In the music issue of The Oxford American , Joe Hagan has written a moving piece about the tumultuou

The Winter Olympics are fast approaching, which means another chance to spend a couple weeks closely following sports we almost never watch and becoming wrapped up in rivalries, struggles, and the stories of athletes whose names we ve just learned. In The Believer , Sarah Marshall revisits a particularly juicy Olympic drama of yore the story of the figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. As you surely remember, Kerrigan was attacked at an ice rink shortly before the 1994 Games by a man who tried to break her knee. Her attacker was eventually found to be associated with Harding s ex-husband. Both skaters went on to compete in the Olympics, and the country couldn las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours t get enough of the tension between them playing itself out on the ice. (Their first Olympic face-off, in the short program, was one of the most-watched TV broadcasts of all time.) Marshall s story not only revisits and clarifies the details of the case; it s also an intelligent and compassionate look at the effects of media rapaciousness on the lives and careers of the women involved. There s a good chance you ll come away from this story with respect and admiration for Tonya Harding.
las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours Another smart and surprising historical re xamination appeared on Slate a few weeks ago: Josh Levin s report about a Chicago woman who became las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours famous in the nineteen-seventies, when Ronald Reagan used her in speeches as the archetype of the welfare queen, who lived large off of public benefits and drove a Cadillac to pick up her welfare checks. It turns out that the welfare queen s name was Linda Taylor, and Reagan s tales of her furs, jewels, las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours and shameless filching las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours were largely true. But the whole of her story is more complicated, and more profoundly weird, than Reagan could have guessed. Taylor was a criminal and con artist who used dozens of disguises and aliases, not just to game the welfare las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours system but also because she was wanted for crimes like kidnapping and homicide. The acquaintances interviewed in the piece all paint her as a terrifying figure. Levin performed a tremendous amount of work to unearth the story of how Taylor became an emblem of the supposedly lazy, scheming poor.
The Geel Question, the title of a piece by Mike Jay, at Aeon Magazine, comes from an ongoing debate in psychiatry over the role of institutions and communities in mental-health care. Geel is a small city in Belgium with a long tradition las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours of providing the mentally ill with housing and care in private homes. The tradition springs from the town s association with Saint Dymphna, the patron saint of the mentally ill, who was killed there in the thirteenth century. The boarders, as the patients are called, have a particular niche in the community, and often live with the same family for decades. las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours The virtues and dangers of Geel s unique system have been a subject las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours of controversy in medical circles for a long time. Jay outlines the evolution and potential future of the Geel system, which still exists but has been in decline for the past several years, as the city succumbs to the rapid changes of modern las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours life.
In the music issue of The Oxford American , Joe Hagan has written a moving piece about the tumultuous life and career of Charlie Rich, a country star who hit the scene in the wake of Elvis Presley, and whose smoldering voice and flexible style wove through the borders of country, las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours jazz, R. B., and blues. He had an uneven career, but his fans loved his music fiercely. las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours Bob Dylan once famously named Rich as his favorite singer. Hagan relates the slow-burning tragedy of Rich s ennui and self-destructiveness: he was a musician of immense talent who never found his place in the music business. But the real coup of Hagan s story is his discovery of a stack of fan letters sent to Rich in the seventies. They reveal that Rich s listeners related powerfully to his music, connecting las vegas to grand canyon overnight tours it to their own lives. I hope it s not giving away too much to say that the piece comes full circle beautifully at the end, when Hagan tracks down some of the letter writers to see where life has taken them and what Rich means to them now.