A New Yorker article on the troubling case of Cameron Todd Willingham.
A New York Times piece on the lost book of Carl Jung.
Archive for September, 2009
Must-Reads
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009Where’d they go?
Monday, September 21st, 2009
By Brian Chasnoff, September 18, 2009
Simply put, police reports matter.
As a source told me, the creation and filing of police reports is a basic function of any city’s police department, yet they affect almost everything: crime stats, investigations, etc. As such, I believe this story embarrassed the department a tad.
Paradise Lost
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
With the help of my colleague John Davenport, I recently wrangled a canoe from the second floor of the San Antonio Express-News, strapped it onto the roof of a Jeep and carefully placed it into the San Antonio River just south of the city.
I got in with John, who shot the photos in this post, and started paddling, come what may.
We were surrendering ourselves to the river because of an 87-year-old man named C.P. Autrey.
Autrey, who likes to be called “Buddy,” had called the newspaper to reminisce about a long-ago trek he and a friend undertook as teenagers during the Great Depression. He and Fred Burkett Jr. had canoed hundreds of miles from San Antonio to the Gulf of Mexico, a six-week journey now a bittersweet memory.
Read a story I wrote about their journey and how the river has changed. Then watch a video that mixes footage from our 12-mile river trip with photos circa 1939. Thanks Kin Man Hui, Anita Baca and John for making it possible.
Oedipus Text
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009What makes a story any good?
Two people I admire have taken a crack at that question: Ira Glass and Aristotle.
We’ll start with Ira:
Turns out Ira is cribbing from Aristotle in his first idea about a sequence of actions. I’ve checked; YouTube has no videos from 336 B.C., so you’ll have to read from here on out. (Thank you, Malcolm Heath, for your translation and introduction in the Penguin Classics edition of Poetics.)
The Killer Who Wrote His Own Story
Monday, September 7th, 2009A convicted murderer sued me for copyright infringement the other day, and it turns out I learned something from it.
His name is Edwin Debrow. He’s been locked up since he was 12, when he shot a San Antonio cabdriver in the back of the head in 1991. That made him the youngest murder defendant in Bexar County history. A jury gave him 27 years for the killing.
Flash forward 16 years, to 2007. A 27-year-old Debrow has won a new trial, largely through his own legal efforts. He is seeking immediate release. A filmmaker, Will Canon, contacts the San Antonio Express-News. He has the film rights to Debrow’s life story and a proposition: The killer wants his tale in the newspaper, and he will submit to interviews.
I was tapped for the job. A junkie of narrative journalism, I was glad to learn that Debrow had written more than 300 pages of an unpublished autobiography. It’s called “12 Year-Old Killer-The Story of My Life.” I asked for it, and Canon furnished it via Debrow, who was locked up in Bexar County Jail awaiting trial. (more…)
