
I went back to work, writing two weekly sections of Time called Milestones and Miscellany. Each filled just one column on a three-column page, and writing them was the entry-level job of new young writers. Milestones were squibs about births, deaths, and marriages, bits of information culled from newspapers and the wire services. Miscellany was a stack of ten or eleven one-sentence news items to which I added puns as titles. Time the Weekly Newsmagazine, March 17, 1958:
TWO TIRED. In Three Rivers, Mich., Thomas Kline, 11, smashed into a moving automobile with his bicycle, later confessed to police: “I fell asleep at the handlebars.”
ABSENCE MINDED. In Miranda de Ebro, Spain, the school principal ordered the school doors closed at 9 a.m. as a disciplinary lesson to late students, gave up the project when 50% of the teachers were locked out.
POLE APART. In Grand Junction, Colo., a shiny new police car drove into a municipal parking lot on a routine assignment, slowly cruised around as the driver checked the left side and his companion checked the right, smacked head-on into a telephone pole.
This story is from the January 20, 2025 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the January 20, 2025 edition of The New Yorker.
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