How Staten Island Is Fighting a Raging Heroin and Prescription Pill Epidemic →

Ian Frazier:

Staten Island has a lot of tattoo parlors, Italian delicatessens, two-story office buildings with empty spaces to rent, massage therapists, car services, Italian restaurants, places that give rock-music lessons and host children’s birthday parties, laundromats, liquor stores, tire shops, nail parlors, foot spas, pet-grooming salons, hair salons, barbershops (“buzz cuts, fades, tape-ups”). A small-business miscellany, sprung from the borough’s abundant middle-class life, lines the bigger roads like Hylan Boulevard from one end of the island to the other.

Most Staten Island enterprises are as their signs describe them. Occasionally, one or two storefronts that look no different from the rest also do a steady, word-of-mouth business in the illegal sale of OxyContin, oxycodone, Percocet, and other prescription painkillers. A neighborhood ice-cream truck playing its jingle might also be selling pills, according to police, who keep an eye on ice-cream trucks. A window-blinds and drapery store sold oxycodone pills until the N.Y.P.D. arrested one of the owners and the store closed. At a barbershop called Beyond Styles, on Giffords Lane, in the Great Kills neighborhood, police arrested the owner and two accomplices in October of 2013 for selling oxycodone and other drugs—two thousand pills a week, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The silent sniper fire of overdoses from pills and heroin that has been picking people off one at a time in increasing numbers all over the country for almost twenty years has hit Staten Island harder than anyplace else in the city. For a number of reasons, this borough of four hundred and seventy thousand-plus people offers unusually good entry routes for the opioid epidemic. In 2012, thirty-six people on Staten Island overdosed on heroin and thirty-seven on prescription opioid pills, for an average of almost exactly one overdose death every five days. Many of the dead have been young people in their late teens to early thirties. In this self-contained place, everybody seems to know everybody, and the grief as the deaths accumulate has been frantic and terrified.

Marc Maron’s ‘WTF’ Interview With Robin Williams →

This is Robin Williams like you’ve never heard him before.

Robin Williams Explains How Golf Was Invented

From his 2009 HBO special Weapons of Self Destruction, this was the first bit of his that came to mind when I heard he’d died. The first 2:15, specifically. The buildup to “Fuck, no! Eighteen fucking times!” is perfect.

Robin Williams, Actor →

Tim Grierson:

The truth is that Williams' career will stand as the signature comedy template of recent times. He's not the only funny actor to transition into dramatic roles, but his path was the most vigorous in both directions. Broad comedies, family films, supernatural dramas, animation, dark character pieces, blockbusters, indies, shameless Oscar bait, crap like Old Dogs: He tried just about everything imaginable, and he always dove in. No matter the darkness that ultimately consumed him, he always seemed to enjoy performing, entertaining, being famous. He made it not seem like a burden, but rather a lark.

Robin Williams, Comedian →

Jim Norton:

What struck me the most about Robin was how important it was to him that the other comedians liked him. He was always gracious to the performer he had bumped off the lineup. That first night and during his many subsequent returns over the years, he would always come upstairs and sit with us at the “comedy table” in the back (made famous on Louie).

He easily could have dominated the conversation; we all knew the difference between who he was and who we were. Robin was one of the few larger than life comedians who could have actually gotten a table full of other comics to just shut up and listen. But he didn’t. He joked and laughed with us and went out of his way to not tower above us. He probably never knew how much we loved him for that.

Nietzsche Family Circus →

Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage whose name is self.

Randomized pairings of Family Circus cartoons and Friedrich Nietzsche quotes.

/via this isn’t happiness

A Couple of Philip Seymour Hoffman Pieces

Alex Pappademas, writing for Grantland:

But at one point I remember asking him some real JV-ball actor-interview question about what, if anything, he felt he had in common with Truman Capote. Hoffman thought about it for a second, and then talked about how Capote was 35 when he started reporting the story that became In Cold Blood, and how there comes a time in every man’s life, around your mid-thirties, when you start to ask yourself, Have I done the great thing I was supposed to do? Am I ever going to do it?

And then there’s Wesley Morris, also writing for Grantland:

Before Capote, he mostly played the schlubby irritant who mocked typical actor vanities. You were drawn to his weirdos, freaks, losers, and assholes — to their nastiness and cruelty — because the actor playing them didn’t seem to have a long game. He didn’t want stardom. He didn’t care what we thought. If he wanted to play a guy who makes obscene phone calls and masturbates (as he did in Todd Solondz’s 1998 tonal masterpiece Happiness), then he would. If he wanted to spend Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights desperate for Mark Wahlberg, so be it.

This Fresh Air remembrance is also worth your time. I have an affection for actors who so clearly put thought—which usually means annoyance as well as enthusiasm—into their answers during interviews. The two interviews of him are full of thought and realness and flaws.

Nobody’s Son →

Mark Slouka, writing for The New Yorker:

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It’s interesting how unsteady a process grief is; the conveyer belt taking me away from him shudders and stalls. Reverses.

“It gets better, right?” I asked a woman I met recently, who’d lost her own father three years ago.

“It changes,” she said.

I can believe that. In the first weeks, especially when I was alone, his death was surreal: late at night, sitting up reading, I could feel it there, just past my sight, like a river seething by in the dark. I couldn’t look at it straight on.

Four months later, I began, once again, to do what I do. Every writer is an anatomist by trade. At some point, it was simply time—time to hack through the rib cage, palp the heart, assess the damage. Hearts, like rocks, can only take so many blows. His had given out once, then cranked up again, run for another twenty-one years (the exact age of our daughter, whom he loved unreservedly), then quit for good. Mine was just stunned.

The writer in me thought this essay was a mess; all over the place in time and space and emotion. The human in me thought: perfect.

"I needed to answer the question, 'Why?'" →

Matthew Lysiak, writing for Newsweek:

It was about 3 p.m. when I pulled up to the coffee shop, which was in the middle of a small shopping complex. I saw a crowd of young adults and teenagers standing outside in small circles with their hands in their pockets. It was well below freezing. Few words were being exchanged. Not a lot of tears. People just wanted to be together. At St. Rose of Lima a crowd had gathered. Two miles down the road another crowd had huddled in the parking lot of the Colony Diner. No one wanted to be alone.

I began working the crowd, asking the same question again and again, for hours: Do you know Adam Lanza?

When you become a parent, you (or at least I) force yourself to consider how you would respond to something horrible happening to your child or your spouse. Almost a year later and I still don't know how I would have dealt with what happened in Newtown.

I would never link to something that just recounted the horror; I think this piece raises an interesting notion—what happened to the people who responded?

Now We Are Five →

David Sedaris, writing for The New Yorker: 

In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide. She was living in a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been dead, the coroner guessed, for at least five days before her door was battered down. I was given the news over a white courtesy phone while at the Dallas airport. Then, because my plane to Baton Rouge was boarding and I wasn’t sure what else to do, I got on it. The following morning, I boarded another plane, this one to Atlanta, and the day after that I flew to Nashville, thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family. A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968, when my younger brother was born.

An especially poignant piece of writing from a man most known for his humor (and there is plenty of humor in the piece). What's especially interesting is how you can almost see him working his way through the stages of grief as he writes.