Vincent Smothers thought that it would be a job like any other. In the summer of 2007, he told me, his friend Marzell Black asked him for a gun for his mother's boyfriend. Smothers didn't sell guns, and he told him so. A few months later, Marzell amended his request, saying, "That dude who was looking for a gun? He asked me how much he would have to pay to kill somebody." A murder Smothers could handle. "Marzell wasn't the killing type," he said. "I told him, 'That's not something for you to do. I'll talk to him and see what this is all about.'"
--From "The Hit Man's Tale," nonfiction by Nadya Labi, The New Yorker (October 15, 2012), pp. 58-67.
Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sat down at the conference table just moments before the faculty meeting began. It was three o'clock on February 12, 2010, and thirteen professors and staff members in the biology department had crowded into a windowless conference room on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology.
--From "A Loaded Gun," nonfiction by Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker (February 11 & 18, 2013), pp. 70-87.
Boog is very good at making words. For example, last week he showed off his new picture at the Main Cave. Everyone was expecting it to be a horse or a bear (all his pictures so far have been horses, bears, or a mix of horses and bears). But this picture was not of any animal. It was just a bunch of red streaks. People were angry.
"I wanted animals," the Old Person said. "Where are the animals?"
It was bad situation. I thought that Boog would lose his job or maybe be killed by stones. But then Boog stood on a rock and spoke.
--From "I Love Girl," a story by Simon Rich from the Shouts & Murmurs column, The New Yorker (December 17, 2012), pp. 43-45.
The summer school assignment, the fucking fucking summer school third paper of ten, and if you didn't get at least a C on the first nine, you had to write eleven papers, the fucking teacher wadding up her big fat lips so they looked like a carnation, her lips that she'd use to pout at your inadequacy . . . this paper, to hold their interest, was supposed to be about Magical Realism, and although you didn't have to read all of the Mรกrquez book the teacher sooooooo loved, she had distributed several paragraphs from the book in which weird things happened, and your paper was supposed to go on forever, like the writer, then have the clouds howl, or something.