believe in anything

When the team of technicians presented the camera to Kodak audiences they of course heard a barrage of curious questions:

Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer?

And although Mr. Sasson and his team tried to answer some of these questions, he concludes with the statement that the digital camera they created could “substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.”

In those early meetings at Fort Benning, those original eight interviews, the Rangers all told me these fantastic stories, but what I didn’t know at the time was that the raid that is the center of the story of “Black Hawk Down” was a Delta Force raid, a special ops raid — a unit that the Army would not even acknowledge existed. It was totally a black ops unit, and so the Rangers whose job it was to set up a perimeter around the block where the Delta guys were doing their work were not allowed to mention the name of Delta Force. So they would try and tell me their stories, and they kept getting stuck. They would go out in the hall, and there would be a representative there from public affairs, and they’d huddle and confer. The soldier would come back in and say, “And then a soldier from another unit would did thus and so.” And I would say, “What other unit?” “I’m not at liberty to discuss that, sir,” he’d say.

(…)

When I interview people for a story, the last question I always ask is “Who else should I talk to?” And of course each of these Rangers that day had lists of their buddies who had fought with them, and many of them had, in the years since this battle, left the Army. You would be amazed at how much more a guy will tell you with a beer in his hand in his basement in Cleveland, than a Ranger sitting next to a public affairs officer at Fort Benning.

Most of Toronto’s jumpers attempt to kill themselves in the daytime, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., and particularly during the lunch hour. The highest concentration of deaths is on the Yonge line, between Bloor and Sheppard, the lowest on the Spadina section between St. George and Downsview.

(…)

In some notable ways, people who choose to commit suicide in the subway are a breed apart. The subway is one of the only violent means of suicide that women are as apt to use as men. (Suicidal women tend to prefer pills and cutting themselves, while men prefer more deadly means, such as guns.) Paul Links, a professor of psychiatry and the chair of suicide studies at the University of Toronto, has studied suicidal behaviour on subway systems around the world and proposes that subways are a draw to people who impulsively commit suicide, for the simple reason that they are convenient. His theory is backed up by a Montreal study that found most people attempt suicides at the subway station closest to home. “A characteristic of a suicidal state of mind is that planning is affected,” Links says. “A suicidal person isn’t thinking, ‘Well, I have six options, so if this doesn’t work, I’ll try another method.’ ” If you can prevent a person committing suicide by one method, he says, the crisis may pass, and so may the desire to die.