“He was attempting to block California-based activist Ward Connerly from putting an affirmative action referendum on the November 2000 Florida ballot. That same ballot would, it was widely presumed, feature George W. Bush as the Republican nominee for president. Florida was a crucial swing state. The Connerly referendum would probably bring out droves of African American, overwhelmingly Democratic voters who would oppose the measure and most likely vote against his big brother. Jeb Bush decided he couldn’t let any of that happen.”

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“For photographs to accompany this piece, Tucker suggests we go to Longview, a childhood haunt. We turn off Highway 12, cross a set of railroad tracks no longer in use and park next to a roofless building that once housed a country store. There’s not much left here. He remembers those long afternoons of boyhood he and friends would walk the tracks, either toward town the fire tower a mile away, or here, to these abandoned buildings. The tracks with their rumbling freight trains remain very much alive in the writer’s memory.”

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“Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication?”

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“What I’m saying to you, this thing with Dutch Leonard, the crime writer? The one who died Tuesday morning and they’re calling the best in our lifetime?

You’d meet him and you’d never know what he did for a living. He was that modest, that humble. He never robbed a bank or shot anybody, at least that I heard about, but he wrote the best bank-robber, guy-about-to-shoot-somebody dialogue ever.

Elmore, you say? How does an old guy named Elmore get the street vibe, the hip black Detroit crook, the charming Miami Mafioso, the cop who ain’t that good but ain’t that dumb, that smart chick who’s got a good-looking leg up on all these dudes — how does he do that?”

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“I held her purse and tried to think of a way to be useful. And about the only way I have found is to write down what happened after Erika died — to show the hold she retains on the living, the lasting nature of those bonds between mother and daughter…Sometimes her friends leave small stones or trinkets at the headstone, perhaps to show Erika they were there, to show that they remember the girl with the long black hair and the pretty brown eyes who once held so much promise for herself, her  family and her world.”

“Sometimes truly American virtues arise in outlaws who — by dint of heroic but questionable endeavors — display the mettle of the national character.”

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“She’s a grandma who helped create satellite radio, found Sirius XM and ran the first company to market GPS in automobiles. Then she founded a $6-billion biotech that helped save her daughter’s life and became the nation’s highest-paid female executive (at $38 million) in the process. Then she founded a religion, a world-class AI robot, and raises genetically altered pigs so that their lungs can one day be transplanted into people. She’s been married for 32 years, has four kids, flies airplanes and helicopters, kills on the piano, puts on a mean seder and started out  life as a man. Oh. And she’s taller than you, too.”

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“The Harrisonburg Church of Christ is an unlikely setting for a bedtime horror story, the kind of Southern Gothic tale involving murder and mendacity and money and treachery and, by many accounts, the handiwork of Satan himself.”

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“And so it goes: One of the major American novelists most associated with obsessive research doesn’t really use his research to tell his stories. On street corners, in the back seat of cop cars, he fills notebooks with data. At home, they pile up, unread, not consulted, lonely little orphans of the novel-writing process. The notes, the time on the street — it’s all set decoration, atmosphere absorbed by osmosis, and never as much as you think — maybe a day a week for “Clockers,” less for his other books.”

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“Families are the wellspring of our lives, and what follows is a story about the aftershocks of what is now called domestic violence in one remarkable family over 46 years. It is a love story, but it is important to remember that love can be both redemptive and destructive, and sometimes both at once.”

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The Confederate flag was on the run earlier this summer. It was coming down everywhere. Then The Moment met The Rest of Mississippi.

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“Coyotes are such a problem that on a recent evening two rotting corpses are strung up by their heels on a fence by the roadside, mouths open and teeth bared. A mile or two farther out, a stone marker by the side of the road notes that the Thorpes’ log cabin stood nearby. At dusk, the sun fades over a small rise that gives onto grasslands and the open expanse of the Great Plains. The sky goes from blue to black, a half-moon brilliant overhead. Lights from a few homes blink in the distance, a quarter-mile, a half-mile, a mile away. The land is that wide open.”

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“He is also, it must be said, a quixotic character who seems to arise from the fantastic world of his own fiction. He has never married and has no children. He never knew much about his father, a Jamaican immigrant, long ago deceased. His beloved mother, Jeanette, died nearly 35 years ago of lung cancer. He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver’s license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television — in particular, those judge shows — he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event.”

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“This is where she’s gotten. This is where she is. This is home now.

She stands in the grassy yard, a little breeze coming up the canyon, the morning sun soft, hazy, not too warm. She’s smiling, barefoot, the city of angels spread out before her.

Taraji Henson, pride of Southeast, in the summer of her 40th year.”

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“His compatriots were hard-drinking, hard-living, often uneducated men who were brilliant musicians. John Lee Hooker, who lived in Detroit, was so profoundly illiterate that he could barely write his own name. “It looked like a little kid’s writing,” Guy says.

Still, for most of his days, the world’s greatest living guitarist made the better part of his money driving a tow truck. The family’s economics were so basic, and his shy demeanor so reserved, that his children and their friends had no real idea of what he did for a living. They just knew he was some sort of musician who was a pretty fair hand with the guitar at a block party”.

“James M. Cain was a tougher writer than anybody in this joint. Sex, murder, bad women, worse men. He slapped your face and told you to like it.

Double Indemnity. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Mildred Pierce. They were outrageous sensations as books and films back in the Depression and just after. People still eat them up. Now his long-lost last novel, The Cocktail Waitress, is landing in book stores, 35 years after the Annapolis-born Cain, an unintentional co- founder of the noir or hard-boiled school of crime fiction, died at age 85″.

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“It’s some sort of cathartic mass-performed communal ritual, a tribal, pagan thing — 55,000 people screaming into the Long Island night about Brenda and Eddie and they can’t tell you more than they told you already and the man on the stage is holding sway over them all…”