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A Not-So-Innocent Bystander Memories of War: Never Saved, Never Forgotten Just Serve Me Tomatoes and Mashed Potatoes: Give Me the Sample Life Mapping With the Mind’s Eye My Best Friends’ Weddings
 
A Not-So-Innocent Bystander

A Not-So-Innocent Bystander

I had lulled myself into a deep daze as I clung to the bar of the 1 subway train, rocking side to side as the carriage gained momentum and Rachmaninov’s Vivace seeped through my headphones. I was in no hurry, no mood to compete with all the commuters racing home as they got off at 72nd street. I paced myself, taking a few minutes to reaffirm my grip on reality, as I prepared to console a friend who had just discovered half-naked photos of a redhead on her boyfriends phone. As I headed toward the exit, a figure in a black jacket rushed past -- and then I heard a young girl screeching in distress.

Memories of War: Never Saved, Never Forgotten

Memories of War: Never Saved, Never Forgotten

Tuesday. 6:30 pm. A ship is sinking; a man has fallen overboard. He desperately stretches his left arm while one of his fellow merchant marines, lying down on the boat, tries to reach him. The distance between their hands is small, less than an inch. But their hands never meet. As the water level of the Hudson River increases, one wave after another start to cover the head of the man in the water Ever hopeful, he continues to stretch his arm.

Just Serve Me Tomatoes and Mashed Potatoes: Give Me the Sample Life

Just Serve Me Tomatoes and Mashed Potatoes: Give Me the Sample Life

IIt’s a frigid weekday afternoon and Whole Foods Market in Union Square is packed with the usual suspects: Nannies pushing baby carriages, office-less freelancers sipping chai in the upstairs café, and business men and women making the lunch-time rounds at the salad bar. The only thing they have in common, it seems, is a commitment to sampling the store’s myriad of free samples: California rolls at the sushi bar, slices of pumpernickel by the bakery, and sautéed scallops on toothpicks, designed to entice them to make a $14.99 a pound purchase.

Mapping With the Mind’s Eye

Mapping With the Mind’s Eye

Danielle Hartman styled and colored her conceptual map of New York’s population to resemble the illustration on the box of a world map jigsaw puzzle. “New York – Global Island” assembles Manhattan as an archipelago, whose islands resembles the country that most residents of a particular neighborhood come from. An elongated Russia occupies Manhattan’s northwest corner; the United States, with compacted proportions, sits on midtown; and a crooked, curvy China, perhaps unsurprisingly, floats over Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

My Best Friends’ Weddings

My Best Friends’ Weddings

I picked up the phone one night last June and it was my best friend’s boyfriend. He told me he wanted to be her fiance. At that moment, I realized two things: I was old enough, at 22 years old, to have friends who get married, and I’m far too selfish to join the ranks. My biggest concern at the time was whether I could afford a weekend getaway for myself to Las Vegas.

A Retreat from the Real World, Maybe

A Retreat from the Real World, Maybe

“Here we are,” Sister Deanna said with satisfaction. “Look what God has put together.” It was a bright February morning at the Villa Maria Academy, a sprawling Catholic school campus and nuns’ residence in the tree-lined Country Club section of the Bronx. Eastchester Bay glimmered through the windows of the long, narrow living room where Sister Deanna Sabetta sat reclining in a rocking chair. Around her were four graying nuns, one in a traditional black habit, the other three in slacks and sweaters. There was a television on the mantle, a large wooden crucifix on the wall, and four potential members of the next generation sitting on couches opposite the nuns, gazing at them quietly.

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Fashion’s Theory of Relativity

Fashion’s Theory of Relativity

“I don’t think I’m emotionally prepared to do this,” a young woman said, staring at a pile of jeans strewn across a Loehmann’s display table in Washington, D.C. Standing next to her, also debating whether or not to grab a pair, I felt like I was in the presence of a mind reader. Sighing, the woman tucked her short, brown hair behind her ear and fled the scene, jeanless, her trench coat whipping up in the air as she turned the corner to the dressing room. Fearing that I wouldn’t be able to fit my “ideal” size, I did the same.

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Blind Ambition: Falling in Love with Love

Blind Ambition: Falling in Love with Love

Toward the end of his college days, Joe Strechay started to lose his knack for dating. One evening a girl he took out for dinner snapped, “Hey. eyes up here!” after she found him staring at her breasts. What she did not understand, what Strechay could not figure out how to explain on a first date, was that he had recently begun to lose his eyesight, and was trying to adjust to establishing eye contact in dark places.

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New York’s Other Real Estate Crunch

New York’s Other Real Estate Crunch

If you think finding an apartment in Manhattan is difficult, try finding ground space to be buried in. There is only one operating cemetery in the borough, and the plots in its 24 acres have been sold out for decades.

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The High Cost of Gluten-Free Good Health

The High Cost of Gluten-Free Good Health

Celiac disease, an elusive diagnosis that can take years to pin down, requires simply that the patient avoid all foods that contain gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. But that single sentence can be so expensive, thanks to the high price of specialty food products, that some patients can't afford to get better.

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Anything I Can Do, You Can Do Better

Anything I Can Do, You Can Do Better

Looking out of his college bedroom window, Harry Schill, a psychology major at Princeton, was feeling lazy. He didn’t want to leave his room, but he needed a library book and had to pick something up from the store. “I thought, look at all these people walking by my room,” he explains. “They’re walking right by what I need. Why can’t I just offer them some small amount of money and get what I want?”

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Double or Nothing: An Athlete’s Two Lives

Double or Nothing: An Athlete’s Two Lives

About five days a week, 40-year-old Alex, a self-proclaimed “partially open” gay man whose name has been changed for the sake of privacy, leads a double life in the world of sports. Alex plays on five different adult-league hockey teams. In New York, Alex is out to all three of his teams; he plays under a pseudonym, but his friends know his real name. But on his two New Jersey teams, Alex chooses to keep his sexual orientation a secret from his straight teammates, because he feels uncomfortable coming out in his less-than-welcoming surroundings.

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Breaking News: The Fragile Strength of Glass

Breaking News: The Fragile Strength of Glass

When Kevin Kutch removes glass from the furnace it is actually in liquid form and measures at 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit – a temperature that is approximately equivalent to what the underbelly of the space shuttle endures when reentering Earth’s atmosphere. The egg-shaped blob of molten glass sticks to the end of Kutch’s five-foot pole, glowing deep orange. Wearing Kevlar gloves to withstand the heat, Kutch clutches the pole at the opposite end and runs water across the middle of it to cool it down, being careful not to let the water touch the glass.

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Tea for Two

Tea for Two

Live piano music tinkles through the air, mingling with soft, cultivated murmurs and the clink of silver on china. The hostess stands with a tight smile, waiting to welcome people in. Light pours through the enormous stained-glass skylight, gleaming on carved golden wood. This is where certain people have always come to pretend they live in another time, another place.

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Attending Cabbie College

Attending Cabbie College

Chernor Sow decided that in order to step out of his father’s shoes, he must first step into them. The twenty-year-old from Sierra Leone wanted to become a Yellow Taxi driver in New York, but only so that he could pay his way through college. To make sure he qualified, Sow decided to attend a small private tutoring academy in Jackson Heights, in Queens.

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Word Count

"Journalism is literature in a hurry." -- Matthew Arnold

Logo design: Robin Palanker

Mixed Media: Journalism Goes to the Movies

A selective (as opposed to a comprehensive) list:

It Happened One Night (1934): A reporter in need of a scoop finds a runaway heiress.

His Girl Friday (1940): A remake of 'The Front Page,' about an editor trying to keep his ex-wife from quitting the paper for suburban life.

Foreign Correspondent (1940): On the brink of World War II, an American journalist exposes enemy agents in London.

Philadelphia Story (1940): Tabloid journalist snoops for dirt about the father of the bride.

Citizen Kane (1941): Charles Foster Kane/William Randolph Hearst, Orson Welles' first feature.

Meet John Doe (1941): Reporter who's about to get fired makes up an unemployed guy who intends to kill himself -- and then hires someone to impersonate him.

Ace in the Hole (1951): Washed-up big city reporter exploits a New Mexico mining disaster to revive his career.

Deadline USA (1952): Editor tries to save a dying newspaper.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957): A powerful gossip columnist and the publicist who needs him.

The Parallax View (1974): 'All the President's Men' meets 'The Manchurian Candidate.' The reporter's not paranoid; they are chasing him.

All the President's Men (1976): The journalist as national hero.

Network (1976): Satire for broadcast concentrators.

Under Fire (1983): TV journalists in Nicaragua before the 1979 revolution.

The Killing Fields (1984): Based on the true story of NYT Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Sydney Schanberg and his Cambodian interpreter, Dith Pran.

Street Smart (1987): A reporter fakes a profile to get a cover story -- and a pimp uses the story as a murder alibi.

Broadcast News (1987): A mainstream romantic comedy set in a TV newsroom.

L.A. Confidential (1997): Corruption everywhere, and a sleazy tabloid to report it all.

State of Play (2003): The 6-episode British TV series, not the movie, for a look at the collision between old and new media.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005): CBS newsman and commentator Edward R. Murrow goes after Senator Joe McCarthy and the HUAC investigation.

Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006): Two takes on Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood,' a classic of narrative non-fiction.