From the story, When Murray Met Helen
When Murray was recovering from his fall off the roof the previous June he sought Renard’s advice on what to do with the four wooden crates he kept in his basement. They were each the size of a long piano bench, pine boards with maple strapping. Three had been nailed shut, and one was open to collect the remainder of the papers, recordings, momentos and artifacts that Murray would be selecting to preserve.
Continue reading Artifacts
By John Hancock
The outcomes are not good. Here are a few recent examples in my news feed:
• $600 in shopping vouchers were a powerful inducement to get pregnant women to stop smoking.
• Some seats in the stadium for the Super Bowl sold for more $20,000.
• Even for those who didn’t attend football’s biggest game, we gambled an average of $12 (the per-person rate for all us Americans) for a chance to get other people’s money, for fun.
• In the Hamptons, a 29-year-old man killed his investment banker over a $200/month reduction in his monthly allowance. Continue reading The Wealth Money Can’t Buy
From the story, When Murray Met Helen
In the letter she received from Harry Michaels on the first day of December, he did not overtly disclose to Helen that he was the executor of Murray’s estate. Before she even opened it, she’d come very close to mistakenly throwing it in the recycling pile, as it looked like one of those cheeky junk mail offerings that feigns authenticity by using fake handwriting in the address. But then she remembered the name on the ivory envelope and connected it to the lawyerly-looking man who approached her after the funeral. Continue reading Bequeathed
By Tim Connor
Seven years ago I set aside a platter of cynicism to caucus in my community for the candidate who eventually became the nation’s first black President.
I don’t exactly remember the ratio of hope to disgust behind that decision. The war in Iraq—induced with false pretenses and fabricated intelligence—had become an expensive, bloody quagmire. Worse, still, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s pronouncement in September 2001 that the U.S. would go to the “dark side” and use “any means at our disposal” to fight terrorism. This not only led to the shame of Abu Ghraib but to the sanctioning of physical and psychological cruelty as a tool of national policy. Along the way, the Bush Administration twisted arms and minds to euphemize torture as an “enhanced interrogation technique” and, in so doing, basically put the U.S. government in moral league with Latin American drug lords. Continue reading A Tortured Presidency
