Editor’s Note, September 2011: When we profiled Steve Goldsmith in December 2010, we headlined the piece about New York’s deputy mayor, “If He Can Make It There.” Apparently he couldn’t. Read the original article about his brief time there before the shame of an arrest for domestic violence led him to resign.
The boss thinks Friday is a workday. And maybe it is for the rest of those poor folks back at the office. But when the days are sunny, the nights are warm, and the water’s just right, two-day weekends hardly seem long enough. So we hereby declare Friday workdays to be optional. And by “optional” we mean we won’t be showing up at all. Join us, won’t you?
Milan could be any small Indiana town—except, of course, for its high-school basketball team, which won the state title almost 60 years ago. Now, a few locals are trying to adapt that history into a basketball museum and a bid at reviving their town. But could Milan’s legacy actually be what keeps it from moving forward?
FOR YEARS, TOYIN AYANGADE HAS been careful. She works early mornings and late evenings so she won’t have to drive past bustling parks and playgrounds. She stays in on holidays so she won’t have to dodge trick-or-treaters or see the columns of smoke rising from backyard family barbecues. Even in Walmart, she hurries past the bulletin board of missing children and takes detours to avoid the racks of kids’ clothing and towering shelves of toys.
I am 28 years old—the age my mother was when she was killed by a woman who drank, used drugs, and then slid behind the wheel of a car. For years, I tried to fill the hole that lost left in my life—with bitterness, with a search for the woman who killed her, even with alcohol. And then finally, I stopped reaching into the past and found what I was looking for.
