In the Ruins of a Blue and White Empire
“Jay Paterno is in the basement bar of an Italian restaurant owned by a friend of his, pretending he’s taking a shower. He’s standing purposefully, uncomfortably close to the guy he’s talking to, and one of his arms is raised, and he’s pretending to soap his armpit, and he’s saying that the showers in the football building aren’t so cramped, that you wouldn’t be forced so close together there. You can take a shower with somebody there and it wouldn’t be like you were necessarily invading their personal space. It wouldn’t be like that.
Walking the Border
“Planning a walk along the border, you quickly encounter certain problems.
One problem is political. The only feasible way to walk the actual borderline is to follow the dirt roads used by the Border Patrol, but a lot of those roads appear only on proprietary maps that the Border Patrol refuses to give out to members of the public. You can turn to online satellite imagery, but these days even that can’t keep pace with how quickly new border roads are being plowed.
Another problem is geographical. The borderlands, whatever route you sketch through them, are a rough mix of deserts and mountains.
Sometimes problems meld the geographic and the political, because sometimes politics dictate geography. Example: I’m in an area known as Smuggler’s Gulch, just east of the Friendship Circle. My maps show a deep ravine, one that drug and human traffickers used for decades to ferry their goods across the border. But a few years ago the Department of Homeland Security, armed with congressional permission to waive a number of environmental laws and regulations, sent in earthmovers to decapitate some nearby hills, filled the ravine with the resulting 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt, then topped it with a Border Patrol road and floodlights. Smuggler’s Gulch, an ancient wrinkle in the earth, has been Botoxed. My maps are wrong.
The Brain That Changed Everything
“When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison’s skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time — a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry’s brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin.
Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die
“As a new report suggests NBC News is using similar tactics from “To Catch a Predator” in pursuit of war criminals, look back at this inside account of the controversial television series
Biography of Usain Bolt, Mutant
“In just two years, he has demolished the 100-meter dash world records with times that are superhuman — literally thirty years ahead of what they historically should be. So what if the greatest athlete alive decided to actually get serious?
