Jeanne Marie Laskas

“There's no telling how many guns we have in America - and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafk...”

“'Affable' is the word that often comes up from reporters, even staunch critics, who meet Lou Dobbs for the first time.”

“The island is named Oooguruk, an Inupiaq word meaning 'bearded seal,' an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska's North Slope.”

“Contrary to popular mythology, not all NFL cheerleaders are bimbos or strippers or bored pretty girls looking to get rich. The Ben-Gals offer proof. Neither a bimbo nor a stripper nor a bore...”

“'The melancholy of all things done' is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point...”

“Football is in a guy's DNA. A primal thing. You should play it so you can talk about the glory days when you get older and drink Bud with the guys from the office. Get it done when you're yo...”

“Ndamukong started out playing soccer, like his sister before him. She excelled at it, played for Mississippi State, made the Cameroon national team.”

“In 2003, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a year later, a national ethics committee in France, said that face transplantation would be going too far. The risk of complication wo...”

“When people spot Fallon in public, they do not shriek or drool or go wobbly in the knees. It's a different look entirely. A tilt of the head, mouth agape, eyebrows rolled like you do when yo...”

“The new disease was named chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the NFL fervently and repeatedly denied that such a thing had anything to do with the league or its players.”

“On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike We...”

“By 2012, Dan Gilbert was well over his LeBron James-abandonment hissy fit. He opened Cleveland's first casino, with 1,900 slot machines and eighty-nine table games.”

“Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world. The woody plants occur naturally in the sandy gravel understory of Maine's coastal forests, where little else bothers even try...”

“LaGuardia is jammed into just 680 urban acres; taxiways are tight; runways intersect; you can't launch a departure until the arrival on the other runway crosses the threshold or else the air...”

“One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it.”

“Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them midflight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten...”

“The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, serves 5 million people in seventy-eight California cities, one of six landfills operated by the Sanitation Distr...”

“The Gun Control Act of 1968 was an attempt to impose order. It set up the Federal Firearms License (FFL) system; gun stores would have to become licensed, and they would have to follow certa...”

“Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive...”

“Every vice president since Mondale has lived up on this hill, on the twelve-acre campus of the Naval Observatory in Northwest Washington. It's a pretty house with a wraparound porch and a wh...”