' Brandon home and sat wondering what to pack.

She carted them to her bedroom in her parents' Brandon home and sat wondering what to pack.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inventory as Biography]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1158</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1158</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory: Ten boxes of stuff. That's all Brooklyn Carr figured she'd have room for in her dorm room. She bought the biggest plastic tubs she could find, deep rectangular bins in black and yellow. "Target didn't have pink."

She carted them to her bedroom in her parents' Brandon home and sat wondering what to pack.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kids Gone, Kids Gone Wild]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1153</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1153</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:04:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Reid Forgrave: By 9:30 a.m., the streets and cul-de-sacs and perfectly manicured lawns in the Bartlett Farms subdivision were – finally, mercifully, eerily – quiet. American flags blew in the breeze. Brown garbage cans and green recycling bins punctuated each driveway. For the first time in nearly three months, this neighborhood of young families off Jordan Creek Parkway was a ghost town, bereft of the elementary-age children who had regularly ridden bicycles in the streets, played basketball in]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Daddy Works At Night]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1154</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1154</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Booth: A most unusual case, this Bob Saget. We were just reviewing the file, a very thick file. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it appears that patient Saget is suffering from PFTSD (Post Family-TV Stress Disorder).

"I'm seriously messed up," Saget says. "Whatever I have, I obviously have it bad."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Invisible Manuscript]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1152</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1152</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:54:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't miss Wil Haygood's beautiful story from last Sunday's Post Magazine on Ralph Ellison and the second novel he never completed. It's a fascinating story and Haygood tells it well. His writing verges on poetry. Deep into the story comes this deeply perceptive assessment of Ellison: "He was a man drowning in his own words."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Rapist Says He's Sorry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1151</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1151</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:55:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is Mitchell Gaff. Mitch lives in a special place. A facility the state of Washington created for sexual predators. Mitch's therapists think there's a chance that Mitch won't go raping again next time he has the opportunity. Which is a good thing. Because, soon, Mitch and the thirty men who live with him are getting out.

The Rapist Says He's Sorry By Tom Junod GQ December 1995

By Tom Junod GQ December 1995

The first thing that strikes you about Mitch Gaff is his voice. The voice is not me]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Rapist Says He's Sorry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1151</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1151</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is Mitchell Gaff. Mitch lives in a special place. A facility the state of Washington created for sexual predators. Mitch's therapists think there's a chance that Mitch won't go raping again next time he has the opportunity. Which is a good thing. Because, soon, Mitch and the thirty men who live with him are getting out.

The Rapist Says He's Sorry

By Tom Junod GQ December 1995

The first thing that strikes you about Mitch Gaff is his voice. The voice is not merely soft, not merely sincere,]]></description>
      <author>Justin Heckert</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Teaching Writing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1150</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1150</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:07:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Bill Marvel: I'm about to teach feature writing at a local university. I wonder: Looking back at similar courses they took in college, what things did Gangreyers find most useful, most useless, most destructive? How could we improve the teaching of writing?

Any takers?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pressure]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1149</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1149</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2007 23:59:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Five short stories: The spotters were too late. … "Sir?" Etherton yelled. "Sir, are you okay?" … "Who knows how long people will want to look at me?" … The girl in the purple dress looks into the mirror and cries harder. … They had sex, but that's all it was: sex.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pressure]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1149</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1149</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Five short stories: The spotters were too late. ... "Sir?" Etherton yelled. "Sir, are you okay?" ... "Who knows how long people will want to look at me?" ... The girl in the purple dress looks into the mirror and cries harder. ... They had sex, but that's all it was: sex.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two To Read]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1136</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1136</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben this morning on 1A: Michael Allen Phillips lived in trouble.

He strutted through the suburbs shirtless, a tattoo of a skull on his arm and a pistol on his belly. The man whose first arrest came at age 12 smoked his tires on Tradewinds Drive, fired gunshots into the sky and talked about his disdain for cops.

"You knew," said Lynn D'Ovidio, 62, who lives down the street, "that the kid was destined for a bad end."

TLake this morning on 1A: We have entered the height of hurricane season, the ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Red Pens]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1138</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1138</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I posted an invite the other day for folks looking for criticism, and the first brave soul has stepped up. Let's hear it for Joe Eaton at the City Paper in Washington.

Here's Joe's story. Tear it up. Let's all get better.

A few weeks ago, after the bars let out, Roscoe Nelson was sleeping on the couch in the tiny front office of the Alamo Motel in West Ocean City, Md., which he has run since 1996. Nelson sleeps light, so when he heard the banging, he got up to investigate.

Near the back of th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Mama! Come see!']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1134</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1134</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers in Finland: Jack Chivers spotted the lightning first. We stood on a pier on a bright summer Finnish night, looking down an archipelago extending into the Baltic Sea.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Master Narrative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1135</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1135</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the post from Roy Peter Clark at the bottom of the frog and the cheese thread: "I'm wondering if there might be a test we could apply to these kinds of stories, a kind of 'master narrative' test. In other words, if there were a hundred little narratives like this one in the paper, what would be the larger picture we would get of this place, this time?

"The cool feature obits running in the Times might provide an example. Each obit might cast a little light on this or on that, but 100 of th]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Guys, A Frog And Some Cheese]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1120</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1120</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We talk a lot about what we should be giving people when they pick up the paper. What do they want? What do they need? How do we strike a balance between "news" and everything else?

There has already been some chatter in my office about the following story (linked below). It opens the door for a converstion. For some context, this ran in the Pasco Times, a regional section of the St. Petersburg Times, under a column-ish header called Night, with this footnote: "What happens between 5 p.m. and 9]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Making It Up?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1116</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1116</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This time it's allegations against Scott Thomas Beauchamp in the New Republic.

The Weekly Standard has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp -- author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns -- signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods -- fabrications containing only "a s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Goats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1117</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1117</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few of us have been kicking around an idea born in an office somewhere in the Northwest.

In the coming weeks, we're going to ask for your submissions for a new kind of writing contest. We're going to ask for your brightest stuff, the stories you bled, the ones that kept you up and made your heart beat heavy in your ears.

The ones your editor didn't get. The gray stories that felt like they didn't belong and wouldn't win traditional snewspaper contests.

Three categories. Three winners.

Best]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1111</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1111</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Wilson and Michael Brick: The 11-month-old girl stood in the tub, playing in shallow water with a 2-year-old girl, both looked after by a teenage mother home alone. The last moments of normal life in the third-floor apartment on Classon Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, ended that way, with one young mother, a pot of rice on the stove down the hall and two children in shallow water that would not be shallow enough.

And Cassi Feldman with The Days And Nights Of Maurice Cherry: AS h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[There's Hope]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1112</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1112</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Howard Kurtz reports that David Bradley had been trying to lure Jeffrey Goldberg to the Atlantic for more than two years and finally succeeded. The guy, evidently, is genius at spotting talent. And he's got some tools.

Part of what Bradley is selling is a commitment to long-form journalism, at a time when there are few quality outlets for those who believe in the power of nonfiction narrative. But what Goldberg calls "smart-bomb flattery" doesn't hurt, and neither do salaries for top journalist]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Michael Vick, In Context]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1113</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1113</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson in Atlanta: An empty chair sits in a ranch-style home in a city long divided. It's a comfortable chair, positioned in front of a large high-def television, and it belongs to Juanita Abernathy, one of the last living heroes of the 1960s civil rights movement.

She'll be here in just a moment to talk about Michael Vick.

Until then, look at the family photographs in Abernathy's den. There's her husband, Ralph, with Martin in Selma. Uncle Martin, that's what her children call him. T]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Light Under The Door]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1114</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1114</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I don't pretend to know the best way to make a newspaper function, but I think it's a bright thing that the Chicago Tribune, what with all the financial stresses, has hired Louise Kiernan (clips here, here and here) as a writing coach.

Here's the (exclusive?) memo.

Dear Colleagues:

We are delighted to announce that Louise Kiernan will become a senior editor of the newspaper overseeing staff writing development, an important new position that underscores our deep commitment to compelling story]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hallowed Sounds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1115</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1115</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sean Daly in Memphis: It's 3 a.m. in the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, and I'm walking out of a former brothel with two tipsy 21-year-old women. I just met them inside. Well, met them six hours ago. It's been a long night.

My new pals, from Tampa no less, have road-tripped to this river city to commune with the spirit of Jeff Buckley, an indie-rock icon who drowned in the Mississippi River 10 years ago. The women took a picture of his old shotgun-shack house. In the photo, red eyes glow in a win]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Giving Up Part of Herself]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1098</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1098</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:23:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Another from Justin George's series, Deciding: RIVERVIEW – She came home from work and asked her husband about his day, holding back the question pressing on her mind. Nicki Bradley, 38, fixed dinner and bathed her twins. When her husband played solitaire on the computer, Nicki ran a bubble bath and bared her soul to God. It had started a day earlier in a phone call with her best friend, Denise Robinson, whose husband, Alex, was on dialysis. By the end of the conversation, Nicki had volunteered,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hack As Journalist]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1097</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1097</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:47:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Manuel Roig-Franzia (thanks, Brady): SAN PEDRO GARZA GARCIA, Mexico — Tinny salsa downbeats jangled out of the flashing cellphone. Mario Salas pressed hard on the clutch, jammed the gearshift into second and wedged the phone between his right ear and shoulder. "Dime," he said — "Tell me." "Si," he said. "Si. A bad accident? A really bad one? I'm on my way." It was 5:15 p.m. in this moneyed suburb of Monterrey– time for Salas to transform. When the call came in, Salas was a taxi driver, prowling ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Promised Land]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1096</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1096</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:14:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bill Reiter: Eddie Johnson walked through the door of the Cadillac dealership in crisp white clothes and dark tinted sunglasses. A small fortune in diamonds hung from his wrists and ears. The words "4 Real" were trimmed into his hair, a statement to his critics that he would be as big as he'd always dreamed. The tattoo "God's Child" was etched on the right side of his neck, a mark of the pressure he'd placed on himself since he was a child. His right arm bore an ode to his mother — the tattoo of]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Apprentice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1095</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1095</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:42:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[S.L. Price (thanks, Tim): ONCE YOU DISCOVER THE SALVATION OF TRAVEL, the way it allows you to escape the old, escape yourself, it's a habit as tough to kick as any narcotic. But it wasn't the thrill of the exotic that got me hooked. It was the shock of becoming exotic, too. Arrive from somewhere six hundred—or twenty-five hundred—miles away, without parents and school ties, as a stranger spouting certainties, and you are no longer bland suburban boy, heir of nothing. You awake suddenly imbued wi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Man Dies Totally Different Than He Lives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1094</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1094</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:58:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Onion Radio News. (Thanks, Matt).]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two More]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1093</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1093</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:45:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephen Farrell and Peter Gelling (thanks, Alex): The bare statistics will record that in the 71st minute of a soccer tournament 5,000 miles from Iraq, a Kurd from Mosul kicked a ball onto the head of a Sunni from Kirkuk, who ricocheted it into the goal to secure a 1-0 victory for Iraq over Saudi Arabia on Sunday in the final of the 2007 Asian Cup. What weeping, shouting, horn-honking, flag-kissing, Kalashnikov-firing Iraqis will remember is that their team, known as the Lions of the Two Rivers,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Small City]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1092</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1092</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:26:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Doherty: This is what Newburgh is like without crack. Laressa Knight and her friend, Yahaira Fernandez, are walking down Lander Street on their way to the city pool, pushing a pair of strollers and herding two boys before them. "There are times, I would never — never — walk through here," said Fernandez, 24.

Laressa Knight and her friend, Yahaira Fernandez, are walking down Lander Street on their way to the city pool, pushing a pair of strollers and herding two boys before them.

"There ar]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Night Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1091</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1091</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:15:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Miami Herald's David Ovalle with Who killed Joaquin March? (thanks, Nigel): On a dark May morning, Joaquin March threw on a red T-shirt backward, slipped out of his house and pedaled away on his bicycle. Three hours later, his body was found on the side of the road. March, 18, lay on his left side, his left arm extended, his head resting on the South Miami-Dade curb. He had been run over — but the injuries to his smallish body suggested he was lying down when the wheels crushed him. His bicycle ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why, Lindsay, Why?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1090</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1090</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jul 2007 10:19:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Ben Montgomery on the fall of Lindsay Lohan:

She looks up and smiles in the video clip taken after her accident, and we're all there, co-conspirators, watching through the glass. We don't know exactly how to feel. We see the Mercedes against a tree. Then the running. The cameraman panting. "Put the f—ing camera down, bro," someone shouts. "Seriously."

We don't know exactly how to feel. We see the Mercedes against a tree. Then the running. The cameraman panting.

"Put the f—ing camera down]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chillin' At Da Depot]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1089</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1089</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Jul 2007 08:41:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Catherine Shoichet's story, then watch the sweet video: On the back of the shopping cart, a bright light flashes with each hip-hop beat. Nelson Sanchez glides past piles of plywood. He crisscrosses his arms. He waves a potted plant in the air. He points at his bright orange apron. I'm chillin' at the Depot. I'm chillin' with my people. Givin' you that customer service that can't be beat. By day, the 27-year-old King High graduate sells windows and doors at Home Depot in Riverview. By night,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chillin' At Da Depot]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1089</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1089</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Catherine Shoichet's story, then watch the sweet video: On the back of the shopping cart, a bright light flashes with each hip-hop beat.

Nelson Sanchez glides past piles of plywood. He crisscrosses his arms. He waves a potted plant in the air. He points at his bright orange apron.

I'm chillin' at the Depot. I'm chillin' with my people. Givin' you that customer service that can't be beat.

By day, the 27-year-old King High graduate sells windows and doors at Home Depot in Riverview. By nig]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Started]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1043</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1043</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow. Thanks. Thanks for the input. What a cool thing. A few folks I know on there, a few I've never heard of. I couldn't come by stuff for everyone, but it will be up soon. Here, then, are some links to get us going. (This is not a fair sampling, by and by, because I just pulled the first few links off Google News that I could find for each of these folks. But good writers are good, even on poor stories, I think.) Enjoy these and keep naming names.

Mark Davis of the AJC, here and here.

Stephen]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Buried Treasure]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1039</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1039</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:02:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tomas Alex Tizon (thanks, rlake): Clyde Friend's life changed the moment his bulldozer hit the first tree on a hot summer afternoon in 2002 as he leveled a hill behind his workshop. Chips flew everywhere, a small explosion of brown and white shards. He hopped off the dozer to investigate. There, embedded in the hill, was a mostly intact fossilized tree trunk standing upright in solid rock. "Well, that's different," he recalls thinking. A heavy-machine operator for most of his working life, Frien]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Who's Good?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1038</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1038</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jun 2007 09:52:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Help Gangrey.com take the temperature of the future of newspaper journalism.

Who is good out there? Is somebody unknown kicking ass at your paper? Does the rookie in the cubicle beside you have a spark? Does the weekly harbor a talent waiting to bust free? Are you good, and nobody knows it?

Click on Comments. Name names. I'll do the Nexis work.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In A Village Of 137, It's Hard To Find A Date]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1037</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1037</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:18:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Victoria Burnett: Ram&oacute;n S&aacute;nchez is not a great believer in the powers of Cupid. But when Mr. S&aacute;nchez, a wiry 54-year-old bachelor, heard that dozens of women would be coming to this quiet village for a blind date with the local men, he happily signed up. Mr. S&aacute;nchez, who lives 13 miles out of town on a farm with no telephone and with only sheep and cattle for company, said he had come along in the hope of meeting somebody with whom he could spend his old age. "It woul]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Trip To The Bronx]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1036</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1036</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:41:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Vincent M. Mallozzi: If seeing is believing, Michael Sayre will see today that he has no better friend than Aiden McGuire.

Mr. Sayre, 25, and Mr. McGuire, 26, grew up in Syracuse and still live there. They have been best friends since kindergarten, and through the years they have been inseparable, from the time they were hanging on monkey bars until now, when they hang out at local bars rooting for the Yankees.

Today in the Bronx, they have another play date.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Golden Rule, Slightly Tarnished]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1035</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1035</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:22:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Monica Hesse: Think for a moment about your cellphone. How many phone numbers does it have? How many photos? If it were lost, how long would it take you to reconstruct your life? If it were found, how much would you pay to get it back? That's what the voice on the phone was asking Ashton Giese.

How many phone numbers does it have?

How many photos?

If it were lost, how long would it take you to reconstruct your life?

If it were found, how much would you pay to get it back?

That's what the vo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Golden Rule, Slightly Tarnished]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1035</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1035</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Monica Hesse: Think for a moment about your cellphone.

How many phone numbers does it have?

How many photos?

If it were lost, how long would it take you to reconstruct your life?

If it were found, how much would you pay to get it back?

That's what the voice on the phone was asking Ashton Giese.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Get to a newspaper']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1034</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1034</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:46:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pete Hamill called into Fred Dicker's Albany-area radio talk show this morning to promote his new novel "North River." Thought all you Gangreeks out there might enjoy what two of the biggest names in Big Apple journalism had to say about blogs, the value of good editing and the future of "the industry."

Dicker: "Pete, let me ask you about contemporary journalism today. I've never before in my career (and I've been at it – well, I'd hate to admit it – 35 years or so) run into so many young repor]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Greeley Stampede]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1033</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1033</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:37:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It's an ancient newspaper quagmire: An event comes to town once a year, and everyone expects the paper to cover it, but how do you give people something they'd want to read. Doyle Murphy covered the Greeley Stampede last year in an interesting way, looking for documentable moments in the lives of people around the Stampede. Meghan Murphy's on it this year. Here she is with the first two installments: Watching over the Watermelon Feed and Leading the way to the Stampede: Norma Trujillo fumbles th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Court Reporting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1032</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1032</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:42:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A sentencing comes alive: The end brought no mercy for Paul Siminovsky.

It came more than four years after he was arrested in cinematic fashion: pulled over in his car, driven to a secluded room at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and seated before a half-dozen investigators to face the evidence of his crimes.

It came after he had confessed to bribery, participated in a sting, lost his license to work as a divorce lawyer and testified in court for nearly 13 days at two trials. It came after he had he]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Greeley Stampede]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1033</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1033</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It's an ancient newspaper quagmire: An event comes to town once a year, and everyone expects the paper to cover it, but how do you give people something they'd want to read. Doyle Murphy covered the Greeley Stampede last year in an interesting way, looking for documentable moments in the lives of people around the Stampede. Meghan Murphy's on it this year. Here she is with the first two installments: Watching over the Watermelon Feed and Leading the way to the Stampede: Norma Trujillo fumbles th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Get to a newspaper']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1034</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1034</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pete Hamill called into Fred Dicker's Albany-area radio talk show this morning to promote his new novel "North River." Thought all you Gangreeks out there might enjoy what two of the biggest names in Big Apple journalism had to say about blogs, the value of good editing and the future of "the industry."

Dicker: "Pete, let me ask you about contemporary journalism today. I've never before in my career (and I've been at it – well, I'd hate to admit it – 35 years or so) run into so many young repor]]></description>
      <author>Brendan</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eddie Houston's Bad Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1031</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1031</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:45:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sometimes you just want to read about a dude gone nuts. Here's John Doherty: There are two parts of Eddie Houston's story police think they believe.

Number one: Police think Houston's telling the truth when he says he set the fire at 222 Broadway that left 11 people homeless Sunday night.

And two: They believe he smoked a good deal of crack before lighting the fire and jumping out a third-story window — just like Houston says he did.

All the other stuff Houston claims — that he was being held]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Angler]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1030</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p1030</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:55:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Barton Gellman and Jo Becker: Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney's lawyer, who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby.

The meeting marked "the first time that the issue of interrogations comes ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Death At Hooters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1027</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-1027</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephanie Hayes: Breasts. Boobs. Hooters.

Half the population has a pair.

In America, they're celebrated. Obsessed over. Regarded with a sexy sense of humor.

But sometimes, breasts get cancer.

The cancer is reckless and unfunny. Like an intruder in the night, it leaves the body ransacked.

It's not sexy.

So, let's say you're Hooters. The owl on your sign has two big, round eyes with dots in the middle. Your slogan is "Delightfully Tacky, Yet Unrefined."

Your "Hooters Girls" are famous for ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get A Room]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p973</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p973</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 May 2007 07:59:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Amber Mobley on love bugs: They're the couple next door in desperate need of drapery, the eternal newlyweds, the definitive PDAers. Kind of sweet. Extremely gratuitous. Perpetually connected. Meet The Love Bugs. Technically termed plecia nearctica, those orange-and-black bugs are known for their immodesty — mating midair, linked junk-to-junk.

Kind of sweet.

Extremely gratuitous.

Perpetually connected.

Meet The Love Bugs.

Technically termed plecia nearctica, those orange-and-black bugs are k]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A beautiful story by Inara Verzemnieks at The Oregonian]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-974</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-974</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this unusual narrative: One day a baby sparrow plummeted 25 feet from a nest tucked in the eaves of a Southeast Portland home and landed in a clump of dying irises.]]></description>
      <author>Mark</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A beautiful story by Inara Verzemnieks at The Oregonian]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p974</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p974</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this unusual narrative: One day a baby sparrow plummeted 25 feet from a nest tucked in the eaves of a Southeast Portland home and landed in a clump of dying irises.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Indiscreet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p972</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p972</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2007 23:42:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall, who sort of took my old job at The Florida Times-Union, comes out of nowhere with a beautiful, haunting character study disguised as a story about a man crapping in public : A disheveled man shuffles into view, sets his drink on a planter, looks to either side, and begins to take his pants down. Monique Brown walks by as his slacks fall. She turns back and lets out a little scream. Tom Broadus looks up from his desk across the street and sees a bare butt sticking up in the air. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pomp And Whatever]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p971</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p971</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2007 22:15:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is great, and I don't have all the details, so correct my mistakes somebody: An editor somewhere in the northern portion of TimesLand put some money down for a contest to spice up the high school graduation coverage this year. Best story, as I understand it, wins, what, $50, or a gift certificate to Olive Garden or something?

Great idea, right? Here, then, are tops of the stories I could find. Please, please post others that I didn't see, if there are more out there.

And you be the judge.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salvation Of Newspapers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p970</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p970</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2007 09:54:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember this two-parter from Thomas Curwen at the LA Times? He shares a bit about his experience and some of the feedback with Nell Lake: He wrote us that the online story package received more than 533,000 hits. The print version ran in the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times and six other papers. And: "I have received nearly 400 emails from readers. One was disappointed that the time sequence in the story jumped around so much. Another did not like it that the Times chose to publish the story ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tuesday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p969</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p969</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2007 06:54:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cindy Lange-Kubick's mom was so not cool.

Andy Newman takes us beneath the Cyclone.

Lane Degregory with another Encounters.

Stephanie Earls on The Force in Albany.

Kruse and Erin Sullivan profile a dreamer.

Inara Verzemnieks at the sheep dog trials: On this particular weekend, obsession looks like a wet border collie, pressed up against a fence, staring at a herd of sheep on the other side with such longing in its amber eyes, you feel ashamed of your own silly human passions: husband, job, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salvation Of Newspapers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-970</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-970</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember this two-parter from Thomas Curwen at the LA Times? He shares a bit about his experience and some of the feedback with Nell Lake: He wrote us that the online story package received more than 533,000 hits. The print version ran in the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times and six other papers. And: "I have received nearly 400 emails from readers. One was disappointed that the time sequence in the story jumped around so much. Another did not like it that the Times chose to publish the story ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pomp And Whatever]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-971</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-971</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is great, and I don't have all the details, so correct my mistakes somebody: An editor somewhere in the northern portion of TimesLand put some money down for a contest to spice up the high school graduation coverage this year. Best story, as I understand it, wins, what, $50, or a gift certificate to Olive Garden or something?

Great idea, right? Here, then, are tops of the stories I could find. Please, please post others that I didn't see, if there are more out there.

And you be the judge.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Indiscreet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-972</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-972</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Konrad Marshall, who sort of took my old job at The Florida Times-Union, comes out of nowhere with a beautiful, haunting character study disguised as a story about a man crapping in public : A disheveled man shuffles into view, sets his drink on a planter, looks to either side, and begins to take his pants down.

Monique Brown walks by as his slacks fall. She turns back and lets out a little scream. Tom Broadus looks up from his desk across the street and sees a bare butt sticking up in the air.]]></description>
      <author>Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two From Sara]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p968</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p968</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 May 2007 10:03:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Real men sweat and wrestle: Arthur Breur pressed down on the other man's back, cradling him in his arms.

"Wrestle!" the coach barked, and then Breur's only thought was domination, pinning the other man down, forcing him to submit.

New spin on the 'burbs: Here comes DJ Neo, 22 years old, stack of CDs in one hand, cell phone in the other, striding toward the doorway of Club Quench.

He is late. Club employees have already left him voice mails to the effect that he should drop whatever unmanly pu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Story In A Box]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p967</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p967</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 May 2007 08:52:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Another Encounters: Susan Zaffater has been to enough garage sales to know when something is junk. The trunk was special. She didn't even need to search inside it to know that. The lid was open. It was Army green, rusted, made of particle board. What got her was the folded American flag, each corner neatly tucked, on top. The seller wanted $20. Susan's husband, Joe, reached into his pocket.

The lid was open. It was Army green, rusted, made of particle board. What got her was the folded American]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Let Me Explain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p966</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p966</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 May 2007 19:55:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[No, these aren't newspaper stories. But I submit the following two passages as standards toward which to strive as we try to explain the world. They both appeared in The New Yorker. The first, from "Struts and Frets" by Burkhard Bilger (May 14, 2007), is about how a guitar works. The second, from "The Bakeoff" by Malcolm Gladwell (September 5, 2005) is about the magic formula of a good cookie. Both seem like simple subjects, but read carefully. There's some real insight here. This sort of report]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p965</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p965</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 May 2007 08:18:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If this lion was successful, would it have pooped pretty sentences?

Peter Slevin: Long time gone.

Dan Barry: A soldier goes down fighting.

What are you reading?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Editor Wall II]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p953</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p953</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 May 2007 20:14:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Advice via email from Roy Wenzl: Here's my take on how to get past the editor wall.

First, just print out what "MIKE" said, and keep it with you. It's the best adivce possible, because it's about turning potential enemies or potential neutrals into occasional allies.

What I say here now merely supplements what Mike said. I suppose I should mention that I worked as an editor for 16 years at four papers before i went back to writing nine years ago.

When I talk to reporters about The Editor Wall]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Editor Wall]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p952</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p952</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 May 2007 10:59:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Okay. This is a good one coming off the writers workshop. Got an email from a guy at a mid-sized paper who wants to do good stuff and he's challenged because the bosses don't get it. News should be "news" and features should contain 14 adverbs and pertain to the elderly and how to cook chicken in new and exciting ways.

Also, the guy wants to stay and make the place better.

How do you break through the editor wall? he asks.

So help your brother out.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Answers In The Wind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-941</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-941</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 12 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tamara Jones: Matt Deighton grabs a broom and starts sweeping the living-room floor, a chore clearly more cathartic than practical in the ruins of his childhood home. The cozy little bungalow is a heap of splintered wood, jagged glass, broken brick and shredded drywall now, like everything else in this heartland town that disappeared a week ago when a 200-mph tornado tore through just around bedtime.

Greensburg is gone, all but a few of its 1,500 residents homeless, left to shovel and bulldoze ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mayborn Conference]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-923</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-923</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Bill Marvel: Several people who regularly post to Gangrey have attended the Mayborn Conference here in North Texas. It's aimed at exactly the kind of writing Gangrey promotes -- smart, literary non-fiction. Last year Gay Talese came to speak and stayed for the whole conference. He was astonishingly gracious, making himself available constantly to writers who wanted to just talk. Those of us who grew up reading Talese wondered why this sort of thing didn't happen in the '60s or '70s, when we]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hail the new (Gangrey) Fellow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p915</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p915</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:57:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here I am, officially my first day back in the Memphis cubicle, and the news comes through my email — Gangrey friend and contributor Colleen Kenney is among the 13 U.S. journalists selected as a 2007-08 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

This is how Colleen informed me, via email:

"YIPPPPPPEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Colleen's study topic is a doozy: Applying Poetry Techniques to Narrative Writing.

I know Colleen's talent and charm will earn her a warm embrace from the University of Michigan's unbelieva]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[11 inches]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p914</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p914</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:16:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sometimes we see things that are hard to stand. And this story is hard to read. But Ben made something beautiful and powerful out of it.

Angel T. Jimenez bought a length of nylon rope from Home Depot, climbed high into an oak tree by the Hillsborough River and ended his life with his secret in his pocket.

Read it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Breaking The Point]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p913</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p913</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:51:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Greg Bruno's report: On the evening of April 8, 2000, midway through her second semester at the U.S. Military Academy, Cadet Kristina Thompson passed out drunk in a Washington, D.C.-area hotel room.

When she awoke, dizzy and disoriented, she found herself naked, a male classmate thrusting into her.

But Thompson, then 21, waited nearly a year before reporting the sexual assault. She was afraid Academy leaders would blame her for socializing with an upperclassman.

She was right to worry.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hike Into Horror]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p912</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p912</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:43:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[LAT's Thomas Curwen with part 1: JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn't sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the tongue, the teeth, the flattened ears. Jenna ran right past him, and it struck him — a flash of fur, two jumps, 400 pounds of lightning.

It was a grizzly, and it had him by his left thigh. His mind started racing — to Jenna, to the trip, to fighting, to escaping. The bear jerked him back and forth like a rag doll, but he remembered no]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Here To Eternity]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p911</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p911</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:18:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[His magazine piece (thanks, Kevin): This story begins on an August afternoon in 2002 when the baby needed a nap. Or possibly in a different year with a different baby taking a different nap: We had several children in quick succession, and some of the details have blurred. On the vast scale of time that this tale will ultimately encompass — a scale so stupendous the human mind cannot fathom it — a year or two, give or take, is nothing.

What I can say with certainty is that this story begins in ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He Lived To Tell About It]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p910</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p910</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:17:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse with an Encounter: BROOKSVILLE – Dan Weaver was telling stories outside his food trailer called The Olde Smokehouse the other day at the Hernando County Fair. He's 55. Sometimes he lives in Gibsonton and sometimes in Ohio, but mainly he stays in the camper he pulls with his van. He talked for a good long while.

He talked about his signature Amish Dagwood sandwich – home-cooked bacon, ham and hard salami and three different kinds of cheese on a six-inch hoagie roll. He talked about how it ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Johnnie Three Names]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p909</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p909</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Apr 2007 23:12:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Google News failed me. My friend John-Henry Doucette has brought light and understanding to the Virginia Tech massacre in a spirit that would have made our mentor proud. Here he is, daily: April 23, 22, 21, 20, 19 and18.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Waiting For The Call]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p908</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p908</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:13:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story: There have been higher points in Rohan Davey's career — starring in big-time college bowl victories, dominating the N.F.L.'s European league and collecting two Super Bowl rings from his three years with the New England Patriots — but there he was last week in Uniondale, sitting and scowling and scribbling his name for fans, seated next to Sparky the Dragon, the team's fire-snorting mascot.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Virginia Tech Shooting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p907</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p907</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:48:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Cory Golden, via email: If you were a feature writer assigned to this, and you had your choice what you went after, where would you be drawn? How would you make your story different from the mass of material being generated by newspapers, magazines, TV and the Net? Reporters are surely drawn to different aspects of an event like this: are you the sort of person who'd want to reconstruct that fateful morning? Focus on one victim? Try to piece together the information about the shooter? And t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Attack, Then The Pointing Of Fingers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p906</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p906</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:15:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[His story: They told the police that they thought it would be easy to rob the gay man. It was not easy. The gay man ran away when they punched him, they said on videotaped statements played yesterday in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. He climbed over a guardrail along the Belt Parkway, stopped a lane of traffic, waved his cellphone as if to call for help, stumbled into the next lane and was hit by a car. They said they dragged the gay man off the road and searched his pockets for money and drug]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-885</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-885</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thomas Lake and Molly Moorhead with A chase, an outcry, then shots in the dark.

Michael Kruse with The boys from Coots cabin.

NOTE: I was deeply impressed by Edmund Fountain's slideshow, which ran online with Kruse's story. To be truthful, I think most of these suck. I rarely watch the entire slideshow. But there was something about this one that brought me in and held my attention. I asked Edmund to explain how he did it.

Generally when I record sound for online I do a combination of formal ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[48 Tips]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-886</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-886</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you didn't look before, swing by Pat Walters' blog citing 48 tips from the Harford National Writers Workshop. Lots of useful stuff (you can nearly feel Pat sweating), including a sweet snippet from Dan Barry: "I think people read newspapers, for reasons not to read the story. ... So our challenge is to grab them through the paper and say -- 'Read this.' ... I work extremely hard on my leads. That's my shot."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Baddest Man On The Planet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-887</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-887</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Carlo Rotella on Shannon Briggs: The eclipse of the American heavyweight echoes the recent string of American failures in international basketball and baseball competitions and the continuing influx of athletes from around the world into these and other sports here at home. Formerly American-ruled games seem to be becoming like hockey and soccer, in which the U.S. is just one competitor among many, no more fearsome than Sweden or Spain. Jingoistic fans should worry that soon the only sport that ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[So Let's Talk About This One]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-884</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-884</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Andrew Wolfe of the Nashua Telegraph goes wild on a car crash (thanks, Matt):

Dude, you are SO grounded!

Taking your mom's '95 Maxima after she went to bed, that was brazen.

It's cool you could pick up your four friends, but, dude, you couldn't find anyone old enough to drive?

A 13-year-old kid wracks up your mom's ride on a PSNH pole, and you all bail. . . . What were you thinking?

Read the whole thing. Thoughts?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Junkyard of Humanity]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-882</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-882</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Post's Sudarsan Raghavan was there (thanks, Tim): The bomber blew himself up no more than a few yards away. First, a brilliant flash of orange light like a starburst, then a giant popping sound. A gust of debris, flesh and blood threw me from my chair as if I were made of cardboard.

I was lying on a bed of shattered glass on the floor of the cafeteria in the Iraqi parliament building, covered with ashes and dust. Small pieces of flesh clung to my bluejeans. Blood, someone else's, speckled t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[NWW in a Blog]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-883</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-883</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He's got a running list of tips from the folks speaking there. Keep up with it here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Question]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-881</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-881</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A friend is seeking advice: I've been reporting a story for three months about a woman with MS who is trying to get off her ventilator and breathe on her own. She hasn't made much progress with getting off the vent and after a hospital stay for five days for pneumonia she was feeling pretty down. I was with her this past Easter Sunday when she told me that the previous week she had essentially tried to kill herself by pulling out her vent and expecting herself to pass out. She also considered do]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He Died In Vast Isolation]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p860</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p860</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:02:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember the racket a few weeks ago about the old man who died in his house and was found 13 months later, still in front of the turned-on TV?

LAT's Erika Hayasaki brings us the backstory (thanks, Cory): Southampton, N.Y. — THE blind man died alone in front of his television in a lounge chair, near a table covered with medicine bottles wrapped in rubber bands and a cereal box stuffed with mail. Each rubber band marked a prescription he recognized by touch. Each envelope contained information he]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Zach and The Reading Thrones]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p859</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p859</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 31 Mar 2007 09:54:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Our friend (and Gangreyer) brings us this story (via, Nieman Narrative Digest): Just before suppertime on Feb. 7, 2006, a little boy named Zach Kroeker, who lived on a farm in Jefferson County with his dad and his mom and his sister and his calves and his cats and a dog named Henry, died.

Instead of flowers for his funeral his teachers filled a basket with pencils and rulers and two books.

One was called "Salt in His Shoes," and it was the last book Zach finished reading in Mrs. Comer's first-]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lies and Memories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p858</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p858</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:27:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jack Shafer on the embellishment trap (thanks, Cory): If you've never embellished an anecdote to get a bigger laugh from your drinking companions, please stand up. If you've never lifted an emotional story from your kid brother's life or from a book you've read and then plugged it into your own narrative, you can stand up, too.

If you're still sitting, stand up and join the other liars. Everybody embellishes and steals a little, and some of us do it a lot.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[To Breaking News]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p857</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p857</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Mar 2007 05:40:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you've ever covered something spontaneous near deadline, you know it's easy to ditch style and story for the sake of getting all the stardard information in short order. That's why it's refreshing to read this Alex Zayas story about a car accident late last night.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Oceans of Promotions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p856</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p856</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:11:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Libby Copeland in the sunshine: The sand is white, the water is blue-green, and the nation's college students are celebrating the proud rites of spring as they always have, with Keystone Light and wet T-shirt contests. What more could they possibly need?

More. So much more.

Behold, the marketers of spring break have descended, transforming the beach into a corporate wonderland. There's a Geico gaming tent and a Neutrogena spa, and the Trojan booth offers pina-colada-scented oxygen you can inha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tea Town]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p855</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p855</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:09:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse with a study of sweet tea geography trends: McDonald's has been selling its so-labeled and specifically pitched product called Mickey D's Sweet Tea for a while now in select markets on the East Coast and particularly in the South. Here's what's interesting about this: Hernando County has not been one of those markets.

Mickey D's Sweet Tea is sold in Ocala. It's sold in Orlando. It's sold in Perry and in the Panhandle and even in Naples and New Port Richey.

But not here.

Here, then, in t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I Don't Have Sex With My Monkey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p854</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p854</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:31:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here at Gangrey we generally focus on craft, but this one wins on content.

The narrative is a litle convoluted and hard to follow. But it may be the best news story of the year.

To untangle it a bit:

Man's monkey gets seized by the cops. Monkey goes to live in an educational exotic-animal center run by the school district. Man is heart broken. He sends the monkey a care package: a box of monkey toys. And an audio tape.

That's where things get peculiar.

Animal center caretaker listens to the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tuesday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p853</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p853</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:57:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for the few posts last week. I took a vacation with my family. Back, now, and ready to roll.

Robert D. McFadden on the rampage a few weeks ago in Greenwich Village.

Brick from Merritt Island, Fla.: The old-timers still talk of manned rockets and raucous nights at the space cowboy roadhouses, the Moon Hut and the Mouse Trap, places where yesterday's gravity resisters could raise a beer to honor the Moon and missions thereabouts. Since those days, a whole generation has known space travel ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Branson]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p852</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p852</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:43:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I seem to recall a conversation late one night not all that long ago in a so-so hotel room just off an I-4 exit ramp in Orlando in which Ben asked that someone please write … THIS.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What The Tut-Tutters Fail To Understand]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p851</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p851</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:33:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A smidge of Hank Stuever on a Sunday morning: As the details of Anna Nicole Smith's death (you may have heard about it already) were being orgiastically reported in print and on TV, I was spending time at a spiritual retreat house in New Mexico that is staffed by nuns, one of whom, for reasons I'll never have enough space to explain, is my 73-year-old mother. Over dinner one night, the sisters asked me who, exactly, Anna Nicole was, and why everyone was so interested in her. I did my best to exp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Portrait of a Legend]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p811</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p811</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:27:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[(Thanks, Ollie) PETE DEXTER blew into town from Florida some 30 years ago with a cowboy limp and a car that smelled like wet dog.

His hips were messed up from an old football injury, aggravated by years of Dexter insisting he could bang with kids half his age in playground basketball games.

He was always bleeding from his ears, gums, recent scabs.

Dexter's car appeared to be upholstered in mouse-colored shag carpet. It was dog hair, layer upon layer, undisturbed, like age rings in a tree. The]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Taking Us There]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p810</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p810</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Feb 2007 06:30:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The egg comes first: Let us now praise an unsung hero of tourist season: the short-order cook slinging hash, right this minute, in the crowded kitchen at Skyway Jack's Restaurant.

His name is Glenn Thompson. He is 51 years old. He sprints from grill to toaster. The notoriously feisty waitresses at the notoriously politically incorrect restaurant don't suffer dawdlers.

"The waitress from hell."

Thompson doesn't call her that. She wears a button that brags about it.

"Where's my eggs?" she dema]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chivers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p809</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p809</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:28:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[ASNE was kind enough to give him the award.

Read it again.

——

By C.J. Chivers New York Times

KARMA, Iraq, Oct. 30 — Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby clutched the injured marine's empty helmet. His hands were coated in blood. Sweat ran down his face, which he was trying to keep straight but kept twisting into a snarl.

He held up the helmet and flipped it, exposing the inside. It was lined with blood and splinters of bone.

"The round hit him," he said, pausing to point at a tiny hol]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stories in Alabama]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p808</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p808</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:48:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anybody going to this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Tribute To Lane]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p807</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p807</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:35:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Even before I knew her, Lane Degregory was my hero. So I think it's pretty cool that she is the winner of this year's Ernie Pyle memorial award for human interest writing.

Here's why: Good Intentions. Calming the Storm. "i am pretty sure that i know u".

Congratulations, Lane.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Forgiven, Not Forgotten]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p806</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p806</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:56:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the AP's Kristen Gelineau (Thanks, Andy): "You got a letter," Mike Seccuro said, tossing an envelope onto his wife Liz's lap as he climbed behind the wheel of their minivan. Who lives in Vegas? she wondered briefly of the postmark before her eyes stopped on the sender's name. She froze.

Who lives in Vegas? she wondered briefly of the postmark before her eyes stopped on the sender's name.

She froze.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p805</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p805</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Feb 2007 20:40:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[C.J. Chivers on what happens after the war. And, my friends, David Finkel with the guys who are going:

Their camouflage on, their wives carrying infants, their older children carrying flags, the soldiers of George W. Bush's surge crowded into a gymnasium for their brigade deployment ceremony, a last public viewing before they disappeared into Iraq. Baghdad, long an abstraction, was now imminent. Of the 21,500 additional troops President Bush decided to send to Iraq in the coming months, about 3]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Owning The Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p804</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p804</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Feb 2007 20:13:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On the heels of some great discussion about what's right and wrong in narrative today, consider this story about the Largo, Fla. city manager who is undergoing a sex change:

As the debate raged about transgender people, Largo City Manager Steve Stanton sat mute. It was 2003, and religious conservatives had converged on the City Commission to fight a proposed ordinance that would protect transsexuals from discrimination. Afterward, then-Commissioner Pat Burke confronted Stanton in his office. Sh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Sunshine State]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p803</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p803</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:51:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It all happens here: "Florida is a dream state," Mormino says. "And the dream comes in many versions. You can reinvent yourself here. You could be bankrupted twice in Illinois and move here and change your name."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Big Chair, Big Mystery]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p802</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p802</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:37:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael's story: The big chair is still gone.

The giant-sized deck chair was 11 feet tall, 6 feet wide and weighed 400 pounds, and it sat in front of the Bare-Lee Used Furniture store on U.S. 19 as sort of a trademark of the small, family-run, bargain-priced business. Then it was stolen sometime late Feb. 2 or early Feb. 3. Now, almost a month later, the Hernando County Sheriff's Office has no leads, according to spokeswoman Deputy Donna Black.

"We've gotten no calls," she said Wednesday.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Street Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-797</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-797</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Gangrey-lurker Jennifer P. Brown's feature column, Street Stories, from the Kentucky New Era. She's catching all sorts of quiet stories, like a prayer meeting in a rough hood, a murder no one remembers, and a couple working on their family narrative.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why We Do What We Do]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-798</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-798</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't kept up with their series on Walter Reed and the results of their investigation, here's your chance, along with a transcript from their online chat today.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Man Who Wouldn't Quit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-794</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-794</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ray Rivera's story: Balding, with just a fringe of unwieldy gray hair, Mr. Melnitzky was once a recognized art expert. He was the principal art conservator at Sotheby's for nearly 30 years and had a client list that included Hollywood celebrities and denizens from high society. When Greta Garbo died, he was called on to examine her art collection.

But when his wife filed for divorce in 1994, Mr. Melnitzky became something else: a litigator. A prolific one. And although he has no law degree and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[JROTC In A Tough Place]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-795</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-795</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: "They seem to think I'm some evil, horrible soldier down here trying to sacrifice our kids to Iraq," Harrington said in describing the increasing tensions on the Eastside campus.

The program's critics see JROTC as a Trojan horse targeting students in low-income minority schools with high dropout rates. "We are a juicy target," said Roosevelt social studies teacher Jorge Lopez.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Powerball Can't Change Me]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-796</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-796</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And that makes a fun read. Here's Colleen Kenney's story: "Say I'm at a bar with friends," Mike Terpstra says. "If I go, 'I'll get that round!' my friends just look at me. ''Think you can afford that?'"]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-793</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-793</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[* Justin George catches up to an old story.

* Dan Barry's This Land.

* John Barry's A rose from Holly.

* And don't miss Dana Priest and Anne Hull on what it's like at Walter Reed: Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world war]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Victim and Victimizer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-791</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-791</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jenifer Warren in today's LAT: It's a warm, cloudless day and Patty O'Reilly is about to meet the man who killed her husband. A million thoughts compete for attention in her head. Two stand out.

Why am I here?

What good will it do?]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get This Book]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-792</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-792</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Nora Ephron in Telling True Stories: I have also learned things through screenwriting that would have been good to know when I worked as a journalist. As a young journalist I thought that stories were simply WHAT HAPPENED. As a screenwriter I realized that we CREATE stories by imposing narrative on the events that happen around us.

Structure is the key to narrative. These are the crucial questions any storyteller must answer: Where does it begin? Where does the beginning start to end and the mi]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Selma March]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-787</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-787</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jimmy Breslin in the New York Herald Tribune March 1965

Selma, Alabama � United States Highway 80, between Montgomery and Selma, is fifty miles of asphalt with a yellow dividing line and a roadside of deep green grass which runs for long stretches without being cluttered with advertising signs. United States Highway 80 does not run through buying country. It runs through farmland that has been picked clean and through swamps with squirrel-colored moss trees standing dead in the muddy water.

An]]></description>
      <author>Ralrika</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Little Turtle's Big Adventure]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-788</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-788</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben swings and connects:

LITHIA - There once was a turtle named Pepper who lived in a small pond in a neighborhood called FishHawk Trails.]]></description>
      <author>SI</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Connective Tissue]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-789</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-789</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ken Speake: We hit 'em upside the head with inhumanity, then we go to commercial and come back and hit 'em up the other side with fear. Folks tell me they appreciate my stuff because it's different, interesting, refreshing, and they like hearing how and why people do what they do to get through life.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Valentine's Nuptials]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-790</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-790</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Thursday's THR: The rings arrive. The party crowds into the mayor's office. The phone keeps ringing. A police scanner chatters in the corner.

"Friends," starts the mayor, Marlinda Duncanson, "we are gathered here ..."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thursday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-786</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-786</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[* Cindy Wolff with some zoo lovin'.

* T. Lake on a gator attack (read the ending).

* David Montgomery with the man behind The Man.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[That Slippery Thing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-782</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-782</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Jacob Fries' story: The fake survey. It's an old ploy private eyes use to trick people into telling the truth. "We're in the neighborhood," they say, "and have a few questions for you."

Chuck Lukey had used the trick many times before. But this time, he wasn't investigating a guy cheating on his wife or faking a back injury. The information he wanted could get a man out of prison.

The case file read like a soap opera script, with a violent death, a trial, a $600,000 settlement, lies, betr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Dark Side Of Valentine's Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-783</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-783</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Earl Swift's classic story: The hall outside Judge M. Randolph Carlson II's courtroom is crowded with old lovers this Valentine's morning. Most are wearing their coats, speaking quietly with attorneys. The lighting is harsh, the tile cool and hard, the mood, apprehensive. No one holds a bouquet or a box of chocolates.

Inside, the every-Monday business of Norfolk's Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court begins.

Ernest and Diane are called in. They were living together last October, they tes]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Big Pimpin']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-784</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-784</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check it out.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Example]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-785</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-785</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gregory E. Favre on Mike Levine: Mike was an editor who never stopped being a reporter and a writer. He was an editor who never stopped being a teacher. He was an editor who understood how you could go directly to the heart of a story.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Perfect Detail]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-781</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-781</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Peter Clark wonders about Lisa Nowak's diaper:

What makes the diaper a great detail? I'm struggling to understand. Perhaps it's the diaper's gritty specificity. Or the way it defines character. Or the way it stands as a symbol of the protagonist's tragic flaws. Or the way it marks the orbit of her narrative from the apogee of heavenly exploration to the perigee of piss and shit.

Can anyone answer that? Why does the diaper detail make that story? Does every story have a diaper-esque nugget ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Odds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-778</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-778</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michelle York's story: The odds of someone Mr. Schenk's age developing lung cancer are roughly one in 5,000; the odds of winning the jackpot in the $5 game of High Stakes Blackjack, as he did, are one in 2,646,000.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gibbs High]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-779</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-779</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Barry's story: The old Gibbs was a dump, a 1928 asbestos-ridden relic. The principal and janitor shared a room. Biology students shared a frog. Everyone remembers old Gibbs as a shrine.

The new Gibbs cost $58-million, the most expensive school ever built in Pinellas County. It has everything. It has 2,300 students. Four in 10 are poor. Four in 10 won't graduate. An anonymous letter went to the superintendent on Dec. 15. The authors claimed to be "very disgusted teachers."

They wrote:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pool Of Talent]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-780</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-780</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: His shoes and jeans are splattered with star paint. His fingernails are lined with the dirt of creation.

John Wilder, a senior in the arts program at Gibbs High, just constructed his own version of heaven, the Earth and the underworld.

After months of drawing, drafting and calculating against the risk of flooding an entire building of his high school, Wilder designed the set for a production of Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman's retelling of classical mythology.

The centerpiece o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fugitive]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-775</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-775</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jim Dwyer's story (Thanks, Craig): "Orlando."

In a dim, nearly deserted Everglades farm stand, nothing moved.

Orlando Boquete, hybrid of youth and age — his body springy and athletic at 52, but knitted to a startlingly ancient head — peered at the stalls through thick eyeglasses.

Other than a faint buzz, the shimmer of heat trapped in a tin roof, the word "Orlando" was the only sound.

An impatient companion called to him.

"Orlando. Hey, Orlando."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadline Narrative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-776</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-776</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lance Griffin came to Tom French's seminar at Poynter a few months ago on doing narrative on deadline. He got the chance to try it out last week when an armed man shot up a medical practice.

Here's his sidebar narrative in the Dothan Eagle: Remia Robertson sat at her second-floor desk at PrimeCare Monday morning. A day's worth of Medicare paperwork rested beside her. She had just gotten off the phone with an insurance claim when she heard a door slam downstairs.

What followed was a single guns]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Who She Was]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-777</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-777</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse on Jessica Lunsford: She was frilly and girly.

She was curious and conscientious.

She was warm and bouncy and kind and caring and empathetic and mature for her age and had good attendance and tried real hard in her third-grade class at Homosassa Elementary School.

She was sweet but sometimes shy.

"She's my friend," Tiffany Powalish told attorneys later.

"What kind of things did you guys do together?" she was asked.

"Cheerleading."

"Cheerleading?"

She nodded her head.

"Okay. Anythi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Friday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-774</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-774</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Helen Anne Travis watches a cow make a cow and Tom Lake brings us the note found in a middle-schooler's pocket: "lay low for a while. Don't bring s--- to school cant get Busted or Dead."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mommy's Little Vulture]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-772</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-772</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Funny is hard to do. This is funny: Joyce Newman misses her vulture.

She adopted it seven years ago, agreeing to pay $300 a year for its care. Usually she sent more, up to $1,000.

Initially the staff of the Pelican Man's Bird Sanctuary in Sarasota tried to steer her toward something smaller, maybe a blue jay.

Newman, a New Yorker in her 60s, said no way to the jay. "For $300 a year," she told them, "I want the biggest (bleeping) bird you got."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Woman's Grief]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-773</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-773</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is a fine example of good narrative. Read Dave Tarrant's story from Sunday's Dallas Morning News: Grief has a way of finding you. Even after 35 years.

Shonda Palmer Hardy was at home in Plano reading a newspaper story about a recovering drug addict who had written a memoir. As a boy, his faith had been shaken after coming upon a family struck by lightning. One of the four killed had been a young boy.

Shonda's stomach tensed. She rushed to a bookstore and found the memoir, Broken: My Story]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[After A Fire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-770</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-770</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There's a fine line between poetry and hokey horseshit, right? So howabout Michael Wilson's observations about a fire in the NYT today?

* Bang: The wind makes waves of the dust and hard dirt that crest and break just like the kind in the water. The wind goes on to whip through Brooklyn, behind you, but it gets you first.

* Something else creaks from a black room. Is someone there? The north side of Noble is lined with shoebox-shaped rooms without walls on the short ends, and some of them look ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bye-Bye Books]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-771</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-771</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sad, sad, sad.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Borrowed Identity]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-769</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-769</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Earl Swift and Tris Wykes write a story about a story: So this Harvard kid writes a book – a book of funny stories, all of them made up – and Random House makes plans to sell the book this April. And among the stories is one titled "My Mom's All-Time, Top Five Greatest Boyfriends," written from the perspective of an 11-year-old boy whose favorite minor-league hockey team happens to be the Norfolk Admirals.

And this story – which is fiction, remember – flips through the five boyfriends, revealin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-768</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-768</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Colleen Kenney with a fire inspector on his last day (One of those pre-bits you guys were talking about).

Dan Barry finds him a librarian.

Jorge Sanchez with a story about the Florida tornados' sole crane survivor. Yay.

Ramsey tests the theory of the half-time flush.

Miguel Bustillo on bail-jumpers in New Orleans.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Been Long Gone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-766</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-766</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for not posting the past few days. We were up covering the tornados. We'll be running full steam soon.

Ben]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Without A Home]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-767</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-767</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: "What's it like to be homeless?" he is asked.

"It sucks. It's so boring, just sitting here."

"It's not that bad," says his mother, Maria Diamond. "And you got an A on your report card in math the other day."

"It wasn't an A. It was an F dressed in a cape."

"No, it was an A. You work hard in school. And it's not that bad here."

"It's bad."

"You get to watch a television."

"Which I stole."

"No you didn't. And you get to watch movie DVDs."

"Which I stole."

"And you get to ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Are You John Lennon?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-765</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-765</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jimbo in the New York Daily News, December 1980.

That summer in Breezy Point, when he was eighteen and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life.

Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.

And now, last night, a thirty-four-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car ]]></description>
      <author>Ralrika</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Friday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-764</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-764</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey Al-Rikabi on a speed boat: Russell Falkena certainly didn't row his aluminum fishing boat down West Street in Manhattan late last year.

And even if he did — if that was possible — Falkena definitely wouldn't do it with reckless disregard for traffic laws. After all, as he often says, he's a good, Christian man.

But somewhere in the deep machinery of New York City, somewhere between its Departments of Finance and Transportation, it was determined that Falkena had indeed run a red light i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p763</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p763</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:32:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He's in New Orleans with Saints fans, in Irvine, Calif., with Mark McGuire, and at the Lorraine Motel with some Trail Blazers.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Narrative In Song]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p762</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p762</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:13:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I got a new computer a few months back, after my old laptop finally expired, and then I spent many hours ripping all my CDs to the hard drive. It was a real pain, but now I can burn discs with everything I want and nothing I don't. Nifty. So the other day I told a writer friend I would make one for her, and I asked her what tracks she wanted, and this is what she said:

"Narratives."

"OK," I said.

And this is what I came up with:

1. Bruce Springsteen, "The River." 2. Ben Folds, "Landed." 3. T]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mystery at the Christmas House]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p761</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p761</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:34:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kruse's story: The lights were off, the music was stopped, the doors were locked. There was a U-Haul truck backed up to the side of the main building at the Rogers' Christmas House complex. And upstairs were Ann Chapman, who was in charge of marketing, and Bill Chapman, who was in charge of the day-to-day finances and operations, and they said in a quiet room they were closing the business for two weeks to figure out how or even if they would reopen.

That was Jan. 10.

Three days later, th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Trail Goes Cold]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p760</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p760</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:24:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Marc Kaufman's story: As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his "one small step" onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander's door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. The ghostly images of the astronaut's boot touching the soil record what may be the most iconic moment in NASA history, and a major milestone for mankind.

Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, ev]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mystery at the Christmas House]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-761</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-761</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kruse's story: The lights were off, the music was stopped, the doors were locked. There was a U-Haul truck backed up to the side of the main building at the Rogers' Christmas House complex. And upstairs were Ann Chapman, who was in charge of marketing, and Bill Chapman, who was in charge of the day-to-day finances and operations, and they said in a quiet room they were closing the business for two weeks to figure out how or even if they would reopen.

That was Jan. 10.

Three days later, th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Narrative In Song]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-762</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-762</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I got a new computer a few months back, after my old laptop finally expired, and then I spent many hours ripping all my CDs to the hard drive. It was a real pain, but now I can burn discs with everything I want and nothing I don't. Nifty. So the other day I told a writer friend I would make one for her, and I asked her what tracks she wanted, and this is what she said:

"Narratives."

"OK," I said.

And this is what I came up with:

1. Bruce Springsteen, "The River." 2. Ben Folds, "Landed." 3. T]]></description>
      <author>Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-763</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-763</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He's in New Orleans with Saints fans, in Irvine, Calif., with Mark McGuire, and at the Lorraine Motel with some Trail Blazers.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Three For The Cold]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p759</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p759</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:50:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick on mercy or death, Dan Barry from Sunday, and some daily inspiration from Hank Stuever back in February of 2003:

A good five inches of snow falls, and the cubicle landscape is suddenly populated the next day by more manly men, who seem to have hiked in from the backcountry, or driven in on their imaginary snowmobiles.

Gone are the gray suits, the khakis, the software-logo golf shirts and tassled loafers. When it snows, the American office starts to look like Stein Ericksen's ski ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[So Saith Simon]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p758</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p758</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Jan 2007 20:16:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Simon, former Baltimore Sun cops reporter and force behind the brilliant television shows Homicide and The Wire, visited the St. Petersburg Times on Friday to talk about the role of narrative journalism in prolonging the slow death of newspapers. (This one had Gangrey written all over it.) His main point seemed to be that stories — not articles, not reports, not infoboxes — will keep readers with us in the coming decades. He said people want something with depth, with nuance, with a beginn]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Man Down']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p757</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p757</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:44:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Damien Cave in Baghdad: Staff Sgt. Hector Leija scanned the kitchen, searching for illegal weapons. One wall away, in an apartment next door, a scared Shiite family huddled around a space heater, cradling an infant.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Ends Meet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p756</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p756</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 Jan 2007 05:39:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Tom Lake's story: In the end they identified just one tooth. It belonged to the old woman's son. Now she sits on a brown wraparound couch in her living room, telling stories to a priest. On her wrist is a metal crescent with this inscription:

CAPT. HERBERT CROSBY]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Exploring The Dictates]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p755</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p755</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:16:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Justin George on Gene's: Someone sneaks out the side door, and a breeze blows in. The DJ interjects with another message: "Shut the door, baby."

It's an order meant to keep the pounding music inside, but it also represents a dividing line patrons respect. What goes on inside and outside Gene's Bar are separate matters, patrons say.

The police and City Council see it differently. Gene's Bar is Tampa's most notorious wet establishment, and after years of complaints, council members have called f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It's An Honor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p754</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p754</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:49:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[New York Herald Tribune. November 1963.

Washington – Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting.

It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington Nati]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-751</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-751</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brick: The killer apologizes

P.J. Huffstutter: The Tightwad bank is closing

Erin Sullivan: 'Bring me back three ripe, organic, unblemished bananas']]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chowdah]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-741</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-741</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the NYT's Molly O'Neill, a food story that's really a story about ecology, culture, morality, mortality:

Like most sons of sons of Maine fishermen, Mr. Bridges, 61, grew up eating fish stews that were as diverse and densely packed as the local waters.

Cod, haddock, white hake, halibut, cusk and dozens of other groundfish, fish that live near the ocean bottom, mingled with clams, shrimp, lobster and mussels under the creamy surface of the stew, cresting a puddle of yellow butter here, a sl]]></description>
      <author>SI</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What We Learned]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-738</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-738</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[To report with everything you have – how did it look, how did it sound, how did it smell – and with FEELING. Let stuff hit you. Flat-faced and hard-hearted "objectivity" misses what's most important. When you're out there in the noise … stop. Listen to people breathe. And when something catches on your insides, and when you feel your eyes start to get big, or wet, or when your heart starts to beat a little bit more quick, write that down. Right there. That's it. Know that moment. Embrace that mo]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson For The Young]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-734</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-734</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Garrison Keillor on why the newspaper ads Style: Whether you're sitting or standing, indoors or out, leaning against a hitching post or with your brogans on a desk, a newspaper gives you a whole rich vocabulary of gesture. You open it with a flourish and a ripple of newsprint, your buoyant self-confidence evident in the way you turn the pages with a snap of the wrist, taking in the gray matter swiftly, your eyes dancing over the world's sorrows and moving on, crinkling the page, snapping it, rol]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Priorities]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-725</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-725</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In his 2006 book Letters To A Young Journalist, Samuel G. Freedman said this:

If you can't be a person, then you'll ultimately be less of a journalist.

The story of two prize-winning photographs and the men who took them goes right to my point. If you've studied the Vietnam War, you've probably come across a photograph of a Vietnamese girl running naked and howling down a road, the victim of a napalm attack by U.S. troops. That single searing image played no small part in deepening opposition ]]></description>
      <author>Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Gallows]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p715</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p715</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Dec 2006 21:14:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey noticed this spare, driving narrative by Marc Santora: Saddam Hussein never bowed his head, until his neck snapped.

His last words were equally defiant.

"Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians."

The final hour of Iraq's former ruler began about 5 a.m., when American troops escorted him from Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, to Camp Justice, another American base at the heart of the city.

There, he was handed over to a newly trained unit of the Iraqi Na]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Traffic Stop, And A Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p714</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p714</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Dec 2006 08:51:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Doherty's story: The problem with the driver of the SUV seemed obvious enough. He was making crazy-wide turns around corners and drifting over the center of line of city streets around 11 at night.

Probably drunk.

But after officers pulled Wilfredo Rivera over Friday, they began to piece together a darker picture.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Christmas Day Caper]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p713</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p713</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Dec 2006 08:43:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: A quiz for aspiring burglars: You've just stolen $25,000 or so from a church safe during Christmas morning Mass. There is a witness, a man who asked you what you were doing lugging a heavy metal box containing the money to your Lincoln Navigator, the one with the Vermont plates.

The crime is a sensation, all over the news. An entire city is searching for you.

What should you do?

Perhaps it would be wise to lie very, very low for a while.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[From Verse To Newsprint]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p712</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p712</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Dec 2006 23:14:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Just the other day, I was scanning through a book of poems by Billy Collins when I noticed one called The Death of Allegory. Here's how it begins:

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a co]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Just A Little Something]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p711</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p711</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Dec 2006 06:52:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Sara Rosenbaum: Mike Zorr stopped in at Einstein's Bagels last week for coffee. He had been visiting family in Virginia and was on his way back home to the Keys, where he lives on a sailboat named Kittens.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Changes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p710</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p710</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Dec 2006 16:59:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I've never done anything for radio but I stumbled onto a story with radio potential, so I wandered over to This American Life to see how to pitch them a story. The section on their website for submitting work is practically a how-to on doing good journalism. Wonder what makes that show so special? Go here and click on the SUBMITTING WORK link on the left. Here's part of it: What makes the show different from most other programs on public radio is that the stories we broadcast tend to have a very]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[32 West Iroquois Street]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p709</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p709</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Dec 2006 07:32:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story: It bears no plaque, nor mention in any local guidebook as a cultural landmark, but local residents recognize the two-story cape as the historic home that incubated the famous Baldwin brothers, the four acting siblings who proved that the Babylon branch of the Long Island Rail Road sometimes stops at Hollywood.

"A lot of people do stop in front of the house and stare," said Claudia Barbosa, who has lived in the house since the last of the Baldwins moved out in 1988.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eternal Soul]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p708</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p708</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Dec 2006 08:48:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Richard Harrington's appreciation for James Brown: This time James Brown is gone. No more faux faints to the floor, no more hasty cape-covering or furious cool-down fanning by concerned band members trying to get the inevitably, and dramatically, exhausted Godfather of Soul to leave the stage. Death chose Christmas Day to declare that 73 years was enough for one rhythm revolutionary who danced and sang America though cultural changes in the '60s and '70s.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shrieking Winds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p707</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p707</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Dec 2006 08:20:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erin Sullivan covers a tornado: Paul Lilley was dialing a neighbor Monday to tell him bad weather was coming their way when he heard a terrible rumble, looked out his window and saw a tornado bearing down.

The black funnel, spewing bits of shingles and debris, crossed the seventh green of the golf course across the street and headed for him.

He screamed to his wife to get in the bathtub. He ran in and jumped on top of her and waited.

The shrieking winds lasted only a few seconds.

Lilley went]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Happy Holidays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p706</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p706</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 23 Dec 2006 11:17:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's to making some stories of our own this Christmas. Turn off the computer. Go be with your friends and family. We'll return to business on Tuesday.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Real Father?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-693</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-693</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On Sunday, the Press-Register started his package about a man trying to prove he's a little girl's father. (You've seen Andy on Gangrey in the past few months) Read his series: This was small talk, but she couldn't have brought him here just for this. It was too uncomfortable.

Jeremy Waldrop, a wiry teenager with calloused working-man hands, shifted in his seat.

His eyes darted around the room. They landed on Angela Roberts, the girl on whose finger he had slid an engagement ring and later ask]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-678</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-678</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ron Matus with Ninth, Or Never.

C.J. Chivers on the black market.

From the NY Times, the business of faith.

Leah Latimer with A Question For Mama.

Jeffrey Fleishman with Midnight sun has a dark side.

Kruse chases the sun across Hernando county.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I Love This Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-668</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-668</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the Post's anniversary edition. Read this now: "We were having a vicious argument -- about ice cream," King says. "I loved Borden's. Herbie loved Breyers. Sandy loved Carvel . . . Finally, we got to price, and Sandy says he knows a Carvel in New Haven, Connecticut, that serves three scoops for 15 cents. Herbie says, 'That's impossible, Sandy. I'll bet you.' I said, 'That's impossible, they can't serve three scoops for 15 cents.' So there's only one way to prove the bet: Three 17-year-old ki]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Our Katrina']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-663</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-663</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The TH-Record's Steve Israel and Ashley Kelly tell a story: In Livingston Manor, the raging brown water roared and rose like some prehistoric monster: 7, 8, 9 feet high.

Edie McArthur ran upstairs to try and salvage whatever she could from her home on Cattail Creek — family pictures, her son's rifle collection, some clothes — but it was too late.

All she could really save from the storm — that would soon claim her niece, Jamie Berthold — was herself.

So in the dark of dawn, McArthur ran outsi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shadow Boxing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-665</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-665</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: Three little blond boys stood in a line in a strip-center dojo in Hernando County's rural east end. Gambatte Karate is in the Sunrise Plaza with a Quiznos sub shop and a Winn-Dixie grocery store. This Little Dragons class not long ago was for kids 4 and 5 years old.

"Are you ready!?!" sensei Tim Hartranft yelled.

"Yeah!" said the three little boys.

"Are you sure!?!"

"Yeah!"

"I. CAN'T. HEAR. YOU!!!"

"YEEESSS!!!"

"Because I'm a stranger," Hartranft finally said, "and I'm com]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mojo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-664</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-664</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Could this be the future of newspapering?

Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. The glow of the screen illuminates his face.

Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or "mojos." The mojos have high-tech tools -- ThinkPads, digital audio recorder]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-659</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-659</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few months ago, David Karp was cleaning out his desk at the Times. He dumped a stack of stuff onto the table in our conference room. Among special editions and pulitzer-winning stories from across the country were about 20 copies of old Washington Post Magazines. Jewels, they were, with stories from Finkel and Walt Harrington and others. I claimed them before anyone else had a chance. The only bad thing was I couldn't share them with you.

Now I can.

Jeb Phillips pointed out that the magazine]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The making of Dan Barry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-657</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-657</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[During an invitation-only visit to the Times Herald-Record's most exclusive Writers Workshop this week, Dan Barry - indeed, he of "About New York" fame - charmed the staff with tales of his real-life adventures in the Big Apple and beyond.

He spoke some about what made him the writer he is:

"My mother was from Ireland and she was a wonderful storyteller and so she would sit there and tell stories in our living room. The TV would be on. Some of you might remember the talk show Merv Griffin. It ]]></description>
      <author>Brendan</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Watching Eva Die]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-658</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-658</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Erin Sullivan in the ICU: This is not their Eva. This can't be happening. She's their doll, shiny dark hair, warm eyes, full, rosy lips. She's tiny, 4 feet 81/2 inches and weighs just over 100 pounds. She's 19 years old, wears clothes from the kids' department, but is so mature. She doesn't party, drink or smoke.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sad Clown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-653</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-653</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Barry's story: A gloomy cloud of homelessness looms over 30,000 clowns. A massive orange, yellow and red clown diaspora could be choking on dust on U.S. 27 by New Year's Day.

All are wooden, ceramic, crystal, cloth and plastic inhabitants of Clown Rushmore, one man's 40-year, bittersweet obsession, which he calls "the World's Largest Clown Collection to the Best of Our Knowledge."

Collector Jack Klein is turning 78. Clown Rushmore is tumbling down around him. He has put about 900 of ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Top Ten Of 2006]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-654</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-654</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The New York Times list of books in time for Christmas.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[People on People]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-655</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-655</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'd say it was a good day for the Gangrey kids at the St. Pete Times.

Ben: The girl was young, slim, pretty in a strange way, and shy. She spent most of her time alone in her bedroom listening to 97X and Tool. She didn't know what she wanted from life, which is to say, she was directionless. College didn't seem right for her, so after high school she went to work where dreamers do, at Starbucks, serving one-pump sugar-free venti vanilla cappuccinos to the Subaru-driving mothers of suburbia.

Th]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Rules]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-656</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-656</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This led to a conversation earlier this week with Meghan, which led to a conversation last night with Ben, which leads now to this question: If you got to blow up your newspaper, effectively immediately, meaning even the potential elimination of the traditional, nuts-and-bolts beats – cops, city hall, school board – and if you then got to rethink completely how we harvest stories …

WHAT?

What would the "beats" be?

Cue Hank Stuever from the introduction to Off Ramp: "I am unassigned, mostly. I]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Street-Hustler Bartleby]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p652</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p652</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Nov 2006 06:51:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick in court: By his own description, the contract Jessie Jacobus signed with prosecutors offers a warm letter to his sentencing judge in return for his pledge to "be truthful, give details about every crime I've ever done in my life, go to the hearings and testify."

Though the agreement does not address how he is to behave on cross-examination, Mr. Jacobus appeared as a man transfigured yesterday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn when a defense lawyer questioned him about the kil]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Killing Deer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p651</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p651</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Nov 2006 06:47:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon in this morning's NYT: In a wooded patch between a schoolyard and a row of backyards, Danny Azzato perched himself 20 feet up a tree and nocked a razor-sharp, carbon-shafted arrow to his hunting bow. He wore a camouflage-print outfit designed to retain body scent and carried a variety of calls and sprays devised to attract white-tailed deer in mating season.

Mr. Azzato is among a growing number of suburban deer hunters who have emerged as the latest line of defense in areas that]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Daughter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p650</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p650</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:06:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This comes from Jessie Bonner via Poynter: She blinked and wondered how long she had been asleep. She saw the Chanel ads and Vogue magazine pages taped to her white walls. She blinked again. Her head pounded. She saw the photos of her high school friends tacked to a bulletin board. Bin Na looked up at her twin bed. Why, she wondered, was she on the floor? Why was her head throbbing?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Skeletons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p649</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p649</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:05:10 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Jennifer 8. Lee's story: Paul Iversen had not seen his aging parents in three years, even though their homes are but a mile apart in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. They had a falling out around the summer of 2003.

But he missed them, and recently called his mother to reconcile.

So yesterday, he returned home. His mother, Joanne, 73, had sad news for him: His father was dead.

She then led him to a bedroom, where, the police said, the skeletal remains of a body lay in the bed, covered with a blanket]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ten Best?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p648</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p648</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Nov 2006 14:20:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[(Via Romenesko) A reader asked Howard Kurtz to list the top ten newspapers in the country. His reply:

"It's an entirely subjective exercise, of course. I think that the NYT, LAT, WP and WSJ are widely seen as in the top tier of American newspapers, and the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe a notch below. In the past, the list would have included the Inquirer and Miami Herald, both former Knight Ridder papers that have suffered their share of cutbacks. The Atlanta and San Francisco papers certain]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Personal Journey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p647</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p647</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:25:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check this out from Shauna Stephenson at the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle: The idea was if I can do it, anyone can. But I don't believe that anymore. There were 300 grueling miles ahead, the earth was spewing water, and already my team was quarreling. Now, combine a strange breed with a desert downpour. Oh yeah, the worst was definitely ahead.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The 'Re-imagining' of a Real Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p646</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p646</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:09:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Some interesting stuff in the Post's review of the new Eggers book: And he's talking about one thing readers of "What Is the What" can't say for sure: How much is fact and how much is fiction.

Why the line-blurring? The explanation goes like this: Introduced to Deng in early 2003 and deeply engaged by his story, Eggers set out to write a conventional biography. But he kept getting stuck.

"I didn't know how to do it," he says. "I didn't want my own voice in there."

Despairing, he was ready to ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Focus]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p645</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p645</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:20:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Sara Rosenbaum's story: The boy is wired into the computer.

He is 8 years old and has gray cat-eyes. A little blond mohawk sticks up on his head like a strip of uncut grass. His right arm stops just below the elbow.

Its rounded end fits into a clear socket containing two electrodes. From there, two wires lead to the computer.

Boy and machine: a single circuit.

Greg Bauer, the prosthetist, asks him: "Are you ready for the moment of truth?"

"Yes," Jonathan whispers. He's been looking for]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How Did He Do It?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p644</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p644</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:03:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sent along by David Finkel and very much worth discussing: Reader Mario Possamai of Toronto raised a good question last week that can come up with longer stories written from an intensely personal angle. "David Finkel's piece 'The Meaning of Work' was brilliant. But in reading its so well-crafted narrative and voices, I kept wondering how he had been able to report some parts of it, like the poignant conversation between Mike and Chris. It would help the reader's assessment of the veracity of a ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Massapequa Boys]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p643</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p643</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:59:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story: But on the field Saturday, the trappings of their current lives fell away, from the opening kickoff until the game was called when another group of Turkey Bowlers wanted the field.

"Twenty-one years we've been doing this, and we'll be doing it till we can't walk onto the field anymore," said Eric Dell, 38, who organizes the games.

Most of them spent their teenage years valiantly vying on playing fields for the Berner Bisons, but most could not make it around the B]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Trail]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p567</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p567</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:00:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Tuesday's Washington Post: Katherine Harris, who is trying to become a U.S. senator, says she is writing a tell-all about the many people who have wronged her. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to: the Republican leaders who didn't want her to run, the press that has covered her troubled campaign, and the many staffers who have quit her employ, whom she accuses of colluding with her opponent.

She is vague about what, precisely, makes her a victim, but she says she has it all do]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[17 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p566</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p566</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Oct 2006 08:01:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Calvin Trillin, who, by the way, is a keynote speaker at this year's Nieman, in American Stories: I sometimes described what I was looking for as a story that had a beginning and a middle and an end. After a while, I had cause to recall how often people who are about to tell a story in front of the fire say, "I don't know where to begin." Looking back through some of the stories I've told over the years, I notice that I have sometimes been so conscious of trying to puzzle out the beginning that ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Downward Spiral]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p565</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p565</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:22:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Damn.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kirby]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p564</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p564</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:12:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The challenges of writing an intimate story on Kirby Puckett's last years were many. Says Laurie Hertzel: how do you profile someone who is already dead? how do you profile someone who is recently dead, and whose friends and families are still grieving? how do you profile someone who is recently dead and whose will is still in probate, being contested by fiancee vs ex wife? how do you profile someone who is recently dead and who has been written about endlessly — long magazine pieces, long newsp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[18 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p563</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p563</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:36:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries: to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style. — Ben Johnson

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily. — Trollope.

When you can with difficulty say anything clearly, simply, and emphatically, then, provided that the difficulty is not apparent to the reader, that is style. When you can do it easily, that is genius. — Lord Dunsany.

Practice is nine tenths. — Emerson.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Clicks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p562</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p562</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Oct 2006 21:28:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Barry at a truck stop.

Wil Haygood on Deval Patrick.

Michael Lewis on what keeps Bill Parcells up.

Dan Barry is good.

Steve Lopez helps reunite classmates: a homeless guy and Yo-Yo Ma.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[19 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p561</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p561</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Oct 2006 10:22:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Peter Clark in Writing Tools: Reports convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, space, and imagination. The report points us there. The story puts us there. …

The tool sets to create reports and stories also differ. The famous "Five Ws and H" have helped writers gather and convey information with the reader's interests in mind. Who, what, where and when appear as the most common elements of informati]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['But I live here. This is a big thing.']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p560</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p560</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Oct 2006 16:29:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Saturday's NYT: It's not every day that a great big rock shows up on your block.

But it happened on Vanderbilt Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The rock is jagged, seven feet tall, very roughly nose-shaped, and covered with a fine, tawny dust. A contractor digging a sewer line yanked it out of the street bed on Tuesday and plunked it down at the curbside near Park Avenue.

Since then, life on Vanderbilt Avenue has been subtly transformed. Adults study the rock. Children trace shapes in its]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[20 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p559</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p559</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Oct 2006 15:31:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Mulvoy in Writing For Your Readers: The best writing in the Globe comes from those who are disciplined, who take a theme or situation and develop it along narrative lines that are logical and, in most cases, chronological. They follow the Queen's advice to Alice: "Begin at the beginning, go to the end, and then stop."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Of Love And Chainsaws]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p558</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p558</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:50:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey Al-Rikabi in court: Early on the morning of Oct. 20 of last year, Marie Jedraszak, during a fight with her husband, walked outside to the garage, plugged an electric chain saw into an orange extension cord, and brought it back into the house.

Police later found her husband, Edward, walking along the road with a gash in his right elbow, deep enough to expose the bone. They found blood splattered throughout the house and a bloody chain saw on the bathroom floor.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[23 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-554</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-554</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Wolfe on Jimmy Breslin in The New Journalism: Breslin's work stirred up a certain vague resentment among both journalists and literati during the first year or two of his column -- vague, because they never fully understood what he was doing ... only that in some vile Low Rent way the man's output was LITERARY. Among literary intellectuals you would hear Breslin referred to as "a cop who writes" or "Runyon on welfare." These weren't even intelligent insults, however, because they dealt with ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[24 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-551</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-551</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jon Franklin in Writing For Story: The technique is foreshadowing, and it's one of the most powerful pieces of magic in the storyteller's bag of tricks.

Foreshadowing is the technique by which the writer unobtrusively inserts details early in the story that will allow him to conduct his dramatic scenes without the necessity of explaining background details. This is what a good jokester is doing when he carefully sets up his situation in the narrative that precedes his punch line...

The princip]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Night Nixzmary Died]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-552</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-552</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael Brick's story: That night, he said, yogurt vanished and computer gear was broken and again Nixzmary lied and he threatened her with a belt. He said he asked her to explain but she only nodded. Nodded how, he was asked.

"Like this," Mr. Rodriguez said, "like she doesn't know what's going on."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Formula]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-553</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-553</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anybody read the piece by Malcolm Gladwell a couple weeks back in the New Yorker in the media issue? It was called The Formula and it was about these people who have developed a system that can often and with a sometimes startling degree of accuracy predict hits in movies and music.

Could we do this?

Is there a way to systematically and quantifiably just about guarantee or at least heighten considerably the chance that your story will resonate with readers?

An excerpt:

Pink estimated that th]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[25 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-549</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-549</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Susan Orlean in her introduction to The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: What I wanted to write about were the people and the places around me. I didn't want to write about famous people simply because they were famous, and I didn't want to write about charming little things that were self-consciously charming and little; I wasn't interested in documenting or predicting trends, and I didn't have polemics to air or sociological theories to spin out. I just wanted to write what are usually called "f]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Talking Shop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-550</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-550</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The idea has been floated: If we're all going to get together at Nieman, should we try to reserve a room at the hotel or a restaurant? The thought is we'll take contributions from those who'd like to hang out and get a room to avoid trying to communicate at a loud bar.

But I need to know if there's enough interest. Show of hands, please, if you'd chip in to get a small banquet room? bamontgomery@hotmail.com]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[26 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-547</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-547</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Rick Bragg to Kelley Benham in Orange Journalism: "While it's true people read less, while it's true that it is difficult to marry up with technology, I think the main reason that so many newspapers are failing is because they're being run without imagination, with an eye only on profits and just generally stump-dumb and butt-stupid. You've got large newspapers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution trying to compete with television with short, quick, dumb, piece-of-shit stories. And you've got s]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[One Thin Thread]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-548</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-548</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Brady Dennis' story: An hour passed, and then another, and finally Jerrick Blue went searching for her.

He slipped out of the small concrete block house on Osborne Avenue and headed east. Up ahead, he saw the flash of blue lights.

He spotted her shoe in the road and the shattered windshield of the Pontiac Grand Prix. She had tried to cross Nebraska Avenue toward home and probably didn't see the car in the gathering darkness.

The driver had no time to stop.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hyperlocal Multimedia Journalism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-544</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-544</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Fast Company: Curley--"just a nerd from Kansas," as he puts it--hasn't won a Pulitzer or worked at a major daily. But since teaching himself to build Web sites 10 years ago, he appears to have figured out what most newspapers haven't: how to do the Internet right. He calls it "hyperlocal" multimedia journalism, and his news and entertainment sites are sucking in audiences, advertisers, and revenue; they're racking up national and international awards; and, most important, they've begun deli]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two Saturday Treats]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-545</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-545</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Ben: She didn't seem to notice the odd juxtaposition of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial replica next to the Westfield Brandon mall, the names of 58,000 dead soldiers situated between the Crosstown Expressway and a giant orange tent made to look like a jack-o'-lantern.

Sacred Ground, read the sign. No cell phones, please.

From Sara: April Leight knows that her son killed another student Wednesday when his truck struck the boy's bicycle.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office says Andrew L]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[27 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-546</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-546</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in New New Journalism:

Q: What is the first thing you do when you begin reporting a story?

A: I drive around and observe. Then I work up the courage to walk over and introduce myself to the people I'm reporting on, explaining as much as I understand of what I'm doing, and that I just want to "be" with them, and not necessarily do anything. I draw the parallel with making a movie: "Imagine I'm making a movie about your life. Show me the places that are most important to yo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[28 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-543</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-543</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Joseph Mitchell in Joe Gould's Secret: Joe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century. He sometimes brags rather wryly that he is the last of the bohemians. "All the others fell by the wayside," he says. "Some are in the grave, some are in the loonybin, and some are in the advertising business." Gould's life is by no means carefree; he is constantly tormented by what he calls "th]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[29 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-541</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-541</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever in the preface in Off Ramp: I am unassigned, mostly. I was a child born and raised and now living in a permanent Elsewhere, and because I didn't have a beat, I gave myself one. It started out as a private list I taped next to my computer, in my newsroom cubicle, for several years: I put "false cities" on my beat, which meant airports, the Best Buy, bland buildings. I put "things kept in shoeboxes in spare closets" on my beat. I claimed "teenagers who don't help out the community" fo]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Empty Vessel]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-542</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-542</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Andy Newman's story: The boat is called the Empty Vessel.

The name was meant to conjure infinite possibility, a floating tabula rasa on the Gowanus Canal in the form of a 63-foot World War II Navy rescue craft.

Fifteen months ago, the Empty Vessel journeyed up the canal on a mission both modest and, in this fenced-off, parceled-up city, almost unthinkably grand: to provide a floating meeting place and performance hall available to anyone with a creative idea.

The Gowanus, which retains a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[30 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-540</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-540</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gary Provost in Make Your Words Work: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length.

And somet]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[31 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-536</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-536</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Samuel G. Freedman in Letters to a Young Journalist: "It takes time to acquire expertise. It takes time to hear out the innermost truths of individuals. It takes pateince and wisdom to even think about playing God."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Strong Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-537</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-537</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ira Berkow with a heavy lifter: Phil Pfister, who owns a Ford Crown Victoria, is an unusual kind of motorist. Not only can he drive the car, he can lift it, too.

"One day we were driving with another couple and we got a flat tire," recalled Pfister's wife, Michelle. "Somehow, the jack didn't work. So Phil picked up the rear of the car and the other guy changed the tire. Phil was the jack. Other drivers on the road passed by and they couldn't believe their eyes."

That's hardly the half of it. P]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finkel's Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-538</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-538</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's his story: When Casey was done talking, the next sounds included scribbling pens and checks being torn out of checkbooks because of what Democrats say this race means: A Casey victory would not only topple one of America's best-known conservatives but would also enhance the Democrats' prospects of winning control of the Senate.

The Democrats need to pick up six seats to take control of the Senate, and Pennsylvania has become one of their best hopes. Emboldened by polls showing widespread]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[That Hurts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-539</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-539</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NYT's Alan Feuer, who wrote this one on the recent plane crash, takes his lumps: T.R. looked at his screen.

What was there? A crash. A fire. A dead man. A dead body. Two dead bodies. One and a half, anyway--that's what the Post would write. They were sensationalists over at the Post. They would take a fact like half a body lying there and print it, the fact, in the paper. Sensation and vulgarity, with all those facts.

T.R. had a higher calling. He looked at the keyboard. He looked at his hands]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[32 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-535</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-535</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Philip Gourevitch in We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: In the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp- and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there's a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyarubuye with two Canadian millitary officers. We flew in United Nations helicopters, traveling low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana tree]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[33 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-533</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-533</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy: Narrative is everywhere a major genre of verbal art, occurring all the way from primary oral cultures into high literacy and electronic information processing. In a sense narrative is paramount among all verbal art forms because of the way it underlies so many other art forms, often even the most abstract. Human knowledge comes out of time. ... The elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it really comes]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-534</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-534</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[-- Bryan Wooley from the Dallas Morning News takes us back.

-- Kurt Streeter on how an Iraqi girl wound up in LA: IT WAS shrapnel that brought her to Los Angeles. Hot and sharp, it pierced her legs, her stomach and her right hand. It mangled her face around her deep brown eyes, and it tore off her nose. "I'm hurt," Marwa cried. "Mommy, I'm hurt in my face. I'm hurt, Mommy. My face."

-- Michael Brick on how the cops nabbed some would-be toughs.

-- "Meet The Mets" in yiddish. (Now that's conver]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[34 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-530</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-530</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Charlie Pierce in the preface to Sports Guy: They are throwaways, these celebrity stories, and they teach lessons as simple and as tedious as flat blacktop. Oh, there is occasionally a burst of neon to them, but they are not the stories I love. I love the ones that meander, that find themselves turning down into the shadier places, where blood and bone and history hang over the road like fingers of Spanish moss, where there is a stirring in the bushes, a flash of shadows, and then gone again, an]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Of Mr. Met]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-531</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-531</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The success of the Mets this season brings to mind one of my favorite Dan Barry columns, from days when things were a bit darker:

Mr. Met does not have the ability to speak. This could be related to his hydrocephalic condition, or to fear among his handlers that if he ever brought foam tongue to palate, he might sound like Anna Nicole Smith, or some tapped-out denizen of a Flushing boardinghouse who gargles with gin.

Whatever the reason, it is probably best that he remain mute. For if Mr. Met ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get Your A-- Out Of The Office]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-532</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-532</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The NPR reporter at the pulpit: A major problem with these new technologies is that they allow reporters to stay in the newsroom rather than hitting the streets to find the real stories. "They lead," she worries, "to a more sedentary form of journalism."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[35 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-529</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-529</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men: What's the problem, officer? he asked.

Sir would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?

The man opened the door and stepped out. What's this about? he said.

Would you step away from the vehicle please.

The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this bloodstained figure before him but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man's head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sou]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[36 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-527</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-527</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stephen King in On Writing: "Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cory Lidle's Last Interview]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-528</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-528</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his column: Cory Lidle wasn't just another Yankee to me, wasn't just another pro athlete I covered. He was closer than that, and getting closer by the day.

In the last couple of months, since he came here from the Phillies at the trade deadline in July, Cory and I were fast becoming good friends, connected by a passion that had nothing to do with baseball but, of all things, playing pool.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[37 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-523</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-523</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1844-81:

We are the music makers And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lonely sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; World losers and world forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world, forever, it seems. With wonderful deathless ditties We build up with the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire's glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And thr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Elephant Crackup?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-524</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-524</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This was fun: Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left bumper, a huge female emerged — ''the matriarch,'' Okello said softly. There was a small calf beneath her, freely foraging and knocking about within the secure cribbing of four massive legs. Acacia leaves are an elephant's favorite food, and as the calf set to work on some low branches, the matriarch stood guard, her vast back flank blocking the road, the rest of the herd milling about in the brush a short dist]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[American Album]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-525</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-525</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I must've missed this one: With all the spectacular ways to die in this dying city, the fate of a man named Allan was almost pathetic. There he lay, in a weedy lot on the notorious East Side, next to a liquor bottle, his pockets turned out.

But as it goes with such things, one man's misery is another man's money. The body retrievalist for the county morgue had arrived on the scene. He was happy. He sang strange little ditties. Cracked odd little jokes. Said things like: "We got plenty of room i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Murder of Jennifer Servo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-526</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-526</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Carlton Stowers, a true crime author and writer at the Abilene Reporter-News, launched a serial narrative on the murder of Abilene television reporter Jennifer Servo. Looks interesting.

Here are parts one, two, three and four ... of eight, I'm told.

(Thanks to Troy Shockley for the heads up.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[38 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-521</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-521</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Lewis in The New New Journalism: "Characters are always so much more interesting when they are moving through space than they are when they are at rest (especially when they are behind a desk in their office). Once I've developed a relationship with a subject, the first question I ask is whether they have plans to go anywhere, and whether I can come with them. Even when what they're doing is irrelevant to what I'm writing about, I just want to participate in something with them.

"Billy ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Red Or Green?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-522</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-522</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jon Franklin the other day on WriterL: The idea of a green zone and a red zone comes, of course, from Iraq. The green zone is where it's safe, and the red zone is the real world outside the barricades and the guards.

I mention this here because it seems to me that journalism has its green zones and its red zones. This is not new; history shows that journalism has a longstanding habit of covering what's easy and safe while the world goes merrily somewhere else. Thus there were hundreds of thousa]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[39 Days To Nieman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-520</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-520</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Origins of a Nonfiction Writer in The Gay Talese Reader: "The shop was a kind of talk show that flowed around the engaging manner and well-timed questions of my mother; and as a boy not much taller than the counters behind which I sued to pause and eavesdrop, I learned much that would be useful to me years later when I began interviewing people for articles and books.

"I learned to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explai]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-517</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-517</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Probe of anthrax casts shadow on brothers

For recruiter, saying 'Go Army' is hard

Review of Cormac McCarthy's new The Road

In Brooklyn, unusual show of sympathy for arson defendant

Time passes by iconic restaurant

Not fit to print for Amish

Everybody say 'Dead whale!'

Wright Thompson on Buck O'Neil]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Gangrey Book Club]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-518</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-518</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Buy this book. Yoder was Rick Bragg's intern back in the day. He put his book out a while back and it's some damn book.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Moving Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-519</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-519</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John-Henry Doucette is theVirginian-Pilot's newest columnist (bottom of the story). Congrats to John. We worked together at the Times Herald-Record a few years ago. John does some great work. My favorites are this one and this one:

Goshen – A woman stood alone in a crowd in a courtyard in the village yesterday during a moment of silence. It marked the moment that the first plane hit the tallest building in the city 60 miles south of here last year. The woman sobbed. She wore black. A year ago a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Paying Attention]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-516</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-516</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm sure this could have been lost among the daily doings of Pinellas criminal court. Chris worked it for all its potential. Read his story: This is a story about a guy who didn't see enough food in his seafood. He found the jumbo shrimp and bay scallops in his pasta dish to be a little, um, shrimpy.

Ralph Paul ate the seafood off the top of the pasta, then sent the dish back and asked the server to take it off his bill. When the restaurant didn't do that, he left without paying the $46 tab, wh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Report From The Shore]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-514</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-514</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Lon Wagner from the Virginian-Pilot:

"Dear Gangrey:

"The Virginian-Pilot narrative team hosted our annual (it was the second one, so I think I can call it "annual" now) conversation about narrative last weekend, and I thought you would like to know about it. We invite 10 to 12 writers, in addition to the four on our team, and sit on the deck of an oceanfront beach house and talk about narrative. We had 16 people this year, each of whom emailed around a story ahead of time, we read all the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Respects]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-515</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-515</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[** Update: His last story.

Obit here: R. W. Apple Jr., who in more than 40 years as a correspondent and editor at The New York Times wrote about war and revolution, politics and government, food and drink, and the revenge of living well from more than 100 countries, died early this morning in Washington. He was 71.

The cause was complications of thoracic cancer.

With his Dickensian byline, Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites, Mr. Apple, who was known as Johnny, was a singular presence]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Throwing Out The Inverted Pyramid]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-513</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-513</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick has it down. Read his story: The case, Justice Albert Tomei of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn reminded the jury, was entirely circumstantial. So instructed, 12 citizens of Kings County filed out of his courtroom yesterday afternoon to ponder the circumstances, which prosecutors said were these ...]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[American Album]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-512</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-512</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read this now: The heart of the heartland, the exact geographic middle of the continental United States, is owned by a middle-aged Kansas man named Randall Warner. He exports wheat, beef and soon his second grown son to the city. He stands in his boots in his field and wonders what's become of his way of life.

"I drive through the city and I wonder what all those people do for a living," says Mr. Warner, a sturdy, square-faced man. "I see that, and it makes me sad that my children see it too an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-511</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-511</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom French tells life stories of a tiger and a chimpanzee: Let us pay respect to fallen royalty.

His early life unfolded like something coauthored by Dickens and Darwin. As an infant he was taken from his mother — he almost certainly saw her die trying to protect him — then sold in an orange crate for $25 and a thumbprint.

He was carried across an ocean, installed inside a cage, taught to depend on the imperfect love of strangers. He charmed Jane Goodall, threw dirt at the mayor of Tampa, lear]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gangrey In Fort Lauderdale]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p510</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p510</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Sep 2006 18:05:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[At these "writers'" conferences it's almost always all about the reporting. This is important.

Today at the National Writers' Workshop here in hot, breezy South Florida, it came up a good bit.

Mirta Ojito, formerly of the Miami Herald, formerly of the New York Times, currently teaching at Columbia, gave the morning keynote on using "I" to tell stories. She said it was not only as important but MORE important to report the hell out off personal narratives, memoirs, things like that, because peo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gangrey In Fort Lauderdale]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-510</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-510</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[At these "writers'" conferences it's almost always all about the reporting. This is important.

Today at the National Writers' Workshop here in hot, breezy South Florida, it came up a good bit.

Mirta Ojito, formerly of the Miami Herald, formerly of the New York Times, currently teaching at Columbia, gave the morning keynote on using "I" to tell stories. She said it was not only as important but MORE important to report the hell out off personal narratives, memoirs, things like that, because peo]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving Papers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p509</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p509</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:43:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From USA Today: Newspapers grappling with declining circulation and profit margins can turn themselves around if they quickly develop publications and affiliated websites packed with local information, according to an eagerly awaited industry report Wednesday.

"The land rush to meet local information needs has barely begun," says Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, based on a study of business models and practices sponsored by the American Press Institute.

For example, the report says ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Three For Thursday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p508</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p508</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:00:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeffrey Gettleman in Mogadishu: They call her the "Black Hawk Down" lady.

And in the corner of her dirt yard, beneath rags drying in the sun and next to a bowl of filthy wash water, she keeps a chunk of history that most Americans would probably like to forget.

It is the battered nose of a Black Hawk helicopter, from one of the two that got shot down in Mogadishu on Oct. 3, 1993, in an infamous battle that killed 18 Americans, led to a major foreign policy shift and spawned a big movie.

The B]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Diver]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p507</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p507</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:38:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: The old man still dreams about the bottom of the sea. He dreams about sponges, about tiger sharks, about big-hearted men he figured would live forever but are now gone.

"It is hard getting old,'' the old man said. Of course it is. You outlive your friends. Your body rebels. Your short-term memory fails. And yet you can't forget.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Last Diver]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-507</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-507</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: The old man still dreams about the bottom of the sea. He dreams about sponges, about tiger sharks, about big-hearted men he figured would live forever but are now gone.

"It is hard getting old,'' the old man said. Of course it is. You outlive your friends. Your body rebels. Your short-term memory fails. And yet you can't forget.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Three For Thursday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-508</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-508</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeffrey Gettleman in Mogadishu: They call her the "Black Hawk Down" lady.

And in the corner of her dirt yard, beneath rags drying in the sun and next to a bowl of filthy wash water, she keeps a chunk of history that most Americans would probably like to forget.

It is the battered nose of a Black Hawk helicopter, from one of the two that got shot down in Mogadishu on Oct. 3, 1993, in an infamous battle that killed 18 Americans, led to a major foreign policy shift and spawned a big movie.

The B]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saving Papers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-509</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-509</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From USA Today: Newspapers grappling with declining circulation and profit margins can turn themselves around if they quickly develop publications and affiliated websites packed with local information, according to an eagerly awaited industry report Wednesday.

"The land rush to meet local information needs has barely begun," says Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, based on a study of business models and practices sponsored by the American Press Institute.

For example, the report says ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Van locked? I've just the thing!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p506</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p506</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:51:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gangrey exclusive from Alex Zesch:

It wasn't a congratulations on your new baby visit.

The woman said something about her van and her dog was inside and her insurance company. I gathered she wanted to use the phone, although she never said that.

I handed her my cell phone and stayed nearby in the front yard, like the small, distressed woman with the massive knee brace was going to run off with it. As she got the runaround from 21st Century Insurance and I pretended to be picking up, we were b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Stuff]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p505</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p505</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Sep 2006 10:47:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Weisskopf loses a hand in Iraq.

Tamara Jones talks to the First Lady about steamy books.

Janine Anderson on the closing of an old theater.

Sudarsan Raghavan on the price of ice and the reshaping of lives.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Stuff]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-505</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-505</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Weisskopf loses a hand in Iraq.

Tamara Jones talks to the First Lady about steamy books.

Janine Anderson on the closing of an old theater.

Sudarsan Raghavan on the price of ice and the reshaping of lives.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Van locked? I've just the thing!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-506</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-506</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gangrey exclusive from Alex Zesch:

It wasn't a congratulations on your new baby visit.

The woman said something about her van and her dog was inside and her insurance company. I gathered she wanted to use the phone, although she never said that.

I handed her my cell phone and stayed nearby in the front yard, like the small, distressed woman with the massive knee brace was going to run off with it. As she got the runaround from 21st Century Insurance and I pretended to be picking up, we were b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bad Things At The Taco Bell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p504</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p504</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:23:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: If you believe their confessions — and the accused say the signed statements cannot be believed — the $2,500 Taco Bell heist was staged, a piece of criminal theater with a simple motive: drugs.

It was hatched in the Taco Bell parking lot, when the night manager's friends convinced her that the cash from the night deposit could land them lots of Ecstasy pills.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bad Things At The Taco Bell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-504</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-504</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: If you believe their confessions — and the accused say the signed statements cannot be believed — the $2,500 Taco Bell heist was staged, a piece of criminal theater with a simple motive: drugs.

It was hatched in the Taco Bell parking lot, when the night manager's friends convinced her that the cash from the night deposit could land them lots of Ecstasy pills.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good Monday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p503</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p503</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:12:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I defy you to find more good stuff inside the Monday edition of a regional newspaper anywhere in the country.

Sports columnist Gary Shelton makes eloquence seem effortless. Read his ode to the courage of injured Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Chris Simms.

Michael Kruse made me roll on the floor laughing with this collection of overheard quotes from the streets of New York.

And then Erin Sullivan made me almost cry.

Enjoy.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two From The Weekend]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p502</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p502</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:52:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Lewis with The Ballad Of Big Mike: As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent. The Briarcrest Christian School team didn't have many black players either, and Michael Oher was black. But what made Michael Oher especially peculiar was that no one in Memphis had anything t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two From The Weekend]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-502</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-502</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Lewis with The Ballad Of Big Mike: As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent. The Briarcrest Christian School team didn't have many black players either, and Michael Oher was black. But what made Michael Oher especially peculiar was that no one in Memphis had anything t]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good Monday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-503</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-503</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I defy you to find more good stuff inside the Monday edition of a regional newspaper anywhere in the country.

Sports columnist Gary Shelton makes eloquence seem effortless. Read his ode to the courage of injured Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Chris Simms.

Michael Kruse made me roll on the floor laughing with this collection of overheard quotes from the streets of New York.

And then Erin Sullivan made me almost cry.

Enjoy.]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Broken Girl And A Slow Trial]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p501</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p501</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 23 Sep 2006 16:16:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: The friendless death of Nixzmary Brown in Brooklyn last January demanded a reckoning. She was broken and starved, 7 years old, left in a den her brothers and sisters called "the dirty room." Child welfare workers, teachers, the police and the parents all came under scrutiny.

In some quarters, consequences were swift. A week after Nixzmary was found, the child welfare agency suspended or reassigned six city workers. Soon hundreds of children were placed in foster care, the police]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Broken Girl And A Slow Trial]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-501</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-501</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 23 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: The friendless death of Nixzmary Brown in Brooklyn last January demanded a reckoning. She was broken and starved, 7 years old, left in a den her brothers and sisters called "the dirty room." Child welfare workers, teachers, the police and the parents all came under scrutiny.

In some quarters, consequences were swift. A week after Nixzmary was found, the child welfare agency suspended or reassigned six city workers. Soon hundreds of children were placed in foster care, the police]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Calming The Storm]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-499</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-499</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: The voices had been bad that morning, angry and insistent, screaming through Justin's head. He sat behind the reception desk at Vincent House, swiveling in the chair, trying to concentrate on the phone he was supposed to be answering.

But the phone didn't ring. The quiet was too loud.

The voices kept shouting.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Description]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-500</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-500</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I came across this piece of physical description in Stephen Hunter's review of the movie, "All The King's Men." I've always had trouble with physical description of people. This one seems first rate.

"For me, Penn's Willie Stark is spot-on, but he's a subspecies of tyrant. He's the small-man tyrant. Penn is short and stubby with a kind of crunched-up face liberated to aggression by a giant ax blade of a nose and rubbery, vulgar lips; with short arms and short, pudgy fingers and a pile of Brylcr]]></description>
      <author>Mark Johnson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thursday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-497</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-497</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[* Michael Brick on the sounds a train makes.

* Tom Lake on a gator.

* Gawker helps readers understand the NY Times' redesign.

* Jeb Phillips on a dead soldier. (The Army suited him, his friends said. He had a predisposition to neatness and order. He made people take off their shoes before getting in his Z28 Camaro so they wouldn't mess up the carpets, said Rob Wallace, his best friend since first grade. He scrubbed that car inside and out every weekend.)

* The Narrative Digest has been updat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[There's A Dog On The Tracks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-498</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-498</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey Al-Rikabi says this made his day: The Q train announcement was, actually, decipherable. That's not to say it was easy to comprehend.

"This train is being delayed. There is a dog on the tracks."

That got the attention of the people in the front car yesterday. Cellphones popped open. Calls were made to work. Doubts were expressed as to whether the excuse would be accepted.

"There's a dog on the tracks."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Changing Landscapes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-495</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-495</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A friend up north pointed out an ongoing series by Bob Shaw at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Shaw is documenting -- in narrative fashion -- the changing of a century-old farm into a yuppie subdivision.

The tagline: "This is part of an extended series about the development of a $1.5 billion suburban community. The stories began in 2004 with the final harvest on the historic Brandtjen Farm in Lakeville and will continue until the first residents move in."

Here's his latest installment: Kim Berge ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hank Stuever]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-496</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-496</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lincoln's Colleen Kenney writes for Gangrey:

After a martini, two margaritas and half a beer last Friday night in Texas, I said this to some Florida journalists I met at a conference:

"Hank Stuever can save journalism."

I stand by it now, in the fluorescent light of my day. Stuever is like a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. He makes us laugh while telling us about ourselves and our nation, yet he's ... deep. Even if we don't like a Stuever story, we talk about it. He surprises us. He entertain]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[For Horse, Death Arrives Inelegantly]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-493</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-493</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story: Juliet the carriage horse held forth for about two decades on the south end of Central Park taking tourists on slow romantic rides through the park. She was the cute white horse whose owner outfitted her head with the elegant white tassel that bobbed as she clip-clopped ahead of her carriage on loops from the Plaza Hotel to Tavern on the Green and other prominent spots.

But as elegant as Juliet was in life, she was undeniably inelegant in death on a rainy morning y]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nick Kristof Gives Blood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-492</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-492</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Save my wife:

Prudence Lemokouno was lying motionless on a bed in the bleak hospital here, her stomach swelled with a fetus that had just died, her eyes occasionally flickering with fright but mostly dull and empty. Dr. Pascal Pipi, the lone doctor in the public hospital, said she had a few more hours to live, and then she would join the half-million women a year who die around the world in pregnancy and childbirth. Her husband, Alain Awona, was beside himself. ''Save my wife,'' he pleaded. ''M]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-491</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-491</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brady Dennis with Pain and patriotism, Adam Smith behind the scenes on some mud-slinging and Rob Farley on the guy taking on Scientology.

What are you reading today?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Another Day In The Cage]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-490</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-490</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: He stood holding his lip. Blood was pouring out, but he kept his voice calm, level. "Good girl," he said to Rula. "Easy. Easy." The tiger listened to his voice, settling.

Then Lancelot Kollmann walked out of the training cage. He went into the house and looked in the mirror.

Where Rula had clawed him, it looked like he'd been hit with a hatchet.

His lower lip was split in two. On the side of his arm, the tiger had sliced down to bone.

That was Tuesday.

On Thursday, Kollmann,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Than Big Bags Of Facts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-489</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-489</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mike Wilson is the AME for newsfeatures here at the SPT. He did a brown bag session Thursday called What I Learned About Writing By Editing. The best thing he talked about: "closing the distance between fact and meaning."

"Too many of our stories are just big bags of facts," he said.

He says we can fix that by focusing on The Big Idea.

What does this story MEAN? To you? To us?

What is it ABOUT?

My take: You might call this a nut graf-PLUS. The BIG IDEA GRAF gives context -- like the traditi]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hey, Doyle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-487</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-487</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Northern Colorado backup punter arrested: The University of Northern Colorado's reserve punter was arrested Tuesday, accused of stabbing his rival in his kicking leg.

Mitch Cozad, a sophomore from Wheatland, Wyo., allegedly attacked starting punter Rafael Mendoza in a parking lot in Evans on Monday night, Evans police Lt. Gary Kessler said.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Big Jack Needs Help]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-488</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-488</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's the story: The place is a hole in the wall, one of those newsstands where a blind guy peddles newspapers, coffee and pastries. The man behind the counter is "Big Jack," not Mr. Jackson or even Gary. No need for formalities or pretense here. The childhood nickname stuck for obvious reasons. Everything about the 45-year-old -- "I'm 6-feet-5 and, proud to say, 282" -- is larger than life.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sept. 11]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-486</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-486</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm going to keep a running list of the good stuff to come from this anniversary. Please drop your links if you see something we should read.

UPDATES: Wow. Wow. Wow. Read Gary Smith on Pat Tillman here.

* Read Deborah Sontag's six-month investigative narrative, Broken Ground.

* The best documentary video I've seen related to Sept. 11 came a few days later at Union Square Park. Watch the clip here. Click on the first video. It's only a few minutes, but it's something powerful.

* Dan Barry's s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Old New Yorkers, New New Yorkers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-485</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-485</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 08 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick's story: Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was televised live.

In New York City, 2,749 people were killed. About eight million remained. Since that day, the numbers have changed.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lessons For Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-484</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-484</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Brady Dennis' story: The stares begin each time he approaches the stage, his hand searching for the familiar touch of the keyboard. He never knows how many pairs of eyes are focused on him, watching, waiting.

But he knows what the hushed audience sees - blind kid, dark sunglasses, the promise of a song - and he knows the introduction that will come, the one that always begins the same way.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the next Ray Charles!"

He's too shy and polite, maybe too proud, to tell the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Frosty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-483</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-483</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael's brother Bjorn Kruse with a rant (it began as a brother-to-brother email) about the changing Frosty: Last week, out on an aimless drive, I stopped at a Wendy's franchise for a Frosty. When I ordered my large Frosty, the cashier asked me, "Vanilla or chocolate?"

I didn't know how to answer. I tried to respond, sputtered, tried again, let fly a few eye twitches and finally managed, "Not vanilla."

"So chocolate?"

Salt in the wound.

"I want a Frosty, the original. Not vanilla."

She nod]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Writing About Golf]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-482</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-482</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Damon Hack with Tiger Woods: A game marked by chance has become something else over the past two months, a treatise by Tiger Woods on what is possible with a crooked stick and a dimpled ball.

Before tens of thousands of New Englanders caught between anguish for baseball and hope for football, Woods rode in a convertible golf cart to the first tee of the T.P.C. of Boston on Monday, shook hands with Vijay Singh, and began the cold and systematic process of relieving Singh of his three-shot lead.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[National Brotherhood Of Gangreyers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-481</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-481</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[* Wright Thompson following a prep star.

* Dan Barry.

* Chris Goffard with Father, son and holy rift (read this).

* And the first thing I thought when I read of 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin's unfortunate encourter with a sting ray? I can't wait to read Hank Stuever's essay.

** UPDATE: Well, it wasn't Stuever. Paul Fahri handles the so-long, Steve duties: Steve Irwin spent much of his life not just tempting fate but petting it, riding its back and swinging it by the tail. In the end, fate s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Paul Salopek's Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p480</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p480</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:36:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Now that he's been arrested in Sudan and charged with espionage and "writing false news," one of the best reporters in the country is finally on the national radar screen. He should have been there long ago for his elegant, poetic writing and dogged reporting.

Stories like this one about a 7-year-old bride.

Or this one about wealthy countries pirating the fishing stocks of poorer countries:

Fade to blue

A tale of fish, pirates, greed and the end of a global frontier

World fish stocks vanish]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Drove The Preacher's Wife?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p479</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p479</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:33:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson writes: "The L.A. Times had a haunting narrative this week on a preacher's wife who killed her husband with a turkey gun. The writer, Peter H. King, makes it more than just a crime story. It's a story about a small town that seems to be living in a different time when church elders held power and people kept each other's secrets."

Read the story: If the minister's widow can be believed — and, accused of his murder, she might prove less than reliable — Matthew Winkler's last, gaspin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Drove The Preacher's Wife?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-479</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-479</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson writes: "The L.A. Times had a haunting narrative this week on a preacher's wife who killed her husband with a turkey gun. The writer, Peter H. King, makes it more than just a crime story. It's a story about a small town that seems to be living in a different time when church elders held power and people kept each other's secrets."

Read the story: If the minister's widow can be believed — and, accused of his murder, she might prove less than reliable — Matthew Winkler's last, gaspin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Paul Salopek's Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-480</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-480</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Now that he's been arrested in Sudan and charged with espionage and "writing false news," one of the best reporters in the country is finally on the national radar screen. He should have been there long ago for his elegant, poetic writing and dogged reporting.

Stories like this one about a 7-year-old bride.

Or this one about wealthy countries pirating the fishing stocks of poorer countries:

Fade to blue

A tale of fish, pirates, greed and the end of a global frontier

World fish stocks vanish]]></description>
      <author>Mark Johnson</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Homer's Odyssey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p478</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p478</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Aug 2006 11:54:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: Every community that doesn't have a Mark Opsasnick needs to get one. He is a tall and obsessed man from Greenbelt who quietly rages against forgetting. What he rescues from collective amnesia are not the big things. One of his favorite phrases is: "miscellaneous and unknown."

He's the guy to ask about, say, Patsy Cline's seminal gigs at the Dixie Pig in Prince George's County. Or James M. Cain hard-boiling his last novels in a house near College Park. Or the true story of the lo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Homer's Odyssey]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-478</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-478</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: Every community that doesn't have a Mark Opsasnick needs to get one. He is a tall and obsessed man from Greenbelt who quietly rages against forgetting. What he rescues from collective amnesia are not the big things. One of his favorite phrases is: "miscellaneous and unknown."

He's the guy to ask about, say, Patsy Cline's seminal gigs at the Dixie Pig in Prince George's County. Or James M. Cain hard-boiling his last novels in a house near College Park. Or the true story of the lo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Remembering Katrina]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p477</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p477</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:31:54 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bruce Nolan recreates the storm: Two hours before dawn, at the threshold of the darkest week in the history of New Orleans, a hand shook Cyril Crutchfield awake in lower Plaquemines Parish, 45 miles southeast of the city.

"Wake up. Wake up! Water's comin' in."

Crutchfield sat up on the hard table that had been his makeshift bed in the darkened cafeteria of Port Sulphur High School. He could hear Hurricane Katrina in the night, its wind keening and moaning with unnerving power, much stronger th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tuesday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p476</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p476</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:22:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[* Hank Stuever's When photos, memories are a little hazy

* Corey Kilgannon's The Hudson, and the lure of blue claws

* Charlie LeDuff's For 56 years, battling evils of Hollywood with prayer]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tuesday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-476</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-476</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[* Hank Stuever's When photos, memories are a little hazy

* Corey Kilgannon's The Hudson, and the lure of blue claws

* Charlie LeDuff's For 56 years, battling evils of Hollywood with prayer]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Remembering Katrina]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-477</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-477</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bruce Nolan recreates the storm: Two hours before dawn, at the threshold of the darkest week in the history of New Orleans, a hand shook Cyril Crutchfield awake in lower Plaquemines Parish, 45 miles southeast of the city.

"Wake up. Wake up! Water's comin' in."

Crutchfield sat up on the hard table that had been his makeshift bed in the darkened cafeteria of Port Sulphur High School. He could hear Hurricane Katrina in the night, its wind keening and moaning with unnerving power, much stronger th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p475</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p475</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:58:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory with i am pretty sure that i know u, and Dan Barry's back down south, following the corpse on Union Street: More than a week after Hurricane Katrina nearly leveled this city, workers newly assigned to collect the dead stopped on a downtown street. There before them, on its back, lay another corpse, all but baked into a pose of submission by several hot suns.

The workers placed the corpse in a zippered black bag somewhat larger than the kind used to protect rented tuxedoes. They s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-475</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-475</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory with i am pretty sure that i know u, and Dan Barry's back down south, following the corpse on Union Street: More than a week after Hurricane Katrina nearly leveled this city, workers newly assigned to collect the dead stopped on a downtown street. There before them, on its back, lay another corpse, all but baked into a pose of submission by several hot suns.

The workers placed the corpse in a zippered black bag somewhat larger than the kind used to protect rented tuxedoes. They s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bragg Sunday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p474</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p474</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Aug 2006 19:49:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I call it: Fun With Archives. It's something I do while waiting for someone to call and say, Go home. And why not share. Here are a few from Rick Bragg in the late 80s and early 90s.

Living in another world, Lesson linger from a lost war, All that matters is if you can play, Little women look back on a lost world, and, my favorite 176-word brief ever, Airborne clipboard knocks out glass eye: Patrick Malloy was walking home from work Wednesday night when a clipboard left on the bumper of a passi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bragg Sunday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-474</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-474</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I call it: Fun With Archives. It's something I do while waiting for someone to call and say, Go home. And why not share. Here are a few from Rick Bragg in the late 80s and early 90s.

Living in another world, Lesson linger from a lost war, All that matters is if you can play, Little women look back on a lost world, and, my favorite 176-word brief ever, Airborne clipboard knocks out glass eye: Patrick Malloy was walking home from work Wednesday night when a clipboard left on the bumper of a passi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gangrey Gathering]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p473</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p473</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:37:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sunday, Sept. 3. 6 p.m. My place in Tampa.

One requirement: bring something to read aloud.

Email me for directions.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Yeti Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p472</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p472</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:35:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Barry's story: O mighty is man's lust for Mount Everest that a team of climbers recently pronounced a frozen companion dead and left him behind in their quest for the summit. A few days later, he inconveniently turned up alive.

On dozens of visits since April, James McCown has left his wife and two children behind at Disney World to rearrange his vital organs aboard the Himalayan roller coaster ride, Expedition Everest.

They escort Dad to the roller coaster. He puts on his toboggan h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[L.A.'s dopest attorney]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p471</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p471</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:30:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her profile: Matt Farrell, a video producer, needed an attorney after he had been charged with growing marijuana. He hired Allison Margolin, "L.A.'s dopest attorney," on a friend's recommendation.

Farrell's first impression was "she was hot." His second was doubt. She looked too young to be a lawyer.

Then he saw the Ivy League degrees on her wall.

Like actress Reese Witherspoon's character in the movie "Legally Blonde" — a rich, ditsy Beverly Hills blond who goes to Harvard Law School — ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[L.A.'s dopest attorney]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-471</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-471</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her profile: Matt Farrell, a video producer, needed an attorney after he had been charged with growing marijuana. He hired Allison Margolin, "L.A.'s dopest attorney," on a friend's recommendation.

Farrell's first impression was "she was hot." His second was doubt. She looked too young to be a lawyer.

Then he saw the Ivy League degrees on her wall.

Like actress Reese Witherspoon's character in the movie "Legally Blonde" — a rich, ditsy Beverly Hills blond who goes to Harvard Law School — ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Yeti Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-472</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-472</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Barry's story: O mighty is man's lust for Mount Everest that a team of climbers recently pronounced a frozen companion dead and left him behind in their quest for the summit. A few days later, he inconveniently turned up alive.

On dozens of visits since April, James McCown has left his wife and two children behind at Disney World to rearrange his vital organs aboard the Himalayan roller coaster ride, Expedition Everest.

They escort Dad to the roller coaster. He puts on his toboggan h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gangrey Gathering]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-473</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-473</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sunday, Sept. 3. 6 p.m. My place in Tampa.

One requirement: bring something to read aloud.

Email me for directions.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tips On Doing Dailies]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-470</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-470</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As he collected his things this afternoon after his brown-bag talk, Ken Fuson grabbed my hand.

"No fat jokes on the blog," he said.

Damn.

In that case, I want to point out something Ken touched on at a time when we tend to be what-do-readers-want?-centric: We should be writing what we're interested in. Like they do at the New Yorker.

Here's to that.

A few others from Ken:

Remember -- WHOGARA: WHO Gives A Rat's Ass?

Know the difference between an article and a story.

Always look for the c]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Patsy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-467</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-467</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his essay: With a man in custody claiming to have killed JonBenet Ramsey -- in just the plausibly improbable way her parents and certain forensic experts had all along claimed it happened -- the command to the world is wait. Wait and see, which nobody really knows how to do anymore, not where infotainment is at stake. So instead the consumers and makers of mass media have started, just in case, to compose an undeliverable letter in their minds. It begins: Dear Patsy.

(But what's the next l]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Welcome]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-468</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-468</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read it: The doe's face smashed against the driver's side window and its body sheared off the mirror. There was no blood.

Pam Fix knelt by the doe, which at about 140 pounds weighed more than she did. Pam, a 60-year-old blond with a raspy voice, dragged the doe to a soft spot in a ditch by the side of the road. There she waited in the dark with the doe for help to arrive.

"I'm sorry, baby," she said. "I'm so sorry."

She held the doe's neck and rubbed her side, trying to calm her so she wouldn]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Choices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-469</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-469</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid talks with Terry Gross of "Fresh Air" about his response to pleas for help while covering the Israeli bombing of southern Lebanon. Here's the link.

Here are some excerpts...

Gross: When you showed up in towns that had been bombed or about to be bombed, did people ask you for help?

Shadid: It was amazing I guess the degree to which journalists had become - I don't want to say part of the story - but the degree to which journalists were within the story. Alm]]></description>
      <author>Brendan</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[No Arms, One Leg, Still Running]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-466</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-466</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: See the green Corvette blazing east toward the dawn, miles beneath the moon, seconds beyond the law.

Pasco County, nine winters back. A pursuit call crackles into Sgt. Gary Albin's cruiser. Albin summons the cavalry and drives north to intercept.

Sparks fly as the Corvette blows a tire at nearly 120 mph. The driver veers off the highway and pulls into a Citgo. Nearly a dozen deputies descend.

"Put your hands behind your back!" they yell.

Then Albin recognizes the driver.

"He]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-465</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-465</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[* From the Dallas Morning News -- Mary Ellen's Will: The battle for 4949 Swiss

* Andy Newman walks around Staten Island (video of his trip here)

* Anne Hull reporting on John Mark Karr here and here]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Imagery Of Smells]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-463</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-463</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[DeNeen Brown on the smell of memories: The smell of summer and dying marigolds, and mosquito spray and cut grass. The smell of melting tar and telephone poles and Chinese kitchens exhaling their morning breath into city alleys already filled with the smell of urine and bold rats.

The smell of bus fumes, and fireflies flickering into good movies at drive-in theaters. The smell of juice dripping from black cherries falling onto white summer dresses, and you sitting on the front porch spitting out]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadline Narratives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-464</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-464</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Swing by the Nieman Narrative Digest for a few on the theme of "deadline narratives."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[But I Just Saw Them At The Store]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-462</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-462</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read it: Though it is murder on the soul, celebrity gossip does keep us young, if only in the sense that it renders us childish and reliably gullible, the way some children can still be completely sideswiped by this particular bit of news: Honey, your father and I are getting a divorce.

Rare is the child who doesn't see a split coming in advance. Same with us, and Us.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Good Die Young]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-460</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-460</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brick: Fred Wheezy, an orphan with half a working lung who recovered to win fame as a detective, to star on Broadway and to contemplate a teaching career, was killed on Wednesday by a car outside his home in Queens. He was 15 months old, known nationwide as Fred the Undercover Cat.

"He was here and then gone in a moment," said his caretaker, Carol Moran.

Fred was whiskery and black-striped, with darting eyes and no fear, sickly then rambunctious and not long for this world. In his time, he etc]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Interviewing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-461</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-461</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[ESPN's John Sawatsky preaches his guiding principles.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[American Album]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-458</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-458</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He's been gone from the pages of the NYT since he left to try his hand at pictures. Now, please welcome back (every Monday?), Charlie LeDuff:

CAMPO, Calif. — Five miles past the paved road, up on a hill of no name, lives a one-eyed man with a one-eyed cat.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Jill Carroll Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-459</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-459</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson pointed out that Jill Carroll's story in the CSM "is written in a very unusual way. Jill writes large sections directly from her experience then a colleague, Peter Grier, steps in to write about what was happening at The Monitor and elsewhere in response to Jill's kidnapping. The paper signals each shift in perspective from Carroll to Grier by putting the writers initials in bold at the beginning of a section. I've never seen anything done like this before. It actually stresses the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sign Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-457</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-457</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Time to start thinking about Nieman. Registration is now open. The conference (in a yet another new place this year) starts Nov. 17 with a keynote by Calvin Trillin. Early-bird registration rate is $325. Here's the updated list of speakers (Thanks, Ramsey). You'll notice that Kruse and I were not invited to lead a discussion this year. Bastards.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Burying Elden]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-455</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-455</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Wright Thompson's story: A great love story ends today.

For 73 years, Elden and Mildred Auker were married, inseparable. Their romance was the stuff of paperback novels and Meg Ryan movies. When he won a World Series game or struck out Babe Ruth, she cheered. When she got sick late in life, he rubbed her feet. As they grew old, they'd part with, "You know I've always loved you," just in case.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Uninvited Guest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-456</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-456</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read T. Lake's story: Cecil and Denise Allred's Sunday night began without incident. They ate dinner at KFC. They returned home to Randee Road. He stepped outside to feed chicken scraps to the cats.

Then he saw the body.

There in the mud a few feet from the house, someone lay in a fetal position. Pants and underwear were pulled down to the ankles. The county had seen six murders in the previous five weeks, and Cecil Allred feared the worst.

"Don't go out there," he told his wife. "Call the sh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Memphis To Miss McMillin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-453</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-453</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[When he splits for his thinking stint, that town's not going to wake up with stuff like this or this in its paper: Barbers tend to be generalists -- they remember heads of hair and faces and favored topics of discussion but not necessarily names -- and so Franks and Hoselton aren't precisely sure the exact day they started working together.

They are sure of this: The shop's co-owners have been working together now for 50 years.

They started before computers, when TV sets were luxury items, whe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Secret World Of The Child Recovery Industry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-454</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-454</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson writes: "AP narrative ace Todd Lewan has an interesting two-years-in-the-making tale that a number of papers have been running this week. He's a superb writer. There are some tightly written scenes here, but I wondered about the sections dealing with the sourcing for the stories. I wished they could have been pulled from the story and confined to the "how-we-did-it" box. I wonder how others feel about this."

Here's the piece: The man in the tailored suit looked to be in his 70s. He]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Girl Gone Wild]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-452</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-452</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read "Baby, Give Me A Kiss": Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"

It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It's Hot]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-450</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-450</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Forgive the no-post yesterday. I was a little busy. Here's the NYT's metro kids on the heat wave ("it was a morning and night of a million little miseries"); and check out B. Scott in today's Times Herald-Record.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stark Consequences: A Sailor's Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-451</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-451</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I must have missed Mark's series from a few weeks ago. I'm seeing this for the first time this morning. You know Mark from his Pulitzer-finalist series last year, and, of course, from his Gangrey posts.

He tells the story of the unravelling of a sailor. Give it a read. Let me. Then let's meet back here and talk about it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[MTV, appreciated]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-449</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-449</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Hank Stuever's story: MTV turns 25 today, which is still a few months younger than Justin Timberlake.

The typical way to go from that sentence would be to bemoan -- in snarkabratory fashion -- what MTV has become since it first transfixed some lucky cable-ready teenagers on Aug. 1, 1981. (Those of us first labeled "the MTV Generation" would now like to apologize to all the parents with basic cable who hired us as babysitters in those days. You should know this: Your small children went uns]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Miracles]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-448</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-448</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Whatever you do today, don't miss Dan Barry from Saturday: A MONTHLY calendar, courtesy of a gas station on Jerome Avenue, hangs in the kitchen of a spare apartment in the Bronx. The 14 pencil strokes upon its face represent 14 successive days this month that one family got past without incident.

But the space reserved for Saturday the 15th remains unmarked, as do all the July days that follow. That is because Saturday the 15th is the day the youngest in this family, a fussing bundle of boyhood]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kennel Trash]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p447</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p447</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:18:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kelley Benham's story: It got dark. Out came flashlights. They still hadn't gathered all the dogs. They didn't know what to do with them all, and they didn't know how many they would have to kill.

The property reached down into the woods, where thick weeds made it hard to walk. The ground was scattered with chewed-up deer bones – spines and splintered femurs. They kept backing into dogs. So many eyes in the dark.

They carried bags of dog food and syringes of something called Fatal-Plus.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kennel Trash]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-447</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-447</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kelley Benham's story: It got dark. Out came flashlights. They still hadn't gathered all the dogs. They didn't know what to do with them all, and they didn't know how many they would have to kill.

The property reached down into the woods, where thick weeds made it hard to walk. The ground was scattered with chewed-up deer bones - spines and splintered femurs. They kept backing into dogs. So many eyes in the dark.

They carried bags of dog food and syringes of something called Fatal-Plus.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p446</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p446</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:35:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Steuver on "Who Wants To Be A Superhero?"; Michael Brick on a police shooting; and if you missed it, Dan Barry reviews Springsteen doing Seeger: THIS is what you would do. Close the bedroom door to the quiet indignities of childhood. Unclasp a small but hefty box to reveal a now forgotten device called a portable record player. Plug it in.

Make a selection from the albums your parents bought when they used to listen to music. No, not Mitch Miller and his Gang. No, not Herb Alpert and the T]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-446</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-446</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Steuver on "Who Wants To Be A Superhero?"; Michael Brick on a police shooting; and if you missed it, Dan Barry reviews Springsteen doing Seeger: THIS is what you would do. Close the bedroom door to the quiet indignities of childhood. Unclasp a small but hefty box to reveal a now forgotten device called a portable record player. Plug it in.

Make a selection from the albums your parents bought when they used to listen to music. No, not Mitch Miller and his Gang. No, not Herb Alpert and the T]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cover Me]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p445</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p445</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Jul 2006 08:31:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A buddy asked the other day for advice on cover letters for job applications. I haven't written cover letters for my last three moves, so I'm not the best person to comment. Besides, back when I was an eager beaver, I don't know what I was thinking.

"I would be greatly moved if you would consider me…" is how I started one of them I found in my Hotmail Drafts folder. "Motivation is my main asset," I wrote, and the rest is too damned embarrassing to put up here, but it included goodies like "unqu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Cover Me]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-445</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-445</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A buddy asked the other day for advice on cover letters for job applications. I haven't written cover letters for my last three moves, so I'm not the best person to comment. Besides, back when I was an eager beaver, I don't know what I was thinking.

"I would be greatly moved if you would consider me..." is how I started one of them I found in my Hotmail Drafts folder. "Motivation is my main asset," I wrote, and the rest is too damned embarrassing to put up here, but it included goodies like "un]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In and Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p444</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p444</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Jul 2006 06:54:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson on Barry Bonds.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In and Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-444</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-444</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson on Barry Bonds.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Writing From The Middle East]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p443</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p443</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:41:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[One good thing about strife over there?

Anthony Shadid comes to play.

Read his stuff here, here and here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Writing From The Middle East]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-443</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-443</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[One good thing about strife over there?

Anthony Shadid comes to play.

Read his stuff here, here and here.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[There Goes Sunday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p442</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p442</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 23 Jul 2006 14:57:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It does my heart good to see so much good long work in the newspapers today. I'm sure I've missed a hundred others, but it's because I've been wrapped up in these. Michael Levensohn's 15,000-word, ridiculously well-reported Teflon Don (Now that's a photograph); Vanessa Gezari's 6,500-word Trapped In The Safety Net; and tiny by comparison is S.I. Rosenbaum's 2,100-word Santa's workshops, which brought us fantastic stuff like this: Surrounded by more experienced Santas, Jim is a little intimidated]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[There Goes Sunday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-442</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-442</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 23 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It does my heart good to see so much good long work in the newspapers today. I'm sure I've missed a hundred others, but it's because I've been wrapped up in these. Michael Levensohn's 15,000-word, ridiculously well-reported Teflon Don (Now that's a photograph); Vanessa Gezari's 6,500-word Trapped In The Safety Net; and tiny by comparison is S.I. Rosenbaum's 2,100-word Santa's workshops, which brought us fantastic stuff like this: Surrounded by more experienced Santas, Jim is a little intimidated]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Boy In The Chimney]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p441</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p441</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2006 09:23:27 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson spotted this story on Thursday: Inside the chill of the county coroner's office, the detective and the forensic anthropologist stood over soot-covered bones arrayed on a metal table.

Over two hours, Elizabeth Miller provided a running dialogue for each bone. She picked up one rib after another, studying them for knife scrapes.

The bones were those of a boy, perhaps 12 to 15 years old, found in the chimney of an abandoned building in South Los Angeles. The boy wore faded and staine]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lincoln Land]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p440</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p440</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2006 09:16:06 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How do you make a feature about a car shop come alive with drama and tension? Take a lesson from John Barry's story: Let's say that back in the day, you were hell on wheels. But you've been around the block a time too many. You've picked up some rust. Let's say they drag you to Lincoln Land at the end of a tow hook.

The preserver has a look at you. If you're lucky, he sees something he likes. He's European, freshly shaven, wears a spotless blue uniform. He could make you good as new, or better ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lincoln Land]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-440</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-440</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How do you make a feature about a car shop come alive with drama and tension? Take a lesson from John Barry's story: Let's say that back in the day, you were hell on wheels. But you've been around the block a time too many. You've picked up some rust. Let's say they drag you to Lincoln Land at the end of a tow hook.

The preserver has a look at you. If you're lucky, he sees something he likes. He's European, freshly shaven, wears a spotless blue uniform. He could make you good as new, or better ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Boy In The Chimney]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-441</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-441</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson spotted this story on Thursday: Inside the chill of the county coroner's office, the detective and the forensic anthropologist stood over soot-covered bones arrayed on a metal table.

Over two hours, Elizabeth Miller provided a running dialogue for each bone. She picked up one rib after another, studying them for knife scrapes.

The bones were those of a boy, perhaps 12 to 15 years old, found in the chimney of an abandoned building in South Los Angeles. The boy wore faded and staine]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Second Look]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p439</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p439</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Jul 2006 08:48:58 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We talked a while back about Doyle Murphy's idea for the Greeley Stampeed, the annual rodeo that draws the same boring coverage year after year. Doyle wanted to try something different, something like Brady's 300 Words. It's a risky venture. It takes a good reporter and photographer to pull a short set of stories like that off without the cheese and ridiculousness.

I think Doyle did a nice job. Check out his series, Second Look. Links to the others are found at the bottom.

Here's some interest]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Second Look]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-439</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-439</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We talked a while back about Doyle Murphy's idea for the Greeley Stampeed, the annual rodeo that draws the same boring coverage year after year. Doyle wanted to try something different, something like Brady's 300 Words. It's a risky venture. It takes a good reporter and photographer to pull a short set of stories like that off without the cheese and ridiculousness.

I think Doyle did a nice job. Check out his series, Second Look. Links to the others are found at the bottom.

Here's some interest]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salaries]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p438</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p438</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Jul 2006 22:34:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I started at the San Angelo Standard-Times at 21K in 2000, and Jenny and I lived in the best apartments in town. So I don't know what this kid is bitching about. But it's an interesting point. And these folks seem to agree. Howabout it Ramsey? You making it? Is low pay leading to the early demise of newspapers?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Weather Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-435</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-435</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: "I need one egg," says the manager at Johnny D's Diner in Newburgh. "A raw one."

A baffled cook rolls a medium grade A onto the stainless steel counter. Johnny K (for Kontogiannis) grabs it and scurries outside to a sea of fresh blacktop. It's been repaved recently and still smells of tar.

It will be Johnny K's griddle. He cracks the egg on the curb, letting the clear and yellow goop drizzle onto the parking lot. "How do you like your eggs?" he asks. "Let's go inside and grab a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Farthest Summit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-436</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-436</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Mark Johnson: "AP just ran a well-written Everest narrative. I especially liked the places the writers chose to end each section. The parallels with the fatal Mallory expedition, the fact David Sharp, an atheist, brings a Bible with him to the mountain. These revelations at the end of sections become omens."

Here it is.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Complementary Content]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-437</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-437</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Thompson of the Times of London says, "An important concept for newspapers to contemplate is that of "complementary content," as each medium has its strength and weaknesses." Here is an example of how not to do "complementary content."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Salaries]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-438</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-438</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I started at the San Angelo Standard-Times at 21K in 2000, and Jenny and I lived in the best apartments in town. So I don't know what this kid is bitching about. But it's an interesting point. And these folks seem to agree. Howabout it Ramsey? You making it? Is low pay leading to the early demise of newspapers?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Quick Arraignment]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-434</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-434</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: The lawyers in a triple-murder case filed some paperwork, the judge named some dates and then the court officers called the next case: a skinny 17-year-old with a green T-shirt and a petty robbery charge. That was it. In the time it takes to order breakfast, a man was formally arraigned yesterday, accused of being a New York City serial killer.

The accused man, Stephen Sakai, 30, never looked up from his white sneakers, which touched the chains on his ankles, which dangled below]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What Are We Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-433</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-433</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Gary Smith's profile of Andre Agassi in this week's SI. What else is good out there this weekend?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Libby Copeland On A Maverick Maverick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-432</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-432</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: Republican Ron Paul missed out on the 19th century, but he admires it from afar. He speaks lovingly of the good old days before things like Social Security and Medicaid existed, before the federal government outlawed drugs like heroin.

In his legislative fantasies, the amiable Texas congressman would do away with the CIA and the Federal Reserve. He'd reinstate the gold standard. He'd get rid of the Department of Education and leave the business of schooling to local governments,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Something You Didn't Know]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-431</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-431</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Among The Ghosts: Heroes and Grand Plans: AT the end of a long week, I went searching for her tomb. I spoke first to the priest at the Armenian Orthodox Church, who pointed me to a cemetery down the road. I went there, and a toothless old blue-eyed lady pointed me to the next one. Then, in the quiet of a compound off clamorous Tehran Square, I found her.

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell — or Miss Bell, as the Iraqis still call her — is interred in the Anglican Church's cemetery in a raised ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Girl Behind The Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-430</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-430</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[For the first day of jury selection in the John Evander Couey trial, Kruse brings us this: Jessica Marie Lunsford, 9&frac12; years old and not quite 5 feet tall, in the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 2005, was taken from her room in her family's tidy, cared-for double-wide in southwestern Citrus County, raped in a nearby mobile home and buried alive in black plastic trash bags. The trial of John Evander Couey, who is accused of killing Jessica, started this week with jury selection in Tavares a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Complaint Dept.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-429</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-429</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: New Yorkers, it has been said, like to complain.

Finally, there's proof.

It comes from the bowels of the municipal archives on Chambers Street, where thousands of complaints to the mayor have been unearthed from more than 30,000 boxes of official correspondence going back to the 1700's.

The parade of squeaky wheels includes a merchant requesting money to make up for income lost in a smallpox scare, a father angry that his 12-year-old son was allowed into a vaudeville show, and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Keeping It Simple]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-426</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-426</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry about the troubles with the site. Completely out of my control.

Keith Goldberg stumbled onto this one: Anna Fiorello has been at Ray and Alice Allen's barn at Historic Track since 7:30 a.m., cleaning out stalls and brushing horses.

"It makes me calm," Anna says.

It might be the calmest thing in her life.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Duck!]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-427</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-427</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Tamara El-Khoury on Vanessa de la Torre's story about a closed Krispy Kreme: "I liked it because I knew exactly what she was talking about. "That smell. Remember?" Talking about the sign saying they were hot. She made me miss Krispy Kreme and I haven't had one in a while! She appealed to my senses. The smell of the doughnuts, the sight of the neon sign. The story took me back to when my younger brother first introduced me to Krispy Kreme. ... It's one of those dailies that you know your e]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Interstate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-428</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-428</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I think Hank's best when he's going off on under-appreciated America. Check out this piece from last week, if you haven't already: What if the government had left Route 66 intact as it was, and people got bored with it anyhow, and the motels and curio shops closed all the same? Imagine the whining about the traffic light in Beatrice, Neb. Even before the highway act was signed we were already going suburban; we were already homogenizing, Woolworthizing, turning Texacoid, watching for the next or]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Filkins]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-425</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-425</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story:

RAMADI, Iraq, July 4 — The Government Center in the middle of this devastated town resembles a fortress on the wild edge of some frontier: it is sandbagged, barricaded, full of men ready to shoot, surrounded by rubble and enemies eager to get inside.

The American marines here live eight to a room, rarely shower for lack of running water and defecate in bags that are taken outside and burned.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-424</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-424</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Dan Barry on the smart car, and on Orange, Tex.; and read Dexter Filkins from Post 1: It is a lonely night on the rooftop of the government center in this rubble-strewn town, and Lance Cpl. Joseph Hamlin is talking about his life.

"I'm 19; I'll be 20 in September," he says, his face shrouded in the darkness. "I'm from western Georgia, on the Alabama line. LaGrange. They say it's the biggest little city in Georgia. It means 'the farm' in French. Lafayette was there."

Corporal Hamlin i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Five For The Fourth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-423</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-423</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Happy Independence Day everyone. I'm heading out of town for the weekend, so here are a few to keep you busy.

Dan Barry from Cameron, La, Lane DeGregory on the reality of a development; Kruse with a guy born on the Fourth Of July, and, from George Madden, my good friend in Oklahoma City, David Brooks and Changing Bedfellows.

And don't think about missing Goffard's latest: Deep inside a hushed fortress at the edge of the Colorado Rockies, behind razor-wire coils and reinforced steel doors, one ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Making Sure They're Not Forgotten]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p422</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p422</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:13:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson writes: You've probably come across Dexter Filkins' story in today's Times. It's a good example of storytelling in a war zone in the tradition of Ernie Pyle and others. One feature of this story seems quite remarkable for The Times. The story doesn't introduce a nut graph until the ninth paragraph. Writers and especially editors rarely show that kind of patience. I doubt many readers will feel they needed to get the nut graph sooner.

Here's the top:

A soldier was dead, and it was ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Making Sure They're Not Forgotten]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-422</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-422</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson writes: You've probably come across Dexter Filkins' story in today's Times. It's a good example of storytelling in a war zone in the tradition of Ernie Pyle and others. One feature of this story seems quite remarkable for The Times. The story doesn't introduce a nut graph until the ninth paragraph. Writers and especially editors rarely show that kind of patience. I doubt many readers will feel they needed to get the nut graph sooner.

Here's the top:

A soldier was dead, and it was ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dispatch From Supreme Court In Brooklyn]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p421</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p421</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jun 2006 21:25:48 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brick's tell-it-like-it-is quickie in court today read like something from the old days, didn't it?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dispatch From Supreme Court In Brooklyn]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-421</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-421</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brick's tell-it-like-it-is quickie in court today read like something from the old days, didn't it?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Journalism Theology Of Lieutenant Colombo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p420</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p420</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:01:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So David Barstow suggests that standard investigative journalism — which tends to include the "a (fill in the blank) investigation shows … bullet, bullet, bullet" nutgraph and three parts: overview, blown-up anecdotes and solutions — tends to feel like homework.

You know you should read it, but you don't really want to. Some display good journalism, but they often fail to connect with readers. When readers see the lede and open to the body, graphics and two sidebars, they think it's time to eat]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Journalism Theology Of Lieutenant Colombo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-420</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-420</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So David Barstow suggests that standard investigative journalism -- which tends to include the "a (fill in the blank) investigation shows ... bullet, bullet, bullet" nutgraph and three parts: overview, blown-up anecdotes and solutions -- tends to feel like homework.

You know you should read it, but you don't really want to. Some display good journalism, but they often fail to connect with readers. When readers see the lede and open to the body, graphics and two sidebars, they think it's time to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lazy Sundays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p419</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p419</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Jun 2006 09:36:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I liked this, this, this and this. (And I'm loving these World Cup photos.)

What are we reading today?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lazy Sundays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-419</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-419</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I liked this, this, this and this. (And I'm loving these World Cup photos.)

What are we reading today?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saturday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p418</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p418</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Jun 2006 07:30:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever on the building beat; Barry on squeegee men; Goffard on an old pedophile.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saturday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-418</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-418</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stuever on the building beat; Barry on squeegee men; Goffard on an old pedophile.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thinking Through The Greeley Stampede]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p417</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p417</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Jun 2006 06:49:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I got this email from Doyle Murphy: "I've pitched a project idea, and I hoping Gangrey readers can offer some advice. We have a giant rodeo called the Greeley Stampede that lasts for two weeks.

It has concerts, a carnival, and a host of other events. Every year the paper does the same stories, so after sitting through a meeting about this year's reruns I decided to pitch a series modeled after Brady Dennis's "300 Words".

I'm going to be feature hunting with a photographer at the Stampede every]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Thinking Through The Greeley Stampede]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-417</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-417</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I got this email from Doyle Murphy: "I've pitched a project idea, and I hoping Gangrey readers can offer some advice. We have a giant rodeo called the Greeley Stampede that lasts for two weeks.

It has concerts, a carnival, and a host of other events. Every year the paper does the same stories, so after sitting through a meeting about this year's reruns I decided to pitch a series modeled after Brady Dennis's "300 Words".

I'm going to be feature hunting with a photographer at the Stampede every]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How Soft Is Too Soft?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p416</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p416</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jun 2006 10:04:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I have a friend and colleague who often comments on my stories. Usually he says nice things. But today he had criticism.

It started with a question.

"When is a news story to be written as a straightforward news story," he asked, "and when should a news story be turned into a news feature? Is there a threshold?"

I wish I knew the answer to this, and I told him so. Then I realized he was talking about this story:

Just after 1 p.m., on the last day of spring, a white sun glared over Janice Cook]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How Soft Is Too Soft?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-416</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-416</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I have a friend and colleague who often comments on my stories. Usually he says nice things. But today he had criticism.

It started with a question.

"When is a news story to be written as a straightforward news story," he asked, "and when should a news story be turned into a news feature? Is there a threshold?"

I wish I knew the answer to this, and I told him so. Then I realized he was talking about this story:

Just after 1 p.m., on the last day of spring, a white sun glared over Janice Cook]]></description>
      <author>T. Lake</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Simple solution]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p415</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p415</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:14:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[My man Charles Fishman passed this along (and even if you don't much cotton to business journalism, his bestseller The Wal-Mart Effect is a virtuoso example of explanatory narrative and Fast Company is a treat to read every month).

20 June, the last day of spring 2006

Tuesday

Well, gang, here's a great answer to the question: How can newspapers fix what's wrong? You gotta love Ben Bradlee:

Bradlee knows what to do about falling newspaper circ

One exchange:

LEHRER: Do you think that the new]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End Is Near]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p414</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p414</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:40:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: There are a lot of really crummy ways we could all die, including nuclear annihilation or a flu pandemic.

And then, of course, there's the possibility that we'll be attacked by aliens. Or that robots might become smarter than humans and put us in zoos.

The Sci Fi Channel sponsored a discussion on Capitol Hill yesterday speculating on 10 exceedingly lousy ways our species might meet its end. It was part of an elaborate promotion for a television special called "Countdown to Doom]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mayhem in Miami]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p413</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p413</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Jun 2006 09:03:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his column: Smiling and hugging and screaming and dancing and blowing kisses and raising index fingers and pounding on their hearts and high-fiving and laughing and raising their arms in triumph, the best basketball team South Florida has ever seen held up the golden trophy at midnight here Tuesday night.

Mountain, climbed.

Basketball, conquered.

History, recorded.

Miami 95, Dallas 92.

And another: There is a mixture of angry defiance and unreasonable pride at the peak of the competiti]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mayhem in Miami]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-413</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-413</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his column: Smiling and hugging and screaming and dancing and blowing kisses and raising index fingers and pounding on their hearts and high-fiving and laughing and raising their arms in triumph, the best basketball team South Florida has ever seen held up the golden trophy at midnight here Tuesday night.

Mountain, climbed.

Basketball, conquered.

History, recorded.

Miami 95, Dallas 92.

And another: There is a mixture of angry defiance and unreasonable pride at the peak of the competiti]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End Is Near]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-414</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-414</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: There are a lot of really crummy ways we could all die, including nuclear annihilation or a flu pandemic.

And then, of course, there's the possibility that we'll be attacked by aliens. Or that robots might become smarter than humans and put us in zoos.

The Sci Fi Channel sponsored a discussion on Capitol Hill yesterday speculating on 10 exceedingly lousy ways our species might meet its end. It was part of an elaborate promotion for a television special called "Countdown to Doom]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Simple solution]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-415</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-415</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[My man Charles Fishman passed this along (and even if you don't much cotton to business journalism, his bestseller The Wal-Mart Effect is a virtuoso example of explanatory narrative and Fast Company is a treat to read every month).

20 June, the last day of spring 2006

Tuesday

Well, gang, here's a great answer to the question: How can newspapers fix what's wrong? You gotta love Ben Bradlee:

Bradlee knows what to do about falling newspaper circ

One exchange:

LEHRER: Do you think that the new]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Walking On Empty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-412</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-412</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: Pardon me while I go off now on the beauty in blank asphalt, and office buildings, and sky. A reverie about what's not there, a newspoem, a secret: I am having an affair with a parking lot.

It begins with a soft, short series of kabooms on a chilly Saturday morning two Decembers ago.

What was that?

Mmmph? Wha? Oh, the convention center. I forgot they're blowing it up today. Go back to sleep.

But we opened the door to the balcony anyhow, shivered, and watched an anemic powder ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Soldier's New Fight]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-410</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-410</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: OCALA - He's a 33-year-old Democrat with no political experience, a Republican wife and a college sophomore running his campaign.

And on this Thursday afternoon, he's working the crowd - two dozen silver-haired seniors - inside the Spanish Oaks community center. His aunt, who lives in the neighborhood, organized the gathering and even brought cake.

Outside, barrel-chested retirees sun themselves while grandchildren splash in the pool. Inside, a burgeoning brand of political cam]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Sinking Island]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-411</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-411</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: All trees and farmland, the tribal chief said. With hard acres of green where cattle grazed, adults trapped game, and boys and girls of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe ran without even dampening their feet. You should have seen it.

But you can hardly imagine it, much less see it, because where gardens sprouted and children sprinted just 30 years ago, there is now a grass skirt of mushy marshland, and beyond, the rippling open waters that lead to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Water," the tri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Big Booster]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-409</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-409</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: It's the morning after his 78th birthday, and T. Boone Pickens is staring at a monitor, watching the energy futures market. He's already been to the gym, done his daily workout. Now it's time for bid-ness.

The prices of crude oil and heating oil and gasoline and everything else move up and down. Outside his spacious office, the staff at BP Capital — the $2 billion-plus fund that Pickens runs — move swiftly around the building. The d&eacute;cor reflects the atmosphere: serious an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Winner On The Rebound]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-408</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-408</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: There are girls out there in ponytails and basketball uniforms who dream their own hoop dreams, bouncing balls on blacktops, stepping on the night's black air for layups, being chosen over the boys for pickup games.

Swish. They're throwing balls through steel hoops, shooting for the WNBA. Basketball in hand, dreaming their own kind of fairy tales. It is a rare thing when one of those dreaming girls gets public attention.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Dan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-407</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-407</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Today's piece from Lakeshore, Miss.: If you were to fly over rural Hancock County here, you would see more than 9,000 of them, white rectangles clumped in sun-bleached parks and scattered in piney woods like pieces of a trashed picket fence. Pick any one, and contained within that FEMA trailer are lives in claustrophobic suspension.

Paulette Shiyou invites you into her family's trailer with a natural hospitality that has remained intact. Her husband, Hugh, offers a can of beer, and her son, Cod]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Radio Farda]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-404</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-404</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: "The typical listener is probably a male (but might be a female), most likely under 30 (but might be over), and is almost certainly listening in a house (but might be in a car). When it comes to knowing its audience, the U.S.-funded Radio Farda knows only two things for sure: that the audience is surreptitiously listening somewhere inside Iran, and that the Iranian government doesn't want anyone to hear what a U.S.-funded radio service has to say.

"How, then, does Radio Farda --]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Awards Rule]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-405</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-405</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Congratulations to Janine Anderson and Colleen Kenney for their recent Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism.

Kenney won for her series on problems at the Pine Ridge reservation, which we talked about before. Janine won for her piece on a woman raising her grandkids. (Her husband Scott shot the photos.)

Again, congratulations.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Juice Vs. Justice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-406</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-406</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A secret source suggested this series called Juice Vs. Justice, a hard look at the Vegas court system. (The other stories link off this page.) Anyone read this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gator Love]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-402</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-402</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Jeff Klinkenberg's story: Gators are falling for each other all over Florida right now. Raging hormones have them on edge.

Males are bellowing. Females are grunting. Boy gators wander out of lakes and creep over terra firma, looking for a pond that might contain an interested girl gator.

If she is interested, he'll bellow some more, she'll grunt and he might stick his noggin out of the water and vibrate until droplets fly off his throat like a dragon's smoke.

If another interested male i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Road Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-403</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-403</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey passed on Dan Barry (start of a series, yay!) from Biloxi, and then Bayou La Batre: "To understand a little about this small crustacean of a city nine months after Hurricane Katrina, you have to accept a counterintuitive concept: Boats in the trees.

"About two dozen shrimp vessels, some of them 80 feet long and weighing more than 100 tons, list in suspended state amid scrub oak and pine, many yards from the bayou where they belong. Removed from the blue and shoved into the green, their w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tracking A Ghost]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-401</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-401</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for the slow posting this week. Finishing this story was keeping me busy. I'd love some criticism, if anyone gets around to reading it.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Faith-Based Initiative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-398</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-398</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read her story: In 1995, Sam Brownback sacrificed part of his body and wound up closer to God. He discovered a melanoma and had to have two surgeries, during which a "big hunk of flesh" was taken out of his side.

"It was a great season in life," the Kansas senator says in his soft lullaby of a voice. "Season" is one of his favorite words. He sometimes sounds as though he's quoting the Bible even when he isn't.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Flagger]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-399</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-399</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Mike Dawson's story: In our two-lane region, there is much we suffer trudging along our side of the yellow line.

The slow turners. The school bus stops. The cell-phone gabbing tailgaters.

Then, there is the flagger.

With trepidation, we face our decider. Wielding that scepter, the flagger can swing our moods with a roll of the wrist. A sigh at STOP; glee at SLOW.

Yesterday afternoon, an Orange County DPW flagger had his sign turned to SLOW on Kings Highway in Warwick.

But despite the s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Well-Lubed Rivalry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-400</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-400</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story: Pepe's Tire Shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fixes flats for $6 apiece and is usually swarming with people trying to get patched up and back on the road.

Yesterday afternoon, flats were still being fixed, but a more pressing task was at hand: watching the opening day World Cup match between Ecuador and Poland.

Pepe's is in a heavily Polish section of Greenpoint, where the beer halls were filled with Polish-speaking locals cheering for their national team and drinking]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[From Way Out In Right Field]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-397</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-397</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Dave Sheinin's story: This is a story about fate, a story about a curse -- if you care to believe in such things. It is a story about coming to grips with them, and maybe, just maybe, reversing them. It is a story about a 12-year-old boy in a black T-shirt who is now a polished 22-year-old man with a marketable talent. And it is a story about a beleaguered baseball team that may be preparing to take a wild stab at manipulating fate by confronting it head-on.

Jeffrey Maier, a future Baltimo]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pulling Legs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-396</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-396</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So I lost Ramsey's cell number when my phone broke a month back, and I started missing the booger, so I called the 800 number for the Times Herald-Record, where my boy handles night cops. I got excited when the automated answering system patched me to the tips line.

Posted below is Ramsey's next-day inter-office memo noting leftover breaking news items from the night before:

*Marlboro. Firefighter injured, but it sounded like it happened in the fire house. Couldn't raise the chief last night.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Baby Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-394</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-394</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson writes: This is one of the strangest features you're likely to read. It's one of the finalists for an alternative weekly newspaper contest. It's not narrative there are some interesting techniques. He uses humor well, and records dialogue between reporter and subject rather than just using the standard, "blah, blah, blah," he said.

Here's the story.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[In For Life? Not Him]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-395</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-395</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Richard Serrano's story: Richard Lee McNair's job in the prison factory was mending U.S. mailbags. Thousands of the leather pouches were routinely delivered to the shop at the federal maximum-security penitentiary here, and the middle-aged convict worked quietly each day, helping to stitch them back up.

Once the bags were refurbished, they were stacked on pallets, hundreds in a pile. McNair watched for four months as forklifts scooped up the pallets and hauled them to a warehouse just outs]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Voices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-392</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-392</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Kalani Simpson at the Star-Bulletin: here, here, here and here.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kill A Cliche -- Save A Reader]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-393</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-393</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you expect to write about a flood or hurricane or snow storm in the future -- most likely everybody not on a sports staff -- please give this piece in Slate a read: "The earth pukes fire and breaks apart. Its oceans dispatch tsunamis, and the heavens, oh the heavens, churn like an intestinal disorder, flinging skyscrapers of water upon the coasts. Winds and floods scrape the land clean of buildings, bridges, and people.

"Water schemes with earth to make mud, which spreads over the dead and h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lazy Sundays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-391</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-391</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anybody see anything out there today we all should be reading?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Choose Your Battle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-388</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-388</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here he is with the pacifist and the warrior: One minute Stacy Bannerman is stuffing envelopes to promote an upcoming peace workshop. The next her husband, Lorin, unexpectedly appears in her office.

"I got the call," he says.

"What call?" she replies.

Does she have to ask? Don't they both know their life is poised to turn completely strange at any moment? Possibly even tragic?

"I'm going to Iraq."

As his mouth says the words, his eyes watch her closely.

"No. No. No."

She dodges his attemp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Goodbye, Fairytales; Goodnight, Narratives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-389</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-389</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meg Martin from Poynter writes: Just chatted with 25ish fourth to eighth graders and their teachers at Writers Camp. Teachers came up to me later to ask about Irish oral storytelling and other related things. Then one of them talked about how her kids have no sense of story -- beginning, middle, end, characters, etc. -- and that they don't think in narrative form. And she thinks it's because they don't read fairy tales anymore -- and didn't, when they were younger. Interesting theory. I've heard]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rich Man, Poor Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-390</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-390</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You remember that cowboy from West Virginia who won $314 million in the lottery a few years back? If you do anything this weekend, read the rest of the story. I know it's old; read it anyway.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mama's Girl]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-384</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-384</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Good catch and good access. Read Tamara El-Khoury's story: Tiffany punches something special on the jukebox. She and Peggy take the stage. They start off slow. Late on a Friday afternoon, there are hardly any customers at the Mons Venus.

Peggy, in faded jeans, holds the pole at the center of the stage and spins. Tiffany runs her hands up under her shirt and pulls off her top.

In this light they could be the same girl. Same long blond hair, same small breasts. Same slow, swaying motion. Some gu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nine Lives Of A Topless Bar]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-385</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-385</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: When the metal door bangs shut, the daylight is gone. Distorted guitars climb a mountainous drumbeat and a voice snarls Spanish. Thin strands of neon shine dim pink on women in worn lace and on the mirror, where the sign says, "Shut Up and Drink."

Outside, a cursive inscription promises 200 girls onstage at the Sweet Cherry, a corner bar the size of a railroad car on 42nd Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. All down the gravelly paved road, the husks of wasted dragsters and bashed ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Technical Difficulty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-386</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-386</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for the problems with the site today. What do you expect? Should be worked out by now. Peace, Ben]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A birth, recreated]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-387</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-387</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey Al-Rikabi tells a tale without wasting words: The Sunday midnight shift for Deerpark police Officers Mike Conklin and Ed Josefovitz began quietly. No calls. Routine patrol. Cruise by Port Jervis High School to make sure no one was messing with it. Then the dispatcher was on the radio: "Woman in labor. Water broke."

Josefovitz and Conklin floored it up Route 209, getting there so quickly that they beat the EMTs. It was a little red house with a hot-dog stand in the front yard and a grandm]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wednesday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p383</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p383</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 May 2006 10:41:30 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for the malfunction this morning. Not sure what happened, but we're back. Don't miss Tomas Alex Tizon from Hawaii, Lydia Polgreen in Darfur, and Andy Newman following some animals through New York:

And the great beasts came down from the mountains and crossed the seas and descended upon the cities — the hind and her fawn, leaping fences in the southeast Bronx; the black bear, stout but fleet of foot, stealing through the streets of Newark; the seals of the harbor sunning themselves by the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wednesday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-383</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-383</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry for the malfunction this morning. Not sure what happened, but we're back. Don't miss Tomas Alex Tizon from Hawaii, Lydia Polgreen in Darfur, and Andy Newman following some animals through New York:

And the great beasts came down from the mountains and crossed the seas and descended upon the cities — the hind and her fawn, leaping fences in the southeast Bronx; the black bear, stout but fleet of foot, stealing through the streets of Newark; the seals of the harbor sunning themselves by the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sob Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p382</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p382</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 May 2006 21:02:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Keith Goldberg passed along this piece from AJR about the frequency of long narratives devoted to harsh disease afflicting young people, and the author explores a few good questions: When does a news story become less about providing information and more about manipulating emotions? When does it become more voyeuristic than revealing? At what point does an effort to elucidate slide hopelessly into pathos? And are such stories as much about reinforcing cultural and religious beliefs as about shed]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gay Talese On Sportswriting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p381</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p381</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 May 2006 11:40:24 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There are gold nuggest throughout SI's Q and A:

SI: (On his DiMaggio profile) Your friend David Halberstam called the piece the best of sportswriting of the 20th century. Did you think afterward that you had captured DiMaggio honestly?

Talese: I never think much about that when I'm doing it. I don't write about the straight-on main guy. It's not DiMaggio. It starts off with the Fisherman Wharf, which is the tradition and the history of the immigrant DiMaggio family, which made its living as fi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Swords and Shouts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p380</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p380</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 May 2006 09:44:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story about the Samurais: "You're looking for the samurais?" said the girl sitting in the hallway. "They're up there."

She pointed up a staircase to a small gym on the top floor of Jan Hus Church on East 74th Street. Inside was a startlingly surreal scene, especially to someone stepping off the streets of the Upper East Side, where people were picking up dry cleaning and lounging at sidewalk cafes on a Saturday evening.

Upstairs, the old church gym resembled an ancient J]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Swords and Shouts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-380</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-380</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story about the Samurais: "You're looking for the samurais?" said the girl sitting in the hallway. "They're up there."

She pointed up a staircase to a small gym on the top floor of Jan Hus Church on East 74th Street. Inside was a startlingly surreal scene, especially to someone stepping off the streets of the Upper East Side, where people were picking up dry cleaning and lounging at sidewalk cafes on a Saturday evening.

Upstairs, the old church gym resembled an ancient J]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gay Talese On Sportswriting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-381</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-381</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There are gold nuggest throughout SI's Q and A:

SI: (On his DiMaggio profile) Your friend David Halberstam called the piece the best of sportswriting of the 20th century. Did you think afterward that you had captured DiMaggio honestly?

Talese: I never think much about that when I'm doing it. I don't write about the straight-on main guy. It's not DiMaggio. It starts off with the Fisherman Wharf, which is the tradition and the history of the immigrant DiMaggio family, which made its living as fi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sob Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-382</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-382</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Keith Goldberg passed along this piece from AJR about the frequency of long narratives devoted to harsh disease afflicting young people, and the author explores a few good questions: When does a news story become less about providing information and more about manipulating emotions? When does it become more voyeuristic than revealing? At what point does an effort to elucidate slide hopelessly into pathos? And are such stories as much about reinforcing cultural and religious beliefs as about shed]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[No Home, Bad Rep, Big Heart]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p379</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p379</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 May 2006 10:15:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John M. Glionna's story: For 16 years, Dane Johnsten has been a pain-in-the-neck panhandler in this city's Castro district.

On some days, the gangly 39-year-old in the filthy Army fatigues and torn motorcycle jacket can make people smile with his reality-of-the-streets comedy rap.

"Having a bad day?" he asks. "Well, I'm having a worse one."

But his mood can change, almost between breaths.

"One misplaced word will trigger him," said Ray Powers, owner of the Welcome Home restaurant. "He'l]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[No Home, Bad Rep, Big Heart]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-379</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-379</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John M. Glionna's story: For 16 years, Dane Johnsten has been a pain-in-the-neck panhandler in this city's Castro district.

On some days, the gangly 39-year-old in the filthy Army fatigues and torn motorcycle jacket can make people smile with his reality-of-the-streets comedy rap.

"Having a bad day?" he asks. "Well, I'm having a worse one."

But his mood can change, almost between breaths.

"One misplaced word will trigger him," said Ray Powers, owner of the Welcome Home restaurant. "He'l]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p378</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p378</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 May 2006 15:19:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Roy Wenzl on a real educator, and Colleen Kenney on a man found dead: Mikey Kelly died the other day, alone on the floor near his kitchen sink. No one is sure when he died. The last "X" he'd marked on his wall calendar was May 3. Twelve days later, the manager at Husker Place Apartments unlocked door No. 4 and found him. Mikey didn't want this story in the paper until after he died.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-378</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-378</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Roy Wenzl on a real educator, and Colleen Kenney on a man found dead: Mikey Kelly died the other day, alone on the floor near his kitchen sink. No one is sure when he died. The last "X" he'd marked on his wall calendar was May 3. Twelve days later, the manager at Husker Place Apartments unlocked door No. 4 and found him. Mikey didn't want this story in the paper until after he died.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hank and Halle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p377</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p377</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 May 2006 21:51:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Stuever's story: We are 50 floors above Central Park on a recent afternoon, and wouldn't it be great if this serene, impossibly gorgeous actress jumped up, kicked out the window, leapt out into the sky and landed like a lightning bolt in Columbus Circle? She's dressed for it: dark curls spilling down her shoulders, over a black, very low-cut hand-knit sweater, with tight indigo jeans and shiny, silver stiletto boots. Sorta like Ororo Munroe (code name: Storm), the mutant she plays yet again]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun. Just Fun.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p376</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p376</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 May 2006 10:41:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Booth:

CANNES, France — Richard Kelly looks not good. His face is the color of a mollusk. He is as clammy as a gym towel. His eyes are these little itchy, red-hot BBs. He confesses that earlier he almost passed out.

This is his story.

(Perhaps young filmmakers should look away.) The wunderkind director of the indie cult hit "Donnie Darko" is making his first appearance in the rarefied competition category at the Cannes Film Festival with his new work, a political, apocalyptic farce ca]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Gators]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p375</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p375</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 May 2006 09:44:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Could've been one of those quick and ridiculous ride-alongs, but this one is much more. Turns out not many people know what happens after they take the gators away.

Read Tom's story: The seduction begins on the shoreline, in the decaying blue of late afternoon, when a man in a cream-colored cowboy hat readies his weapons and calls to his prey.

Eow-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo. Eow-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo.

He says the call can mean one of two things to an alligator: Defend Your Territory, For I Am Invading It;]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Gators]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-375</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-375</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Could've been one of those quick and ridiculous ride-alongs, but this one is much more. Turns out not many people know what happens after they take the gators away.

Read Tom's story: The seduction begins on the shoreline, in the decaying blue of late afternoon, when a man in a cream-colored cowboy hat readies his weapons and calls to his prey.

Eow-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo. Eow-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo.

He says the call can mean one of two things to an alligator: Defend Your Territory, For I Am Invading It;]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun. Just Fun.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-376</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-376</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[William Booth:

CANNES, France -- Richard Kelly looks not good. His face is the color of a mollusk. He is as clammy as a gym towel. His eyes are these little itchy, red-hot BBs. He confesses that earlier he almost passed out.

This is his story.

(Perhaps young filmmakers should look away.) The wunderkind director of the indie cult hit "Donnie Darko" is making his first appearance in the rarefied competition category at the Cannes Film Festival with his new work, a political, apocalyptic farce c]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hank and Halle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-377</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-377</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Stuever's story: We are 50 floors above Central Park on a recent afternoon, and wouldn't it be great if this serene, impossibly gorgeous actress jumped up, kicked out the window, leapt out into the sky and landed like a lightning bolt in Columbus Circle? She's dressed for it: dark curls spilling down her shoulders, over a black, very low-cut hand-knit sweater, with tight indigo jeans and shiny, silver stiletto boots. Sorta like Ororo Munroe (code name: Storm), the mutant she plays yet again]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A rare stamp]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p374</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p374</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 May 2006 15:56:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Theresa Vargas on a stamp's story: In the stamp collecting world, often the tiny square on the outside of an envelope is all that matters. It is the commodity that is coveted and traded and sold. But for some, there is the draw of the story behind the stamp — where it came from, the time it represents, the printing mistake that alters it just a bit from others like it.

And so it was with the Alexandria Blue Boy — a stamp that carried a love letter in 1847 between a couple that for many reasons ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-373</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-373</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[She showed up about 9:32 p.m., and her momma was smiling into the pain and blood, eyes closed, just smiling, smiling.

God, she had said over and over before the pushing was finished. Please. God.

Eight pounds and an ounce. Twenty-one inches. Fingers as long as French fries from the Steak 'n Shake.

Once in a while she'll open the left eye. Just a peak, though, like she's not quite sure she wants to know what's out here yet.

Now it's done, back home, lights out, quiet house save the ticks of t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A rare stamp]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-374</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-374</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Theresa Vargas on a stamp's story: In the stamp collecting world, often the tiny square on the outside of an envelope is all that matters. It is the commodity that is coveted and traded and sold. But for some, there is the draw of the story behind the stamp -- where it came from, the time it represents, the printing mistake that alters it just a bit from others like it.

And so it was with the Alexandria Blue Boy -- a stamp that carried a love letter in 1847 between a couple that for many reason]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking At Newspapers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-371</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-371</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jon Franklin in a recent post on WriterL:

"It has been my observation, over the years, that journalists for some reason are impervious to outside critique of their craft. As long as I've been a journalist I've heard readers' pleas for more "good news" get pooh-poohed away by journalists who always have a ready answer -- an answer that always implies that our readers are soft-headed idiots who want nothing so much as to kill the messenger.

"In fact what readers mean by "good news" is not at all]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Love you, miss you, drive safe, peace]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-372</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-372</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He asked for some Gangrey feedback on his chilling story of a girl named CoriAnn McDevitt:

The party started at 7 p.m. It's already 7:10, and 13-year-old CoriAnn McDevitt's jeans are still damp.

Though her closet's stuffed with jeans, she wants the off-white Hydraulics she bought two weeks ago at the Palisades Center. They're the only ones to wear to this Friday night party.

Boys will be there.

"Throw them back in the dryer for 10 minutes and I'll run you right over," her mother, Theresa, te]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Two In A Million]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-368</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-368</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Haven't heard of this series until this morning. Anyone read it?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Voices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-369</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-369</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson passes on a fresh voice from KC.

Wright on J. Brady McCollough: "a michigan grad, a high school reporter for us (but not for long). He is an amazing story teller and really gets the form. gonna be a star."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Wright]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-370</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-370</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Big stuff these days for our guy Wright Thompson, Gangrey poster, sports writer for the last four years at the Kansas City Star -- and now the latest newspaper talent to be plucked away by ESPN. Wright took a job on Monday as a senior writer for ESPN.com doing features and a contributing writer for ESPN The Magazine. He signed a three-year deal and starts July 15.

Oh, and he's getting married this weekend.

Congrats on that.

And the new gig, obviously, is a great thing, too. For him.

But it's]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Voices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-363</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-363</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Troy Shockley passed along this piece (fixed, sorry) by his colleague at the Reporter-News in Abilene, Texas. Shockley says: "Jacob Brown is the sports writer that put this story together. He's fresh out of college (University of Texas) and has been at this less than a year professionally, but I think this story shows that Jacob has a great future in this business."

What do you think?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hallman Subtext]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-364</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-364</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[All this Hallman talk seems to stem at least partly from the assumption that the kind of reporting "the Tom Hallmans" do is somehow different than any other kind of reporting. It gets at the question of are you more a writer or more a reporter, which, of course, as we on Gangrey all should know, is the dumbest, most misguided question in the whole darn industry. You can't be the one without the other. Just can't.

Jeff Leen, the AME for investigations at the Washington Post, was here at the SPT ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[David Remnick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-365</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-365</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This time from the Boston Globe:

Q: As a writer, you show a great deal of interest in the working methods of your subjects. What is your own working method?

A: I do a lot of reading. Before going to London to interview Tony Blair, I'll have read half a dozen books -- on New Labour, on Gladstone -- and I'll do some phoning around, though not the kind that will scare the subject and make him think, "Aha, here comes the missile." You spend as much time as you can in as many different circumstance]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Voices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-366</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-366</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Cindy Lange-Kubick passed along this piece from Cory Golden: Lako Tongun turned cold when he spotted the name.

It took him back to the early 1980s, when Tongun was part of a large group of Sudanese students at UC Davis.

There were maybe 60, some with families. They held parties in the game room of the Anderson Place Apartments, eating, laughing, now and then talking politics.

Sometimes an agriculture major drove up with other Sudanese students attending UC Riverside. Unlike many the other Mus]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Music Calms, Malady Lingers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-367</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-367</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon goes upstate: It took a brass band to make it happen, but peace broke out last week in the Ulster County Legislature. It was a brief but harmonious disarmament, lasting the duration of a hymn, a motet and a lively orchestrated rag performed by a local high school sextet that was invited to play before the Legislature's monthly meeting.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-360</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-360</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Chris Goffard; Colleen Kenney; and Zack McMillin: "There he stands, sentry to Aisle 13 at Hubbard's Hardware on Summer Avenue, one of the oldest living hardware men still going, the twice-widowed man born in 1918 still giving his bosses -- and his customers -- 44 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.

"There stands Allen W. Hurley. Some say the "W" is for work, not Walter."

Anything good out there this weekend?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Chivers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-361</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-361</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He can write. Mark Johnson passed on this MediaBistro Q and A from '05:

Q: You started out as a police reporter at The Times. Did you like that beat and what were the plusses and minuses on working that beat there.

A: I asked to cover cops. I had covered crime and corruption in Providence, and my view was—is—that covering the NYPD is one of the better beats at the paper, providing insight into a fascinating subculture and an essential organization, as well as a fast way to get to know the city]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Narrative, Narrative, Everywhere]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-362</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-362</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ever notice that? Somebody does some digging, checks some records, and suddenly the story needs a line that says "a [Your Newspaper's Name] investigation shows ..." and about 17 bullets?

Read Michael Van Sickler's House Hustler.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-359</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-359</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 20 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[On June 1, Gangrey.com will be a year old. Ahhh. I remember the days when HTML was just a bunch of letters.

The site has grown in popularity thanks to metions from a few people out there who appreciate the content. Poynter's Chip Scanlan's metion helped a ton, as did a link on Cyberjournalist.net, and several others. The site's traffic now averages about 180 unique visitors a day from papers across the country (and from someone who daily Googles "ross coleman" and "girlfriend," whatever that me]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking Around]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-358</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-358</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 19 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Doherty's story: On William Street, far from the Renaissance city of the riverfront festivals, the news travelled fast: Hargrove heard before Rivera's family did.

If Newburgh's 30,000 residents packed into 3 square miles are a swirling mix of people and classes, William Street is Newburgh distilled to its essence.

The storefront First Born Church of the Living God draws second generation black Newburghers with traces of North Carolina accents still in their voices. Yemeni immigrants ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Forensic Examination]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-355</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-355</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the current Esquire: On Sept. 1, 2004, The New York Times reported a new form of terror unfolding at School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia: "Heavily armed insurgents, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, seized a school here in southern Russia on Wednesday." Fifty-two hours later, the Times correspondent in Beslan, C.J. Chivers, witnessed the end: The gym exploded and a battle broke out, killing more than three hundred people and wounding more than seven hundred others, all on school gro]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Feed The Fish]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-356</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-356</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Simple wreck, in an area where they happen every day. Simple story, in a business where we refer to them as "fatals" and holler "brief it" across the newsroom. Tom Lake shows us why we should pay attention.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Being Careful]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-357</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-357</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Finkel said once that narrative writers 10 years ago had the benefit of the readers' doubt, but it's different now. We must be honest and transparent with our work. I thought of this tonight while reading Tom Hallman's The Riddle In Room 114, which ran Sunday, then this line-by-line rebuttal from the subject of his story.

I'm not sure where the truth lies, and I hope for all of us that Hallman's piece was truthful.

However this thing plays out, remember that none of us can afford to sacr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Voices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-352</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-352</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl passed along the following: "We have a highly motivated young sports reporter here named Jeffrey Martin who I believe you will hear about in coming years. He's got a muscular style, and the daring to bend conventionality. The facts of this story make it compelling, but Jeff made it more so by structuring it not by chronology but by meaning/theme. I don't know why more writers don't attempt that. It's striking, effective...and also visually unusual, a factor that we simple-minded word p]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hope, Saved On A Laptop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-353</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-353</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: For a long time, Ann Nelson's laptop computer remained dark.

It had been returned to her family in North Dakota, along with the other belongings she left behind in that great city 1,750 miles to the east. She was 30, lively, working near the very top of the World Trade Center, and -- you already know.

In the small town of Stanley, halfway between Minot and Williston, a fog thick enough to blur time's passing enveloped the Nelson home. Amid the many tributes to Ann, amid the gri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Precidente Fox]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-354</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-354</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: Out of ideas and low on cash one cold morning, the man with the biggest badge in town put his meaty fingers on a keyboard and tapped out a letter to the leader of Mexico.

"Dear Precidente [sic] Fox," it began.

"My name is John Trumbo. I am Sheriff of Umatilla County in northeastern Oregon, United States of America." Illegal immigrants "from your country" who committed crimes here, the letter said, cost Americans lots of money.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shouting, Wrestling, Displaying His Garters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-349</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-349</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And Michael Brick is there to document it: And then, despite complaints of arthritis and gout, Mr. Gargiulo re-enacted the fight, his voice rising and accelerating, hands waving, feet dancing backward and forth. He struck his chest and he fell to his knees, swinging an imaginary blade left and right.

He dropped into a wrestling hold, sank to his stomach, flipped to his back, climbed to his knees and pantomimed holding a man down by the shoulders. Then he returned to the stand and drank water fr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Gift]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-350</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-350</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeb Phillips on Mother's Day: All of it, every second, has been a gift.

Lisa Norman knows this because she and her husband, Jack, prayed for a year and a half for a baby and then, one day in November, she learned she was pregnant.

She bled through most of the pregnancy, but she prayed and the members of the Athens United Pentecostal Church put their hands on her and prayed, too. She bled, but the ultrasound at 21 weeks showed the baby had Jack's nose.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Katrina Serial]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-351</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-351</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Atlanta Journal Constitution is half way through a 22-part serial narrative by Jane O. Hansen called Through Hell And High Water. Chip Scanlan has some background, and there's more here. Anyone reading this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Feeling the spirit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-346</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-346</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[One of our veteran reporters here at The Commercial Appeal is the insatiably curious and always energetic Cindy Wolff. She attended Nieman for the first time in 2004 and it has been remarkable to watch her get better and better and better.

This weekend, she gave our readers this deeply told story about a family, a tragedy and a small-town's embrace.

Sayeth Cindy: "I spent the first part of my career dancing around a writing style I didn't really understand. I tried to be with sources during ac]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Feeling The Pain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-347</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-347</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeb Phillips passed along this piece from the Baltimore Sun: Paul had been shot in the side of his face, but the freckles of gunpowder on his cheeks were covered with makeup now, and so from certain angles he looked almost exactly the same to those who knew him: an 18-year-old kid with a wild spray of braids and a few thin brushstrokes of beard. The red bandana was missing, but otherwise he wore what he always wore in summertime, jeans and a polo. And his silence - that was typical, too. Paul ne]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Convergence]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-348</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-348</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Amen.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good Intentions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-345</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-345</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 14 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Lane DeGregory's story about a family that took in a 14-year-old and her baby and never expected what would happen next:

"The last time I came in here,'' she told Amy, "I was in chains. Only they couldn't fit the chain around my belly, it was too big and pregnant."

Amy wasn't sure what to say. Chains? The caseworkers hadn't told her anything about Lillie's past.

"I just had chains on my wrists," Lillie said, "so I still could've run."

Amy didn't press for details. She pulled Lillie clos]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Voices]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-343</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-343</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this stuff from Jeb Phillips from The Columbus Dispatch: Here, here, here and here. I especially liked this: "There's no easy way to say this, but the spirit world is certain: Michigan will beat Ohio State in football this year."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fighting (And Biting)]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-344</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-344</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: In court yesterday, he wore a matching blue sweatsuit and handcuffs. His dreadlocks were disarranged.

Mr. Rothstein told the judge that doctors at Bellevue Hospital Center had deemed Mr. Julian unable to comprehend his circumstances. Though prosecutors can challenge that finding, a spokesman for the district attorney's office said they would not contest it.

The judge set a court date for next month to review the psychiatric findings. Before the hearing ended, the lawyer conveye]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wise Man's Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-342</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-342</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In this morning's editorial in the Times: "Newspapering is not a philosophy, it is a way of spending a lifetime," Abe Rosenthal concluded when his time running this newspaper ended. He added, "If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you to sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business."

And, from the New York Sun: He once addressed a group of us summer interns about his journalism. There was nary a reference to his Pulitzer Prize, ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Frantic Father]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-339</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-339</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This ran a few days ago, but check out Thomas Lake's piece on a man who was arrested while trying to tend to his daughter: After the car crash, after the paramedics came, after the rescue helicopter touched down on Starkey Boulevard on Tuesday night, a man in a black Volvo barreled into the accident scene and nearly sideswiped a deputy.

The man burst from the car and ran across the runway, inches from the chopper's whirling tail rotor. He pushed past the paramedics into an ambulance, where a yo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tracing Babe's Steps Through Greenwood Lake]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-340</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-340</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Mike Dawson's A Legend At The Lake: On Windermere Avenue, where the CVS and post office now stand, there was a long expanse of open pasture. There, the boys would play sandlot games. One afternoon, Babe Ruth walked across the road and stepped onto the field.

"He just came over and started tossing the ball around," said Hart, now 74. "He was older and big, but he had that power in him, you could see it."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Most Prized Possession]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-341</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-341</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Alan Cowell's story: He had been shot at in Zambia, stung by bees in Gambia. There had been volcanoes, arrests and accidents. But when the round-the-world cyclist Heinz St&uuml;cke reached Britain, he suffered the cruelest cut of all: his bike was stolen.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Journalists, Lawyers, Etc.]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-336</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-336</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Samuel Freedman's Letters to a Young Journalist led me to Alan Dershowitz's Letters to a Young Lawyer -- doing the courts beat makes you buy funny things off Amazon -- and this passage in particular spoke to me:

"A law student once asked Judge Benjamin Cardozo, then on the New York Court of Appeals, why he got all the interesting cases. He replied that the cases were not particularly interesting until he started to think about them. I observed that phenomenon with Judge Bazelon, who managed to ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[David Finkel]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-337</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-337</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sometimes, if I have reason, or even if I don't, I end up pulling up some of Finkel's stuff from long, long ago here at the "SPT, and it never doesn't make me say ... GAWWLLLY. Seriously, if someone put out a rough book of clips called Early Finkel, I'd buy it today, and it wouldn't matter if it cost 5 bucks or 50 bucks. All at once, more than anybody else, I'd say, he reminds me how good what we do can be done, and that it CAN be done, and should be done, and must be done.

Like this. Or this. ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Into The Light]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-338</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-338</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Johnson passed along this must-read from Esquire: Humanity has paused on Jones Street near the summit of Russian Hill in San Francisco. Tourists, businessmen, caf&eacute; workers, the homeless—all seem to have taken a collective breather at this steepest of places, a city peak where stairs are carved into the sidewalks so people don't topple. Only one person keeps climbing, and he's talking, too; he's saying that you can't stop here, that if you just keep pushing, you'll see things no one e]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Velvet Ropes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-335</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-335</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[She asks: "What happens when semi-famous-people-from-Hollywood meet people-who-might-be-slightly-famous-for-Washington?

"Is one more powerful than the other? Or is it like matter meeting antimatter, and they both explode? Eighties glamourpuss Morgan Fairchild walks past a fellow who looks a lot like Time magazine reporter and Plamegate testimony-giver Matt Cooper, and their eyes meet. And then, just as suddenly -- their eyes unmeet.

"Whoa!"

(Does anyone else find themselves really wanting to ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Topspin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-334</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-334</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the NY Times in-house self study on its own writing:

"First, I think the Times should be striving for kinetic energy at every opportunity. It should be thinking about topspin in the writing: the power of words and images to propel the reader forward. We do not always do this, sometimes because of the realities of deadline, and sometimes because of laziness."

Barry's is here.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-333</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-333</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 07 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Anne Hull on the racial divide in Durham (Three miles from the Gothic splendor of Duke, NCCU is plunked down on a stretch of Fayetteville Street near a plaza with hot wings, hair salons and bail bonds. The student union has four vending machines. Single mothers sometimes bring their kids to class, setting them up with juice and crayons in the back of Mass Comm.)

Check out Colleen Jenkins' piece, Helping son healed father.

Then read Jeff Klinkenberg's profile of a guy named Spook who cha]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Let Lane Explain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-332</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-332</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 06 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So we've got these cool weekly "brown bag" shop talk lunch sessions here at the SPT with people who either work at the paper or come in from somewhere else -- Anne Hull did one, and Dennis Lehane of Mystic River fame, and Pulitzer winner and Gangrey lurker David Finkel's on deck for next month -- and a couple weeks back in-house Lane DeGregory led a session on how to find stories. It's something she's done before, including a few years ago at Nieman, but it was SO good to hear this stuff again. ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Man In A Skirt]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-330</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-330</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey writes: For Gangrey, or, as is it sometimes known, the Unofficial Michael Brick Fan Club.

I think this first-person piece has about as much info as I've ever known about the guy.

"I am highly suggestible, humble, patient, self-assured and, perhaps most important, desperately broke. So when the call came to my office in Brooklyn, where I work as a reporter for The Times, asking if I would spend a day in a designer skirt intended for men, I named my price."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Art of Reporting]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-331</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-331</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Talking about his new book on NPR today: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, says he often finds himself in the "loser's locker room." There, he tells Robert Siegel, without public-relations flacks or adoring crowds, it's easier to capture a person in time and to get a sense of his or her ideas -- which Remnick says are the goals of an effective profile.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Friday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-329</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-329</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 04 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wright Thompson on a horse town's last breath: A telephone rings in the racing office. Lee Smith, light twinkling off the oversized belt buckle bearing his name, reaches across his cluttered desk to pick up the receiver. He sounds tired.

"Eureka Downs," he says.

The caller wants to come on opening day, which is this Saturday. Smith scribbles on a Post-It note. He's in his third month as general manager of the troubled racetrack in southeast Kansas, and if things don't turn around, he could be ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Making Us Proud]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-327</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-327</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Let's congratulate Gangrey contributor Zack McMillin. He learned a few days ago that he was awarded a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. Huge honor. If you know Zack, you know he's a hell of a guy and a fantastic writer. I can't think of a more deserving person.

Zack writes: "Charles, the director, says he selects the 12 people he thinks are most capable of using the Fellowship year to pursue their 'dream,' whatever that dream may be. My dream? To write mesmerizing stories like Gary Smith. Paint scenes]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Crunchy Cons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-328</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-328</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: Two succulent, naturally raised chickens with good farm references are in the oven, snuggled up in a roasting pan like doomed lovers. Fat, perfect carrots are peeled, chopped, seasoned and ready to simmer.

"Notice that I am literally barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen," observes Mrs. Crunchy Con, and perhaps, she quips, she should have done her hair for the occasion like Phyllis Schlafly's. The li'l Crunchy Cons, boys ages 2 and 6, are out back in the warm Wednesday afternoon]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Third Perfect Game?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-326</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-326</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Was Corey Kilgannon's shot at sports perfect?

"Everything seemed perfect for Anthony Velazquez going into yesterday's game.

"Anthony, 17, made history by throwing perfect games in his last two starts pitching for Bayside High School in Queens, retiring every batter consecutively with no walks or errors or anything.

"The perfect game is a stunning achievement by any pitcher in baseball, and two in a row had never been done before in high school, experts said. Yet yesterday afternoon, Anthony w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['Don't Get A Mortgage Until You've Got Good Clips']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-324</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-324</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy was kind enough to pass along his notes from this weekend's National Writers Workshop:

Leonard Pitts, new Pulitzer-winner Stan Tiner, Hank Stuever, Jack Hart and Gangrey readers Kelley Benham, Colleen Kenney, Chip Scanlan and Tommy Tomlinson told us everything — or damn close to everything — we need to know at the National Writers Workshop this weekend in Wichita, Kan. And those were only a few of the speakers.

After two days of furious scribbling and feeling lucky to be in Kansas]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Inside The Mind Of ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-325</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-325</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This story feels familiar, like maybe we've talked about it before, but as I sought some inspiration tonight for a tough-to-assemble crime piece, I came across Matt James' Inside The Mind Of Phillip Schuth. Mark Kramer says in explaining narrative (everyone say "like a lover's arm") that, "Most narrative articles, books and documentaries represent a sensible truce in the struggle between chronological and topical organizational principles. This is possible only (1) if readers, viewers or listene]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Whispered Lessons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p323</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p323</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Apr 2006 05:19:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Since every person I've interviewed has led a life unique to them, they have something to say about the world that I couldn't get from anyone else. That gives them a value that transcends any job or social rank they might have. I began to see that you could divide up the world in many different ways, and some of those ways actually put a homeless man from Wyoming at the top. He might not have known it, but I do, and the point of much of my work has been to communicate that…

As I got older I tra]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Whispered Lessons]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-323</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-323</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Since every person I've interviewed has led a life unique to them, they have something to say about the world that I couldn't get from anyone else. That gives them a value that transcends any job or social rank they might have. I began to see that you could divide up the world in many different ways, and some of those ways actually put a homeless man from Wyoming at the top. He might not have known it, but I do, and the point of much of my work has been to communicate that...

As I got older I t]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[John Carroll]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p322</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p322</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Apr 2006 08:54:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In case you missed the former LA Times editor's speech: It is important for us to explain to the public why journalism — real journalism, practiced in good faith — is absolutely essential to a self-governing nation. This is a cause that is larger than us and larger than our newspapers. It gives meaning to our labors in a difficult time.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[John Carroll]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-322</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-322</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In case you missed the former LA Times editor's speech: It is important for us to explain to the public why journalism -- real journalism, practiced in good faith -- is absolutely essential to a self-governing nation. This is a cause that is larger than us and larger than our newspapers. It gives meaning to our labors in a difficult time.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Man And A Dog]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p321</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p321</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2006 19:36:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael Kruse's story: Stuart Harvey killed a dog. He shot it dead and has never said he didn't.

Is he necessarily guilty of animal cruelty?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Long Pause]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p320</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p320</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2006 08:36:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry. I slipped out on business for a few days. Hope all is well out there in NewspaperLand. Mark Johnson asked Dan Barry for his Pulitzer entries, and here they are. Forgive the funny characters.

A Last Whiff of Fulton 's Fish, Bringing a Tear By DAN BARRY

It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada , Florida , and the squid-ink East River . Of funny fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Long Pause]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-320</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-320</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sorry. I slipped out on business for a few days. Hope all is well out there in NewspaperLand. Mark Johnson asked Dan Barry for his Pulitzer entries, and here they are. Forgive the funny characters.

A Last Whiff of Fulton 's Fish, Bringing a Tear By DAN BARRY

It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada , Florida , and the squid-ink East River . Of funny fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Man And A Dog]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-321</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-321</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael Kruse's story: Stuart Harvey killed a dog. He shot it dead and has never said he didn't.

Is he necessarily guilty of animal cruelty?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p319</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p319</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:40:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here are Hank Stuever, Tom Hallman Jr. and Michell Roberts, and Tomas Alex Tizon. Please post something good if you see it out there.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-319</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-319</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 23 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here are Hank Stuever, Tom Hallman Jr. and Michell Roberts, and Tomas Alex Tizon. Please post something good if you see it out there.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun With Briefs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p318</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p318</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:29:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Mike Dawson: The man just wanted to start his lawnmower. But things this afternoon got complicated and dangerous.

Fast.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun With Briefs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-318</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-318</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's Mike Dawson: The man just wanted to start his lawnmower. But things this afternoon got complicated and dangerous.

Fast.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Sidewalk Poet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p317</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p317</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 22:27:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Lane Degregory's story: Find him if you can. Stake out the sidewalks. The poet is as elusive as his verses.

He signs his work in script: Jacob Christiano. A lyrical name.

It's fake. Another one of his creations. Jacob Christiano doesn't exist in any state database. No driver's license, birth certificate or court records bear that name.

So you ask around town. Has anyone seen him? What does he look like? When does he work?

"I'd guess he's in his late 20s, early 30s," says Mark Lecato, wh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back On The Mound]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p316</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p316</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 15:54:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Wright Thompson's story: Zack Greinke is alone, something that seems to both comfort and frighten him. The normally busy baseball facility has gone silent. Just green grass and brown dirt and white chalk — the simple things that have always drawn him to the game.

When the young Royals pitcher speaks, his voice is quiet but strong. "Most people who have my problem have it when they're by themselves," he says.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Secrets]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p315</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p315</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 09:55:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael Brick's story: In the days after the disappearance, the Randall family had a backyard party. Neighbors later told the police of a foul odor; Ms. Randall said that a family dog was buried in the yard.

In 2000, Ms. Randall moved to North Carolina. That same year, Ms. Williams went to meet the new owners of the house on Harman Street. She brought a police detective, who asked for permission to dig up the concrete. The new owners said they had planned to do the excavation themselves wi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Secrets]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-315</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-315</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael Brick's story: In the days after the disappearance, the Randall family had a backyard party. Neighbors later told the police of a foul odor; Ms. Randall said that a family dog was buried in the yard.

In 2000, Ms. Randall moved to North Carolina. That same year, Ms. Williams went to meet the new owners of the house on Harman Street. She brought a police detective, who asked for permission to dig up the concrete. The new owners said they had planned to do the excavation themselves wi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back On The Mound]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-316</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-316</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Wright Thompson's story: Zack Greinke is alone, something that seems to both comfort and frighten him. The normally busy baseball facility has gone silent. Just green grass and brown dirt and white chalk — the simple things that have always drawn him to the game.

When the young Royals pitcher speaks, his voice is quiet but strong. "Most people who have my problem have it when they're by themselves," he says.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Sidewalk Poet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-317</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-317</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Lane Degregory's story: Find him if you can. Stake out the sidewalks. The poet is as elusive as his verses.

He signs his work in script: Jacob Christiano. A lyrical name.

It's fake. Another one of his creations. Jacob Christiano doesn't exist in any state database. No driver's license, birth certificate or court records bear that name.

So you ask around town. Has anyone seen him? What does he look like? When does he work?

"I'd guess he's in his late 20s, early 30s,'' says Mark Lecato, w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Wisdom Of Ages]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p314</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p314</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 15:25:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Chip Scanlan with Samuel G. Freedman: There's a temptation, once you've mastered a certain skill or form, to endlessly repeat it, especially if you're praised for doing it well. Routine is safe. But routine is the enemy of growth. So you can't grow unless you're ready to risk failure and to stare down your own fears.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Old News]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-313</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-313</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Meg Martin wrote the other day about Alex Wolfe's tips on doing the historical feature. Fantastic opportunities exist for that, although we don't do many in the news pages. We've talked about Michael Brick's The Man Who Walked Away and a few others. But it seems like sports writers do this more.

Two examples: Alex Zesch pointed out Year Zero from the OC Weekly, and Keith Goldberg passed along Long Memories From A Baseball Classic, from the Washington Post. Both are good reads. Both make me want]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Wisdom Of Ages]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-314</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-314</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Chip Scanlan with Samuel G. Freedman: There's a temptation, once you've mastered a certain skill or form, to endlessly repeat it, especially if you're praised for doing it well. Routine is safe. But routine is the enemy of growth. So you can't grow unless you're ready to risk failure and to stare down your own fears.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Soul Survivor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-312</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-312</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I asked Mark Johnson for a link to his fantastic Pulitzer finalist piece, and he sent this: "Feel free to let us know what worked and what didn't and what we could have done to make it better. Just like you, I'm trying to get better at this."

Says a lot about Mark. So here's your chance. What did you think?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Driven]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-309</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-309</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Thomas Lake's story: One week ago today on a boulevard in Jacksonville, an uncommon woman punched her accelerator and rolled west toward the skyline.

She drove a dark SUV full of teenage boys, none of whom seemed to know where she was going. They would never find out.

A man in a red BMW coupe cut into the middle lane just ahead of her bumper, and the uncommon woman hit the brake. She also mashed the horn. This last fact is crucial to our story, because it shows us the start of her anger, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Big Dance]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-310</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-310</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Finkel won the Pulitzer for explanatory reporting for his piece on exporting democracy to Yemen.

And check out who was a finalist for explanatory: "Mark Johnson and Kawanza Newson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for their riveting chronicle of a teenage girl's miraculous recovery from a rabies infection that medicine had previously considered fatal."

Congrats, Mark. That's huge, man.

Here are the rest:

PUBLIC SERVICE Two Prizes: The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss. The Times-Picayune, New O]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story Behind The Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-311</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-311</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We've talked about Andy Newman's story a few times (here and here) but if there's ever been one worth revisiting, it's that piece.

Kruse hit him up for some more info. Read it again, and consider their back and forth:

MICHAEL: The $64,000 questions about the story on the $65 table: How did it come up? How did you hear about it? And once it did come up, what made you choose to structure it the way you did, saving Mr. Klein's weird, random death 'til three grafs from the end?

ANDY: i got incred]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Immigrant]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-306</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-306</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Corey Kilgannon's story: He lives in a small room he rents for $400 a month in Woodside with a bathroom in the hall he shares with three other men, all Colombian and in a similar situation.

He commutes on the elevated No. 7 train, known as the immigrant express, which rumbles along Roosevelt Avenue, bringing workers into Manhattan from Flushing, Corona, Jackson Heights and Woodside.

Mr. Carvajal works evenings for $6.50 an hour at a small parking garage in Manhattan, where the required sk]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Prison Bars]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-307</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-307</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Chris Goffard's story: He said the Brotherhood killed one gang member for engaging in openly homosexual activity, and killed another inmate for informing to authorities. He said the Brotherhood provided protection for mob boss John Gotti in prison, and Mills hoped that Gotti would supply him with a good lawyer to handle his appeal on a murder conviction.

Roach said gang member John Greschner once bragged to him of murdering, on Brotherhood orders, Richard "Rhino" Andreasen for snitching.

]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Left, Online and Angry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-308</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-308</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read David Finkel's story: In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describe]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Empty Shop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-304</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-304</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Finkel and N.C. Aizenman from a few days ago: On most days, Mohammed Butt and his older brother, Imran, can be found in an office decorated with photographs of their family back in Pakistan. A dozen years after entering the U.S. on tourist visas, both are permanent U.S. residents who share a four-bedroom house in Northern Virginia and co-own a business that is utterly dependent on Latino workers.

Every one of the six mechanics they employ is a Latino, and as all six made plans last week to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bliss, If Only For A Moment]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-305</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-305</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read S.I. Rosenbaum's profile: In Clancy Huffman's life there have been 825 moments of pure happiness.

They haven't been his. But he was there. He was close enough to see the bride's hand tremble. He doesn't know what brings them to this moment, when he pronounces them husband and wife. And he doesn't know what will happen when they leave.

Huffman just says the words he transcribed from a scene in a black-and-white movie long ago:

"To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Poynter Pointer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-302</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-302</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[SI's Tom Verducci, in a handout, from a breakout session called "Bringing a magazine sensibility to the daily paper":

"The bottom line is I think newspapers think in terms of snapshots instead of movies, as magazines do. By that I mean, the newspaper will look for a moment in time to feed the deadline of the day. The magazine allows many snapshots to occur and puts them together. Often that's a case of manpower. The newspaper has to be willing to yank a writer off a beat or a column for a more ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Story Behind The Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-303</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-303</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I asked Alexa James from the Times Herald-Record in upstate New York to give us some background on her series about a high school musical. Alexa is a still-new-to-newspapers beat reporter and it was her first attempt at a series. You'd never know it. I ate it up, and I'm sure readers did, too.

Here's Alexa:

Started as an idea that had been floating around in my head for a while. Knew it had been done before, at big papers. Thought it could work here too. Of the two school districts I cover (Va]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Unrest In The Valley]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-301</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-301</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Doherty on a rally in Newburgh: It took 10 minutes for them all to pass. They sang in Spanish, carried signs in English and chanted seamlessly in two languages. They carried flags, but an old pro like Martinez could pick them out by their haircuts, their faces: Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, a Peruvian here and there, and, most of all, Mexicans. They stretched over a quarter-mile, and the white police who stopped traffic for them put their number as high as 2,000.

They drew an audien]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The DJ With The JD]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-297</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-297</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Hank Stuever's latest: Tony from Gardena, Calif., is calling: "My question is I'm in a band now and we're starting off and we came up with a name and want to know if any other band has this name. Like, is there a Web site where we can put in the name and see? And if we use this same name . . ."

"Okay, Tony," Escalante says. "I've got a Web site for you. Ready?"

"Um, yeah," Tony says.

"Okay, I'm going to spell it for you because it's kind of hard to pronounce. Ready? G. . ."

"G," Tony re]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Phil Mickleson?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-298</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-298</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This year's Masters was all about Damon Hack and Wright Thompson.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back In The Race]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-299</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-299</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Colleen Kenney's piece from Huron, S.D.: This is the first thing he remembers: It's dark. Maybe 3 a.m. He's in his hospital bed in Rapid City about a month after the seizure.

Something takes hold of his legs and pulls him to the foot of the bed.

He hears animal noises. Buffalo.

He thinks he's hallucinating, or dying. Then he remembers the vision he had five years before, when he was a boy in a sacred run around the Black Hills.

The brown buffalo and the white buffalo cornered him o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Kid On A Corner]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-300</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-300</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The story of Mike Russell: Out on the corner, some people drive by and shout FREAK, others tell him to ROCK ON, MAN, and then there are some who sit at red lights and put up their windows and flick their locks.

The kids around Spring Hill call him the Caveman. The seniors at Springstead call him "Most Likely to Become a Superstar" in their yearbook superlatives.

His mother calls him Michael.

"He's a good boy," Shari Russell said last week.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Call To Duty]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-296</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-296</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark said it, and I agree. Anne Hull's latest is a lesson in journalism:

Blake Johnson is almost 18. Tan and muscular, he plays third base for the Clarkdale High School Bulldogs. He is a B student who says "Yes, sir" when his coach corrects his batting stance. Wisps of brown hair fall above his green eyes, and a rope choker is clasped around his neck. He lives in a mobile home with his mother and younger brother on Old Highway 80 on a piece of land that never quite dries.

On the afternoon befo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Murderer Revisited]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-295</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-295</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Doyle Murphy passed along this piece by Mike Peters from the Greeley Tribune, on a schizophrenic who killed his folks a few years ago:

Just above his bed in Ward F-7 at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, attached to the calendar, is a small photo of his parents, Victor and Elizabeth Hillman. They are smiling.

Larry Hillman remembers the good things: How his father taught him to play the guitar; riding the ranch in northern Weld County; his mother, the teacher.

And he will never f]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ink]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-291</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-291</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out S.I. Rosenbaum's story of trapeze artist Simone Dykes (click the link under Brandon Times), told in a comic. We ran this in the section, and they added the cool online component with her audio. What do you think?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Breakout]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-292</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-292</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm posting this again because I didn't realize it was a more than a single part. Man, I enjoyed this. Here's Alexa James' series on a high school play.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Come Out Writing]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-293</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-293</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thomas Lake's St. Pete Times debut: Yvonne Holcombe stood firm as night fell on her husband's mind. She busied his hands with household tasks. She watched as he wandered the back yard, gathering twigs. She coaxed him back to bed when he rose to hunt for phantom intruders.

Then she had brain surgery for a blood clot, she said, and she came out too weak to chase him. So she sent him to a group home where she thought he'd be safe.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Table, Revisited]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-294</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-294</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Guess who Nell Lake just threw up at the Narrative Digest. (Hint: We talked about it.) Nell has a fantastic critique of the piece.

"We like the spareness of this story's telling, the nodding at the theme of human connection, but the stepping back from it, just as the events themselves do," Nell writes. "We like the quirky details of Klein and the wonderfully timed line about the half-full glass; Klein's pressing his face against the screen; his sudden and mysterious death; and the ghostly endin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Holy Hank]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-290</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-290</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Hank Stuever's Ballpark Blues: No amount of Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton and Mariah Carey songs could mask the pain. One by one, until the wee hours Monday morning, the reigning drag queens of Half Street SE descended the stairs at Ziegfeld's cabaret to strut their last, blowing kisses to admirers and making a few more sweepingly glamorous gestures -- all of it a farewell to the shabby but perfect place they called home for three decades.

Ziegfeld's, and four other establishments on th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Givin' It Their All]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-287</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-287</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Alexa James' piece in today's Times Herald-Record: On a December night, in the high school auditorium, junior Noah Meyer finds himself steaming across the Atlantic on a luxury ocean liner.

Ignore the plaid pants and Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt. Ignore the red hair with two black stripes, like a skunk, that run from his forehead to the nape of his neck. Noah is now an English gentleman, and he's about to do the highly anticipated "hot pants" scene.

Knock, knock.

"Come in," he calls.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA['God Rains On The Just And Unjust']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-289</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-289</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Let's hope Zack stays safe out there covering the tornados in Tennessee. His stories are stellar. Read them here and here: The saddest hillside in Gibson County was clogged with the remnants of a young family's life, blown away by Sunday night's deadly storm.

A mounted deer wedged under a fallen tree. A stuffed bear, still able to chirp, "Time for the bear, cha cha cha." A purse, glittery and multi-colored. Diaper bags. Children's sneakers.

"Hey, Mama," Ashley Austin yelled out from near a hug]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dama en Mascarada]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-284</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-284</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Saundra came in a few weeks ago talking about a wacky obit she ran across. Turned into a damn fine story: Magdalena and Andres married and had six children together; she worked in the circus and he dodged the clutches of his lions. But Ramos couldn't resist the fawning attention of his female followers.

Magdalena left him. But her rope-and-mouth routine couldn't pay the bills. She had six children to feed. So she turned to the next best thing: boxing. After knocking the daylights out of a woman]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Good Word]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-285</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-285</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Donald Murray, Pulitzer Prize winner and writing teacher: "The more pofessional we become, the greater the danger that we will see what we expect to see. Experience, of course, is an advantage, but it has a dark side. It may keep us from seeing the real story ... The effective writers must always have an essential naivete -- skepticism must be balanced by innocence. The reporter must be capable of seeing what is new. Cliches of language are significant misdemeanors, but chiches of vision ar]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Of The Old Musician, And The Secrets He Kept]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-286</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-286</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: The old musician died on a southbound Q train. It was after midnight on a Sunday and the body of the old musician rode to Stillwell Avenue where the subway tracks end and there is an amusement park and then there is the sea.]]></description>
      <author>Ramsey</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Plaschke On Moments]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-283</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-283</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The morning of a big sports night, especially when it involves a team from L.A., Plaschke, of course, is a must-hit on the Web run.

Read up heading into tonight's game:

"The player tonight might be thinking they will play many more games like this in their careers," O'Bannon says. "I'm here to tell them, they will not."]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Sunday In April]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-281</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-281</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 02 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry with A Safe Haven, but Not Safe From All; T.O. does Dallas, so the Morning News finally makes it to Alexander City, Ala.; Robert L. Smith in Cleveland with Ohio new 'border' town; the LA Times starts a series; and, man, I sure am enjoying Gary Smith's Beyond the Game (Thanks, Sara). Check out this opening graph of Damned Yankee, which doesn't let up for a second:

Everything you will read on the next 23 pages revolves around one photograph. The rest of the old man's past, you must unde]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Porch Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-282</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-282</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 02 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I can't say enough how important it is that you read W.C. Heinz's Death of a Racehorse: They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for the purse of four thousand dollars. They were moving slowly down the backstretch toward the gate, some of the cantering, others walking, and in the press box they had stopped working on the kidding to watch, most of the interested in one horse.

"Air Lift," Jim Roach sai]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More On Access]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p280</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p280</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:30:16 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Feinstein is known best for his sometimes long, padded, sappy books, but he does know a thing or two about access — and, like in this story, how to use small details to show bigger stuff: Last Saturday night, as has become tradition during this remarkable NCAA tournament run, the George Mason basketball team was having night-before-a-game dinner at an Outback Steakhouse. This wasn't just any dinner or any game: The next afternoon the Patriots would play Connecticut for a spot in the Final Four.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More On Access]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-280</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-280</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 31 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Feinstein is known best for his sometimes long, padded, sappy books, but he does know a thing or two about access -- and, like in this story, how to use small details to show bigger stuff: Last Saturday night, as has become tradition during this remarkable NCAA tournament run, the George Mason basketball team was having night-before-a-game dinner at an Outback Steakhouse. This wasn't just any dinner or any game: The next afternoon the Patriots would play Connecticut for a spot in the Final Four.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Quest To Deliver Mom's Gift]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p279</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p279</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Mar 2006 21:07:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I go back to this piece once in a while for a reminder of the power of brevity. I remember watching Steve work on this story. He listened again and again to a tape of Charlie speaking and tried to write with Charlie's voice.

Here it is: Charlie's walking through the graveyard in his new sneakers. Gray New Balance with red and black laces. First ones he ever bought. He's wearing his new watch. Silver and gold. From Wal-Mart. He wants to learn to tell time. He's working now, packing nail polish, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Andy Newman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p278</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p278</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Mar 2006 08:34:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[First this, then this this one yesterday. Makes me think Andy Newman is just a read-to-the-end kind of guy.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Andy Newman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-278</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-278</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[First this, then this this one yesterday. Makes me think Andy Newman is just a read-to-the-end kind of guy.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Quest To Deliver Mom's Gift]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-279</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-279</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I go back to this piece once in a while for a reminder of the power of brevity. I remember watching Steve work on this story. He listened again and again to a tape of Charlie speaking and tried to write with Charlie's voice.

Here it is: Charlie's walking through the graveyard in his new sneakers. Gray New Balance with red and black laces. First ones he ever bought. He's wearing his new watch. Silver and gold. From Wal-Mart. He wants to learn to tell time. He's working now, packing nail polish, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A New Coach]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p277</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p277</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Mar 2006 12:01:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I could give flip about Mizzou basketball, but this is why people know Wright Thompson's name: Truman the Tiger sat in a darkened hallway, mascot head by his side. A small crowd had gathered inside Mizzou Arena, some to see Mike Anderson be named head basketball coach, others for the circus.

There was certainly going to be a news conference Sunday afternoon. Everyone knew that. But as the appointed hour approached, no one was sure what would happen. A hiring? A firing? Both? Forty-five days aft]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A New Coach]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-277</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-277</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I could give flip about Mizzou basketball, but this is why people know Wright Thompson's name: Truman the Tiger sat in a darkened hallway, mascot head by his side. A small crowd had gathered inside Mizzou Arena, some to see Mike Anderson be named head basketball coach, others for the circus.

There was certainly going to be a news conference Sunday afternoon. Everyone knew that. But as the appointed hour approached, no one was sure what would happen. A hiring? A firing? Both? Forty-five days aft]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Plagued By Fear]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p276</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p276</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:27:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Mangels' seven-part series, Plagued By Fear: Dr. Thomas Butler was the government's go-to guy if you were worried about a plague attack – and in the hair-trigger months after Sept. 11, 2001, a lot of federal officials were. For parts of three decades, he had treated the Black Death's bloated victims in the Third World. He'd plumbed the bacteria's dark secrets in university labs in Cleveland, and later in Lubbock, Texas, searching for better ways to blunt its lethal kiss. After Jan. 11,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Plagued By Fear]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-276</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-276</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Mangels' seven-part series, Plagued By Fear: Dr. Thomas Butler was the government's go-to guy if you were worried about a plague attack - and in the hair-trigger months after Sept. 11, 2001, a lot of federal officials were. For parts of three decades, he had treated the Black Death's bloated victims in the Third World. He'd plumbed the bacteria's dark secrets in university labs in Cleveland, and later in Lubbock, Texas, searching for better ways to blunt its lethal kiss. After Jan. 11,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p275</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p275</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:27:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl watches people watching a game; Zack McMillin watches a man run; this one from the Oregonian could have been a narrative; the Seattle Times with a massacre that left seven dead; Tizon profiles Dirk Kempthorne; and Libby Copeland at a dress-up party.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-275</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-275</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 26 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Roy Wenzl watches people watching a game; Zack McMillin watches a man run; this one from the Oregonian could have been a narrative; the Seattle Times with a massacre that left seven dead; Tizon profiles Dirk Kempthorne; and Libby Copeland at a dress-up party.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p274</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p274</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:10:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Dan Barry on a circus in a circus; Wright Thompson on ending the song where it began; Erin Sullivan on a bird man who cries; Colleen Kenney with The Ghosts Of Whiteclay and a love story.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Love Of His Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p273</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p273</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:51:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I meant to post this a few days ago. Please read Jeff Klinkenberg's story about a man who won't give up: Through the open door Freddie spots the Cadillac, looking for parking space among the pickup trucks. Perfectly coiffed, smelling of after-shave, the driver glides into the building. Freddie comes forward and wipes his hands on the back of his dungarees and extends a hand still dirty from harvesting pole beans.

"Do you own this land?" the stranger asks, giving Freddie's hand a shake.

"Yes, s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Love Of His Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-273</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-273</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I meant to post this a few days ago. Please read Jeff Klinkenberg's story about a man who won't give up: Through the open door Freddie spots the Cadillac, looking for parking space among the pickup trucks. Perfectly coiffed, smelling of after-shave, the driver glides into the building. Freddie comes forward and wipes his hands on the back of his dungarees and extends a hand still dirty from harvesting pole beans.

"Do you own this land?'' the stranger asks, giving Freddie's hand a shake.

"Yes, ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-274</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-274</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Dan Barry on a circus in a circus; Wright Thompson on ending the song where it began; Erin Sullivan on a bird man who cries; Colleen Kenney with The Ghosts Of Whiteclay and a love story.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Commuters and Gangsters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p272</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p272</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:42:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Doherty's story on commuting gangsters: "Mobsters are just like everyone else – it's simple demographics. The money is moving to the suburbs and the Mafia follows the money," says Selwyn Raab. For years, Raab covered the Mob for the New York Times. His 2005 book, "The Five Families," traces the Italian Mafia from its beginnings through the first years of the 21st century.

"Another reason these guys move to the suburbs is they think they'll be harassed less," Raab says. "The FBI isn't as de]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bronson Arroyo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p271</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p271</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:34:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse dropped this piece in the Hernando edition on Tuesday.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bronson Arroyo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-271</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-271</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse dropped this piece in the Hernando edition on Tuesday.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Commuters and Gangsters]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-272</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-272</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Doherty's story on commuting gangsters: "Mobsters are just like everyone else - it's simple demographics. The money is moving to the suburbs and the Mafia follows the money," says Selwyn Raab. For years, Raab covered the Mob for the New York Times. His 2005 book, "The Five Families," traces the Italian Mafia from its beginnings through the first years of the 21st century.

"Another reason these guys move to the suburbs is they think they'll be harassed less," Raab says. "The FBI isn't as de]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Brick In Court]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-270</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-270</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick's continuing coverage: Most murder defendants do not testify in court; the strategy is too risky. But then, most murder defendants do not take on a SWAT team with a kitchen knife, stab a lawyer during a courtroom escape attempt, apply to represent themselves, face banishment from the courtroom or make obscene gestures at the jury via videoconference.

Kayson Pearson, accused of raping and killing a Hunter College student in April 2003, rounded out that list yesterday. After five we]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It's No Swamp]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-268</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-268</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kelley Benham's piece on an unhappy swamp rat: It is, by almost any standard, a nice house. There's a Beware of Dog sign in the bay window and some junk cars around back, but compared with his old place, it's a mansion.

The codger cussing in the driveway does not care for it.

"It's just a g-d--- house,'' he says.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Great little stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-269</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-269</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Found the StoryCorps site last night and spent an hour being blown away. This is good good stuff. You guys think there is a way to do this sort of thing in print?

"Sweetie, your restaurant is right here."(Listen to this one. It is my favorite so far.)

"Have you ever lied to me?"

"Tell me about mom."

"I got a great, big rock ... and heaved it through the back window of his car."

"Now I want you to know you may be dying. Are you telling the truth?"

All those hits and more at StoryCorps.

Go ]]></description>
      <author>Ramsey</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Gettleman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-266</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-266</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jeffrey Gettleman, good guy and proud alum of the Hernando County bureau of the St. Petersburg Times, is back in Iraq for the NYT.

Check out the ending on this bad boy (and the beginning, too, for that matter):

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 13 -- Shiite vigilantes seized four men suspected of terrorist attacks, interrogated them, beat them, killed them and left their bodies dangling from lampposts on Monday morning, witnesses and government officials said.

(Now THERE is one hell of an "authorities sai]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A $65 Table]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-267</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-267</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please read Andy Newman's story about a guy who bought a table and got a New York story: Funny how a piece of furniture can bring strangers together.

Beau Willimon and his girlfriend were looking for a table for their apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

On the Web site Craigslist, they saw an elegant oval dining table with a rich mahogany finish: $65. Mr. Willimon called the number. The man at the other end, a Mr. Klein (he never volunteered a first name) would not deliver the table unless]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Upon This Rock]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-263</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-263</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read John Jeremiah Sullivan's Upon This Rock: But as my breakfast-time mantra says, I am a professional. And they don't give out awards for that sort of toe-tap, J-school foolishness. I wanted to know what these people are, who claim to love this music, who drive hundreds of miles, traversing states, to hear it live. Then it came, my epiphany: I would go with them. Or rather, they would go with me. I would rent a van, a plush one, and we would travel there together, I and three or four hard-core]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Manliness]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-264</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-264</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[More Hank Stuever: For woe unto the manly. So scorned, so sublimated. When was the last time you could throw a punch? Not in the professional world, with its PowerPoint, no-I-in-team manners. We've reduced ideas of manliness to a blue-collar art form -- the lifeguards, the bodyguards, the guys you pay to come over and repair appliances. Congress -- so unmanly, only aiming to please. Lawyers, actors, agents -- nary a manly man among them, settling as they do for a percentage of the action. The on]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Even More Memphis Music]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-265</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-265</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[My former wiffle teammate, Cory Branan, is releasing his second album, and anyone lucky enough to pick up his first effort, The Hell You Say, knows why it's much anticipated. Anyone who has heard most of the material from 12 Songs (shout out to Randy Newman), knows it's going to be $15 well spent.

We love him here in Memphis. Rolling Stone loved him two years ago, too.

Some sample lyrics, from Whiskey Grove, which will be on the Gangrey CD spectacular when my CD drive regains its mojo.

my mot]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mom Wouldn't Do That]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-261</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-261</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Malcolm Garcia's story: He walks the aisles of the supermarket, scrutinizes prices against his coupons.

It was here by the meat counter one afternoon a woman stood and stared at the girls rude as she could be.

"You want to know what happened to us," Megan said. "We were in a car accident and our mother died."

"Sorry about how your girls are," the woman told Rusty.

"Nothing sorry about it," he said. "We get along."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Desperately Seeking Denise]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-262</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-262</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The lesson here is always read the classifieds. Damn. Read Jim Walsh's story from City Pages in Minneapolis/St. Paul (Thanks, Sara): He placed his first ad in the "I Saw You" section of the City Pages classified ads a few days later. "Hi, Denise. It's Kevin. Met at Minnesota Music on 2-28-04, great night! Gave you a rose, you taught me to dance. We had some romance. Please call to talk. Denise, you're sweet, can we again meet?"

He heard nothing. He has placed a version of his ad in every issue ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Connections]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-259</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-259</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this innovative series by Janine Anderson, from the Journal Times of Racine, Wisconsin (You may have bumped into her on Grangrey). Here's the tease: If a reporter called you on the phone and asked you to name someone who has touched your life, what would you say?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The High Heater]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-260</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-260</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This Fresh Air interview with David Mamet and Shawn Ryan is instructive for storytellers in any medium.

********

Mamet ...

The trick is to leave everything out. That's the whole trick to drama. It's like the ability to hit the fastball, it's the ability to leave out the narration. You've got to leave the narration out because anybody can say, "Well, Jim, welcome back from Antarctica. We haven't seen you since we cured cancer together in 1985. How's your wife? Is she still an albino?"

If you ]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Datelines]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-257</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-257</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Hank Stuever's story: Even though the courthouse is right next to Santa Maria's lone shopping mall, many people in this town of 83,000, three hours north of Los Angeles, were able to ignore the fuss completely -- if they wanted to. ("Welcome Canadian Golfers," read a big sign in the Holiday Inn lobby this time last year. "Welcome Canadian Golfers," it says again now.)

But many of the courthouse regulars liked it. It started every day at 8 a.m. and ended at 2:30 p.m. Some days it felt as if]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Struggle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-258</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-258</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Wright's story: They climb higher and higher, the ride a gift from a friend, just one of a thousand little acts of kindness that have gotten the Holleys through. It climbs up toward heaven. Sitting in a gray-leather seat, Larry Holley clutches a snapshot of his entire family, back when they were whole.

"It still doesn't seem like this is real," he says. "It's like it's happening to someone else. It can't be happening to Ann. She's so healthy and full of life. One day, she's feeling fine, a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Welcome]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-255</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-255</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't noticed, posts this week have come from a few different people and have hit a variety of subjects. Three reasons for that: I'm pressed for time, Kruse and I don't have enough new ideas to keep people interested, and, finally, that's what Gangrey should be -- a diverse and ongoing conversation about writing and reporting and gangsta rap.

Since new folks are dropping by all the time, I figured it's a good idea to introduce the writers behind the names at the bottoms of the posts la]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Point Of No Return]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-256</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-256</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Vanessa Gezari's story from Houston: On the way to Wal-Mart, they passed a mosque and a truck selling tacos. Inside, Jauney wondered at the food on the shelves: the giant taro root, rough-skinned and hairy, the dried chili peppers and lemon-flavored Lays.

"I wish they had crawfish," she said.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Daily Dose]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-253</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-253</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey Al-Rikabi went to a fire then told people about it; Chris Goffard on a small tape with a huge impact; and Tomas Alex Tizon with a Katrina evacuee a long way from home:

She didn't know diaper wipes could freeze so fast. One moment they were a stack of moist towelettes, next they were an icy white brick.

Patti Tobias had left her infant's wipes in the back seat of the car on a morning when the temperature dipped to 7 degrees below zero. "Huh," she said, inspecting the block and grinning.
]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dog-eared Wisdom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-254</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-254</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Got in the mail the other day a dog-eared copy of The Literature of Reality. The introduction is by Gay Talese. It's called "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer."

Some bits of wisdom:

"I learned to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments (as the listening skills of my patient mother taught me) people often are very revealing -- what they hesitate to talk about can tell]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Conscience With A Lense]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-252</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-252</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He was a photographer, but he was much more, and we could all learn from Gordon Parks' example of hard work and showing people things they wouldn't otherwise see. Wil Haygood with an appreciation:

In America, he used his cameras like six-shooters, aiming right at the nation's broken souls, her sad-eyed children, her blacks, browns and whites, her shoeshine men and faceless women with both dishrag and dignity.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fresh Stuff]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-250</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-250</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry on life going on at ground zero, Rebecca Catalanello on a rescue gone wrong and Andy Grundberg with Gordon Parks' obit.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mo' Memphis, Oscars]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-251</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-251</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So long as we're talking about origins and keeping it real, welcome to the controversy here in Memphis (where we lay claim to Ralph Wiley, too): To be proud or ashamed of Memphis rappers winning an Oscar for Best Song, that is the question.

Ashamed, says our columnist, Wendi Thomas, and many in Memphis are inclined to agree.

I do not take issue with much of what Wendi says, but could not help being delighted upon seeing someone who goes by the moniker 'Frayser Boy' (Frayser's the neighborhood ]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Party On, Oscar]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-248</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-248</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I mean, come on, how FUN is this? I want this in MY local newspaper.

Some highlights:

This one was reeeeeeeeeal. Understand that we are mostly blase about famous people, see 'em all the time, write chatty little profiles of them when their new moobies come out. We play it especially cool once we get behind a velvet rope.

*** But Ma-freakin'-donna. C'mon. That's another level -- pope and Beatle-not-Ringo level. Even the most tippy-toppest celeb wranglers are atwitter. She and her husband, Guy ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Storytellers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-249</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-249</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read on a break from prepping for next week's Allains trial: "We are storytellers, an amalgam of journalists, entertainers, poets, jugglers and dodge artists. We sling ink and binary bytes. This does not make us the Supreme Court justices we sometimes like to think we are. Look deep enough into anybody's life, you'll find another fine mess in there somewhere. You'll find a story to tell. The question is, to me ... what do you do with it then? All I know for sure is, there's an awful lot of crap ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hank In Hollywood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-246</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-246</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Just watching the red carpet. And taking notes. And writing it up all fun: "They're all predictably thrilled, prepped, dressed, posed. They're all tiny but somehow huge. They toss little standard vignettes about their moods, their day. They smile, and you smile. All you remember from those few seconds, all you really have, is some small and useless detail rendered huge in your mind: the blue vein barely noticeable on Meryl Streep's cheek, or a glimpse at her dental work when she's leans forward ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Did It Work?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-247</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-247</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his letter, then his story below.

Did Jimmy B. succeed?

Inside the church, the heavy air-conditioner in the wall kept the narrow hallway cool. Carroll Tyler and Sandra Hopkins, who had just been married, stood under the machine while the guests squeezed in front of them and kissed the tall, striking bride and shook hands with the groom and then went through the doors and into the hot Sunday-afternoon sun. Outside the church, the Salem Methodist Church on 129th Street and Seventh Avenue in]]></description>
      <author>Ramsey</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-245</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-245</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry with an epitaph for a man of monuments; Michael Brick profiles a judge; and check out this piece by Chris McKenna and Kristina Wells, Twist of Fate:

Forty tons of truck rammed the SUV into Hastings' car carrier, which dragged the Land Rover a short distance before dropping it.

McKiver's truck shot across the northbound lanes and smashed into another guardrail, leaving its trailer stretched sideways across the highway.

The first emergency call came in at 12:41 p.m.

Some drivers stop]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The 36-Hour Transition]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-244</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-244</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 04 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm due to hand my Tampa Tribune-issued computer and various chords over to Darrin, the tech guy here, in a few moments, so I'll rapid-post one last time as Friday nears Saturday. The Tribune has been a fine place to work and I have learned things from dedicated people. I start at the St. Petersburg Times on Monday. Here's to growing, getting better and dropping bylines in new places.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Some Stuff]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-242</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-242</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick and Corey Kilgannon on bad people in New York; Christopher Goffard is out west; look who's being plugged for the Pulitzer's feature prize (yay Lane!); And don't miss this one from Roy Wenzl:

It has been one year since the cops caught the BTK monster and put an end to his deeds. So many words have been written and so many stories have been told that many of us are tired of hearing how the monster hunted people and hurt children and dressed in women's underwear. But one story has no]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Pitch]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-243</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-243</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is a letter Jimmy Breslin sent to his editor at the New York Herald Tribune in, I believe, May 1964. He's pitching a series about Harlem. The language is dated, for sure, but there are lessons:

Dear Jim [Bellows]:

Here, for your information and consideration, is a schedule of ideas and the mechanics of carrying them out which I intend to put into effect starting today. I was out bouncing on the street at 6:30 a.m. today so I might as well do something with all this freaking time. . .

Tom]]></description>
      <author>Ramsey</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Voice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-240</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-240</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How does Garrison Keillor write with such a distinct voice? You hear him speaking as you read his stuff.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Deadline Inspiration]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-241</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-241</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[For those of you nearing the deadline for another daily on yet another day, here's some last-minute inspiration from Jimmy Cannon via a guy who isn't. (From the New York Post)

"THE great multitude, collected around the scaffold in the plain of Yankee Stadium last night, set up a hoarse cackling which, coming from the ledges and the balconies and the temporary seats on the field of that vast place, sounded like the cawing of a flock of jubilant birds.

"For three rounds they had been moved to bu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Morning Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-237</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-237</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry with New York's nicest pool player; Damon Hack spins one from Palm Harbor; John Doherty with a narrative state of the city; Colleen Kenney at the famous U-Stop.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Narrative In Nairobi]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-238</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-238</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Emily Wax's story: Under a rotating disco ball and steps from a clay pot sitting on fake flames, Congolese crooner Prince Fisecoze slams down a couple of shots of sambuca bar-side at the ritzy Club Afrique, the latest addition to Nairobi's otherwise edgy nightclub scene.

Hoping to court some loyal fans, he flashes a business card to well-dressed patrons filing in around 10 p.m. Printed in a hodgepodge of fonts, the card proclaims -- in bold -- that Prince Fisecoze Ikalaba M. Wembadio is pr]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Close To Perfect]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-239</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-239</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I stumbled across this short profile of Jimmy Cannon. It's full of lessons, including this: "Jimmy led the classic reporter's life," said Izenberg, who wrote alongside Smith for the Herald Tribune before joining Newark's Star-Ledger. "He read police blotters and paid attention to his city. He spent time in bars and got to know everybody in the room."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson On Tension]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p236</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p236</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:05:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love it when a reporter becomes a character. It adds tension to Michelle O'Donnell's A Haunted House, Clinging To Secrets: Every winter, when the trees drop their leaves, a certain house in Laurelton, Queens, comes into full view. It is a decrepit Victorian on a cul-de-sac at 141-36 222nd Street, a structure whose condition has made it known as "the haunted house."

To say the condition of 141-36 is woeful seems, well, woefully inadequate. Its siding is weathered to the marrow, and most of its]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dialogue]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p235</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p235</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:16:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Wright's piece on Buck O'Neil:

Heading toward the stadium, the SUV ate up highway. Inside, O'Neil was talking about his family's tribe in Africa, and he was asked how he had found all that out. Did you do genealogical research? Did you find old bills of sale? He laughed. He's old enough to have talked to former slaves. "My grandfather told me," he said. "I knew my grandfather." It's times like this that Tonya Tota, the museum's operations director and, often, O'Neil's driver, picks his bra]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dialogue]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-235</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-235</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Wright's piece on Buck O'Neil:

Heading toward the stadium, the SUV ate up highway. Inside, O'Neil was talking about his family's tribe in Africa, and he was asked how he had found all that out. Did you do genealogical research? Did you find old bills of sale? He laughed. He's old enough to have talked to former slaves. "My grandfather told me," he said. "I knew my grandfather." It's times like this that Tonya Tota, the museum's operations director and, often, O'Neil's driver, picks his bra]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson On Tension]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-236</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-236</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love it when a reporter becomes a character. It adds tension to Michelle O'Donnell's A Haunted House, Clinging To Secrets: Every winter, when the trees drop their leaves, a certain house in Laurelton, Queens, comes into full view. It is a decrepit Victorian on a cul-de-sac at 141-36 222nd Street, a structure whose condition has made it known as "the haunted house."

To say the condition of 141-36 is woeful seems, well, woefully inadequate. Its siding is weathered to the marrow, and most of its]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Huh?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p234</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p234</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:52:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is off topic, and I fear it reveals something about me I'm not sure I wish to make known, but what? How could Travis not pick Moana?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Death in Turin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p233</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p233</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:26:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Why my man Geoff Calkins is so well-loved here in Memphis.

"I love you more than you love me," Kimberly would say.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Morning]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p232</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p232</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:25:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon on a gadfly in a Queens co-op; Kelley Benham on measuring memories; Hank Stuever on The Blue Tarp.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Monday Morning]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-232</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-232</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon on a gadfly in a Queens co-op; Kelley Benham on measuring memories; Hank Stuever on The Blue Tarp.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Death in Turin]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-233</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-233</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Why my man Geoff Calkins is so well-loved here in Memphis.

"I love you more than you love me," Kimberly would say.]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Huh?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-234</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-234</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is off topic, and I fear it reveals something about me I'm not sure I wish to make known, but what? How could Travis not pick Moana?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Loving Libby]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p231</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p231</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 25 Feb 2006 23:05:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There's an energy and sense of wonder in Libby Copeland's writing that makes me jealous. Here's another one from Turin: The Americans just attack the snow with their fierce wills, the lactic acid burning up their legs, past the stands filled with exuberant fans waving flags from many nations, but not theirs. This is a sport for the stubborn and the strong.

"In some sense the only reason I'm doing this is because nobody else was doing this when I was young," says Rachel Steer. She is considered ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Loving County]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p230</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p230</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 25 Feb 2006 18:59:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ralph Blumenthal with the story of a big small town: What it does have is the Boot Track Caf&eacute; (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county's oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

"When I was little, I couldn't wait to leave," said Beverly Hanson, the county clerk. Then,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Loving County]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-230</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-230</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ralph Blumenthal with the story of a big small town: What it does have is the Boot Track Caf&eacute; (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county's oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

"When I was little, I couldn't wait to leave," said Beverly Hanson, the county clerk. Then,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Loving Libby]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-231</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-231</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[There's an energy and sense of wonder in Libby Copeland's writing that makes me jealous. Here's another one from Turin: The Americans just attack the snow with their fierce wills, the lactic acid burning up their legs, past the stands filled with exuberant fans waving flags from many nations, but not theirs. This is a sport for the stubborn and the strong.

"In some sense the only reason I'm doing this is because nobody else was doing this when I was young," says Rachel Steer. She is considered ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Regretfully, Dick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p229</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p229</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2006 07:15:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lauren Collins in Talk of the Town: Some breaches of decorum are easier to rectify than others. Perhaps you have been invited to attend a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz and you arrive in a parka and hiking boots, only to find that most of the men are wearing dark suits. Solution: Buy an overcoat and, next time, call ahead to ask about attire. Or, say, you lose your temper and tell a senior member of the United States Senate to "go fuck yourself." Solution: Issue a statement acknowledging your fr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Regretfully, Dick]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-229</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-229</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lauren Collins in Talk of the Town: Some breaches of decorum are easier to rectify than others. Perhaps you have been invited to attend a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz and you arrive in a parka and hiking boots, only to find that most of the men are wearing dark suits. Solution: Buy an overcoat and, next time, call ahead to ask about attire. Or, say, you lose your temper and tell a senior member of the United States Senate to "go fuck yourself." Solution: Issue a statement acknowledging your fr]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Libby Copeland]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p228</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p228</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Feb 2006 12:06:04 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse pointed it out, and I'm in agreement: Libby Copeland's stuff from Turin is fresh, energetic and, unlike a lot of stuff from the Olympics, readable.

Here are a few of them.

Ciao to all the folks back home. Drop till you shop. Knife Dancer. A red-hot race for gold. Legends of the fall. Downhill partying. Turin, going for the gold.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where Hope Lives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p227</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p227</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:52:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kelley's story: They cruise the bus station, Campbell Park, Lake Maggiore. These aren't places homeless people cluster. They were the kinds of places Tom hid. He was a loner.

In Roser Park, they drove up on a little white bridge over a muddy creek.

Tom knows this place.

"I used to live there," he told Marta. "Under this bridge right here."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where Hope Lives]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-227</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-227</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kelley's story: They cruise the bus station, Campbell Park, Lake Maggiore. These aren't places homeless people cluster. They were the kinds of places Tom hid. He was a loner.

In Roser Park, they drove up on a little white bridge over a muddy creek.

Tom knows this place.

"I used to live there," he told Marta. "Under this bridge right here."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Libby Copeland]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-228</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-228</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse pointed it out, and I'm in agreement: Libby Copeland's stuff from Turin is fresh, energetic and, unlike a lot of stuff from the Olympics, readable.

Here are a few of them.

Ciao to all the folks back home. Drop till you shop. Knife Dancer. A red-hot race for gold. Legends of the fall. Downhill partying. Turin, going for the gold.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Morning Coffee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-226</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-226</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brick's Suspect In Murder-Attempt Case Has Something To Say, Dan Barry's Away From Mardi Gras, Glints Of Life As The Hopeful Trickle Home, Corey Kilgannon's At $2 A Dance, A Remedy For Loneliness, Libby Copeland's Drop Till You Shop, and, wow, I'm not the only one with a thing for Susan Orlean; Ann Hornaday idolspizes her too.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Details]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-223</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-223</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick in court: "From a juror's vantage, much of the strange courtroom imagery goes unexplained. The disembodied faces on trial are represented by a row of four men seemingly plucked from the far ends of a casting agent's files. Mr. Pearson's new lawyers, John B. Stella and James L. Koenig, are burly enough to stretch their jackets by leaning forward.

"Mr. Hendrix is represented by Steven Chaikin, a philosophical speaker who wears gray suits with hiking boots, an unkempt beard, hoop ear]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dan Barry At Mardi Gras]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-224</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-224</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his story: "Trumpets sounded, drums pounded and the feet of a city marched in place, tapping an anticipatory beat on asphalt. Someone gave the noontime signal for a parade to move forward, and it did: exuberant, silly, gaudy, giddy, diminished, defiant.

"It could have been just another parade, even just another Mardi Gras parade. But Saturday's train of floats and marching bands — five parades that seemed to blend into one — was the joyous first step of this year's Mardi Gras season in New]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wild Bill]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-225</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-225</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Erin Sullivan's story from Daytona:

The man they call Wild Bill Owen sat at the bar, looking through photo albums of his hero.

"There's the man."

"And there he is."

"There he is again."

He got his photo taken shaking hands with Dale Earnhardt in 1979, when Wild Bill's beard was brown. It's now gray and yellowed around his mouth. He won't say how old he is.

"Mas viejo que tierra," he says. "Older than dirt."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pilot of the Airwaves]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-221</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-221</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A threatening voice mail from a thug name of Monty has me frantically finishing off the first-ever Gangrey.com two-CD Narrative Song extravaganza. Also, we're trying to cajole Michael out of his obvious cultural agoraphobia.

Some songs I culled from past posts include:

Bob Dylan ... Hattie Carroll Kanye ... 18 years Steve Earle ... Billy Austin Robert Earl Keen ... Road Goes on Forever

Any more requests?]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Bond]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-222</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-222</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Goldberg passed along this story from the AP's Desmond Butler: O'Pharrow, known to friends as "Jimmy O'," has been a mentor to Salita since he taught the young boxer to jab at the age of 13. Jimmy O' is 80 years old now. He's given up training on a daily basis, even with Salita, who works mostly with Roca now. But Jimmy O' follows Salita's moves closely. The boxer's career might be the old trainer's last project.

"Dmitriy and I became very close friends," he says. "When he gets hit, I feel it."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Enrique's Update]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-220</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-220</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 19 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[For those of you who remember Sonia Nazario's Pulitzer-winning piece, Enrique's Journey, here's the latest chapter.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Love In The Frozen Food Aisle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-216</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-216</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kruse's story:

SPRING HILL - Lori Burns and John Gorman had come Thursday morning to be wed at Winn-Dixie in the frozen foods aisle in between the pizza and the ice cream.

This is a new twist to an old story.

But a good one.

Lori and John: Both of them are from up North and moved down here looking for sunshine. She's 44 and from Michigan. He's 57 and from New York. Both of them have been married before. Both of them have children and even grandchildren.

Both of them say they weren't lo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Skating]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-217</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-217</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Hank's story: "These are all things Weir's mother, the equally outspoken Patti, did.

"She raised a kid who would grow up to nickname himself "J. We" and "Tinkerbelle" and tell Sports Illustrated that his only other ambitions right now are to own an apartment in either Chelsea or Soho and start his own fashion line. At home, in Quarryville, Pa., bullies at the rink would shoot hockey pucks at Johnny while he practiced, Patti Weir told the New York Times. "I raised him to speak his mind, eve]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kill Zone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-218</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-218</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm sure everyone has seen this, but this is the first time I'm reading Steve Coll's two-parter on the death of Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal free safety who, after 9-11, turned down an NFL contract to join the Army Rangers. Man, it's good reporting and storytelling. Give it a read.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mardi Gras, Anyway]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-219</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-219</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry and Adam Nossiter advance a parade:

The first Mardi Gras parade of 2006 will strut and shout up Napoleon Avenue and then along St. Charles on Saturday, trumpeting a plaintive, post-traumatic theme: "May God Bless New Orleans." This parade, and the more than two dozen to follow over the next 11 days, through Mardi Gras on Feb. 28, will wend through a city stripped of all but its pride in the wind and floodwaters.

The people on the floats will toss beads and plastic coins onto the New ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Welcome To Metro]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-215</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-215</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his debut: The snowmen melteth.

In the front yards of homes all over Greater Memphis, the last vestiges of Friday's 3 to 5 inches of snowfall were thawing to death.

Wind and sun and 50-degree temperatures had sculpted some into inaccessible pieces of modern art. Others looked like white zombies, frozen in mid-stagger.

Tuesday afternoon, many were mere lumps of ice, their mortal coil resembling ancient gravestones -- with no engraving for identity.

In some yards, the only remnants were t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Coming Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-213</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-213</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brady Dennis' The Long Road To Recovery: Lee has bad days, too. He worries, as injured soldiers often do, whether his wife will have the patience to stay by his side. Just last week, he asked her, "You promise you will stay here?"

Maria answered in her best English:

"I married forever."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saying Anything]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-214</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-214</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He writes: "Cusack, who turns 40 in June, was only 22 when he played the part (and, arguably, played it over and over -- the sensitive, mix-tape-making, imperfectly perfect boyfriend). He didn't want to do it, in that way 22-year-old actors are terrified of doing more high school roles. More terrifyingly, in Hollywood trivia myths, it has been said that Kirk Cameron, the teen idol star of TV's "Growing Pains," was up for the part. Crowe had to beg Cusack, who agreed only if he could fuse his own]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Storytellin']]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-212</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-212</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Robert Redford. Dave Eggers. Sarah Vowell. Elvis Mitchell. Jonathan Caouette. Bonz Malone. Ira Glass. Catherine Hardwicke. Xeni Jardin. Orville Schell.

Go here and listen to all of them telling stories about telling stories.]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Who's Hot]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-210</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-210</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[An email came in backchannel asking for the names of folks out there who are pushing the envelope without recognition. Gangrey tracks a lot of good writers, but there are no doubt many more reporters we haven't heard of who are doing good stuff.

So let's list them.

Anybody come across brothers and sisters we should be paying attention to?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Aaahhh]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-211</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-211</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The New Yorker editor -- deep breath -- isn't really worried about what readers want and he isn't dumbing down his product to attract the young'uns. Please forward this to your editor.

"My principle in the magazine - and I am not being arrogant - is that I don't lose sleep trying to figure what the reader wants. I don't do surveys. I don't check the mood of the consumers. I do what I want, what interests me and a small group of editors that influences the way of the magazine.

"I know in my hea]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday School]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-209</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-209</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Lane DeGregory's A Matchmaker Named Katrina; Tom Hallman Jr.'s Bill Porter: Life Of A Salesman; Rick Meyers' 14 Tips For Building Character; a slew of stuff that won American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors honors in 2004; and, finally, Michael Brick making the Times' Shaken and Stirred column a must-read:

On a television screen above the bar, people named Tia Carrere and Maksim Chmerkovskiy whirled in "Dancing With the Stars." They smiled like idiots in pain. The regulars speculated ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dumping Objectivity]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-207</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-207</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[G. Paschal Zachary, a Time and Wall Street Journal vet, says it's about time to stop lying to readers: "Trying to be fair and balanced, journalists have failed their subjects and themselves. In seeking to stand above the fray, journalists have denied the obvious. They have robbed themselves of credibility. They are getting torn to pieces fighting the wrong battles."

Vaugh Ververs' rebuttal: "Zachary gives us all a lot to think about, some of it part of an ongoing conversation and some presented]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Just The Facts, Ma'am]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-208</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-208</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick as Joe Friday: "The place was New York City. Crime was the dish of the day, and the main course was injury to an animal with a side of petty larceny. The victim was Burt. Burt was a Boston terrier. He was about to find a friend who looked more like a foe."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[This Real Life]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-206</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-206</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From a conversation between Robert Krulwich and Ira Glass, on the occassion of This American Life's 10-year anniversary. Go read the whole thing. It's chock full of inspirations and insights. Anyone else as obsessed with TAL as I am? Anyone have any favorite episodes they want to mention?

Most people think that what reporting is, is you go to powerful people or really fascinating people and you say, "Whassup?" You know? You go to their press conferences, you follow them around, you ask them for]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Riding The Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-204</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-204</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Over at WriterL, a chat about personal essays has turned into a detailed discussion on the nomenclature of literary journalism, which Mr. Franklin says is very important. If we're going to talk seriously about journalism, we should all be using the same vocabulary. It's often a bit boring (important, no doubt), but I found a recent post by Walt Harrington interesting. I've always worried about not following the guidelines laid out in Franklin's book when working on a piece, because it seems like]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bedtime Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-205</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-205</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Again and again and again.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[White Castle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-202</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-202</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon takes a look at the setting of a crazy crime in the Bronx: "White Castles open 24 hours a day have long been a siren for off-kilter customers looking to cap off their evening by gulping down sodas and devouring Slyders, the restaurant's signature burgers, also known by some people as murder burgers or gut busters. They are served with onions and pickles and often consumed in sufficient quantity to sop up a bellyful of beer.

"White Castle marketing officials have marketed this ga]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sight Unseen]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-203</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-203</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Erin Sullivan's story: "His room is a boy's room, mostly frozen in time from when his mom decorated it seven years ago. It is covered with sports things he can't really see. His NASCAR-themed comforter is deep blue and violet. Edgar can't tell the difference between black and blue anymore. Anything black -- black cord, black sock, black notebook -- left on the bed is lost.

"There's a Rusty Wallace border along the top of his walls, which are blanketed with plaques -- of him playing basebal]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Price On Paradise]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-201</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-201</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Lane DeGregory's story: In Briny, you never have to worry about anything. You don't have to think about dressing up or trying to impress anyone. You are never lonely or bored. You live so close to your neighbors that when you sneeze in your kitchen they say, "Bless you!" Everything you want is within walking distance: the beach and boats, fish and friends, bingo and shuffleboard, Bible study and poker nights.

If you get hurt or sick, everyone rallies around and drives you to the doctor and]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading Room]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-199</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-199</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 04 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A lot of new folks are swinging through the ol' bloggy-blog since Chip Scanlan gave us a mention (Thanks, Meg), so I figured it might be useful to highlight some of the stuff the folks involved (some more than others) here at Gangrey have done. Have fun.

Minor-league life, major-league drive, Breaking long years of silence, Death on Route 17M, QB Cutler in scouts' spotlight, On-court heroics of Finch, others helped 'change hearts and minds', The Biggest Game: Memphis-UCLA Final Four becomes stu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Does Fear Sell Papers?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-197</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-197</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Asher was up early -- like, nose-bleed early -- so we strollered down to the Henry Avenue honor boxes in the dark. I could find just two dimes and a nickel, so I played the who-gets-my-money this morning bit.

As I approached the boxes, in the Times box, center page and above the fold, I could barely make out the shadowy, ready-to-lunge-off-the-page profile of ... who is that? I nearly dropped my change.

John Barry examined Chuck Norris' recent fame among teenage boys (and, um, grown men), with]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vintage Kate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-198</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-198</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[She has a piece in this week's New Yorker, but only in the mag. They did link online to her piece out of Oklahoma City from 2003 -- The Marriage Cure. (Print it before it's gone, or read The Best American Magazine Writing of 2003.)

It's pertinent to the dialogue about access and getting out of the office. Obviously, time is probably the biggest challenge here, but hanging out is priceless. The passage below is a tiny piece of this story, but it gives you a sense of the benefits of this massive ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Turning Point]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-195</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-195</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Hallman Jr.'s latest: Nearly all the great ones start out this way. Anonymous. The public has no idea because it's nearly impossible to truly see heart, passion and dedication. But that's what drives the gym rat who'll one day become an NBA star. Or that kid practicing guitar hour after hour, destined to go platinum. Until they hit it big, though, they're just faces in a crowd.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Out Of The Office, Part II]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-196</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-196</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From CJR's Cultivating Lonliness: "With so many low-budget Web logs that do little more than emotionally react to the headlines" -- not Gangrey! -- "rare is the commentator who does the field work necessary to earn his opinions -- or even his prejudices."

"Above all, it is the lack of appreciation for geography in the broad, nineteenth-century sense of the word that is basic to an age of journalism increasingly given to summarizing from above rather than reporting from below."

"Barry Lopez, th]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Another Huge Fan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-193</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-193</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[All the cool kids read Gangrey. Please welcome Chip Scanlan into the fold. I should start charging for this wisdom.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Super Bowling]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-194</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-194</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Finding something readable on media day is possible. Wright Thompson does it twice. Here he is on Jurevicius and turducken.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear David]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p192</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p192</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2006 06:35:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We want more stuff like this: To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive north for a long time from Salt Lake City, and then you pull into Gator's Drive Inn, where the customer at the front of the line is ordering a patty melt.

"Patty melts! No one makes patty melts anymore," she is saying to the counterman, Ryan Louderman, who knew she wasn't local as soon as he heard the sound of a car b]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear David]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-192</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-192</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[We want more stuff like this: To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive north for a long time from Salt Lake City, and then you pull into Gator's Drive Inn, where the customer at the front of the line is ordering a patty melt.

"Patty melts! No one makes patty melts anymore," she is saying to the counterman, Ryan Louderman, who knew she wasn't local as soon as he heard the sound of a car b]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Annagain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p191</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p191</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:04:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Make that five: "Hall has red hair and pearly skin. She was born in Kankakee, Ill. Chili pepper lights hang in her kitchen; Southern folk art and pink flamingos abound. In the middle of this bright whimsy is Badie, an austere modern jazzman, as cool as midnight itself, dealing with his homelessness, anger and unsure future. "This is life in New Orleans now: tenuous, with strange forgings and new beginnings. No one is saying how long the arrangement will last."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Boo and A]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p190</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p190</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:49:26 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In advance of her coming story on "young, poor mothers in the swamps of Louisiana, their children, and a nurse who is trying to change their lives."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Boo and A]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-190</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-190</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In advance of her coming story on "young, poor mothers in the swamps of Louisiana, their children, and a nurse who is trying to change their lives."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Annagain]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-191</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-191</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Make that five: "Hall has red hair and pearly skin. She was born in Kankakee, Ill. Chili pepper lights hang in her kitchen; Southern folk art and pink flamingos abound. In the middle of this bright whimsy is Badie, an austere modern jazzman, as cool as midnight itself, dealing with his homelessness, anger and unsure future. "This is life in New Orleans now: tenuous, with strange forgings and new beginnings. No one is saying how long the arrangement will last."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Advocacy Journalism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p189</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p189</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:57:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Former Times Herald-Record publisher Jim Moss: "And there's a question for us at the newspaper. Do we simply hold up a mirror and report dispassionately about what we see, or is there a positive, albeit less objective, role for us? The accompanying editorial report is where we came down on this question. This report required our open minds. It required research and discussions with scores of Newburgh residents. But it is not a news story bound by journalistic requirements of objectivity. Indeed,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Advocacy Journalism]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-189</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-189</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Former Times Herald-Record publisher Jim Moss: "And there's a question for us at the newspaper. Do we simply hold up a mirror and report dispassionately about what we see, or is there a positive, albeit less objective, role for us? The accompanying editorial report is where we came down on this question. This report required our open minds. It required research and discussions with scores of Newburgh residents. But it is not a news story bound by journalistic requirements of objectivity. Indeed,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Showman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p188</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p188</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:31:31 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sometimes, when I really, really like something I read online, I click the print button twice with a kind of subliminal string – Maybe this will disappear from the WWW, and then maybe, because you never know, one of my copies will be lost or misplaced, so I better print two, just in case. Just in case.

I print Michael Brick twice a lot. I did this one three times:

Then the shots are gone, and 2 o'clock is gone, and the last customers are gone in outsize camouflage, cockeyed caps and big jeans ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On A Tear]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p187</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p187</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:17:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Four in a month? I'm not complaining. Anne Hull's latest on a post-Katrina Dickensian encampment in a place called Arabi.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Writers With Writers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p186</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p186</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:49:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stumbled across The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. Looks pretty good.

From the pitch:

Ian McEwan: "The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."

Jamaica Kincaid: "All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself–though, thank god I had never committed them to pap]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p185</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p185</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:29:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse passed on two pieces from the West Coast, back to back: "Both used I (not only that, but "I" was a major character, and HAD to be), and both made me read to the end. Definitely good reading. Maybe a good lesson."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-185</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-185</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse passed on two pieces from the West Coast, back to back: "Both used I (not only that, but "I" was a major character, and HAD to be), and both made me read to the end. Definitely good reading. Maybe a good lesson."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Writers With Writers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-186</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-186</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Stumbled across The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. Looks pretty good.

From the pitch:

Ian McEwan: "The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."

Jamaica Kincaid: "All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself--though, thank god I had never committed them to pa]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On A Tear]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-187</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-187</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Four in a month? I'm not complaining. Anne Hull's latest on a post-Katrina Dickensian encampment in a place called Arabi.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Showman]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-188</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-188</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sometimes, when I really, really like something I read online, I click the print button twice with a kind of subliminal string – Maybe this will disappear from the WWW, and then maybe, because you never know, one of my copies will be lost or misplaced, so I better print two, just in case. Just in case.

I print Michael Brick twice a lot. I did this one three times:

Then the shots are gone, and 2 o'clock is gone, and the last customers are gone in outsize camouflage, cockeyed caps and big jeans ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get Out Of The Office]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p184</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p184</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2006 11:49:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Mike Dawson's subtle use of scene in his short story on some neighbors. It makes this story, and is not something you get on the phone.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Get Out Of The Office]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-184</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-184</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out Mike Dawson's subtle use of scene in his short story on some neighbors. It makes this story, and is not something you get on the phone.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The $40 Lawyer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p183</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p183</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Jan 2006 17:01:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["After passing the Bar exam on his fourth try, Charley Demosthenous wasn't exactly a hot property. Even his father thought he should go sell screwdrivers. Representing the poor and miserable was his last chance to be somebody."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The $40 Lawyer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-183</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-183</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["After passing the Bar exam on his fourth try, Charley Demosthenous wasn't exactly a hot property. Even his father thought he should go sell screwdrivers. Representing the poor and miserable was his last chance to be somebody."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Summer Homes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-182</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-182</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So Susan Orlean has a pretty fancy summer home in the Hudson Valley, and she told the NY Times all about it. She even did voice-over for the slideshow, talking about how her home is sort of like a story. Nice, right? Timothy Noah didn't think so: "I don't begrudge Orlean her delight in her new abode. But what possessed her to broadcast it to millions of New York Times readers? Yes, dozens of idiots do it in the Times "Home" section every year, but, perhaps naively, I've always expected journalis]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Best Narrative Writer In History]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-181</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-181</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 20 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And when you were finished reading, he'd roundhouse kick you in the face.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hurry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-179</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-179</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kurt Vonnegut says we're smart only four hours a day, and that what we do after the age of 45 is crap.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Alt-Advice]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-180</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-180</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How I Got The Story essays from 2005 Alt-Weekly award winners.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Bright Side]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-177</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-177</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gregory E. Favre: We are going through a period in our industry, at this moment, in which we seem to be searching for our souls; in which the feeding frenzy over the future of newspapers is in full bloom; in which every blogger in the world, with or without any knowledge or experience, seems to be gleefully writing our obituaries. The obits all mention recent circulation figures, but fail to mention that newspapers are holding on to more of their market share than almost all of their competitors]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lesson From 24]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-178</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-178</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack passed on this nugget from Slate's conversation with 24 writer Michael Loceff on why complex narrative works:

Slate: In the last five years or so, television has experienced something of a renaissance, with HBO shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, and network shows like Lost and 24. Viewers seem increasingly comfortable with complex long-form stories. Do you think 24's been a beneficiary of this trend? Are you surprised by it?

Loceff: I recently saw David Lynch speak, and he said that ye]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Barry]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-175</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-175</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is good. That's all I'll say.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bragging]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-176</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-176</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Salem Oregon Statesman Journal talks to Bragg: "Writers are crazy anyway, we're just looney, and I don't mean that in any romantic sense. We're just generally a restless and unhappy bunch. But I really have found something close to peace of mind here. Don't know if that will last. I hope it lasts the rest of my life."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Anne Hull]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-174</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-174</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[When Mom Is Over There: I am driving a hulking Expedition with a yellow ribbon on the bumper that says "Support Our Troops." In the grocery store parking lot, a man nods at me. I'm walking to the shopping carts when it hits me. He thinks I'm a kindred spirit in a country that is losing its nerve. I should turn back and tell him that the truck isn't mine, to clear up his misconception, but I don't.

For one week I find myself pulled into the war effort. I am in Florida to help my brother juggle s]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New York Report]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-171</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-171</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It's not every day you get Dan Barry, Michael Brick, Corey Kilgannon, and Tamar Lewin in the same metro section. (And don't miss Lewin's piece on growing up from Sunday.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Letting Go]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-172</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-172</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Baird Helgeson passed along this series from the Denver Post. Looks pretty good at first glance.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rehabbing the Fourth Estate]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-173</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-173</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The folks at Nieman have added a program to Public Radio Exchange on rehabbing our business. Here's the description: "Rehabbing the Fourth Estate" is a broadcast special from the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. It is hosted by Christopher Lydon. Every year the Program hosts a conference where a thousand working journalists come to Cambridge for one of the largest annual meetings of the journalist community. Harvard's annual journalism conference felt different in 2005. It]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A, Er, Request]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-170</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-170</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anyone else want to see the Times' Vanessa Gezari, who carried her narrative voice to Sago, W. Va., pursue the karma-kissed Mouse Burns House story? What do you say, Vanessa?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Girl]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-167</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-167</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Warm day. Cool water. Sand and all.

And two buckets. Maybe we should build a castle! Collect broken shells, then throw them back and start again. Perhaps we should put seaweed on our heads and dance like before! Or ride Bareback Daddy down to the drink?

Or just sit. And let the girl be herself.

Sometimes it's enough to watch her play.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Saturday Night]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-168</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-168</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The way Erin Sullivan asks questions and listens, it's no wonder she was able to get the sensitive details of Jessica's Story. Give it a read when you get a chance.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Poop Man]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-169</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-169</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jim Shutze in the Dallas Observer: "I have waited patiently for the holiday season to expire. Now I'm afraid I must bring up the guy who got caught sprinkling his own dried feces on the doughnut display last summer at Fiesta Mart. For some weeks I have been in possession of new information--a haunting burden for me. I kept expecting him to appear among the carolers."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Be Good To The Pizza Guy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-165</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-165</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Jay Allison deserves an award for This I Believe. It makes me want to work in radio. Check out Be Cool To The Pizza Dude: "Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humility and forgiveness. I let him cut me off in traffic, let him safely hit the exit ramp from the left lane, let him forget to use his blinker without extending any of my digits out the window or towards my horn because there should be one moment in my harried life when a car may encroach or cut off or pass and I let it]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Sound Of Loss]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-166</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-166</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse passed along this Bill Plaschke column: History died cruelly, unusually, extinguished by a killer who didn't even lose his breath.

Shortly after 9 p.m. Wednesday, Vince Young sprinted across the wet Rose Bowl grass as if skating.

There was no apparent sound. There was no visible sweat.

As the Texas quarterback ran toward me on the sideline, I heard nothing. As he cut past me into the end zone, unhurried and untouched, it was as if he were in slow motion.

He did not hoot. He did not how]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Batteries Not Required]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-164</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-164</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Fred Grimm: Stop reading for a moment. Flip this over. Notice that the backside of your morning newspaper is utterly unencumbered by cords, plugs, telephone jacks or USB connections. To hell with Bluetooth technology. We were wireless long before wireless was cool. Marvel at our paper-thin technology -- each page 40 times skinnier than an iPod Nano. Take it anywhere. Take it to the bathroom. To bed. On an airplane. When the flight attendants hustle through the cabin shutting down Blackberrys, Ra]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Morning Walk]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-161</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-161</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom French's One life, a treasury of moments: "Sometimes, you can live an entire lifetime in a single morning. Just take a walk with Bill Futch."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pleasing Everyone]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-162</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-162</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Ignatius writes: "Maybe the lesson of 2005 was the same for the media as for the politicians: Hang on tight to your values, and don't be afraid to let that passion animate your work; be careful about making promises you can't or shouldn't keep; and don't try to please everyone, or you may end up pleasing nobody at all."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Orleans, New Year]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-163</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-163</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anne Hull and Julia Cass with Auld Lang Syne in the Big Easy: "The waitresses at Cafe du Monde hustled out trays with warm beignets and thick chicory coffee, and Maspero's was pressing muffulettas as fast as it could. At the venerable Palm Court, the jazzmen were opening their horn cases in preparation for the $90-a-person New Year's Eve supper."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[11th Street Bar]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p160</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p160</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Dec 2005 16:23:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon's Beer by the Barrel, Stories by the Scoop: "At the crime scene, reporters compete ruthlessly for exclusive information, hunting and hoarding the juiciest quotation, the grittiest fact and the bloodiest narrative – anything to land a story on the front page.

"But after deadline, many of them head to a bar, declare a truce and order enough beer to douse the daily dose of horror. An eavesdropper can sample the next day's headlines, along with details too gory to print."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson From New Orleans]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p159</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p159</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Dec 2005 08:01:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[James Rainey writes that Times-Pic reporters "have made their front porch the world's. They have become the definitive news outlet for myriad journalists trying to understand this city, and an essential read for its displaced and far-flung denizens.

"Set against the cacophony of bickering local, state and federal officials, the 168-year-old newspaper's voice has been clearly heard.

"The Times-Picayune exposed poorly constructed levees, picked apart obtuse FEMA policies, debunked overblown clai]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson From New Orleans]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-159</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-159</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[James Rainey writes that Times-Pic reporters "have made their front porch the world's. They have become the definitive news outlet for myriad journalists trying to understand this city, and an essential read for its displaced and far-flung denizens.

"Set against the cacophony of bickering local, state and federal officials, the 168-year-old newspaper's voice has been clearly heard.

"The Times-Picayune exposed poorly constructed levees, picked apart obtuse FEMA policies, debunked overblown clai]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[11th Street Bar]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-160</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-160</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon's Beer by the Barrel, Stories by the Scoop: "At the crime scene, reporters compete ruthlessly for exclusive information, hunting and hoarding the juiciest quotation, the grittiest fact and the bloodiest narrative - anything to land a story on the front page.

"But after deadline, many of them head to a bar, declare a truce and order enough beer to douse the daily dose of horror. An eavesdropper can sample the next day's headlines, along with details too gory to print."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[CJR Daily's Five Best]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p158</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p158</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2005 14:42:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the CJR Daily: "Each day and every week, a great mass of print journalism is produced in this country — something all too easy to forget when reading a mere sliver of that output in your local paper or scanning the links on your favorite blog. From that mass, the work of the country's Big Five dailies is usually more than enough to keep us occupied in our pursuit of lively, helpful and quick media criticism.

"At the same time, each week smaller papers across the nation quietly publish comp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Christmas Memories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p157</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p157</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2005 09:17:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever overcried. Deneen Brown had Christmas in the basement. Tanya Ballard's mother got an iron and left. And I'm thinking we should do more of these; Easter, St. Patrick's day, whatever. (PS: Also read Stuever's The Strange Afterlife of Uncles in Seattle's The Stranger. And check out Dan Barry's Ghosts of a Christmas Past, in Plastic and Tinsel. And catch Lane Degregory's The Gift.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Christmas Memories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-157</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-157</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever overcried. Deneen Brown had Christmas in the basement. Tanya Ballard's mother got an iron and left. And I'm thinking we should do more of these; Easter, St. Patrick's day, whatever. (PS: Also read Stuever's The Strange Afterlife of Uncles in Seattle's The Stranger. And check out Dan Barry's Ghosts of a Christmas Past, in Plastic and Tinsel. And catch Lane Degregory's The Gift.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[CJR Daily's Five Best]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-158</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-158</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From the CJR Daily: "Each day and every week, a great mass of print journalism is produced in this country -- something all too easy to forget when reading a mere sliver of that output in your local paper or scanning the links on your favorite blog. From that mass, the work of the country's Big Five dailies is usually more than enough to keep us occupied in our pursuit of lively, helpful and quick media criticism.

"At the same time, each week smaller papers across the nation quietly publish com]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Narrative Christmas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p156</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p156</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2005 08:46:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[…for Christmas is to write like these people. May your holiday reading be plentiful and your underwear warm.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Narrative Christmas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-156</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-156</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[...for Christmas is to write like these people. May your holiday reading be plentiful and your underwear warm.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Feeling Good Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p155</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p155</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:04:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin with a Gangrey.com exclusive: According to Forbes, it has been "the year the newspaper industry began to self-destruct." According to Editor & Publisher, "Fitch Ratings assigns an 'outlook negative' to the overall (newspaper) industry in its latest report." According to BusinessWeek, "The demise of the newspaper industry has become a favorite topic on both Wall Street and Main Street." And yet, I'm feeling good about newspapers right about now. Maybe it's the soy milk 'silk' Egg No]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Feeling Good Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-155</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-155</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin with a Gangrey.com exclusive: According to Forbes, it has been "the year the newspaper industry began to self-destruct." According to Editor & Publisher, "Fitch Ratings assigns an 'outlook negative' to the overall (newspaper) industry in its latest report." According to BusinessWeek, "The demise of the newspaper industry has become a favorite topic on both Wall Street and Main Street." And yet, I'm feeling good about newspapers right about now. Maybe it's the soy milk 'silk' Egg No]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Christmas In Prison]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p154</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p154</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:22:03 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I was reminded how good John Prine is when I heard "Christmas In Prison" today and cried. We've talked about him before. I'm obliged to post the lyrics below, but if you can, give it a listen.

It was christmas in prison And the food was real good We had turkey and pistols Carved out of wood And I dream of her always Even when I don't dream Her name's on my tongue And her blood's in my stream.

Wait awhile eternity Old mother nature's got nothing on me Come to me Run to me Come to me, now We're ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finkel Is Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p153</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p153</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:39:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his series on a U.S.-funded program to encourage democracy from its inception to its conclusion.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Finkel Is Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-153</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-153</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read his series on a U.S.-funded program to encourage democracy from its inception to its conclusion.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Christmas In Prison]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-154</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-154</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I was reminded how good John Prine is when I heard "Christmas In Prison" today and cried. We've talked about him before. I'm obliged to post the lyrics below, but if you can, give it a listen.

It was christmas in prison And the food was real good We had turkey and pistols Carved out of wood And I dream of her always Even when I don't dream Her name's on my tongue And her blood's in my stream.

Wait awhile eternity Old mother nature's got nothing on me Come to me Run to me Come to me, now We're ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bored at 30,000 feet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p152</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p152</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Dec 2005 23:27:38 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You've used this before? Microsoft Paint is far more difficult than it looks, but I gave it a go and have plans to release a full Gangrey.com clothing line. Hats, decorative swords, doggie-sweaters, etc. Order your T shirt today and get 50 percent off the original price of $40. Comes in three designer colors.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Merry Christmas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p151</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p151</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Dec 2005 22:24:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm gone a week and the world goes to hell. What ever happened to wholesome holiday stories? Pumpkin pies and snowflaked skies and rasmuffins and tidy greetings? Kelley has a PR guy pitching sex videos, the Florida Times-Union's Thomas Lake is curious about a nearby nudist resort, John "The Snake" Doherty tracks the history of a snow penis (classic headline), and Ramsey finds the victim of a dirty, dirty Santa. Completely unrelated: Check out Wright Thompson in River Ridge, Louisiana. "Surrounde]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Merry Christmas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-151</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-151</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm gone a week and the world goes to hell. What ever happened to wholesome holiday stories? Pumpkin pies and snowflaked skies and rasmuffins and tidy greetings? Kelley has a PR guy pitching sex videos, the Florida Times-Union's Thomas Lake is curious about a nearby nudist resort, John "The Snake" Doherty tracks the history of a snow penis (classic headline), and Ramsey finds the victim of a dirty, dirty Santa. Completely unrelated: Check out Wright Thompson in River Ridge, Louisiana. "Surrounde]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bored at 30,000 feet]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-152</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-152</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[You've used this before? Microsoft Paint is far more difficult than it looks, but I gave it a go and have plans to release a full Gangrey.com clothing line. Hats, decorative swords, doggie-sweaters, etc. Order your T shirt today and get 50 percent off the original price of $40. Comes in three designer colors.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Being Poor]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-150</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-150</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Scalzi's Being Poor:

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America that's worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wounded]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-148</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-148</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack says: Take your blood pressure medicine and then read ... THIS:

Staff cuts are a disgrace to journalism Profit-driven media companies trimming muscle, not fat, are bad news for democracy, readers and business BY TODD GITLIN AND OLIVIER SYLVAIN

December 12, 2005

Everyone trying to lose weight should know that the trick is to cut fat and not muscle. This is not a lesson media companies have learned.

Last month, Private Capital Management, a $32-billion money management firm, issued a sell]]></description>
      <author></author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The End Table]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-149</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-149</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[It's cold in Oklahoma City today, so cold I've been stuck inside my in-laws' for hours. I'm holed up in this little computer room reading and cleaning out email. I came across the following (thanks to Michael for saving it from my files in Middletown). In light of what seems like an overload of recent chatter about layoffs and trimmings at papers near and far, maybe you'll find this useful. May your holidays be cherry-berry and bright, or whatever.

The dog is crashed on the couch. The wife, who]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Final Stretch?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-147</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-147</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Keith Goldberg:

Just read this story in Sunday's New York Post, from 1956 on the trade of Jackie Robinson.

You never see a news story written like this in a sports section any more. I'm halfway through the Best American Sports Writing of the Century, reading some great narrative newspaper pieces...all published at least 30 years ago. The annual BASW volumes are filled with great narrative pieces...nearly none of them from newspapers.

I'm loving all the enthusastic talk coming from the Ni]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lede Me On]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-146</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-146</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I stumbled across this test a few days ago and finally had a chance to give it a whirl. Fun stuff, it is. A sample from the Trib's 1A, using first graphs only:

* Hillsborough County officials want voters countywide to send a strong message against nude dancers.

* The family of a 13-year-old boy found dead at a county park struggled Friday to make sense of the slaying.

* We hear the most egregions cases: restaurants making black customers pre-pay for their meals; stores accusing black customer]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nieman Wrap]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-144</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-144</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Bill Kirtz tells us why narrative matters most now: ... "when outmoded notions of "he said/she said" fairness, avaricious owners and new media all threaten newspapers' primacy -- narrative journalism has the chance and the vital mission of bringing context and emotion to reporting. Here's his Nieman folo.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Gonzo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-145</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-145</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I admit it's been a while since I've bought a Rolling Stone, but I really want to read this guy. (Thanks, Kelley.) (I also like reading this guy.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Scenes Behind The Scenes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-142</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-142</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Vanessa Gezari shows us the story behind Sami Al-Arian as it spilled out of court.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Looking At The Toilets]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-143</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-143</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ramsey passed along this story from Jason Burke of The Observer, which Adam Hochschild mentioned at Nieman. He was making a point about observation. This is especially brilliant:

... Thus the graffiti on the walls of the Portakabins where, if you got to them later than 9am, you'd be greeted by a 5ft-high pile of soldiers' faeces:

Toilet 7: 'I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds'; 'I am become Bored, Destroyer of Motivation'

Toilet 3: 'Though I walk through the valley of death I shall fear no]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sugg-estions]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-139</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-139</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sitting there stunned, listening to the Diana K. Sugg preaching a virtuouso Sunday sermon about finding journalistic salvation, that's what I kept asking my good buddy Erin Sullivan.

She is going to levitate, right? That's what I expected, for Diana Sugg to rise like the old TV Superman, go flying just over our heads like Cathy Rigby, and whoosh out the double door, with Clark Kent somehow missing the whole darn thing.

In three years of Nieman, it was the single-most inspiring and affecting se]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Mama, I'm A Big Girl Now]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-140</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-140</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Lane Degregory's series: Michelle Dowdy had auditioned on a lark. In January she had gone to New York with her mom, Karla Harris, to visit colleges. A friend had phoned to tell Michelle about an open casting call for Hairspray. They needed someone to be the understudy to the lead character.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Courtroom Quickie]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-141</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-141</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick gives us something not even Court TV can do: a short daily on hours of court proceedings, with graceful narrative elements and important details that put readers there. Those of us who cover courts can learn something from his story:

This is the second trial for Mr. Norman, who was convicted in September of soliciting illegal campaign contributions, and his long volley with the prosecutor, Michael F. Vecchione, first deputy district attorney, was something of a rematch. Mr. Vecchi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dear Mr. Kramer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-137</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-137</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[While waiting at Logan with Ben and a beer for a snow-delayed flight back to what will be the most welcome warmth of Greater Tampa Bay …

Nieman every year ends up being about amazing talents from amazing places saying amazing things – Mark Singer, Philip Gourevich, Tom French, book writers, Roy and Chip and the Poynter people – and then most of the rest of the folks there going, OK, well, great, but how the heck do I do that at the place where I work?

A suggestion then:

Let's have more breako]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Quickies]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-132</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-132</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Tom Wolfe: "It's great to see this many people involved in journalism. I just wish there were more readers."

"It's the emotional part of crimes that we do not report in our newspapers... We report what kind of guns the assailants are carrying. That's not the story. The story is the fear. The fear of the victims and the fear of the assailants."

"In the writing of narrative journalism, there is not enough writing about mommy... I don't think we should ever gloss over mother in non-fiction to exp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beer Head]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-133</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-133</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Why is it that some people, for some reason, are compelled to do this blogging thing? Ben insists. I wake up. I feel a little groggy. I'm not sure what I can possibly learn about words and such today when my mouth feels like glue. And for some reason, in this post-beerdom, I know I will want to smoke lots of cigarettes.]]></description>
      <author>Ralrika</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New Word]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-134</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-134</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The seminar was called Community Journalism and Narrative. At the table up at the front of the room were Charlotte Observer editor Cheryl Carpenter, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson and Southern Minnesota blogger guy Doug McGill. And what we learned from these people, long, maddening story short, is that "community journalism" means small weeklies, something you do before you do stuff that matters, "a little write-up," "a slice of life," Little Fucking Johnny kicking a fucking soccer ball ]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pet Peeves]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-135</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-135</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Pet peeve question No. 1 asked by some people at Nieman who don't get it: Um, he there, yeah, I was wondering, how can you weave facts into narrative?

OK. NARRATIVE IS FACTS. IT'S NOTHING BUT FACTS. REPORTED FACTS. SEEN, HEARD, PAINSTAKINGLY RE-CREATED FACTS.

Pet peeve question No. 2 asked by some people at Nieman who don't get it: Um, hey there, yeah, I was wondering, how can you incorporate narrative "elements" into hard news?

OK. WHAT IN THE HELL IS HARD NEWS ANYWAY AND WHY WOULD NARRATIVE]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[No Nuts]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-136</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-136</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mark Singer, the longtime writer for The New Yorker, admitted he comes from a different world than the daily newsperson.

"I didn't work in newspapers. I don't think I would've lasted long. The nut graph, ya know, that third or fourth thing -- No. I don't like that."]]></description>
      <author>Brendan Scott</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tom Wolfe Talking Smack]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-131</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-131</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["Novelists come out of these great standing pools of water called Masters of Fine Arts programs," Tom Wolfe declared on Friday, his left arm in a sling but the rest of his white beclothed self rattling sabres at the highfalutin fictitioners.

"It's wiped out an entire generation. It's a catastrophe. It's so sad it's almost worth writing about."

Wolfe came close to channeling his inner Rush Limbaugh a number of times Friday, but did anyone else find themselves nodding at this particular diatribe]]></description>
      <author>Zack</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tune In]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-130</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-130</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please stay posted this weekend. I'll be doing what I can to update gangrey from the Nieman Conference for those of you who couldn't make it. Look for some guest bloggers as well. Peace.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beat]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p129</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p129</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Nov 2005 17:46:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[His Doctors Wage A Frantic Fight To Save A Wounded Officer: The guarded entrance to Building C of the Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn is designed for ambulance traffic, but the green Impala that stopped at its painted curb around 3 a.m. yesterday counted as an emergency vehicle. There were bullet holes in the doors, and the front-seat passenger, Officer Dillon Stewart, was bleeding from a massive heart injury.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beat]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-129</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-129</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[His Doctors Wage A Frantic Fight To Save A Wounded Officer: The guarded entrance to Building C of the Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn is designed for ambulance traffic, but the green Impala that stopped at its painted curb around 3 a.m. yesterday counted as an emergency vehicle. There were bullet holes in the doors, and the front-seat passenger, Officer Dillon Stewart, was bleeding from a massive heart injury.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dust In The Water]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p128</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p128</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2005 10:03:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kelley's story: They eat cold fried snapper for breakfast. Taso shaves with saltwater and enjoys the sting. He says "buenos dias" to Louie the sun and plays with his dog, but his mood is falling. He found healthy sponges 40 miles from home, but not many, not enough. Jason has work tomorrow, and it's time to head back.

Taso will make about $250, enough to pay for his groceries but not his gas. This trip wasn't so much about finding sponges as finding answers, and now he has some. He knows n]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dust In The Water]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-128</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-128</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Kelley's story: They eat cold fried snapper for breakfast. Taso shaves with saltwater and enjoys the sting. He says "buenos dias" to Louie the sun and plays with his dog, but his mood is falling. He found healthy sponges 40 miles from home, but not many, not enough. Jason has work tomorrow, and it's time to head back.

Taso will make about $250, enough to pay for his groceries but not his gas. This trip wasn't so much about finding sponges as finding answers, and now he has some. He knows n]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Black Friday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p127</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p127</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Nov 2005 23:09:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Is it that time of year again? Time to string the cliches from the rafters and hang the unoriginality from the mantle and tuck the ridiculous quotes snug into bed for a long winter's nap?

Here's the participatory Holiday Weekend version of Gangrey.com.

You be the judge of who did the obligatory Friday-After-Thanksgiving story justice, and let's try to learn something.

Brace yourself, though, for much swarming and luring and quite a few references to standing in line for this or that. Be warne]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It gets better]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p126</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p126</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:35:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember this? Well, now there's this. And that's the way miracles unfold sometimes.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It gets better]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-126</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-126</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Remember this? Well, now there's this. And that's the way miracles unfold sometimes.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Black Friday]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-127</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-127</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Is it that time of year again? Time to string the cliches from the rafters and hang the unoriginality from the mantle and tuck the ridiculous quotes snug into bed for a long winter's nap?

Here's the participatory Holiday Weekend version of Gangrey.com.

You be the judge of who did the obligatory Friday-After-Thanksgiving story justice, and let's try to learn something.

Brace yourself, though, for much swarming and luring and quite a few references to standing in line for this or that. Be warne]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stovetop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p125</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p125</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Nov 2005 08:40:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: Quick! Stir this while we take a sec to give thanks for dear Ruth Siems, who is credited with inventing Stove Top Stuffing in 1972, of which tens of millions of boxes are eaten every year. (Instead of potatoes.) She died last week, but somebody neglected to run her obituary until today, which is such a holiday-rush kind of thing to do…]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Stovetop]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-125</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-125</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Hank Stuever: Quick! Stir this while we take a sec to give thanks for dear Ruth Siems, who is credited with inventing Stove Top Stuffing in 1972, of which tens of millions of boxes are eaten every year. (Instead of potatoes.) She died last week, but somebody neglected to run her obituary until today, which is such a holiday-rush kind of thing to do...]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beige and White]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p124</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p124</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 19 Nov 2005 16:08:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The OC Weekly's R. Scott Moxley on one of California's most awful hate crimes: We joke, in Orange County, about beige and white, about beige carpets in beige homes behind beige walls in beige housing tracts, and white walls in the beige homes. We joke because beige and white aren't really colors, and color suggests excitement, and Orange County, particularly South County, is, well, anything but exciting. We joke until we see something like a crime-scene photograph of a Tustin apartment, from the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Beige and White]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-124</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-124</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 19 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The OC Weekly's R. Scott Moxley on one of California's most awful hate crimes: We joke, in Orange County, about beige and white, about beige carpets in beige homes behind beige walls in beige housing tracts, and white walls in the beige homes. We joke because beige and white aren't really colors, and color suggests excitement, and Orange County, particularly South County, is, well, anything but exciting. We joke until we see something like a crime-scene photograph of a Tustin apartment, from the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wrestling With Bam Bam]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p123</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p123</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2005 17:30:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse's story: Bam Bam Bigelow skidded off the motorcycle and onto the hard wet asphalt on State Road 50 one Sunday in early October on the west side of Hernando County. The woman who had been on the back of his bike hit the pavement with a sound one witness said was like an open palm slapping the surface of water. Then she flopped around like a rolled-up rug. Bam Bam landed about 50 feet up the road. The former professional wrestler with the tattooed scalp and the name no one can forget]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The man who walked away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p122</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p122</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:59:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick's Tracing Steps Of The Man Who Walked Away: He walked these avenues and then he was gone, as the inhabitants of one city give way to the next, as some are hurried along. Everyone leaves behind a name, a time, a place and a role, and his were Jimmy Moy, 1960, Park Slope, Brooklyn: the man who never returned.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The man who walked away]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-122</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-122</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Brick's Tracing Steps Of The Man Who Walked Away: He walked these avenues and then he was gone, as the inhabitants of one city give way to the next, as some are hurried along. Everyone leaves behind a name, a time, a place and a role, and his were Jimmy Moy, 1960, Park Slope, Brooklyn: the man who never returned.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Wrestling With Bam Bam]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-123</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-123</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Michael Kruse's story: Bam Bam Bigelow skidded off the motorcycle and onto the hard wet asphalt on State Road 50 one Sunday in early October on the west side of Hernando County. The woman who had been on the back of his bike hit the pavement with a sound one witness said was like an open palm slapping the surface of water. Then she flopped around like a rolled-up rug. Bam Bam landed about 50 feet up the road. The former professional wrestler with the tattooed scalp and the name no one can forget]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Studying Narrative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p121</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p121</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:40:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[WriterL member Lynda Ward has started a Yahoo group for studying and analyzing narrative themes in movies like Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Station Agent.

I tend to wonder: Who has the time? But I recall one winter afternoon when a certain duo left the office for 5 Mills Avenue to study Final Destination II (we couldn't find the original) and ended up with a pretty decent read.

Ward's description of the free group: "Writers who wish to practice narrative w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Studying Narrative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-121</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-121</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[WriterL member Lynda Ward has started a Yahoo group for studying and analyzing narrative themes in movies like Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Station Agent.

I tend to wonder: Who has the time? But I recall one winter afternoon when a certain duo left the office for 5 Mills Avenue to study Final Destination II (we couldn't find the original) and ended up with a pretty decent read.

Ward's description of the free group: "Writers who wish to practice narrative w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kate Boo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p120</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p120</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Nov 2005 10:27:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kate Boo on lying low:

"The darnedest thing about real people is that they don't conform to our little preconceived narrative of life," Boo said. "So they are going to surprise you, and if they don't surprise you, then you probably aren't doing your job right."

(How come Boo never came to Arkansas Tech to speak?)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Kate Boo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-120</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-120</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kate Boo on lying low:

"The darnedest thing about real people is that they don't conform to our little preconceived narrative of life," Boo said. "So they are going to surprise you, and if they don't surprise you, then you probably aren't doing your job right."

(How come Boo never came to Arkansas Tech to speak?)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-119</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-119</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Vanessa, who has been thinking THIS is some of the "weirdest, prettiest writing I've seen in a while": Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie Plame affair, the most remarkable, in literary terms, may belong to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's recently deposed chief of staff. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life," he wrote in a jailhouse note to Judi]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Hard Road]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-117</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-117</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[...the Jennifer Porter case.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Delery Street]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-118</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-118</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[chronicling the lives of three generations on Delery Street in New Orleans.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-115</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-115</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 11 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NYT's Warren St. John talks shop:

"But I don't think storytelling is ever going to go away. I don't think trying to understand what's really happening in the world is ever really going to go away. I think it's definitely the case that how we tell those stories is changing rapidly."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Where's Hank Stuever?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-116</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-116</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 11 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[In case you were wondering, THIS appears to have been up since August, but I must've missed it. There's a nugget of inspiration in the second graph below. And make sure you read A Guitar's Life.

"Latest question: How come we haven't seen any new articles by you in the Post lately? (In March 2005, I took a temporary job as an assignment editor in the paper's daily Style section. I'm liking it quite a bit. This is the first time I've had in a decade to cool my jets and not write for a while, and ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It Just Doesn't Matter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-113</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-113</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse found this: "Let's be all the things we love to read. Let's astonish our audience. Let's stop asking our readers what they want. Let's remember, as Frank Capra, the great director, once said, that "the audience doesn't know what it wants--until it sees it."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Evaluating Esquire]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-114</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-114</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Writing that spurred a revolution.

Talese: "I'd always read short stories," he said, "and the short story writers?and the playwrights and the novelists?were just writing about people, about the interiors of people. And that's what I always found challenging about nonfiction. My favorite short story writers were John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, and I figured I could do what they were doing without changing the names."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Nieman Schedule]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-111</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-111</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Anybody making plans yet? What are we longing to hear?

2005 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism Draft Schedule Friday, December 2, 2005 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Registration 1:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m. Welcome (Bob Giles and Mark Kramer) 1:15 p.m. - 2:25 p.m. Keynote Setting, Psychology and Mommy in Narrative Journalism (Tom Wolfe) 2:45 p.m. - 3:55 p.m. Breakout I • The Gift of Personal Stories (Tom French, Amy Ellis Nutt, Eddy L. Harris) • Writing for Multiple Cultures Without Reaching for the L]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Six Months of Famine]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-112</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-112</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So the new circulation numbers are out for six-month period ending Sept. 30, compared to the same period last year.

In the spirit of the New York Tab War, I'd like to shoot one across the Bay:

Nearly 10,000 readers said "No more!" to the St. Petersburg Times as the paper reported a tumble in Sunday circulation of almost 2.4 percent, from 395,117 to 385,794 copies, even though it sells the edition for a measly 50 cents. The struggling paper's daily circulation was down nearly 3.4 percent, from ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Old School]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-110</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-110</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[For those without a staff, and without the time or the patience to muddle through more than one paper, there is Carlos, a young man of indeterminate origin and background ("I'm from everywhere and nowhere," he says), who, for the past several months, has stood at the southwest corner of Forty-second and Eighth, by the entrance to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, greeting evening commuters with a simple one-line digest of the latest in world affairs: "Bush nominates a lady with zero experience to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Halloween]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-109</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-109</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Michael Brick's Halloweens Pass:

The old-timers watched Halloween from the stoops, and laughter rose above the other noises. Batman came with a Superman bag. A tiny cheerleader posed, then walked away without her candy. A teenage boy in a suit with an unlit cigar led a group of cross-dressing boys down the block, ordering them into the photo booth.

"No touching my women," the boy said, only he used a different word. Sylvester the Cat was freed from his stroller for a turn in the booth, wh]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Suicide, Inside Out]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-107</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-107</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse says this is the best thing Ramsey Al-Rikabi has ever done:

Jose "Tito" Torres fired only two shots. The first went through the belly of a 16-year-old girl. The second he shot through his own chest 13 hours later. It started late Saturday night, when the 44-year-old Torres shot the girl, stole a car, took hostages, then barricaded himself in a Farrington Street apartment. It ended early yesterday afternoon when negotiators, who had enlisted the help of Torres' sister and the girl he shot,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Weather Story]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-108</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-108</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Button up your overcoat...]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p106</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p106</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Oct 2005 23:18:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wild week. The power of that hurricane made me feel insignificant, like when you roll out of your tent at 1 a.m. in Seminole Canyon and see the stars for the first time. That's a nice feeling once in a while.

A few items for your weekend reading pleasure.

Keith was looking for feedback on this piece on Port Jervis football: At Homer's Coffee Shop on East Main Street, where $2.65 gets you a couple of eggs, home fries and toast, a few sleepy residents wake themselves with cups of freshly brewed ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Catching Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-106</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-106</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Wild week. The power of that hurricane made me feel insignificant, like when you roll out of your tent at 1 a.m. in Seminole Canyon and see the stars for the first time. That's a nice feeling once in a while.

A few items for your weekend reading pleasure.

Keith was looking for feedback on this piece on Port Jervis football: At Homer's Coffee Shop on East Main Street, where $2.65 gets you a couple of eggs, home fries and toast, a few sleepy residents wake themselves with cups of freshly brewed ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Suspension]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p105</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p105</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Oct 2005 19:24:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gangrey will be down for a few days. Miami lost power and phones so I'm stuck for now using the cell to file, which is as slow as Doherty on deadline. Please keep making each other better.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Suspension]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-105</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-105</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Gangrey will be down for a few days. Miami lost power and phones so I'm stuck for now using the cell to file, which is as slow as Doherty on deadline. Please keep making each other better.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Waiting On Wilma]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p104</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p104</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Oct 2005 22:33:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Am I not looking hard enough, or have all the waiting-on-the-big-one stories been done? Seems like every idea that feels fresh has been done by someone better and brighter than me. Could someone please get me excited about a pre-hurricane hurricane story in the vicinity of Miami? Please.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Waiting On Wilma]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-104</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-104</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Am I not looking hard enough, or have all the waiting-on-the-big-one stories been done? Seems like every idea that feels fresh has been done by someone better and brighter than me. Could someone please get me excited about a pre-hurricane hurricane story in the vicinity of Miami? Please.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Renegade Bus]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p103</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p103</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2005 13:13:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this piece by Josh Peter, who should have won the Pulitzer for feature writing a few years back. Here's to this year.

"Across the street from the Astrodome, in the alcove of a motel where the night manager sits behind bulletproof glass, a young man leaned against a faded stucco wall.

A grin crept beneath his wispy mustache when a stranger approached.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

His name is Jabar Gibson.

The first bus to arrive in Houston loaded with Hurricane Katrina evacuee]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Renegade Bus]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-103</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-103</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out this piece by Josh Peter, who should have won the Pulitzer for feature writing a few years back. Here's to this year.

"Across the street from the Astrodome, in the alcove of a motel where the night manager sits behind bulletproof glass, a young man leaned against a faded stucco wall.

A grin crept beneath his wispy mustache when a stranger approached.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

His name is Jabar Gibson.

The first bus to arrive in Houston loaded with Hurricane Katrina evacuee]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Streets]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p102</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p102</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Oct 2005 20:11:41 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He's living on the street. And it looks real. (Thanks, Tim.)

Steve Lopez: The call comes in at 11:18 in the morning. Possible overdose on skid row, just half a block from one of the busiest firehouses in the United States.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Umbrellas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p101</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p101</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Oct 2005 09:44:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry:

Umbrella.

Say it fast, as one peddler did in Times Square – umbrella-umbrella-umbrella – and there's music playing. Say it soft, as another peddler did at Herald Square – ummm-brell-laa – and it's almost like praying.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Umbrellas]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-101</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-101</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Dan Barry:

Umbrella.

Say it fast, as one peddler did in Times Square - umbrella-umbrella-umbrella - and there's music playing. Say it soft, as another peddler did at Herald Square - ummm-brell-laa - and it's almost like praying.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On The Streets]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-102</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-102</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He's living on the street. And it looks real. (Thanks, Tim.)

Steve Lopez: The call comes in at 11:18 in the morning. Possible overdose on skid row, just half a block from one of the busiest firehouses in the United States.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rattlesnakes, Mass Murderers and A Pool-Shooting Hermit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p100</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p100</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:40:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The last (and only?) interview Cormac McCarthy did was this one, for the New York Times Magazine, in 1992.

But someone has been thinking lately about how cool it would be to talk to the lonesome genius who wrote:

They rode. You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shallow Water]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p99</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p99</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 22:47:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex sent this: "If Michelle Kosinski's canoe had sprung a leak on NBC's "Today" show Friday, she didn't have much to worry about.

"In one of television's inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera _ making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lessons From Capote]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p98</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p98</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:49:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sheryl McCarthy thinks so: "Relationships between journalists and their subjects are complicated and often conflicted. Even when they evolve into a kind of friendship, they are fueled, as are most friendships, by needs on both sides. I think Capote genuinely felt affection for his subjects, but he knew there was a boundary between his relationship with them and his job as a writer. At one point in the film he tells Smith, who was still refusing to tell him what happened the night of the murders:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Poetry and Baseball]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p97</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p97</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:11:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse passed along the story behind Josh Paul, the now famous third-string catcher for the Angels.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rattlesnakes, Mass Murderers and A Pool-Shooting Hermit]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-100</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-100</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The last (and only?) interview Cormac McCarthy did was this one, for the New York Times Magazine, in 1992.

But someone has been thinking lately about how cool it would be to talk to the lonesome genius who wrote:

They rode. You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Poetry and Baseball]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-97</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-97</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse passed along the story behind Josh Paul, the now famous third-string catcher for the Angels.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Lessons From Capote]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-98</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-98</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sheryl McCarthy thinks so: "Relationships between journalists and their subjects are complicated and often conflicted. Even when they evolve into a kind of friendship, they are fueled, as are most friendships, by needs on both sides. I think Capote genuinely felt affection for his subjects, but he knew there was a boundary between his relationship with them and his job as a writer. At one point in the film he tells Smith, who was still refusing to tell him what happened the night of the murders:]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shallow Water]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-99</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-99</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Alex sent this: "If Michelle Kosinski's canoe had sprung a leak on NBC's "Today" show Friday, she didn't have much to worry about.

"In one of television's inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera _ making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Unnatural Natural]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-96</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-96</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[( Thanks, Baird. )

It was supposed to be a simple story about a mysterious senior-softball phenom whose legend was growing in America's heartland. Of course, nothing is simple.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Grinding Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-95</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-95</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NEW ORLEANS - Inside, it smells like mold. Outside, the entire French Quarter smells like a dead cat. But the lights came on this week and so, here and there along the street, men prowled again, booze swirled in plastic cups again, and the strippers, the few who found their way back, climbed up the poles.

In Big Daddy's strip club, where a mannequin swings from the ceiling, manager Saint Jones smokes a Marlboro and tries to hold back what is nearly impossible to hold back: the appetites at the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The day of days]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-94</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-94</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Brooklyn, 1955, and raw ( Thanks Keith ):

There is no way to understand Oct. 4, 1955 and the great explosive release of giddy, tearful, fist-pumping emotion at 3:45 that Tuesday afternoon without understanding the place from which it all came. These were the Brooklyn Dodgers and they had traveled from Brooklyn, our country, into the heart of darkness, into the majestic confines of Yankee Stadium, into the House that Ruth Built, into the place of long October shadows where doom had so often awai]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Miracle]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-91</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-91</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[When you get a minute: Part I. Part II. Part III.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Scoop O' The Day]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-92</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-92</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NYTimes.com: A third man has been detained in a suspected plot to detonate explosives on the city's subway system, a government official said today, as police officers searched passengers' bags on subways, buses and ferries.

Authorities are holding three Al Qaeda operatives in connection with the suspected plot, although no details were available on who they are, where they were detained or what agency captured them, said the government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Conversation Continues]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-93</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-93</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kurtz: The Washington Post is a bloated newspaper that should cut its voluminous and often dull output by a third to attract more readers, some say.

The Washington Post's rich offerings have attracted an incredibly loyal core of readers who would be alienated by a drastic personality change, others say.

The people who hold these divergent views all work for the capital's biggest paper, and they are firing away in daily in-house electronic critiques that have sparked an impassioned debate about]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Quality May Not Matter]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-90</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-90</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Romanesko letters: There are any number of ideas for coping with this problem, some of which will be successful -- examples include a Web news presence that reflects the abilities of the Web instead of simply putting ink-on-paper stories on screens; targeted marketing and niche products -- and some that would be bottom-line unfriendly but enhance our current product -- mandating doorstep delivery, for example. The weakest point in our production and distribution chain is that we expect the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Quick and Painful]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-88</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-88</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Here's John Henry Doucette, sweet and tight, on a family making copies of a dead kid's picture:

Billie A. Spruill sifted through photos to pick out the best one of her dead son. She and her husband, Robert, were following the advice of a police officer. They traveled in their motor home to a copy shop.

Her son, Michael L. DeMasse , was killed late Dec. 10 in a hit-and-run collision while riding his motorcycle.

The Chesapeake man had been trying to turn left from Portsmouth Boulevard onto Cali]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An account]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-89</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-89</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Vanessa Gezari on the police beat:

At 7:31 a.m. Tuesday, on a quiet street in St. Petersburg, a man who had done terrible things to a woman and dodged justice for almost two years sat slumped over in the cab of a white Chevy pickup, his life ebbing away as the law closed in.

Edward Lee Green was 53 years old with a staggering rap sheet and a price on his head.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[John Prine]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-87</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-87</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 04 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Zack: Went to see John Prine Friday night, and found myself inspired for two solid hours, listening to THE MAN. Was wondering if anyone had particular favorite singers/bands who get their narrative juices flowing. Obviously, Nebraska and the Boss. Gordo Lightfoot and the Edmond Fitzgerald. Not necessarily Dylan, though I understand the attraction. I've always thought he needed an editor, but I'm just a humble sports writer, so what do I know.

Anyhow, I'm always struck dumb when I recall th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The corpse]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-86</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-86</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[As someone else said, there has been so much good writing out of New Orleans, but this is the first poetry. I can't stop reading it.

...In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods, the severely damaged streets bear the names of saints who could not protect them. Whatever nature spared, human nature stepped up to provide a kind of democracy in destruction.

At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass spill from the crushed door, offering a view of the complemen]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chat With God]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p85</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p85</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2005 11:18:57 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I dig this, but I don't get it.

"GOD couldn't decide where to meet for a cup of coffee.

Dunkin' Donuts? "No place to sit." Howard Johnson's? "Gone, my child, gone." Starbucks? "Too pretentious."

Here's Dan Barry.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Chat With God]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-85</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-85</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I dig this, but I don't get it.

"GOD couldn't decide where to meet for a cup of coffee.

Dunkin' Donuts? "No place to sit." Howard Johnson's? "Gone, my child, gone." Starbucks? "Too pretentious."

Here's Dan Barry.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Death Spiral]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p84</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p84</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:10:37 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few nuggets from Newspapers In Turmoil in The Rake: ( Thanks, Zack. )

…But almost everywhere else, newsrooms have been stripped of adequate resources, imagination, and editorial courage. Too much of the regular, daily content of too many news organizations is filled with predictable, redundant stories produced in the same bland newspeak, the same inevitable tone and perspective…

…The bard of Anoka, Garrison Keillor, a lover of good writing and journalism, gave an interview to the Hartford Co]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Goods]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p83</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p83</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:20:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please check out the Times Herald-Record's Tuesday coverage of a triple homicide Monday. Comprehensive, readable, good stuff. The main bar: Fired sex offender shoots 3, kills self. From the scene: 'I want to go home and hug my kids. On the workplace: Low-profile plant a big player. The gunman's secrets: Gunman had dark side few knew about. On the victims: Shooting victim profiles. And: Photo gallery.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Goods]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-83</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-83</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please check out the Times Herald-Record's Tuesday coverage of a triple homicide Monday. Comprehensive, readable, good stuff. The main bar: Fired sex offender shoots 3, kills self. From the scene: 'I want to go home and hug my kids. On the workplace: Low-profile plant a big player. The gunman's secrets: Gunman had dark side few knew about. On the victims: Shooting victim profiles. And: Photo gallery.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Death Spiral]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-84</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-84</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[A few nuggets from Newspapers In Turmoil in The Rake: ( Thanks, Zack. )

...But almost everywhere else, newsrooms have been stripped of adequate resources, imagination, and editorial courage. Too much of the regular, daily content of too many news organizations is filled with predictable, redundant stories produced in the same bland newspeak, the same inevitable tone and perspective...

...The bard of Anoka, Garrison Keillor, a lover of good writing and journalism, gave an interview to the Hartf]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Better]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p82</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p82</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2005 12:42:12 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Following a few backchannel discussions, I'd like to extend an open invite for all of you to let me post your stuff here on Gangrey.com for feedback from other pros. If we can't get honest feedback, we'll all have a tough time getting better. Shoot me an email and I'll put it on, and hopefully we'll stir some thoughtful critiques.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Getting Better]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-82</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-82</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Following a few backchannel discussions, I'd like to extend an open invite for all of you to let me post your stuff here on Gangrey.com for feedback from other pros. If we can't get honest feedback, we'll all have a tough time getting better. Shoot me an email and I'll put it on, and hopefully we'll stir some thoughtful critiques.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Garrison Keillor on Hank Williams]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p81</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p81</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Sep 2005 19:49:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["The good years were sweet – he sang on big radio shows in New York, was offered a movie contract by MGM, got to hear his songs covered by pop stars – and then he fell and fell hard. The end was brutal. He was in and out of sanitariums and got hooked on a sedative, chloral hydrate, and became pitiful in a public way: he got booed off a number of stages by his own fans. He was, Hemphill writes, "skinny as a spider, suffering from chest pains, nearing impotence, incontinent to the point he was wet]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Charlie's Adventures]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p80</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p80</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Sep 2005 01:24:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So I got Direct TV a few weeks ago and I finally got a chance to flip channels this morning. Somewhere in the 300s, I stumbled across Charlie LeDuff getting his ass kicked by a biker in a fight club-style boxing match. Turns out, I'm watching the Discovery/Times channel, and LeDuff has his own show called Only In America. Have you seen this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Charlie's Adventures]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-80</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-80</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So I got Direct TV a few weeks ago and I finally got a chance to flip channels this morning. Somewhere in the 300s, I stumbled across Charlie LeDuff getting his ass kicked by a biker in a fight club-style boxing match. Turns out, I'm watching the Discovery/Times channel, and LeDuff has his own show called Only In America. Have you seen this?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Garrison Keillor on Hank Williams]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-81</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-81</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["The good years were sweet - he sang on big radio shows in New York, was offered a movie contract by MGM, got to hear his songs covered by pop stars - and then he fell and fell hard. The end was brutal. He was in and out of sanitariums and got hooked on a sedative, chloral hydrate, and became pitiful in a public way: he got booed off a number of stages by his own fans. He was, Hemphill writes, "skinny as a spider, suffering from chest pains, nearing impotence, incontinent to the point he was wet]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Nuns And The Wind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p79</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p79</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:39:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Taped under receptionist Gloria Williams's desk were "urgent" instructions to recite in case of a hurricane: "Our Father who art in heaven, through the powerful intercession of Lady of Prompt Succor spare us from the harm during the hurricane season."

No prayer could stop Katrina's rushing waters or ease the fatal heat that followed. When rescue workers finally arrived five days later, bodies were found wrapped in bedsheets in the chapel. Originally told 14 had died, officials eventually recove]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Another one fades]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p78</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p78</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Sep 2005 08:47:08 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Early on, after I had written my fifth robbery roundup in five days, the metro editor at that time, a great guy named Bill Gerdes, came to me and said, "Stop! No more robbery roundups."

Then he explained the Post-Herald mission to me.

"Look," he said, "you don't have to write about every crime committed in the city. This is not the paper of record; those guys are," and he jerked his head toward the other side of the building where the reporters and editors of the Birmingham News worked.

"What]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Another one fades]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-78</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-78</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Early on, after I had written my fifth robbery roundup in five days, the metro editor at that time, a great guy named Bill Gerdes, came to me and said, "Stop! No more robbery roundups."

Then he explained the Post-Herald mission to me.

"Look," he said, "you don't have to write about every crime committed in the city. This is not the paper of record; those guys are," and he jerked his head toward the other side of the building where the reporters and editors of the Birmingham News worked.

"What]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Nuns And The Wind]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-79</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-79</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Taped under receptionist Gloria Williams's desk were "urgent" instructions to recite in case of a hurricane: "Our Father who art in heaven, through the powerful intercession of Lady of Prompt Succor spare us from the harm during the hurricane season."

No prayer could stop Katrina's rushing waters or ease the fatal heat that followed. When rescue workers finally arrived five days later, bodies were found wrapped in bedsheets in the chapel. Originally told 14 had died, officials eventually recove]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Times Select]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p77</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p77</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Sep 2005 17:17:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't done it already, sign up for a free 14 days of Times Select at nytimes.com, and check out the multimedia video feature with Dan Barry. Classic stuff. He reads the papers, he reads Joseph Mitchell, he reads E.B. White, and he walks around New York being curious. There are lessons throughout.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bargain Basement]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p76</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p76</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Sep 2005 08:26:22 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin ran across a helluva bargain: 80 years of the New Yorker for $63.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bargain Basement]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-76</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-76</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin ran across a helluva bargain: 80 years of the New Yorker for $63.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Times Select]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-77</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-77</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[If you haven't done it already, sign up for a free 14 days of Times Select at nytimes.com, and check out the multimedia video feature with Dan Barry. Classic stuff. He reads the papers, he reads Joseph Mitchell, he reads E.B. White, and he walks around New York being curious. There are lessons throughout.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Returning]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-75</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-75</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[What do you think about this piece?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Newspapers, Vinyl Records, And The Loo]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-72</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-72</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Makes perfect sense. What else is there to do while you're taking a dump?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More Hurricane Winds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-73</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-73</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't miss her stuff off Katrina: In Rural Texas, Blessings and Culture Shock and Hitchhiking From Squalor To Anywhere Else.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[RIP]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-74</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-74</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check out John Doherty's tab-sized tribute to curiosity. Makes me miss the 'burgh.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ti-i-i-ime is on my side, yes it is]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-71</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-71</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Just thinking, after a long hard trip and staring down the muzzle of another: If a good writer only puts out a story or two a year, is the writer really all that good? (I like that. Like, if a subscriber can only read a paper's best writer once a year, is he or she really the paper's best writer? And if a tree falls on that writer, but no one sees it, can you still try a narrative? And how long can one go without publishing a story and still be invited as a featured speaker at a NWW?) Really, th]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Back]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-70</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-70</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Please pardon the delay. Moved into a new house over here in Seminole Heights, and I've been unpacking boxes since I rolled in from the coast. I'll be running stuff shortly. Meanwhile, has anyone ever had symptoms of PTSD after covering an especially brutal assignment?

PS: I think I fixed most of the links in the Katrina post below. If not, find them yourselves, you word hungry bastards.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Katrina]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-69</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-69</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Given the extreme physical conditions, the obvious logistical difficulties and the challenges of just being a human being and seeing what there is to see all along the Gulf Coast, some of the work being done off Katrina and the aftermath is awe-inspiring.

Here is but a small sample of some of the very best:

Scott Gold of the LAT, first person, walking around New Orleans:

Water is the enemy. Even now, it drips steadily into the lobby of my hotel. It gurgles up from storm drains, splashes again]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hurricanes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p68</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p68</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2005 09:35:19 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'll be away for the next week, so forgive me for not updating Gangrey. But make sure you check on how Kruse and I are doing as the water recedes from Mississippi at www.tampatrib.com and www.sptimes.com. As said via cell-phone as we prepared to leave town, him by plane, me by 24-foot RV, I WILL write circles around him. Best, Ben]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hurricanes]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-68</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-68</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'll be away for the next week, so forgive me for not updating Gangrey. But make sure you check on how Kruse and I are doing as the water recedes from Mississippi at www.tampatrib.com and www.sptimes.com. As said via cell-phone as we prepared to leave town, him by plane, me by 24-foot RV, I WILL write circles around him. Best, Ben]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trailing Mister Softee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p67</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p67</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2005 21:15:18 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon shows us how.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trailing Mister Softee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-67</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-67</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Corey Kilgannon shows us how.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Death of a Racehorse]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p66</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p66</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 Aug 2005 21:44:23 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for the purse of four thousand dollars. They were moving slowly down the backstretch toward the gate, some of the cantering, others walking, and in the press box they had stopped working on the kidding to watch, most of them interested in one horse.

"Air Lift," Jim Roach said. "Full brother of Assault."

Assault, who won the triple crown … making this one too,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Death of a Racehorse]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-66</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-66</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 27 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for the purse of four thousand dollars. They were moving slowly down the backstretch toward the gate, some of the cantering, others walking, and in the press box they had stopped working on the kidding to watch, most of them interested in one horse.

"Air Lift," Jim Roach said. "Full brother of Assault."

Assault, who won the triple crown ... making this one to]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Decision]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p65</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p65</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:15:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This started on Sunday: Portland attorney Darian Stanford must choose: He can keep his paycheck at a prestigious law firm. Or he can pursue principles at the DA's office. Does he make money — or a difference?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun in Middletown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p64</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p64</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2005 11:14:46 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And Dave Richardson lets him have it: "This week's contender for the title of World's Dumbest Criminal: the genius who allegedly broke into the same house for possibly the third time in a week – and looked right into a Web camera left there by the owner to catch him. "The smart person in this case: the Times Herald-Record's own night copy desk chief, Don Bruce, owner of both home and webcam, who watched the crime unfold live at his desk Wednesday night."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fun in Middletown]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-64</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-64</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And Dave Richardson lets him have it: "This week's contender for the title of World's Dumbest Criminal: the genius who allegedly broke into the same house for possibly the third time in a week – and looked right into a Web camera left there by the owner to catch him. "The smart person in this case: the Times Herald-Record's own night copy desk chief, Don Bruce, owner of both home and webcam, who watched the crime unfold live at his desk Wednesday night."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Decision]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-65</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-65</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This started on Sunday: Portland attorney Darian Stanford must choose: He can keep his paycheck at a prestigious law firm. Or he can pursue principles at the DA's office. Does he make money -- or a difference?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson In Tension]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p63</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p63</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Aug 2005 10:54:59 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Father Who Never Came Home. Read and learn.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Lesson In Tension]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-63</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-63</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Father Who Never Came Home. Read and learn.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dwight Gooden Feeding Frenzy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p62</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p62</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Aug 2005 23:41:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So, Dwight Gooden ran from the cops Monday, and folks here and in New York (and lot of other places, I guess) are nuts about it. It's a nice chance to compare how different folks handle the same story. Here goes: AP. Newsday. Daily News. Hartford Courant. Times. Reuters. Newark Star Ledger. St. Pete Times Mine.

And today: Ny Post Newsday NY Daily News AP St. Pete Times Mine

And, for the sake of a break, a story about a thirsty cowboy: from The Well Of Bermo, Niger — Every sunset, when his favo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dwight Gooden Feeding Frenzy]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-62</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-62</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So, Dwight Gooden ran from the cops Monday, and folks here and in New York (and lot of other places, I guess) are nuts about it. It's a nice chance to compare how different folks handle the same story. Here goes: AP. Newsday. Daily News. Hartford Courant. Times. Reuters. Newark Star Ledger. St. Pete Times Mine.

And today: Ny Post Newsday NY Daily News AP St. Pete Times Mine

And, for the sake of a break, a story about a thirsty cowboy: from The Well Of Bermo, Niger — Every sunset, when his favo]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Zack's Farred Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p61</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p61</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Aug 2005 08:08:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin let's Roy Peter Clark have it (from a WriterL discussion on narrative length):

During one of those unavoidable by-committee meetings that accompany a large narrative, one of our designers, upon hearing that each installment would run 35-50 inches (I think that's 750- 1,500 words), made quite a show. "35 inches? 35 inches! That's a lot to ask of any reader." That the narrative focused on chess did not exactly temper his fears. "Read it," I told him. "It will seem like 15 inches." W]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Zack's Farred Up]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-61</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-61</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin let's Roy Peter Clark have it (from a WriterL discussion on narrative length):

During one of those unavoidable by-committee meetings that accompany a large narrative, one of our designers, upon hearing that each installment would run 35-50 inches (I think that's 750- 1,500 words), made quite a show. "35 inches? 35 inches! That's a lot to ask of any reader." That the narrative focused on chess did not exactly temper his fears. "Read it," I told him. "It will seem like 15 inches." W]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading Room, Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p60</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p60</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 20 Aug 2005 17:38:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse asks if Corey Kilgannon's The Endless Night works: "One night, hanging out with teenagers, apropos of nothing much. Does it work?"

Elizabeth Gilbert on the worst wedding toast ever.

Bruce Feldman on what happens when a freckled 15-year-old named Brittany collides with an upward-reaching football program.

David Finkel on a Bush-loving family.

Michael Brick on dinosaur bones in Brooklyn.

Julie Cart and Maria L. La Ganga on a conservationist's suicide.

Tomas Alex Tizon on Hawaii's hole ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading Room, Again]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-60</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-60</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 20 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse asks if Corey Kilgannon's The Endless Night works: "One night, hanging out with teenagers, apropos of nothing much. Does it work?"

Elizabeth Gilbert on the worst wedding toast ever.

Bruce Feldman on what happens when a freckled 15-year-old named Brittany collides with an upward-reaching football program.

David Finkel on a Bush-loving family.

Michael Brick on dinosaur bones in Brooklyn.

Julie Cart and Maria L. La Ganga on a conservationist's suicide.

Tomas Alex Tizon on Hawaii's hole ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trucker Love]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p59</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p59</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Aug 2005 13:01:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NEW: Here's the end.

Figured I'd throw this on for your thoughts and advice. On Tuesday, I pitched a short serial out of the 2005 National Truck Driving Championships this week in Tampa. The bosses gave me Wednesday to report and said they'd decide if we wanted to do it again when I had written the first piece. So I went in early and reported broad and at the end of the day I could have gone three ways with this story: father and son truckers reconnecting at the championship; the oddity of a hu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Overstepping Our Bounds]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-58</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-58</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[David Finkel on overstatement:

"Do not overstate, no matter how big of a rush you're in. Be a fearless editor of yourself. See if things stand up, or if you're overstepping your bounds.

"Ten years ago in narrative, we got the benefit of the doubt. Now it's 180 degrees. We can't be excessive. We must be trustworthy and transparent."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Trucker Love]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-59</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-59</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[NEW: Here's the end.

Figured I'd throw this on for your thoughts and advice. On Tuesday, I pitched a short serial out of the 2005 National Truck Driving Championships this week in Tampa. The bosses gave me Wednesday to report and said they'd decide if we wanted to do it again when I had written the first piece. So I went in early and reported broad and at the end of the day I could have gone three ways with this story: father and son truckers reconnecting at the championship; the oddity of a hu]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Playing With Blocks]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-57</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-57</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[New New Journalism excerpt, from an interview with Lawrence Weschler:

Are there any activities that help at this point? Two things. One is that I read a lot of novels. Writers like Larry McMurtry and Walter Mosley are especially good. I'm sort of like a bicyclist riding behind a truck: I want to get into the slipstream of that other narrator's narrative. To get the feel of narrative, to be on the road, to remember what it feels like to tell a story. The second thing I do is play with blocks. I ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading Room, Deux]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-56</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-56</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Sunday hymnal: Please check out my boy's boy Marc Broussard, with his new video, for his song "Home." This kid is bad. Sounds like a 67-year-old black man. (Click on VIDEO beside Home.)

This historical serial, from the Hartford Courant's Jim Shea, starts pretty cool: That finally changes at about 1 a.m., when Torrington Mayor William T. Carroll gets on the phone and wakes up Gov. Abraham Ribicoff. "We've got trouble!" Carroll shouts into the receiver. "Rivers are running through the main street]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Morning Coffee]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-53</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-53</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Passed on from Goldberg, from Richard Ben Cramer's writings about Ted Williams (second graph in a 1986 excerpt for Esquire):

"It was forty-five years ago, when achievements with a bat first brought him to the nation's notice, that Ted Williams began work on his defense. He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America's dust."

Keith is right. "Bitchin'" gra]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Friday Night Cops]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-54</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-54</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Kruse passed along this piece from Connie Schultz. And check out Christian Wade's Trib debut: The Deep Lagoon clubhouse, a faded yellow building with clumps of long grass sprouting from its foundation, has a sign that was meant to be a listing for social events. But the blackboard is blank. No barbecues. No meetings. Nothing but a sarcastic missive someone scribbled in white chalk. "Happiness is a northern bound Yankee," it says. Inside the building, cardboard boxes and garbage are piled in corn]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Shame]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-55</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-55</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Writer's Almanac, in my view, is par to my Slick granny's buscuits and gravy. On behalf of the education of future generations of Kentuckians(ites?), shame on the gutless tricks that pulled it.

Here's one that inspired me, work-bound one dateless morning in the mid-sized family sedan: Topograph, by Sharon Olds (Let Keillor read it in your head).

After we flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco again]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Short Narrative]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-51</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-51</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Man. Read Mike Dawson: "Pat Campbell is giddy Wednesday as she emerges from her dank trailer, which has no electricity, and stands in her yard of squalor – a sagging heap of busted furniture, rain-soaked blankets and mattresses with nesting holes, where birds and rats pick over moldy bread and empty condensed milk cans. It's an hour before the Village Board will begin eminent domain proceedings to grab this land, the last of her lakefront property. "Tonight. Tonight is going to be my debut. My t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fall Reading List]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-52</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-52</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Mediabistro's list.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How We Do It In Oklahoma]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-50</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-50</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I told you. Fanclub.

"California v. Michael Jackson is a criminal trial, but if you sit on a metal folding chair in an oversize trailer behind the county courthouse watching it on a 35-inch RCA closed-circuit television set (as most of the press does, partly so they can make smart-alecky comments during the proceedings) for a stretch of several days, you also begin to see it as an epic fable: How the values of a 20th-century celebriculture came home to roost in the 21st.

It's about a boy who w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sunday Reading Room]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-49</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-49</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Don't miss Kevin Cullen's The Redemption of Shane Paul O'Doherty: "He was given his middle name because he was born on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, who was a zealous killer of Christians before his own conversion on the road to Damascus. But O'Doherty's story is not about a miraculous religious conversion as much as a gradual spiritual evolution. He had a tug of war with God, and God won."

Michael Brick's Finding Shade In A Legend's Shadow: "Frankie drinks his beer and the jukebox i]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Go On, Young Writers -- Treat Yourself To An Adverb]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-48</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-48</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 06 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin writes: The Hank Stuever riff sent me to the bookshelf for Nick Hornby's "The PolySyllabic Spree." I love it so much I'm going to retype it for Gangrey readers everywhere.

He's talking about novels and J.M. Coetzee in particular and how he got 907 hits when he googled "J.M. Coetzee and spare." His point is about fiction, but I think there's a parallel to what we do at newspapers, too. We're all trying to corral readers, right?

"Coetzee, of course, is a great novelist, so I don't ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Joseph Mitchell]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-44</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-44</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He left the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina in 1929 and headed to New York City. He was 21 years old. He got gigs at The World, then The Herald Tribune, then The World-Telegram, papers when papers were PAPERS, then the New Yorker, where he worked until his death in 1996.

These, from 1938, are his words:

"I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is a]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[It Aint So Bad]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-45</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-45</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Zack McMillin passed this along: If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says University of North Carolina professor Philip Meyer, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. But Paul Farhi tells us not to fret, newspapers are in good shape.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[He Speaks Truth]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-46</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-46</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I will soon be creating a Hank Stuever fan club. Read his critique of the Washington Post's critiques.

Highlights:

I think we've overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn't include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Why are we obsessed with the paper being too much, too large? Our counterparts at McDonalds, Googl]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[An Obit for People's Park]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-47</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-47</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[John Doherty nearly made me cry with his sad goodbye to a scruffy chunk of a scrippy-scrap city: It's always been a park by default. It's an empty lot next to the Newburgh Ministry soup kitchen, where for decades those clinging to the bottom rung of Newburgh's ladder have gathered. It's a stretch of weeds right off Broadway where wanderers passing through the city rest a bit, cadge a swig of Thunderbird wine, maybe spot a familiar face. "We sit down, we drink our beer," explained Edward Morales,]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Personal Essays]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-43</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-43</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Like this, by Jay Allison: A young boy molts. Tender skin falls off, or gets scraped off, and is replaced by a tougher, more permanent crust. The transition happens in moments, in events. All of a sudden, something is gone and something else is in its place. I made a change like that standing in the back of a pickup truck when I was 15.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[I'm In Love]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-41</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-41</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I don't know how I haven't run across this yet, but here's your girl, doing her thing, for free. From Nice Doggy: The other day, my Welsh springer spaniel, Cooper, gave me a manicure. He doesn't give the world's best manicure -- for that you'd have to go to that Korean joint, Nuclear Nails, or whatever it's called, on Broadway -- but he really tries. He can tell whether I'm in the mood to have my cuticles cut or just pushed back, and it was actually his idea to wear a little white uniform--he ca]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Serial From Cleveland]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-42</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-42</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Plain Dealer's film critic Joanna Connors does Andy's Last Secret in seven parts.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[God and Newspapers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p39</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p39</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Jul 2005 16:12:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Almost missed Brick's Longing For A Cuss-Free Zone: And all that art, if you want to call it that, reflects life, if you want to call it that. In the schoolyards kids bomb the pencils, the books and the teachers' dirty looks. Outside office buildings smokers bomb their bosses, and nonsmokers bomb the smokers. On the streets T-shirts bomb milk in favor of marijuana, bomb the space between the words New York and City and even bomb you just because "we're from Texas." Even the culture's hallowed sp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[God and Newspapers]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-39</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-39</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Almost missed Brick's Longing For A Cuss-Free Zone: And all that art, if you want to call it that, reflects life, if you want to call it that. In the schoolyards kids bomb the pencils, the books and the teachers' dirty looks. Outside office buildings smokers bomb their bosses, and nonsmokers bomb the smokers. On the streets T-shirts bomb milk in favor of marijuana, bomb the space between the words New York and City and even bomb you just because "we're from Texas." Even the culture's hallowed sp]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Times …]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p38</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p38</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jul 2005 22:19:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Barry: Irish shipwrights built St. Brigid's in 1848 as spiritual shelter for those brothers and sisters who survived steerage on famine ships. Its twin steeples rose over Tompkins Square in proud declaration to nativist New York: we Irish – we Catholics – are here to stay.

And Brick: It was no place to leave a baby in the middle of the night. The fence runs under the dirt and clang of the elevated train, around a lot of weeds in a neighborhood where the bodegas have bulletproof glass for a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More New New]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p37</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p37</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jul 2005 17:01:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben's last post inspired me to go back and do some re-reading.

Lawrence Weschler:

"I'm obsessed with a narrow range of huge issues: Passion. Grace. Exile. Blockage.

"In the case of passion, the overarching theme is something I describe as 'Inhaling the Spore.' In Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, the first image is of ants foraging for food on the rainforest floor, who every once in a while accidentally inhale the spore of a fungus. The spore lodges in their brain and they start to behave oddly]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[More New New]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-37</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-37</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben's last post inspired me to go back and do some re-reading.

Lawrence Weschler:

"I'm obsessed with a narrow range of huge issues: Passion. Grace. Exile. Blockage.

"In the case of passion, the overarching theme is something I describe as 'Inhaling the Spore.' In Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, the first image is of ants foraging for food on the rainforest floor, who every once in a while accidentally inhale the spore of a fungus. The spore lodges in their brain and they start to behave oddly]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Times ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-38</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-38</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Read Barry: Irish shipwrights built St. Brigid's in 1848 as spiritual shelter for those brothers and sisters who survived steerage on famine ships. Its twin steeples rose over Tompkins Square in proud declaration to nativist New York: we Irish - we Catholics - are here to stay.

And Brick: It was no place to leave a baby in the middle of the night. The fence runs under the dirt and clang of the elevated train, around a lot of weeds in a neighborhood where the bodegas have bulletproof glass for a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New New Dispatch]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p36</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p36</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:39:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This stuff from Richard Ben Cramer is so good I don't even want to share it: How do you know when a story is right for you? I'll mention an idea to my wife, and she'll say, "Ah, that's horseshit." And I'll get all defensive and argue with her, "No it's not, and the reason it's not horseshit is …!" That's when I know I'm hooked. It grown on me to the point where I start telling the story to people over and over again.

On interviewing techniques: (Talking here about seeking advice from a friend o]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Nut Grafs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p35</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p35</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2005 06:23:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is a story I wrote, yes, and it was done on deadline, and I'm not even sure I dig it, but I'll throw it out there as a way to start a discussion I think is worth having here.

Here are some pieces of messages I got from colleagues after it ran:

hey, liked the Schafer story. holding the nut graf til near the end didn't bother me one bit. headline, subhed and cutline all give the reader that up front anyway. you gave that guy a damn good sendoff.

i don't know… i think it works. the headline]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sense of Place]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p34</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p34</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:09:44 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm 17 pages in, and I already need to post from Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism, in an interview with Ted Conover: Do you have any reporting routines you follow when you arrive in a new town? Conover: I pay a lot of attention to place in my writing, so when I arrive in a new town I try to do what Lawrence Durrell recommended in his essay "Spirit of Place," which is to get still as a needle, as he puts it. ["It is a pit indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape value]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sense of Place]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-34</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-34</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm 17 pages in, and I already need to post from Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism, in an interview with Ted Conover: Do you have any reporting routines you follow when you arrive in a new town? Conover: I pay a lot of attention to place in my writing, so when I arrive in a new town I try to do what Lawrence Durrell recommended in his essay "Spirit of Place," which is to get still as a needle, as he puts it. ["It is a pit indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape value]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[On Nut Grafs]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-35</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-35</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This is a story I wrote, yes, and it was done on deadline, and I'm not even sure I dig it, but I'll throw it out there as a way to start a discussion I think is worth having here.

Here are some pieces of messages I got from colleagues after it ran:

hey, liked the Schafer story. holding the nut graf til near the end didn't bother me one bit. headline, subhed and cutline all give the reader that up front anyway. you gave that guy a damn good sendoff.

i don't know... i think it works. the headli]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[New New Dispatch]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-36</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-36</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[This stuff from Richard Ben Cramer is so good I don't even want to share it: How do you know when a story is right for you? I'll mention an idea to my wife, and she'll say, "Ah, that's horseshit." And I'll get all defensive and argue with her, "No it's not, and the reason it's not horseshit is ...!" That's when I know I'm hooked. It grown on me to the point where I start telling the story to people over and over again.

On interviewing techniques: (Talking here about seeking advice from a friend]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dose of Dan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p33</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p33</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jul 2005 18:20:33 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Today's Dan Barry:

POLICE officers stopped a sightseeing bus in Times Square on Sunday morning, and not because they suddenly desired to see the South Street Seaport. Urgent word had come to them of suspicious men on board, acting suspiciously in these suspicious times.

Within seconds, the tourists on the double-decker bus had their hands raised high, in pantomime of thrill-seekers riding the Cyclone. And within minutes, five of those tourists, all dark-skinned men, had their hands in cuffs an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Write Like Yourself]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p32</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p32</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jul 2005 16:52:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Yagoda tells Poynter's Chip Scanlan why style is important:

"Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a twenty-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster each playing a chorus of "All the Things You Are," of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme each fixing a duck a l'orange, of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson each designing a 20-story office tower on the same corner of the same city, or of Pieter Breughel and Vincent van Gogh each painting the same farmhouse. Everybody under]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Write Like Yourself]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-32</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-32</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ben Yagoda tells Poynter's Chip Scanlan why style is important:

"Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a twenty-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster each playing a chorus of "All the Things You Are," of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme each fixing a duck a l'orange, of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson each designing a 20-story office tower on the same corner of the same city, or of Pieter Breughel and Vincent van Gogh each painting the same farmhouse. Everybody under]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Dose of Dan]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-33</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-33</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Today's Dan Barry:

POLICE officers stopped a sightseeing bus in Times Square on Sunday morning, and not because they suddenly desired to see the South Street Seaport. Urgent word had come to them of suspicious men on board, acting suspiciously in these suspicious times.

Within seconds, the tourists on the double-decker bus had their hands raised high, in pantomime of thrill-seekers riding the Cyclone. And within minutes, five of those tourists, all dark-skinned men, had their hands in cuffs an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Night Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p31</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p31</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2005 20:53:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love retyping this piece by Bob Considine, via The International News Service, 1938.

Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling. It was a shocking thing, that knockout – short, sharp, merciless, complete. Louis was like this: He was a big lean copper spring, tightened and retightened through weeks of training until he was one pregnant packag]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seven]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p30</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p30</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2005 07:31:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Got in the mail in a package from Amazon.com a big fat book called The Seven Basic Plots.

In it a dorky British guy named Christopher Booker says that's how many stories there are.

1. Rebirth.

2. Tragedy.

3. Comedy.

4. The Quest.

5. Voyage and Return.

6. Rags to Riches.

7. Overcoming the Monster.

That's it.

Discuss.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Seven]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-30</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-30</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Got in the mail in a package from Amazon.com a big fat book called The Seven Basic Plots.

In it a dorky British guy named Christopher Booker says that's how many stories there are.

1. Rebirth.

2. Tragedy.

3. Comedy.

4. The Quest.

5. Voyage and Return.

6. Rags to Riches.

7. Overcoming the Monster.

That's it.

Discuss.]]></description>
      <author>Kruse</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Night Reading]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-31</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-31</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[I love retyping this piece byBob Considine, via The International News Service, 1938.

Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling. It was a shocking thing, that knockout - short, sharp, merciless, complete. Louis was like this: He was a big lean copper spring, tightened and retightened through weeks of training until he was one pregnant package]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Maureen's Mom]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-29</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-29</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[And when reporters just starting out asked her for advice about journalism, she replied sagely: "Get on the front page a lot and use the word 'allegedly' a lot."]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Awakening]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-26</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-26</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Up Highway 96, sometimes called the State Fair Freeway, past the cliche of wheat fields, the thicket of signs proclaiming a right to life, take a left on 23rd Avenue and you will find a very plain nursing home, where something happened that wasn't supposed to happen.

Defied man-made logic.

Resisted complicated scientific analysis.

Couldn't be explained by some of the smartest brains in the world.

Still can't.

(When you're done, check out Kruse's version.)]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Hot and Bothered]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-27</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-27</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[He keeps cranking out stuff like this:

This time there were no all-night happy hours in front of the bodegas, no battery-powered boom boxes blasting news updates between "In Da Club" and "Hey Ya!" No neighborhood tough guys made it their jobs to direct traffic, winking at the girls and waving flashlights, and you can bet nobody will sell T-shirts when it is done.

If mamas tell their babies about the blackout of ought-five, they will not speak of a whole region plunged into darkness, as in 2003]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Senses in Print]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-28</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-28</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ran across a good question: How do we use our senses to report without slipping into cliche? Lynn Franklin points out that taste and smell are aspects of reality best shown in print, not broadcast. But how do we report those with originality?

Dan Barry's one of the best. Here he makes the Fulton Fish Market smell poetic:

"It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada, Florida, and the squid-ink East Ri]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ghosts Of A Queens Press Room]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-24</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-24</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 23 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Newspaper writing was better then than now, Jimmy Breslin tells Corey Kilgannon, because "the language has been hurt by the computer."

"It was a product of nervous energy back then," he said. "It came out of a city room with noise and typewriters and thick smoke all through the joint. It was horrible, terrible and unhealthy, and now they have computers that can do wondrous things and everybody sits at them and bores the world. There used to be newspaper bars where everyone hung out and talked. ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[(Parenthesis)]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-25</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-25</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[How does Hank Stuever pull it off in every graph without looking stupid?

And don't miss his ending:

Doohan was Scotty; Scotty was Doohan, and an archetypal employee/colleague/friend was given a name: Scotty is the person in your office who swears that a project cannot possibly get done by deadline, then somehow pulls it out at the last minute. His favorite words: can't, won't, need more, impossible, losing power, can't, won't, overloaded, no way.

You have to let the Scottys blow off steam, an]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tomorrow?]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-22</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-22</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The New York Times has seen tomorrow, and it is Medicaid fraud and man dates! On July 6, Times managing editor Jill Abramson and associate managing editor Rick Berke convened a lunchtime gathering of the paper's youngest writers—including health-system-expos&eacute; scribe Michael Luo and social-trend-piece innovator Jennifer 8. Lee—to urge them to put their stamp on the paper. The morning that Judith Miller was heading to jail in the name of civil disobedience, Ms. Abramson was telling The Time]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Johnny Cash Talks Stories]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-23</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-23</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God."

Makes sense, doesn't it?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Working Backward]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-20</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-20</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From a Wall Street Journal interview with John Irving on his latest book: "Novels are exaggerations of life -- we exaggerate the worst and the best of our experiences. . . . It [this story] is a tale of extreme dysfunction. I work that way because I begin with endings first. I build a novel as a piece of architecture from the back to the front. I need to do that because if you are going to take a long journey, which writing a novel is for me, I want to know that there is an emotional payoff at t]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Vision]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-21</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-21</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["The novelist's eye for detail and attention to moral complexity is not just a bag of techniques. It is a way of seeing, a kind of theory of human behavior. When we inquire with what we think of as the needs of storytelling imbedded in our search, we are actually attuning ourselves beforehand to that human richness so often missing in our journalism. When used properly, the novelist's eye opens our eyes and heads and hearts to the breadth of what we can and should be looking for in our reporting]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Franklin's Treasure Chest]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-19</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-19</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ever wonder where you can find vintage Jon Franklin?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[A Surprise ...]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-18</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-18</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thanks to Keith Goldberg for noticing this serial narrative from Kurt Streeter.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Fish]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-16</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-16</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 09 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ann Gerhart proves there's a story in 873 pounds of bluefin tuna.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Writing our own obits]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-17</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-17</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 09 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["There's a sky-is-falling quality to the media's conversation about their own troubles." But is it really all that bad?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ira Glass]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-14</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-14</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Transom.org Ira is a radio hero because of the way he listens, and the way his listening summons stories you remember. He is a champion for the Many Voices that public radio's mission says it values. This American Life is not the voice of record, but a record of the voices around us. The stories are as fully strange and hopeful and funny and harsh and romantic as America itself...and occasionally all at the same time. They sprawl outside the usual standard-issue broadcast confines, telling ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Imitate others]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-15</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-15</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Ira Glass suggests we imitate others. "Painters do it," he says. "Why don't we?" Michael Kruse, sounding a lot like Mikey from The Goonies when he's standing in the waterfall and trying to convince the others not to ride up in Troy's bucket, responds. "We DON'T? WHO doesn't? Every time I drop overheard dialogue or lyrics, it's Anne Hull. Every time I read over what I've got just to hear how it SOUNDS, it's Dan Barry. Every time I go short-sentence staccato (and, please, please, please, hope to h]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Ladder of Abstraction]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-12</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-12</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Some writers are simply better at finding meaning. Their habits of mind find connections that other writers miss. They discover patterns in what others see as chaotic thickets of information. And they have a knack for explaining their findings in ways that relate to the lives of their readers. No doubt some of that ability flows from God-given talent. A good education counts for something, too. But the ability to find meaning is also a skill. Any writer can get better at it. One route to improve]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The man who would be king]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-13</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-13</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Not even a half-hour before show time, Hernando County's Elvis Presley is upstairs, in Room 615 of the Sheraton, wearing a tight white suit circa 1972, changing his daughter's diaper.

"We got 20 minutes to get down there," he says to his family.

And then?

Three songs to go huge.

Kenny Grube is a part-time drum teacher, a full-time stay-at- home dad, and a guy who wanted to be a rock star for pretty much forever.

For years he hung Sheetrock during the day, and at night played the drums in di]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Six Tips]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-11</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-11</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Saw these at The Neiman Narrative Digest, from a Laurie Hertzel speech early this year. She's the enterprise editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and she's good.

Tip one: Write with a Camera Angle To make a scene vivid, think like a movie maker. Don't try to describe everything; aim your camera. What do you want to zoom in on? Do you want to show the subject closely, intimately, slow down and build tension? Or do you want to pull back, show more sweep, use a wider camera angle, so to speak --]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tips]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p9</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p9</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2005 22:00:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The folks on WriterL are recalling tips passed on by Jon Franklin. A few are worth noting.

From Adina Gewirtz: Jon called it the "black box" school of deduction. That's to look at the outcome a person achieves – look at what he actually has done, rather than what he says he meant to do. Then try to figure out why he wanted that outcome, what that outcome did for him. Eliminate, to start, the idea that things happen by coincidence. Eliminate the person's protestations that he or she didn't mean ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tips]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-9</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-9</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The folks on WriterL are recalling tips passed on by Jon Franklin. A few are worth noting.

From Adina Gewirtz: Jon called it the "black box" school of deduction. That's to look at the outcome a person achieves - look at what he actually has done, rather than what he says he meant to do. Then try to figure out why he wanted that outcome, what that outcome did for him. Eliminate, to start, the idea that things happen by coincidence. Eliminate the person's protestations that he or she didn't mean ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[My Girls]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p8</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p8</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jun 2005 23:08:53 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[They are a story.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bulletin Board]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p7</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p7</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jun 2005 23:01:40 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["We aren't trying only to tell a good story. We're trying to chronicle and illuminate the world, take readers into the lives of people they would never meet, write stories that are mirrors in which readers can glimpse a piece of unexpected humanity in others and, perhaps, even in themselves. If you do not have this deep commitment, it will be far easier for you to fall prey to making it up." — Walt Harrington

"This world … which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing a]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Youngblood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p6</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p6</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jun 2005 22:44:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check this out, from Ramsey Al-Rikabi of the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Youngblood]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-6</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-6</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Check this out, from Ramsey Al-Rikabi of the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Bulletin Board]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-7</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-7</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA["We aren't trying only to tell a good story. We're trying to chronicle and illuminate the world, take readers into the lives of people they would never meet, write stories that are mirrors in which readers can glimpse a piece of unexpected humanity in others and, perhaps, even in themselves. If you do not have this deep commitment, it will be far easier for you to fall prey to making it up." -- Walt Harrington

"This world ... which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thin]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[My Girls]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-8</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-8</guid>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[They are a story.]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pretty Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p5</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jun 2005 23:30:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Brave Men: "I've written many times that war isn't romantic to the people in it. But there in that plane, all of a sudden, things did seem romantic. A heavy darkness had come inside the cabin. Passengers were indistinct shapes, kneeling at the windows — to absorb the spell of the hour. The remnants of the sun streaked the cloud-banked horizon ahead, making it vividly red and savagely beautiful. We were high, and the motors throbbed in a timeless rhythm. Below us were the green peaks of the ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Pretty Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-5</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-5</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[From Brave Men: "I've written many times that war isn't romantic to the people in it. But there in that plane, all of a sudden, things did seem romantic. A heavy darkness had come inside the cabin. Passengers were indistinct shapes, kneeling at the windows -- to absorb the spell of the hour. The remnants of the sun streaked the cloud-banked horizon ahead, making it vividly red and savagely beautiful. We were high, and the motors throbbed in a timeless rhythm. Below us were the green peaks of the]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Little Girl In Grave 1565]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p4</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jun 2005 22:22:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[The Little Girl in Grave 1565 Life November, 1991

For 47 years after she died in a tragic circus fire, no one knew her name. This is the story of two people: one obsessed with finding out who she was, the other wanting only to forget what happened.

By Gary Smith

In a housing complex for the elderly in Easthampton, Mass., lived a lady in her eighties with sharp and clear blue eyes.

The capital of Alabama is Montgomery.

Her life was busy for a woman her age. She still worked two half days a w]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Words]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-4</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-4</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Thinking: We should use more proper nouns. Doesn't it sound better to say Longhorn Steakhouse rather than local eatery?]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Eating Jack Hooker's Cow]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-p3</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Jun 2005 20:45:11 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[By Michael Paterniti Esquire, Nov. 1, 1997

Go with him. Go out into the feed yards with Jack Hooker. His daddy was a cattleman, he was a cattleman, his son today is a cattleman. Go out to the feed yards near Dodge City, Kansas, out into the stink of manure and the lowing slabs of cow, into the hot sun and rain and driving snow with Jack Hooker and know what it means to be a man.

First, a man looks like someone who's lived awhile. Looks like Jack Hooker. Has a neck like Jack Hooker's, the back ]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Starting Somewhere]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-starting-somewhere-june-2005</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-starting-somewhere-june-2005</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[So I'm speaking in a participation in government class in a high school in Newburgh, N.Y., and a kid at the back of the class raises his hand. 

"Yep," I point. "How do you know all this stuff you write?" he asked. 

I didn't understand. 

"You be writing it like you be there," he said. 

His question has baffled me since. The stories his teacher had given him to read before my visit were mostly narratives, mostly about crime in an ugly, dangerous section of the Hudson River city of Newburgh. Th]]></description>
      <author>Ben Montgomery</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Read These]]></title>
      <link>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-3</link>
      <guid>https://gangrey.org/stories/gangrey-3</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Back in Howard Beach, the pot and the kettle are both black

Dan Barry

David Finkel

Anne Hull

Michael Kruse

Dan Barry

The Lost Youth of Leech Lake]]></description>
      <author>Ben</author>
      <category>Gangrey Redux</category>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>