Reading

This Sunday, September 18th, I'll be reading at The Whistler's Orange Alert Reading Series. The literary-and-booze starts at 6 pm. The location is 2421 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, Illinois.

[IMAGE]

Parade

 Parade, Chicago, Illinois.

I get email

Dear Susannah,

I’m a regular visitor to your site and also the editor of the popular energy site [oil-related site].

The reason for my writing and i realise it’s a bit of a long shot is to see if you would consider adding us to your Elsewhere section?

[Oil-related site] has a lot of great contributors and we try to cover all energy sectors from fossil fuels to alternatives and have a great deal of content that focuses on Finance, economics and trading. We publish on average 10 articles a day – six of these are written by our in house analysts and we are working with over 100 contributors. I truly believe us to be one of the most informative energy site online today and we can appeal to all visitors from investors and traders to news enthusiasts looking to get the latest stories.

[Oil-related site] sadly doesn’t have a links section – but to reciprocate we could add your link to the blogroll in our other site: [dipstick-related site] – which is also a PR6.

We also have a unique section of financial tools – that are not available anywhere else online, that focus on energy, climate change, finance and metals which you or your readers may be interested in: [oil-related link] (We can also remove [oil-related site] and any ad reference on them and insert your websites details – so they look like a unique tool offered by your site.)

I realise a link on your site would be based on merit and i hope you can consider us as If you were to add our link i’m certain your visitors would not be disappointed with what they found.

If you have any questions about [oil-related site] please do let me know.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,

[Redacted]

[IMAGE]

Can you say good?

For Harvard's Nieman Storyboard, I wrote a piece on why Tom Junod's famous Esquire profile of Mister Rogers is so good.

Occasionally, a fragment of the story will resurface in my mind. Mister Rogers, nude in a locker room, "slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself." Mister Rogers, visiting his family tomb, "'And now if you don’t mind,' he said without a hint of shame or embarrassment, 'I have to find a place to relieve myself,' and then off he went, this ecstatic ascetic, to take a proud piss in his corner of heaven." Mister Rogers, meeting a boy with cerebral palsy, "'I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me?' On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, 'I would like you to pray for me. Will you pray for me?'"

[READ]

10

On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I reached out to a former Wall Street lawyer, a novelist, and a combat medic veteran, among others, for their thoughts on how that day changed their lives.

An hour or so later, I remember talking to a woman in her fifties, covered in soot, who told me in a calm, unemotional voice, like she was telling me what she had for lunch, how she had been leaving the tower with her best friend who had been hit by debris and killed. The woman was wiping at her jacket with napkins and said, "And now I don’t know how I’m ever going to get this jacket clean." She kept wiping and wiping.

[READ, IMAGE ]