Bob Jackson doesn’t know what happened, or where the press car is going now, or why, only that it is following the rest of the motorcade toward Stemmons Freeway at a high speed. He is still holding his empty camera in his lap. The other one, which is loaded, is still strapped around his neck. It all happened so fast he didn’t get a single photograph. If he had only gotten a picture of the rifle barrel in the window, he undoubtedly would have won the Pulitzer Priize for the best news photograph of the year. (Jackson redeemed himself two days later when he took a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.)

An excerpt from Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November.

I took [some pictures] of Harvard Book Store’s David Sedaris book talk and signing.

So Benny told Jim the story of why Marcia was mad at him. Since becoming employed full-time again, he had grown aware of a phenomena that seemed to happen only at work, or at least happen with more frequency at work than other places in life, and the phenomenon was this: one person would say something and the person listening would have positively no idea what he or she meant, but not wanting to appear rude, or worse, stupid, or alternatively, not caring to waste any more time, it was easier just to nod or laugh along than it was to pause and inquire what that person really meant. This was especially true with hallway banter and kitchen talk and other types of inconsequential daily exchanges. People were indifferent to what was said, or they were preoccupied by other things, or they had long ago concluded that what passed for speech during the course of a work day was mostly the babble of idiots. “So I thought, would it make a difference, really,” said Benny, “would it honestly make a difference if instead of replying the way I would normally, I answered everybody with quotes from The Godfather?”

An excerpt from Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris.