Family Room
ON THE FOURTH DAY I went to get a sense of the devastation. The street outside my building in lower Manhattan was still cordoned off on either end by police, and you needed an escort and proof of ID to get in or out. The young officer who stood guard on the corner said that two of his colleagues from the police station next door were missing. “A man and a woman,” he said. “We’re still hoping.” READ MORE >>
Manhattan Dispatch: Scrapped
By the time I reached the roof of my apartment building on 21st Street, one of the towers was already gone. All you could see was a plume of smoke. An elderly tenant, who lives in the penthouse, was leaning over her railing, blinking at it. "Some fool flew right into it," she said. The doorman, Miguel, pulled out a Polaroid camera and took a snapshot. "I saw the plane come right in and hit it," he told me. "It was too low." READ MORE >>
To Die For
“Everybody is kind of sitting around waiting for a slow speed chase and waiting to write, you know, this into a movie.”—A guest on “The Edge With Paula Zahn,” Fox News, May 15 READ MORE >>
The Courtship
"I'M ON THE record. D'ya hear me? I'm on the record. Dov Hikind is a self-anointed power broker and kingmaker. He's a political cross-dresser. He's not a man of enormous scruples or morals. He looks for a parade and runs to the front of it and declares he's leading it. He's a craven opportunist--d'ya hear me? An insufferable egomaniac." READ MORE >>
Crimetown USA
There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses or police and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Sometimes neighbors would hear the short, sharp sound of gunfire and then nothing, a silence you can't describe unless you've heard it, which if you're lucky you haven't. READ MORE >>
Race Against Himself
Ghosts
The phone startled Suzette Latsko. She had worked the night shift at the hotel and was at home napping when it rang. The woman on the other end said she was conducting a poll on the upcoming South Carolina primary and wanted to ask a few questions. Latsko, who is working toward a degree in political science at the College of Charleston, perked up. “Go ahead,” she said. READ MORE >>
Entrenched Warfare
The Hero Myth
The Stasi and The Swan
In the spring of 1995, Jim Clark, who had spent half his life spying on others, was sure someone was spying on him. He first noticed the person when he got off the plane in Germany. Now, at the train station in Bonn, he could see the man's reflection in the ticket counter window. He knew from experience that people do silly things when they think they're being watched, but he did them despite himself: zigzagging across the terminal, spinning around, even walking backward. READ MORE >>
