Brian Chasnoff

The Moth has been fluttering around for more than a decade now — under my radar until a friend Tweeted about it a few weeks ago. (I’m sensing an aerial theme here.)

Anyway: true stories, pure and unfiltered. Check out the podcasts, and enjoy.

In the middle of Dave Cullen‘s recently released 358-page account of the Columbine school schootings, he quotes from anonymous letters discovered in the bedroom of one of the young victims years before the shootings took place.

In the context of the massacre, the significance of the letters is peripheral. Their author is never revealed. Apparently, he or she was a close friend of the victim, Cassie Bernall. The notes were discovered in Cassie’s bedroom about two years before Eric Harris slammed a hand down on a table in Columbine’s library, squatted down for a look underneath and said “Peekaboo” before shooting the girl in the head with a shotgun.

But its content is an illustration of what works best about Cullen’s book: fruits of startling fact plucked from years of painstaking research and a long, cold stare at an adolescent heart of darkness.

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This is too interesting to ignore. And I’ve never seen someone use Twitter this way.

Dan Baum, a reporter who lost a staff writing position at The New Yorker in 2007, is Tweeting the story of his hiring and firing from the estimable publication. He’s currently at a point in his story when the “heavenly angels burst into song,” i.e. David Remnick calls and offers him a position.

Yes, a job at The New Yorker is still the apex of any reporter’s career, Dan assures us.

But I sense some bad blood, particularly when Baum maintains that the magazine “shows no loyalty to its writers, yet expects full fealty in return.” He also drops advice for writers, echoing Tom Wolfe’s tip to forget that old platitude to “write what you know,” and instead write about what you don’t know, because in that case “you don’t bring any lazy preconceptions.”

It’s noteworthy that Baum is using the notoriously terse platform of Twitter, with its 140 characters or less, to tell a winding narrative. Subversive. Smart.

“Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever.”

- Jiddu Krishnamurti: speech in Holland, 8/03/1929

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”

- Robert Louis Stevenson: Virginibus Puerisque (1881)

*                                           *                                              *

A dimensionless face peered out from behind a screen door.

“I’m not willing to talk about this,” it said.

I turned away, disappointed. This was the last door in a labyrinth of sorts: a succession of knocks at doors across the city and strangers turning me away or leading me to more doors, more strangers.

I was trying to reconstruct a terrible event I knew only as a full-page article framed inside the employee entrance of the San Antonio Express-News. Every day, I would pass the headline, “Fiesta Horror: Sniper kills 2; 51 injured,” and a photograph of a blood-streaked and terrorized woman.

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