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Undercover With the Weird Religious Divorce Rules Unit

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An undercover agent posed as an Orthodox Jewish woman in a sting operation that led to the arrest of two rabbis for kidnapping men who refused to grant divorces to their wives.

North from Laguna Beach

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I was Orson Welles skulking in the shadows and you Alida Valli; our time measured like footsteps advancing on Gethsemane.

Walking In My Big Black Boots

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"People do that. They cross the road when they aren’t supposed to and get away with it. They do it all the time. Only, then, he might think I was a rebel and I’d rather he imagine me a square. A square who never was a wild thing. A rebel who chose to be t

Alcoholic Reverie

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My grandfather’s soul And his infinite high-pitched laughter Intervene And the alcohol that Brought him closer to heaven But that wreaked havoc Among his family And my father Washes down the gullies of the Future

Blind Observer.

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I sat there, observing the city people. Frowns upon all our faces. The rain moistened my heart and journal. A blind family; a trio. They used their wands to lead the way.Their faces read joy but, most importantly, satisfaction.My envy filled the damp page.

Zeus Takes a Day Job

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That's demeaning enough, but not as hard to take as the customers. They're all jaded hipsters, thumb diddling smartphone freaks, pretending their online interactions actually count as relationships and that “tweets” are real conversations. It's sad, reall

Deliberate Music

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My emulations always fail. At heart,/ I don’t want bougainvillea nor blushing pilgrims

The Thing

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I look back at Bobby, his wide blue eyes staring at me. A dark shadow on his round baby face also tells me that he isn't entirely convinced if the thing is dead in the first place. Because even the folks buried in the town's only cemetery have a way of co

A Girl You Couldn't Hurt

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“You take the woman, you get her records,” Dean said, and he didn't seem the least bit troubled by the Streisand album.

The Tribe of Women

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One can’t predict the final cadence of one’s life.

Those Things

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For me, it was that kind of moment. I got to come back. I had been here before and now, well now, I could come back. I had a chance to do it all again, bigger, better and well, just better. I hoped I could remember all that I learned the first time.

Yeah, He's Stoned

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He’s so stoned he’s in the zen zone, Which is just beyond the end zone.

To All the Lights

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I have nothing in me but a raw loneliness right now. It's as if someone whirl-winded me out of the sky into the middle of the ocean in the middle of the red faced night. My fate seems immobile, sealed, doomed to a rocking nothingness, like…

Motel

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Brody was standing against the wall with one hand in his hip pocket, as if he was holding a gun. The motel was set in the undergrowth of several weedy small towns, but a flashing neon sign made it impossible to miss from the road. We used it as a safe hou

Marion Winik Has Kissed A Lot Of Frogs

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Writer Marion Winik has ridiculously bad taste in men. She's an intelligent woman and a terrific writer, a good mom with a good heart, and ALL of her romantic relationships are train wrecks.Winik recounts her quest for love at age 50 in her new book, “Highs In The Low…

Much Ado About Exploring.

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John was sitting at his computer one night after work, when he read an article linked to him by a friend.

Secondhand: Four Inscriptions

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To whoever reads this next--Henry James makes my head hurt.

His Father’s Statement

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He didn't want to read his father's statement. Yet still he lingered, poised over the kitchen table, where his father had left it.

Polaris

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Things get lost in Big John, too. I see the other guys throw jokes about his size at his body that wedge their way into his armpits or into the wrinkles of his laugh lines and disappear. I’m not sure if it all disappears to remind us how small we are,

The Glass

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Not only half-full/ but stress-fractured

Short Cuts

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The shop is swarming with little women.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 55

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Zoë’s divorce lawyer, Arno Aghajanian (“Double A” to his friends), sat at his desk in Los Angeles reading a copy of the Hollywood Intelligencer.

The Abstracted Man

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The abstracted man lacks an inside. He is a body. A shell. An exterior that encompasses nothing.The abstracted man yearns to fill himself with adjectives. He lumbers through streets. No adjectives fit. He finds adjectives where we discard them. He carries them in his…

The Passing of a Hero

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"...and time came hurtling behind him, gripped his shoulder/ jumped clean over him like a buck goat/ the world aged but he did not/ he spent his afternoons in an old car with fake leather seats/ drank cold beer under the olive trees/ or lay in a hammock/

So What

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This morning I heard her downstairs trying to get away silently. I knew she would write a short goodbye note. I knew it would tell me her reason for leaving —she had to be free of my indifference. I dressed, finished my coffee, backed out of the driveway and went to…

A Little Load of Paint

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Cézanne sags during a moment of paint. There is an umbrella in the room whose surface collects his thoughts. Outside, in the rain, the grass and garden smell strongly of spring. Fruit litters the table. Light through the window writhes in conversation with shape and…

Out of Time

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I was so high on the not knowing, I thought, you will love me for my confusion. And so I allowed myself to reach further inward than either of us felt comfortable. I imagined a delicious vanilla pudding at the core of my exploration, sweet and satisfying enough for me to…

Matron

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His land lady was somehow thrilled that the Herr Doktor Professor had a visitor from the US and invited us for tea. She caught us coming in and without thinking anything, and at her persistence, I had absently accepted. My friend did not seem to want to b

Erasing the Modern World

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An electromagnetic pulse/ scrubbed the servers./ The clouds wisped and blew away, empty./ Markets lost what little mind they had.

Sit Down, Here.

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“The window is a much better place to read,” she said.I wasn't aware she was talking to me, at first. In my typical manner, I was thinking about far off possibilities and realities completely detached from my own. Yet, here she was, a far off…