Kansas City Quotes

It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene

Kansas City, that’s like in Kansas, right?” I ask. “Missouri,” Frank and Dad both correct.

We the People - shelling the Vietcong

Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?

And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.

The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles.

My dear grandmother (who was a psychic in her own right and very well known in Kansas City, Missouri) used to say if you find someone who doesn’t like animals, children, or music . . . run.

Abelman’s Dry Goods Kansas City, Missouri U.S.A. Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.: We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned. “Why? Why?” You are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview. The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter-length trousers a byword of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.) We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders. Yours in anger, Gus Levy, Pres.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass by informs your back that she is daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own.

This town was caught in a perpetual state of stagnation. The same three thousand or so people were still living the same small-town life. They thought they ruled the universe from the confines of this one-mile square, yet their world ended at the city limits.

My parents come from old money in Kansas City. They

Years as a detective on the Kansas City police

I’d heard people order coffee drinks whose names went on for half an hour . . . A double mocha joka jerky over ice with a peppermint twist and a Kansas City pickle on the side.

Sigsby One. Kansas City Chiefs.

Even today, we tend to think of sake as a miserable hot, sour, yeasty drink we once tasted at the urging of an aunt who took us to a Japanese restaurant in Kansas City.

Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas. There’s a difference.

Kansas City Sunday, August 22, 1915 I'm going to find everyone kind and all the help I need, as usual.

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure--in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically.

-Prayer In My Life- Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not a plea for special favors, nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God. Deeds rather than words express my concept of the part religion should play in everyday life. I have watched constantly that in our movie work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether it deals with fable or with stories of living action. This religious concern for the form and content of our films goes back 40 years to the rugged financial period in Kansas City when I was struggling to establish a film company and produce animated fairy tales. Thus, whatever success I have had in bringing clean, informative entertainment to people of all ages, I attribute in great part to my Congregational upbringing and lifelong habit of prayer. To me, today at age 61, all prayer by the humble or highly placed has one thing in common: supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best impulses which should bind us together for a better world. Without such inspiration we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish. But in our troubled times, the right of men to think and worship as their conscience dictates is being sorely pressed. We can retain these privileges only by being constantly on guard in fighting off any encroachment on these precepts. To retreat from any of the principles handed down by our forefathers, who shed their blood for the ideals we all embrace, would be a complete victory for those who would destroy liberty and justice for the individual.

Cowgirl Interlude (Bonanza Jellybean) She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet. Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire int he woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. "Self-defense," she pleaded, when her parents complained. "It was a [sic] out-law tennis shoe. Billy the Ked.

Gone to Kansas City, Nick thought. For all I know, that could be it, too. Everybody left on the poor sad planet picked up by the Hand of God and either rocked in the everlasting harms of Same or set down again in Kansas City.

I rent a small brick bungalow within a loop of other small brick bungalows, all of which squat on a massive bluff overlooking the former stockyards of Kansas City. Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas. There’s a difference.

We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston—red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.

Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it." "There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice. "That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia--and so has Uncle Henry." "For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries." "And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland." "So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about.

I’m not one to insist that a man can’t possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I’ve tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading,

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

Many of us can't go home again, whether home is Seville, Cabo Sur, Nastas, Havana, or Kansas City. Thus, we must recognize that home really lies in the eternal peace, dormant or conscious, that dwells in each human heart... Quote from "Ms. Quixote Goes Country", a truthful novel.

You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?

In river rescues, members of the Kansas City Fire Department rescue squad yell profanity-laced threats at victims before they get to them. If they don't, the victim will grab on to them and push them under the water in a mad scramble to stay afloat. "We try to get their attention. And we don't always use the prettiest language," says Larry Young, a captain in the rescue division. "I hope I don't offend you by saying this. But if I approach Mrs. Suburban Housewife and say, 'When I get to you, do not fucking touch me! I will leave you if you touch me!' she tends to listen.

When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch—not an iota—more.

What did the ’70s feel like? As recalled by Bebe Buell, a singer and onetime habitué of that fabled hipster magnet Max’s Kansas City: “Everybody’s eyelids were very heavy. I used to chuckle to myself, thinking, ‘That’s the cannabis eye, the quaalude eye’ — the look people get when they’re feeling no pain.

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she’d ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn’t very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her).

In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York. Seattle. Cincinnati. Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas. Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically. His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv. Same thing. “I said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration.6 Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

It's hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther - beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say - quickly became almost foreign. It wasn't just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere.

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max's Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn't get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another. if only we had been so careful with ourselves.

But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and cliché-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them ‘the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing’.

We knew that proactive policing was a legitimacy risk for the police, and I stressed that repeatedly,” Sherman said.3 Even more crucially, this is why the Kansas City gun experiment was confined to District 144. That’s where the crime was. “We went through the effort of trying to reconstruct where the hot spots were,” Sherman said. In the city’s worst neighborhood, he then drilled down one step further, applying the same fine-grained analysis that he and Weisburd had used in Minneapolis to locate the specific street segments where crime was most concentrated. Patrol officers were then told to focus their energies on those places. Sherman would never have aggressively looked for guns in a neighborhood that wasn’t a war zone.

When shall we start?” asked the Scarecrow. “Are you going?” they asked, in surprise. “Certainly. If it wasn’t for Dorothy I should never have had brains. She lifted me from the pole in the cornfield and brought me to the Emerald City. So my good luck is all due to her, and I shall never leave her until she starts back to Kansas for good and all.” “Thank you,” said Dorothy,

Far from being a national crisis of affordable housing, outrageous rents and astronomical home prices are largely confined to a relatively few places along the east and west coasts. Rent per square foot of apartment space in San Francisco is more than double what it is in Denver, Dallas, or Kansas City, and nearly three times as high as in Memphis. Home prices show even greater disparities.

In the empty Houston streets of four o’clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roared through, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poet of the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going, singing, “Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas—and sometimes Kansas City—and sometimes old Antone, ah-haaaaa!” They pinpointed out of sight.

And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.

I could move away. Yes, I could go far away and never step foot in New York City again. Where would I go? Kansas. Yes, Kansas. No one ever says, “Hey, let’s leave New York to go to Kansas.” That means no one I know will move there.

Most confidence games depend on the mark not knowing they’re being conned. The Kansas City Shuffle depends on the mark knowing it. Not only do they have to see you coming, they have to figure out your entire plan before it happens.” “Problem being,” Corman said, “they’re working to stop the wrong con. You get ’em looking left, while you rob ’em blind on the right.” “We can’t take the coin out of the building,” I said, “but Royce can. So let’s give him a reason to do it.

The Hobo One day while strolling through the great park in Kansas City, he and his mother saw a young woman get her foot caught in the tracks at a railroad crossing. The woman’s husband was desperately trying to free her because a train was bearing down on them. The train was travelling far too quickly to stop before the crossing. As Heinlein and his mother watched the terrifying situation unfold, a hobo suddenly appeared and immediately joined the husband’s futile effort to pull the woman free. But tug and twist as they might, they could not get her foot unstuck. The train killed all three of them. In his description of the vagabond’s effort Heinlein observed that the hobo did not so much as look up to consider his own escape. Clearly, it was his intention either to save the woman or to die trying. Heinlein concluded his account of the nameless hero’s action with this comment: “This is the way a man dies,” but he then added, “And this is the way a man lives.

Here are some of the towns I played last year: Carmel, Indiana; Hutchinson, Kansas; and Huntsville, Alabama. I even played Peoria. So why not limit my dates to easy-to-reach cities like Toronto, Chicago, and Reno? Easier still, why not just retire?

In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created. Instead the state income taxes are given to companies that agree to move jobs from one state across the border to another, as AMC Theatres agreed to do in moving its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri, to Leawood, Kansas, just ten miles away. AMC will get to pocket $47 million withheld from its workers, a boon to its major owners: J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, the Carlyle Group and the firm Mitt Romney cofounded in 1984, Bain Capital Management.

A woman living in a Kansas City suburb may think Tunisia is another planet, and her life has no connection to it, but if she were married to an air force navigator who flies out of the nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, she might be surprised to learn that one obscure Tunisian’s actions led to protests, that led to riots, that led to the toppling of a dictator, that led to protests in Libya, that led to a civil war, that led to the 2012 NATO intervention, that led to her husband dodging antiaircraft fire over Tripoli.

After you flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansas burning against my Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my Mountain Time beating against your Central Time, your sun rising swiftly from the right my sun rising swiftly from the left your moon rising slowly from the left my moon rising slowly from the right until all four bodies of the sky burn above us, sealing us together, all our cities twin cities, all our states united, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The Lawrence Sherman who went to Kansas City is the same Larry Sherman who had worked with David Weisburd in Minneapolis a few years earlier, establishing the Law of Crime Concentration. They were friends. They taught together for a time at Rutgers, where their department chairman was none other than Ronald Clarke, who had done the pioneering work on suicide. Clarke, Weisburd, and Sherman—with their separate interests in English town gas, the crime map of Minneapolis, and guns in Kansas City—were all pursuing the same revolutionary idea of coupling.

In early August, Bill Virdon was fired and replaced by Billy Martin. Virdon’s dismissal left Elston with mixed feelings: He was glad to be reunited with Billy, his old friend and teammate, but once again he was hurt because he had been snubbed for the job he so badly wanted. We loved Billy. At heart, he was a nice person, very generous. Billy’s problem was that he was an alcoholic. One time we were in Kansas City for the playoffs; he joined us for breakfast and ordered eggs and scotch. When Billy was drunk he could be a pretty rotten person; he got into fights. But

You shouldn’t kiss me like that unless it means something to you.” Max’s lip trembled beneath her thumb. A deep groan rose from his chest. And then he was pushing to his feet, pulling her with him. His mouth covered hers, hot and wet and full of a driving need she answered kiss for kiss.

Why are you stopping people in places where there’s no crime?” Weisburd says. “That doesn’t make sense to me.” Sherman is just as horrified. “At that hour of the day in that location, stopping [Sandra Bland] for changing lanes is not justifiable,” he said. Even during the initial Kansas City gun experiment—in a neighborhood a hundred times worse than Prairie View—Sherman said that the special police officers made their stops solely at night. That’s the only time of day when the crime rate was high enough to justify aggressive policing. Sandra Bland was pulled over in the middle of the afternoon.

But think back to those statistics from North Carolina. If you go from 400,000 traffic stops in one year to 800,000 seven years later, does that sound like focused and concentrated policing? Or does that sound like the North Carolina State Highway Patrol hired a lot more police officers and told everyone, everywhere, to pull over a lot more motorists? The lesson the law-enforcement community took from Kansas City was that preventive patrol worked if it was more aggressive. But the part they missed was that aggressive patrol was supposed to be confined to places where crime was concentrated. Kansas City had been a coupling experiment.

KANSAS CITY JAZZ: RECOMMENDED LISTENING Count Basie, “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” August 22, 1938 Count Basie and Lester Young, “Oh, Lady Be Good,” October 9, 1936 Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump,” July 7, 1937 Billie Holiday (with Lester Young), “I Can’t Get Started,” September 15, 1938 Kansas City Seven (with Lester Young), “Lester Leaps In,” September 5, 1939 Kansas City Six (with Lester Young), “I Want a Little Girl,” September 27, 1938 Andy Kirk (with Mary Lou Williams), “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” March 2, 1936 Jay McShann, “Confessin’ the Blues,” April 30, 1941 Bennie Moten, “Moten Swing,” December 13, 1932 Mary Lou Williams, “Clean Pickin’,

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

Yet if the gross national product measures all of this, there is much that it does not include. It measures neither the health of our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It pays no heed to the intelligence of our public debate, nor the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country except those things that make us proud to be a part of it. ROBERT F. KENNEDY, KANSAS CITY, 1968

I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean? We had to pay a lot of money to get the tickets for the next day; luckily they still had seats, although I suppose there are usually seats to and from Kansas City. It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real.

Eager to reestablish their brand as the “King of Beers,” the company’s board of directors had authorized August Jr., the superintendent of the brewery, to buy several teams of Clydesdale draft horses “for advertising purposes.” Gussie, as he was called, purchased sixteen of the massive 2,000-pound animals for $21,000 at the Kansas City stockyards. He also found two wooden wagons from back in the days when the company employed eight hundred teams of horses to deliver its beer, and set about having them restored to the exacting standards of his late grandfather, brewery founder Adolphus Busch, who liked to conduct weekly inspections from a viewing stand, with his son August at his side as all the drivers passed in parade, hoping to win the $25 prize for the best-kept team and wagon.

Bisceglia Pharmacy is a tiny, dusty relic tucked into a dying strip mall on the other side of the Kansas-Missouri state line. I see Liv’s doubt as we pull up to the pharmacy and there’s a dog chained up out front gnawing industriously on an old shoe. “Uh,” she says, stepping over the dog, who doesn’t stop his chewing to look up, “is this like...a licensed pharmacy?” “We’re in Missouri now, princess. This is what shit looks like here.” Liv shoots me a look as we walk through the door—which is propped open with a rabbit-eared television set—and into the dimly lit pharmacy. “You know, it’s not nice to be geographically snobby.” “I lived on the Missouri side of Kansas City until Mom died,” I tell her. “So I feel a little entitled to some trash talk. Also this place was my first job. So I’m double entitled

Oh fool, oh desolation!" said the Prince of Kansas. "Ill give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I'll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I'll give you a dog—in truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion. Do you know why dogs died out? Because they were loyal, because they were trusting. Go alone, man!

We were working on the idea about dogs’ Internet searches, and first we debated whether the sketch should feature real dogs or Henrietta and Viv in dog costumes (because cast members were always, unfailingly, trying to get more air time, we quickly went with the latter). Then we discussed where it should take place (the computer cluster in a public library, but, even though all this mattered for was the establishing shot, we got stalled on whether that library should be New York’s famous Main Branch building on Fifth Avenue, with the lion statues in front, a generic suburban library in Kansas City, or a generic suburban library in Jacksonville, Florida, which was where Viv was from). Then we really got stalled on the breeds of dogs. Out of loyalty to my stepfather and Sugar, I wanted at least one to be a beagle. Viv said that it would work best if one was really big and one was really little, and Henrietta said she was fine with any big dog except a German Shepherd because she’d been bitten by her neighbor’s German Shepherd in third grade. After forty minutes we’d decided on a St. Bernard and a Chihuahua—I eventually conceded that Chihuahuas were funnier than beagles. We decided to go with the Florida location for the establishing shot because the lions in front of the New York Main Branch could preempt or diminish the appearance of the St. Bernard. Then we’d arrived at the fun part, which was the search terms. With her mouth full of beef kebab, Viv said, “Am I adopted?” With my mouth full of spanakopita, I said, “Am I a good girl?” With her mouth full of falafel, Henrietta said, “Am I five or thirty-five?” “Why is thunder scary?” I said. “Discreet crotch-sniffing techniques,” Henrietta said. “Cheap mani-pedis in my area,” Viv said. “Oh, and cheapest self-driving car.” “Best hamburgers near me,” I said. “What is halitosis,” Henrietta said. “Halitosis what to do,” I said. “Where do humans pee,” Viv said. “Taco Bell Chihuahua male or female,” I said. “Target bull terrier married,” Viv said. “Lassie plastic surgery,” Henrietta said. “Funny cat videos,” I said. “Corgis embarrassing themselves YouTube,” Viv said. “YouTube little dog scares away big dog,” I said. “Doghub two poodles and one corgi,” Henrietta said. “Waxing my tail,” I said. “Is my tail a normal size,” Viv said.

Consider this oddly neglected fact: the West was acquired, conquested, and largely consolidated into the nation coincident with the greatest breakthrough in the history of human communication. The breakthrough was the telegraph. The great advances that followed it, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet, were all elaborations on its essential contribution. The telegraph separated the person from the message. Before it, with a few exceptions such as a sephamore and carrier pigeons, information moved only as fast as people did. By the nineteenth century, people were certainly moving a lot faster, and indeed a second revolution, that of transportation, was equally critical in creating the West, but before the telegraph a message still had to move with a person, either as a document or in somebody’s head. The telegraph liberated information. Now it could travel virtually at the speed of light. The railroad carried people and things, including letters, ten to fifteen times faster than the next most rapid form of movement. The telegraph accelerated communication more than forty million times. A single dot of Morse code traveled from Kansas City to Denver faster than the click it produced moved from the receiver to the telegrapher’s eardrum.

On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools

A fost odată Louis Armstrong, cântând la frumoasa lui trompetă în noroaiele din New Orleans. Înaintea lui fuseseră muzicienii trăsniţi care mărşăluiau la paradele oficiale şi transformau marşurile în ragtime. Pe urmă a apărut swingul şi Roy Elridge, viguros, viril, scoţând din trompetă valuri de forţă şi logică şi subtilitate - se apleca asupra ei cu ochi sclipitori şi cu un zâmbet minunat şi trimitea sunetele prin radio să legene lumea jazzului. Sosise apoi Charlie Parker, care copilărise doar cu maică-sa într-o căsuţă de lemn din Kansas City, unde cântase la saxofon alto printre buşteni, repetând în zile ploioase, mergând în oraş să-i vadă pe bătrânii interpreţi de swing Basie şi Benny Moten cu a lor Hot Lips Page şi celelalte, Charlie Parker plecând de acasă şi sosind în Harlem, întâlnindu-se cu nebunul de Thelonius Monk şi cu celălalt smintit, Gillespie, Charlie Parker la începuturile carierei sale, când cânta învârtindu-se în cerc. Puţin mai tânăr decât Lester Young, tot din K. C., un scrântit de geniu, sumbru, a cărui muzică acoperea toată istoria jazzului. Când îşi ţinea saxofonul în sus, în poziţie orizontală, scotea cel mai formidabil sunet. Pe urmă părul îi crescu şi deveni mai leneş şi saxul îi coborî mai jos, ajunse în sfârşit să-l ţină vertical, şi acum, când purta pantofi cu talpa groasă ca să nu mai simtă cărările tari ale vieţii, instrumentul îi zăcea rezemat de piept, iar el sufla lejer şi scotea fraze tot mai simple. Aceştia erau copiii bopului din noaptea americană.

Then came the so-called flash crash. At 2:45 on May 6, 2010, for no obvious reason, the market fell six hundred points in a few minutes. A few minutes later, like a drunk trying to pretend he hadn’t just knocked over the fishbowl and killed the pet goldfish, it bounced right back up to where it was before. If you weren’t watching closely you could have missed the entire event—unless, of course, you had placed orders in the market to buy or sell certain stocks. Shares of Procter & Gamble, for instance, traded as low as a penny and as high as $100,000. Twenty thousand different trades happened at stock prices more than 60 percent removed from the prices of those stocks just moments before. Five months later, the SEC published a report blaming the entire fiasco on a single large sell order, of stock market futures contracts, mistakenly placed on an exchange in Chicago by an obscure Kansas City mutual fund. That explanation could only be true by accident, because the stock market regulators did not possess the information they needed to understand the stock markets. The unit of trading was now the microsecond, but the records kept by the exchanges were by the second. There were one million microseconds in a second. It was as if, back in the 1920s, the only stock market data available was a crude aggregation of all trades made during the decade. You could see that at some point in that era there had been a stock market crash. You could see nothing about the events on and around October 29, 1929.

For a hitter, there’s no thrill quite like a late inning, game-changing home run. Unless, that is, the shot is called back. On July 24, 1983, Kansas City superstar George Brett was riding high after hitting a two-out, two-run homer in Yankee Stadium. The future Hall of Famer’s blast changed a 4–3 ninth inning deficit into a 5–4 Royals lead. The joy soon faded, though, when New York manager Billy Martin asked home plate umpire Tim McClelland to inspect Brett’s bat. Earlier in the season, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles had noticed that Brett seemed to use more pine tar than the rules allowed—and Martin had saved that choice information for just such a moment as this. McClelland measured the goo on Brett’s bat, finding it exceeded the eighteen inches allowed. Brett was called out, erasing the home run and giving the Yankees a 4–3 victory. The Royals were incensed by the ruling, which was later overturned by American League president Lee McPhail, who said “games should be won and lost on the playing field—not through technicalities of the rules.” Baseball’s official acknowledgment of the “bigger picture” is reminiscent of Jesus’ approach to God’s laws. Arguing with hypocritical Pharisees, Jesus once said, “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). Our concern for the letter of the law should be balanced by an equal concern for the spirit of the law. If you’re inclined to spiritual pickiness, don’t forget the “more important matters.

Mr. Clutter enjoyed the chore, and was excellent at it—no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf of salt-rising bread, and his celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to go at charity cake sales—but he was not a hearty eater; unlike his fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts. That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City’s First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire.

Greetings and welcome to The Keltic Woodshop. Established since November of 2003 in Kansas City, Missouri, The Keltic Woodshop specializes in custom cabinetry, furniture, and unique fine wood products in a personalized old fashioned handcrafted way. We are a small shop that strives towards individual attention and detail in every item produced. The Keltic Woodshop of Kansas City specializes in the following products: Custom Cabinets and Furniture: We use worldwide exotic woods. Our custom cabinets and furniture contains Russian Birch, Brazilian Cherry, African Mahogany, Asian Teak, Knotty Pine, Walnut, Red Oak, White Oak, and Bolivian Rosewood just to name a few. Custom orders are available. Handmade Walking Sticks: Our walking sticks include handcrafted, lightweight, strong, durable, handpainted, handcarved, Handapplied finishes and stains, Alaskan Diamond Willow, Hedgeapple, Red Oak, Memosa, Spalted Birch, and Spalted Ash. Custom Made Exotic Wood Display Cases: These are handmade from hardwoods of Knotty Pine, Asian Teak, African Mahogany, Sycamore, Aniegre, African Mahogany, and Black Cherry. We will do custom orders too. Pagan and Specialty Items: We have Red Oak and White Oak Ritual Wands with gems, Washington Driftwood Healing Wands with amethyst, crystaline, and citrine points, handpainted Red Oak and Hedgeapple Viking Runes for devination. We can make custom wood boxes for your tarot cards. Customer satisfaction is our highest priority. If you are looking for unusual or exotic lumbers, then we are the shop you've been searching for. The Keltic Woodshop stands behind and gurantees each item with an owner lifetime warranty on craftsmanship of the product with a replacement, repair, or moneyback in full, no questions asked, policy. We want you happy and completely satisfied with any product you may purchase. We are not a production shop so you will find joinery of woods containing handcut dovetails, as well as mortise and tenon construction. Finishes and stains are never sprayed on, but are applied personally by hand for that quality individual touch. the-tedswoodworking.com

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

In any discussion of serial killers, a few notorious names—those of the most prolific killers—always get mentioned. Ted Bundy admitted to killing thirty women, but it could well have been more. Gary Ridgeway, also known as the Green River Killer, was convicted of murdering forty-eight, but later confessed to others. John Wayne Gacy was convicted of killing thirty-three people. Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted of murdering and partially ingesting fifteen people. David Berkowitz, New York City’s “Son of Sam,” shot and killed six people. Less well known but significant are Dennis Rader, who killed ten people in Wichita, Kansas, and Aileen Wuornos, portrayed by Charlize Theron in the film Monster, who killed six men. Wayne Williams was convicted of killing only two men, but he is believed to have killed anywhere from twenty-three to twenty-nine children in Atlanta. Robert Hansen confessed to four murders but is suspected of more than seventeen. Juan Corona was convicted of murdering twenty-five people. Their crimes are all horrific, and the number of victims is heartbreaking. But all these most notorious serial killers stand in the shadow of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Strangely, Gosnell appears in no list we have found of known U.S. serial killers, though he is the biggest of them all. In reality, Kermit Gosnell deserves the top spot on any list of serial murderers. He’s earned it.

Come here.” Without regard for modesty, she pulled off her T-shirt and wadded it up to stanch his wounds. He splayed his fingers on her bare stomach and grinned. “Honey, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that right now. Maybe later?” How could he joke and flirt when she was so afraid? “Max. You’re bleeding. Maybe dying. I don’t want to lose you.” “Come. Here.” He grabbed her and pulled her down into the grass beside him. He pressed a kiss to her temple and rubbed his grizzled cheek against hers. The sirens were getting closer. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” “I’m fine. You’re the one who got shot. Twice.” “I’m gonna live through both. I’m a tough guy, remember?” “Damn it, Max—” “Rosemary March. Did you just swear? You know I don’t like hearing that from you,” he teased. He pulled her in for a kiss that lasted until a groan of pain forced him to come up for air. “You get under my skin, Rosie.” “Like an itchy rash?” she teased. “Like an alarm clock finally waking me up to the life I’m supposed to have. With you.” So when did the tough guy learn to speak such beautiful things? Tears stung her eyes again as she found a spot where she could hug him without causing any pain. “I know I’m not the guy you expected to want you like this, and I know you weren’t the woman I was looking for. Hell, I wasn’t even looking.” “Neither was I.” “But we found each other.” “We’re good for each other.” “I’m not an easy man to live with. I come with a lot of emotional baggage.” “And I don’t?” “You can do better than me.” Rosie shook her head, smiling. “I can’t do better than a good man who loves me. A man who encourages me to be myself and to be strong and who makes me feel safer and more loved than I have ever felt in my life.” “I do love you, Rosie.” “I love you, Max.” “What are we going to do about these feelings?” Max asked. “What do you want to do?” " Let’s give the Dinkles something to talk about.” “You’re moving in upstairs?” “And opening all the windows.” Rosie smiled. “Oh, I hope we give them plenty to talk about.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

I was born a master of the universe in Manhattan. Not Manhattan, New York City, and not Manhattan, Kansas, but Manhattan, the suburb of Orafouraville.

Fear of black independence and self-determination took a Freudian form: rape hysteria. In one town after another, racial violence was sparked by rumors that a Negro had harmed a white woman. This happened in Washington; Omaha, Neb.; Kansas City, Kan.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Longview, Tex.; and Rosewood, Fla.

Jesus. Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix, L.A., and Seattle, plus two small towns she'd never heard of in the Gulf Coast region. The unit was literally scattered across the map, manpower and resources spread thinner than she'd ever known them to be. And every team was involved in high-risk operations ranging from murder to possible terrorist threats-the latter being investigations the unit had only recently begun to be called into as consultants. As far as Riley could tell, she was the only agent operating without a team, partner, or any kind of backup. But then, she was also the only one who had set off on a very unofficial investigation of a few oddities-not murder or any other major crime. Then. Now the situation was definitely high-risk. And being on her own here now was both a very bad idea, and seemingly unavoidable. Unless she bailed. Returned to Quantico. Nobody would blame her for that, not under the circumstances. Hell, when-if-she told Bishop about this latest wrinkle, he'd undoubtedly recall her without even allowing her time to pack. Riley realized she was fingering the burn at the base of her skull. She forced herself to stop, swore under her breath, and disconnected from the SCU's database. She couldn't bail. Couldn't leave. She had to know. Had to figure out what was going on. "Let's pretend," she whispered. She could do that. It's what she did best, after all. Pretend. Pretend everything was normal. Pretend there was nothing wrong with her. Pretend she wasn't terrified.

Garden City: Dreams in a Kansas Town,

Shon was the man in charge of the biggest drug operation in Kansas City, Missouri. When he was fourteen years old, he was put on by one of the biggest drug dealers KC has ever seen. He went by the name of Big Tone. When Shon came to Tone looking for work, he wasn't feeling it. He didn't like the idea of a fourteen-year-old working for him. But as time went by, Tone gave in; he like that Shon was persistent. Shon would show up every week at the coffee shop downtown that Tone chilled at on Sundays, until Tone put him on. He took Shon under his wing and gave it to him straight, no chaser. Before long, Shon and his boys were moving dumb weight for Tone. Tone took a real liking to Shon; he started to look at him as a son he never had. He knew Shon would go far in his line of work.

Behold, this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow. —Job 8:19 (KJV) I often tell people that sometimes life is like Roller Derby: We may be skating along at the back of the pack, until God grabs our hands and whips us to the front to score. But sitting on a plane departing Atlanta for Kansas City, I was discouraged. I had been hard at work on a project that I thought would take six months to complete. Six months stretched to two years and then five. The more I worked, the further behind I was. The flight attendant interrupted my thoughts: “We will be taking off as soon as our last few passengers arrive.” When a young woman slid into the seat beside me, I glanced at her and the other interesting-looking last-minute boarders. Two words popped into my brain: Roller Derby! “Hi,” I said to my seatmate. “Are you all some sort of team?” She nodded. “We play for the Kansas City Roller Warriors.” I giggled as I recalled Roller Derby matches I’d watched on TV as a child. I rejoiced thinking that I sat in the presence of roller-skating angels, living reenactors of the metaphor I used to encourage others. I chuckled. Life is like Roller Derby. I am never so behind that God cannot reach down His mighty hand and whip me forward. God, thank You for making me smile. When I feel frustrated or too far behind, help me to remember Your Roller Derby angels. —Sharon Foster Digging Deeper: Prv 17:22; Phil 4:4

cả đều bị lột da phải không? - Đúng, nhưng chỉ một phần thôi. - Báo chí chưa hề cắt nghĩa cái biệt danh đó. Cô có biết tại sao người ta lại đặt cho hắn cái tên Buffalo Bill không? - Biết. - Nói cho tôi xem nào. - Tôi sẽ nói chỉ khi nào ông chấp nhận đọc qua bản câu hỏi của tôi. - Tôi sẽ đọc. Thế nào, tại sao vậy? - Nó xuất phát từ một trò đùa xấu của Ban Trọng án ở Kansas City. - Vì sao? - Người ta đặt cho hắn cái tên Buffalo Bill bởi vì hắn

Neil E. Edgar and Christy Y. Edgar, the leaders of a small Kansas City church, God's Creation Outreach Ministry, disciplined their nine-year-old son, Brian, by wrapping him in duct tape, only leaving space for his nose. He died by suffocation, as a result of choking on his own vomit.174 Mother, father, and babysitter all received life sentences.175 Further investigation into the storefront church led investigators to bring abuse charges against five more women who abused the ministers’ children and a family friend. At least two of the women pled guilty and received probation.

At the KIPP Endeavor Academy in Kansas City, for instance, 80 percent of KIPP teachers were TFA Corps Members in 2014.

Particularly galling was the way the Homestead Act was abused. Passed during the Civil War, it was supposed to make a reality out of Lincoln’s version of the free labor, free soil dream. But fewer than half a million people actually set up viable farms over nearly half a century. Most public lands were taken over by the railroads, thanks to the government’s beneficent land-grant policy (another form of primitive accumulation); by land speculators backed by eastern bankers, who sometimes hired pretend “homesteaders” in acts of outright fraud; or by giant cattle ranches and timber companies and the like who worked hand in glove with government land agents. As early as 1862 two-thirds of Iowa (or ten million acres) was owned by speculators. Railroads closed off one-third of Kansas to homesteading and that was the best land available. Mushrooming cities back east became, in a kind of historical inversion, the safety valve for overpopulated areas in the west. At least the city held out the prospect of remunerative wage labor if no longer a life of propertied independence. Few city workers had the capital to migrate west anyway; when one Pennsylvania legislator suggested that the state subsidize such moves, he was denounced as “the Pennsylvania Communist” for his trouble. During the last land boom of the nineteenth century (from about 1883 to 1887), 16 million acres underwent that conversion every year. Railroads doubled down by selling off or mortgaging portions of the public domain they had just been gifted to finance construction or to speculate with. But land-grant roads were built at costs 100 percent greater than warranted and badly built at that, needing to be rebuilt just fifteen years later.

Indians love baseball,” jokes Charlie Hill, “but we don’t set up camp in the ballpark! Hey, if the Atlanta Braves think that using Indians as mascots is simply harmless fun, then why not have them dress up some white guy in a three-piece suit and have him shuffle around a mobile home parked in the middle of the outfield every time their team scores a hit? Or how about changing the names of a few of these sports teams? Why not have the Atlanta White Boys or the Kansas City Caucasians or the Chicago Negroes, the Washington Jews or New York Rednecks?” My

No more hitting him. If you need him to talk, come get me. I'll inject him with something that will have him singing the blues like he was on stage in a dive bar in Kansas City.

The decade of the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, the 1980s, were the major periods for police research, helping to change policing in America. Cities such as Kansas City, Missouri; San Diego, California; Rochester, New York and New Haven, Connecticut helped to prove that operational research could be undertaken in police departments without disrupting the operations of the agency. Furthermore, the research provided new and valuable insights into police work, often challenging some of the notions held sacred by the police.

Blue Valley West, a high school in the nouveau riche south Kansas City suburbs.

Reich would soon back a request from Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide’s white-haired, unnaturally tanned CEO. Mozilo wanted an exemption from the Section 23A rules that prevented Countrywide’s holding company from tapping the discount window through a savings institution it owned. Sheila and the FDIC were justifiably skeptical, as was Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, in whose district Countrywide’s headquarters were located. Lending indirectly to Countrywide would be risky. It might well already be insolvent and unable to pay us back. The day after the discount rate cut, Don Kohn relayed word that Janet was recommending a swift rejection of Mozilo’s request for a 23A exemption. She believed, Don said, that Mozilo “is in denial about the prospects for his company and it needs to be sold.” Countrywide found its reprieve in the form of a confidence-boosting $2 billion equity investment from Bank of America on August 22—not quite the sale that Janet thought was needed, but the first step toward an eventual acquisition by Bank of America. Countrywide formally withdrew its request for a 23A exemption on Thursday August 30 as I was flying to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to speak at the Kansas City Fed’s annual economic symposium. The theme of the conference, chosen long before, was “Housing, Housing Finance, and Monetary Policy.

Corruption in American politics is hardly new, of course, but previously, for the most part, it was conducted mainly on the local level. It was also conducted by Democrats. There were exceptions, of course, especially during Reconstruction, and in the administration of President Grant, and in the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. But generally, when we think of political corruption, we think of the Democratic Party machines in America’s big cities, of the city “bosses” using the political system to rig votes, install cronies in office, extort favors from businesses, collect bribes for the assignment of city contracts, and generally rip off the local taxpayer and loot the treasury. Just as slavery and white supremacy were the tools of Democratic exploitation in the South, the boss system was the party’s tool of corruption and theft in cities throughout the country. The most famous Democratic bosses were Edward Crump, mayor of Memphis from 1910 to 1916; Tom Pendergast, who ran the Jackson County Democratic Club and controlled local politics in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1911 until his conviction for tax fraud in 1939; Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947; and Richard Daley, who was mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976.

He assured me there were no free fish to be found in the Farran household, so if I wanted to make something of myself (and I did!), I’d have to find a pole and catch some fish. From that point on, I was on my own. I put myself through college, doing my undergrad at Creighton University in three years. I then put myself through dental school at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

As a child, I didn't like to study history, until it became my past.

I wed them, before I bed them.

President Dwight Eisenhower, a native of rural Kansas, said, "Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America." The countryside is no more our nation's heart than are its cities, and rural people aren't more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as "flyover country," is to forget not just a country's foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.

I think Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future.

The first Kansas City experiment said that preventive patrol was useless, that having more police cars driving around made no difference. The second Kansas City experiment amended that position. Actually, extra patrol cars did make a difference—so long as officers took the initiative and stopped anyone they thought suspicious, got out of their cars as much as possible, and went out of their way to look for weapons. Patrol worked if the officers were busy. The statistics from the final report on the experiment were eye-opening.

When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement.

States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago. Indeed, during a routine influenza season, usage of respirators rises to nearly 100 percent; in a pandemic, most people who needed a mechanical respirator probably would not get one. (The strain influenza puts on health care was driven home to me in a personal way on my book tour. In Kansas City, a flare-up of ordinary seasonal influenza forced eight hospitals to close emergency rooms, yet this was only a tiny fraction of the pressure a pandemic would exert.) This and similar problems—such as if a particular secondary bacterial invader is resistant to antibiotics, or shortages of such seemingly trivial items as hypodermic needles or bags to hold IV fluids (a severe shortage of these bags is a major problem as I write this)—could easily moot many medical advances since 1918.

Google Fiber was launched to connect homes in Austin, Kansas City, and Provo (Utah) with internet service that’s one hundred times faster than broadband. Google never intended to become an Internet Service Provider. Rather, this is about forcing the established providers in each market—Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, Verizon, Charter—to lower their prices and increase their bandwidth. In developing countries, a similar strategy is in play. Google is helping to build out fiber backbones for entire cities, such as Kampala, Uganda. Where the ground or the local government proves tricky, there is Project Loon. Laying a massive backbone would be an expensive proposition for a rural community, hence those giant floating balloons.

The individual most responsible for the triumph of the documentary style was probably Roy Stryker of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), who sent a platoon of famous photographers out to record the lives of impoverished farmers and thus “introduce America to Americans.” Stryker was the son of a Kansas Populist, and, according to a recent study of his work, “agrarian populism” was the “first basic assumption” of the distinctive FSA style. Other agencies pursued the same aesthetic goal from different directions. Federal workers transcribed folklore, interviewed surviving ex-slaves, and recorded the music of the common man. Federally employed artists painted murals illustrating local legends and the daily work of ordinary people on the walls of public buildings. Unknowns contributed to this work, and great artists did too—Thomas Hart Benton, for example, painted a mural that was actually titled A Social History of the State of Missouri in the capitol building in Jefferson City.16 There was a mania for documentary books, photos of ordinary people in their homes and workplaces that were collected and narrated by some renowned prose stylist. James Agee wrote the most enduring of these, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in cooperation with photographer Walker Evans, but there were many others. The novelist Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White published You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937, while Richard Wright, fresh from the success of his novel Native Son, published Twelve Million Black Voices in 1941, with depictions of African American life chosen from the populist photographic output of the FSA.