fiefoe

"The Strawberry Girls" / Anne Hull

Then she had to start the process of washing and drying her long hair. Kristen was beginning to suffer from sleep deprivation, and she knew that she needed to find a solution. That’s when a cosmetologist friend named Nancy Rupp stepped in. <> Mrs. Rupp, as she was called by everyone, moonlighted in funeral homes, “fixing the hair of loved ones,” as she put it, which is how she came up with the idea of styling Kristen’s hair while she slept.
Shortcakes and shakes, the best in the county, were devoured in a glitzy picnic area called the Garden of Eatin’.

"Running to Beijing" / Peter Hessler

During the race he drank flat Coca-Cola at every aid station. Olympic marathoners prepare their own bottles, but sports drinks were still in the early stages of development, so Shorter shook up the Coke until it was de-fizzed.
My father was an ideal subject: he ran a hundred miles a week, and he had an inquisitive streak. He also had an appetite for pain... They did a muscle-fibre test in which they extracted a chunk of my father’s thigh. The moment they snipped the tissue, the muscle contracted so violently that the doctor had to stand on my father’s leg in order to yank out the sample. “And then they said, ‘You’re ninety per cent slow-twitch muscle fibres,’ ” my father recalled. “Well, brilliant—so what?”

The New Yorker, 2008-08-11&18