Tom sat cross-legged in the corner, next to his pack, winding a piece of duct tape around the frame of his glasses. A candle burned beside him, and Kate sat nearby, with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, holding a beer bottle on her lap.

“Tom,” I said. “What did you mean, you never paid for your plane ticket?”

He didn’t look up. He tore off another strip of duct tape and carefully wrapped it around his glasses. “Next time I come to Africa I’m going to bring some superglue,” he said. “Life in Africa would be so much easier, if only we had some superglue.”

Excerpted from The Road Builder by Nicholas Hereshenow. Published by The Berkeley Publishing Group, New York, 2001.

On the federal level, public art programs are part of the General Services Administration (GSA). The GSA’s Art-in-Architecture Program mandates that all new-construction, newly purchased, or renovated federal buildings set aside 0.5 percent of the cost toward acquiring and installing art in or around the building. Artwork made for federal projects is generally durable and permanent, designed to last for decades. The work generally must represent values held by the majority of U.S. citizens. Artists participating in the GSA’s projects usually have national reputations, excellent ties with fabricators, and an ability to work on a grand scale.

Excerpted from The Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist by Margaret R. Lazzari. Published by Wadsworth, Cenage Learning, Boston, 2010.

But if you really want to shock a few Manhattanites, just tell them you’re going fishing in the park. At first, they invariably think you’re full of it and, after you finally convince them, they’re horrified. When the discuss it, the look they give you conveys several layers of reservation: It’s illegal. Well, if it’s not illegal, it should be.  There’s no fish there, anyway. Even if it’s not illegal, why would you want to? …

Yes, you can fish in Central Park. You just need a New York State fishing license and a taste for weirdness. There are largemouth bass, some specimens of which are rumored to approach double-digit poundages. There park is certainly a fertile place in many observable – if not always appetizing – ways, and I don’t doubt that there are some real hogs cruising its eight tiny bodies of water.

Excerpted from ‘Manhattan Odyssey’ by Paul Guernsey. Appearing in City Fishing, edited by Judith Schnell. Published by Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 2002.

From time to time we could see two forms glide by alongside the trees. We were passing in front of a bench, where a couple were seated side by side, making a single dark patch.

My friend murmured:

“Poor things! It is not disgust but an immense pity which I feel for them. Of all the mysteries of human life, there is one which I have thoroughly solved: the great torture of our existence lies in the fact that we are eternally alone, and all our efforts and all our acts are only an attempt to escape this solitude. Those two lovers on the bench, in the open air, are trying, like all living creatures, to put at least a temporary stop to their loneliness; but they are, and always will be, alone, just as you and I are alone.”

Excerpted from ‘Solitude’ by Guy de Maupassant. Appearing in The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant, published by Walter J. Black Inc., New York, 1903.

Ticket scalping in connection to the Army-Navy football contest has been one of the features of the annual game which officers of both institutions have been trying to prevent for years. In spite of all precautions, however, the ticket scalper has always been on the ground at the annual contest with seats which he held until the great demand made it possible for him to sell at exorbitant prices.

This year special precautions were taken to trace the tickets. A record of every ticket presented to officers was kept, and efforts have been made to buy tickets from scalpers by officers from the Annapolis and West Point institutions. The tickets which Lieut. Commander Lenning now has in his possession, it is said, are the first that have been obtained from scalpers which were originally given to a cadet. A probe will be begun as soon as the cadets return to their academies, to ascertain what disposition of the youthful soldiers and sailors made of these tickets.

Excerpted from ‘PROBE TICKET SCALPING.; Naval Officers Will investigate Sale of Football Tickets.’ Published in The New York Times, Wireless Cable and Sporting Section, November 27, 1910.

The phenomenon of the informal economy is both deceivingly simple and extraordinarily complex, trivial in its everyday manifestations and capable of subverting the economic and political order of nations. We encounter it in our daily life in such simple activities as buying a cheap watch or a book from a street vendor, arranging for a handyman to do repair work at our home for cash, or hiring an immigrant woman to care for the children and clean the house while we are away. Such apparently trivial encounters may be dismissed as unworthy of attention until we realize that, in the aggregate, they cumulate into billions of dollars of unreported income and that the humble vendor or cleaning woman represents the end point of complex subcontracting, labor recruitment, and labor transportation chains. … We do not commonly realized that the clothing we wear, the restaurant meals we eat, and even the laptop computer we regularly use may have something to do with the informal economy.

Excerpted from The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg. Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2005.

On the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, as the nation reflected on its losses, thousands of families gathered at the new World Trade Center rising in Lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and on a field of wildflowers in Pennsylvania to commemorate nearly 3,000 killed on that infamous morning when jetliners were turned into missiles and a new age of terrorism was born.

The day’s centerpiece unfolded at ground zero, where more than 10,000 members of the victims’ families, and some dignitaries and their wives, gathered in a parklike setting of swamp white oaks and emerald lawns — a strangely futuristic plaza with precisely spaced trees rising from a five-acre granite floor, surrounded by a gouged wasteland of unfinished skyscrapers and silent construction cranes.

Excerpted from ‘On 9/11, Vows of Remembrance’ by Robert D. McFadden. Published September 11, 2011 in the New York Times.

Behind the lunch counter at Ida’s Country Store at the corner of Main Street and Stutzmantown Road, Tammy was wrapping ham and cheese sandwiches in advance of what passes for the noontime rush in Shanksville, population 250. The lifelong resident of this sleepy mountain town tucked in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania is happy to give directions, share a joke or dispense unsolicited advice to strangers, but she won’t give up her last name.

And her age?

“Old enough to know better,” she chirped, drawing a cackle from Missy Brant, 38, who was shaving carrots in the kitchen. Tammy talked to the media a lot in the months after the “incident” that made Shanksville an international destination for pilgrims seeking to understand America by standing at the edge of one of its worst wounds. She has “googled” herself a few times since, however, and unhappily found that her name has been broadcast around the world.

Folks around here value their privacy, Tammy explained, and they are determined to preserve it even as bulldozers and mounds of federal and donated dollars raise the monument that will make Shanksville a tourist attraction rivaling Gettysburg. Swarms of tourists will soon descend on her hometown, most who will neither know nor care what was there before tragedy put it on the international roadmap.

Excerpted from ‘Sept. 11: Ten years later, a nation of resolve‘ by Christopher J. Kelly. Published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on September 11, 2011.

If details given by Russians about man’s first artificial moon are correct, the Soviet has taken a giant step into space, a step beyond what is contemplated by scientists in this country.

Soviet reports placed the weight of the successfully launched satellite at about 184 pounds. The diameter of the sphere was said to be about twenty-two inches. The Soviet “moon” was said to be up in an orbit 560 miles above the surface of the earth, where it is speeding around the world at about 18,000 miles an hour.

In contrast to this large satellite American scientists told Congress last spring that they hoped for a twenty-inch sphere weight 21.5 pounds up 300 miles. These plans have since been dropped – an American September launching was at one time envisioned – in favor of plans to launch the twenty-pound satellite some time in 1958. Perhaps a tiny test satellite scarcely six inches in diameter could be achieved this fall, American scientists said recently.

Excerpted from ‘Satellite Flight is Step into Space’ by Robert K. Plumb. Published by the New York Times on October 5, 1957.

Quite possibly, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast will never completely recover from the catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Katrina (see the postscript in this volume). A major indicator of Katrina’s destruction to the built environment is that in Louisiana alone, insurance companies paid $14.5 billion in claims during the first year after the storm, and many claims have yet to be processed. … Specifically for the New Orleans metropolitan area, all sectors of non-form employment have experienced significant decline, and the return of manufacturing, especially smaller manufacturers (food processors), had not occurred in the year since Katrina. … Even more serious, construction employment in the New Orleans metropolitan area has not rebounded, as in other metropolitan areas along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, reflecting an anomalous pattern following a natural disaster.

Excerpted from ‘Katrina as Paradigm Shift: Reflections on Disaster Research in the Twenty-First Century’ by J. Steven Picou and Brent K. Marshall, appearing in The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe, edited by David L. Brunsma, David Overfelt and J. Steven Picou. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Massachusetts, 2007.

Joshua likes donuts, jelly donuts in particular. He also likes apples, but not as much as jelly donuts. Let’s use this information as a starting point for our study of utility. Let’s also assume that the price of a jelly donut and the price of an apple are each $.50. If Joshua has just $.50 in his pocket, and had to choose between buying a jelly donut and an apple, which would he choose? Based on what you know about his tastes and preferences, you’ve probably guessed correctly—he would choose the jelly donut! In economic terms, Joshua receives higher utility from the consumption of a jelly donut than he does from an apple.

Excerpted from Basic Economic Principles: A Guide for Students by David Edward O’Connor and Christopher C. Faille. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 2000.

Tropical Storm Irene’s swipe at the Big Apple proved Sunday that New Yorkers can be a tough crowd to impress.

“I slept through the whole thing,” said James Trager, a writer who watched nature’s display of fury as it took place outside the windows of his apartment in Midtown and gave a tepid review: “Nothing. It’s exaggerated.”

“I think we’re all surprised how relatively quickly the storm blew through here and the rain stopped,” said Steve Kastenbaum, a national correspondent for CNN radio, who watched the storm from the comfort of his apartment in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn.

He said he saw lots of local street flooding and branches in the streets, but few uprooted trees; during the height of the storm, people were walking on the street. “I even saw one or two folks taking a jog,” he said. “I kid you not. Pretty typical for Brooklyn. They’re not going to let anybody get in their way.”

Excerpted from ‘Irene fails to wow New Yorkers‘ by the CNN Wire Staff. Appearing on August 28, 2011, on CNN.com.

From the earliest historical data we find the territory adjacent to Norwich, mentioned by the Mohegan Indians – as well as the early English settlers – as exceptionally good fishing territory. The conditions existing in the early days are recognized to-day.

The larger streams are known as the Yantic, Shetucket and Quinebaug Rivers, and they, uniting at Norwich, form the romantic Thames, the head of navigation, fourteen miles from Long Island Sound. One of the first proofs we have of the fishing customs of the Indians is to-day to be seen just above the fording place in the Quinebaug. Here the Indians built weirs of stones running in a V-shape down stream from either shore and at the lower point a small opening was left where a noble Mohegan would be stationed with a spear or club or such other means as the Red Man had, and thus secure a bountiful supply of shad, bass, eels, trout, or perch for their immediate needs, when the fish were driven down by the members of the tribe, who stationed side by side, waded and beat the waters for a mile or more above.

Excerpted from ‘A New England Angling Eden’ by Herbert R. Branche, originally appearing in The American Angler, September 1918. Published by The American Angler Inc., New York.

And J. H. Plumb argues that this new engagement with pets within the bourgeois household is one of the means by which “quite humble men and women, innocent of philosophical theory, [were led to accept] perhaps unconsciously, the modernity of their world.”

The pet plays a complex cultural role in this period: as commodity, companion, paragon, proxy, and even kin. The practice of pet keeping was initially an urban phenomenon and served as a response to modern alienation and commodification by creating a being who could generate a sense of connection and meaning in a world of things. In this era of dramatic increases in consumption, pets were increasingly visible as a sign of prosperity and widely bred and sold for profit. New practices of selective breeding, developed at first for livestock, were exploited to produce more desirable types of ornamental fish, canaries, and pigeons, while exotic pets like parrots and monkeys were coveted possessions.

Excerpted from Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Published by Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2010.