About Editing and Writing

From a conversation between New York Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens headlined “America Is Breaking Our Hearts”

Gail Collins: Bret, I have a lot to ask you about government spending and deficits and … all that stuff. But first, we really need to talk about all the recent mass shootings and what to do about them, right?

Bret Stephens: In Britain or Germany these sorts of mass shootings are, at most, once-every-other-year events. Over here, hardly a day goes by without something like this happening. And the horror doesn’t just lie in the carnage. It’s that we’ve become accustomed to it. Dostoyevsky wrote, “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” That’s the state of our nation.

From an AP story by Hillel Italie headlined “Julie Otsuka, Ed Yong win Carnegie Medals for Excellence”:

Novelist Julie Otsuka has strong memories of libraries from her childhood California — the bike rides with her best friend to the local branch; the soft, firm sound of librarians closing books; the shopping bags she and her friend would fill with science fiction and other stories.

“It seemed like I lived at the library,” she says. “I felt very free to explore there, and explore away from adult eyes.”

From a New York Times story by Mike Baker headlined “A Small Boat, a Vast Sea and a Desperate Escape From Russia”:

A series of knocks rattled his apartment door one day last fall, and Maksim peered through the peephole to see two soldiers in uniform. They were military enlistment officers, he knew, expanding the vast conscription effort for the war in Ukraine to Russia’s remote Far East.

From a Washington Post story by Cindy Boren headlined “Ex-Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett arrested for public intoxication”:

Stetson Bennett, who led Georgia to its second consecutive college football national championship earlier this month, was arrested in Dallas early Sunday morning on a misdemeanor public intoxication charge, where he is preparing for the NFL draft.

Officers responded to reports of a man banging on doors in the 1600 block of Tribeca Way at 7:10 a.m. Eastern time, Dallas police said.