The Electric Typewriter

by Gene Weingarten

Against the far wall is a dresser cluttered with religious statuary: crucifixes, Sacred Hearts, Virgin Marys, bleeding Jesuses with crowns of thorns. Scotch-taped beneath the chins of many of these effigies are little Dixie cups, to catch the weeping oil…

by Gene Weingarten

In Savoonga, Alaska, a tough people have made a tough place their home for generations. They’ve survived one of the world’s most inhospitable climates and the barren isolation of their Arctic island. But can they survive booze, bingo and satellite TV?

by Gene Weingarten

We promised to find the armpit of America. Turns out it’s only about five inches from the heart.

By Gene Weingarten

Forgetting a child in the backseat of a car is a horrifying mistake. Is it a crime?

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

by Gene Weingarten

Here’s what happens when a middle-aged man tries to find the girl he loved in second grade.

by Gene Weingarten

You have weighed the facts and have concluded, rationally, that even if terrorists strike again in this country, the chances are negligible that you or anyone you know will be killed or injured…

by Gene Weingarten

Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.

By Gene Weingarten

There are dozens of professional children’s entertainers in the Washington area, but only one is as successful and intriguing, and as completely over-the-top preposterous, as the Great Zucchini. And if you want to know why that is, it’s going to take some time…