Tuesday Reading

Stephen Nohlgren: It lacks the carnal drama of a python-alligator showdown in the Everglades, or the body-slamming potential of a leaping Suwannee sturgeon. But given its staid urban habitat, this quirk of nature bears telling.

A large goliath grouper lives in a stormwater retention pond in mid Pinellas County.

It probably came from the bay through an outlet pipe when it was young – perhaps more than a decade ago. A fisherman who recently hooked it thinks it approaches 180 pounds, still modest for a species that can top 800.

Now it may be landlocked – too fat to squeeze back through the pipe to a more natural setting.

Joe Eaton: Inside his rural Virginia house trailer, Carson Warner lounges on a love seat that sits atop two-by-fours that keep it from crashing through the waterlogged floor. Black mildew circles stain the ceiling, marking spots where rain has trickled through.

"It's like a matchbox," Carson says of the trailer where he lives with his wife, Lorraine, and their 14-year-old daughter, Michelle. "You put water on it and it mushes."

Carson doesn't want to fill the holes in the roof or the gaps around the windows. The furnace quit years ago, and the wind that blows through the home clears away the fumes from the kerosene heater.

Michael Kruse: Ben Pumo's path to salvation started with a daily walk to work along a thin cracked concrete sidewalk on a road called Sunset Lane.

Three DUIs meant he had to walk. This was late 1998, where he lives in Lutz, and the walk went past a post office, a Dollar Tree, a Winn-Dixie, and to Villaggio Italian restaurant, where he had a job washing dishes.

It's only 1.2 miles, but that was a long walk in every other way – every day, over and over, there in the light and back in the dark.

But it led, somehow, to here, an unlikely success story in an unlikely place, his own award-winning Benedetto's, in a converted Captain D's fast-food fish joint, in the middle of the parking lot of the old Village Lakes Shopping Center with an Amscot and a Wal-Mart with a fading blue sign.

Libby Copeland: LAS VEGAS — This is a good place to talk about the American dream — which could be on the verge of disappearing, according to the Democrats who campaigned for president here in recent days.

It's a good place because Vegas is so American, with all its gaudy most-most-mostness, and because so many people move here every month, drawn by all that land and all that opportunity, drawn by the sense that a person could remake a life here. There are cities farther west than Vegas, but few places that feel so Western, so much like the carefree frontier. The decadence of the Strip! The designer stores and overpriced gourmet sandwiches! (Recession? What recession?)

Those who live in Vegas talk as if they were blown here on a breeze.

Noam Cohen: "NASHUA: Just saw Bill O'reily misbehaving at Obama rallly. Shoving Obama staffer."

With these sloppily spelled words, sent Jan. 5 by text message by John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for the online magazine Slate, did microjournalism come of age.

The encounter between Mr. O'Reilly, the Fox News host, and the campaign aide did become actual news, kind of, for a day (a brief item ran in The New York Times, for example). But it first emerged from a high school gym in New Hampshire via Mr. Dickerson's BlackBerry.