Examples of Storytelling Ledes
1.
To neighbors, Casey Price was a seventh grader with acne and a baseball cap who lived an unremarkable life among a bevy of male relatives.
He built the occasional skateboard ramp and did wheelies on his bicycle down the streets of this subdivision of stucco homes north of Phoenix.
In nearby Surprise, where Casey was enrolled as a 12-year-old in a public school for four months, he was regarded as a shy, average student with chronic attendance problems. A man identified as his uncle had registered him, attended curriculum night and e-mailed his teachers about homework assignments.
Now Casey is in jail, and his former neighbors and classmates have learned the unthinkable: Not only is Casey not Casey — his real name is Neil H. Rodreick II — but he is also a 29-year-old convicted sex offender who kept a youthful appearance with the aid of razors and makeup.
2.
The players who grow up by the sugar-cane farms like to say that they get their speed from racing jackrabbits along country roads.
The players who grow up on the coast like to say that they get their speed from running through sand pits on the hottest summer days.
And the players who grow up in Riviera Beach, Fla., like to say that they get their speed from a football field with no grounds crew.
“The grass isn’t mowed here in the winter, so it gets really high and thick,” 15-year-old Tavis Hester said. “It kills your legs, but it also builds them. My grandfather played on this field. My uncle played here. And, you know, my brother played here.”
His brother, Devin Hester, is a rookie with the Chicago Bears, famous for returning punts, kickoffs, missed field goals and anything else he can get his gloves on. He is the kind of player who could change this year’s Super Bowl with one cutback.
3.
ON a warm massage table at Sothys Spa, far from the January chill, Fran Glennon, 52, was cocooned in white terry cloth and enjoying a facial. On another massage table, about five feet away, was a smaller cocoon: Ms. Glennon’s daughter, Emma, 9.
Emma, of course, did not need blackhead extraction or steam to open clogged pores or a massage to stimulate the skin stretched across her delicate little face. Instead, Emma’s aesthetician gently applied to her forehead, nose and cheeks lotions made with mineral water from the city of Spa in eastern Belgium.
“How do you feel?” asked Zina Bekenshtein, the aesthetician, after a mask was rinsed from Emma’s face and a damp cloth peeled from her eyes.
A sleepy looking Emma grinned and half-whispered: “Gooood.”
More and more, little girls like Emma are participating in activities that their own mothers might not have experienced until they were adults. It is not unusual to walk into a salon and be seated next to a preadolescent girl whose twiggy legs barely reach the pedicure tub or to be dining at a fancy restaurant near a second grader or to encounter a 6-year-old in the gym locker room.
Places once considered adult domains — spas, gyms, restaurants and nail and hair salons — are increasingly becoming destinations for little girls and their mothers.
4.
You're a respected scientist, one of the best in your field. So respected, in fact, that when the United Nations decided to study the relationship between hurricanes and global warming for the largest scientific endeavour in its history -- its International Panel on Climate Change -- it called upon you and your expertise.
You are Christopher Landsea of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. You were a contributing author for the UN's second International Panel on Climate Change in 1995, writing the sections on observed changes in tropical cyclones around the world. Then the IPCC called on you as a contributing author once more, for its "Third Assessment Report" in 2001. And you were invited to participate yet again, when the IPCC called on you to be an author in the "Fourth Assessment Report." This report would specifically focus on Atlantic hurricanes, your specialty, and be published by the IPCC in 2007.
Then something went horribly wrong. Within days of this last invitation, in October, 2004, you discovered that the IPCC's Kevin Trenberth -- the very person who had invited you -- was participating in a press conference. The title of the press conference perplexed you: "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity." This was some kind of mistake, you were certain. You had not done any work that substantiated this claim. Nobody had.
As perplexing, none of the participants in that press conference were known for their hurricane expertise. In fact, to your knowledge, none had performed any research at all on hurricane variability, the subject of the press conference. Neither were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability, you knew, showed no reliable upward trend in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. Not in the Atlantic basin. Not in any other basin.
5.
On the first night of December, an unseasonably cold one in the Ozarks, the boys and girls of John Brown University primped in their zoot suits, suspenders, waistcoats, spats, faux-hawks, pompadours, knee-length pleated skirts, nylons, snoods and inch-high black heels and marched through snow drifts to their gymnasium in the Walton Lifetime Health Complex, one of northwest Arkansas’s monuments to the Wal-Mart family’s generosity. Inside, the gymnasium was decorated with rows of Christmas lights strung overhead across the width of the basketball court, from one railing of the mezzanine jogging track to the other. The occasion, which would last from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., was a dance, the first of its kind at this small, nondenominational Christian college.
As if to make up for 90 essentially dance-free years on campus, the 14-piece Jack Mitchell Big Band began playing early, shortly before 8, and from the first note of “In the Mood” the best dancers clustered up front, where they performed aerial lifts, between-the-leg slides and precarious dips, looking like a reasonably good audition for “So You Think You Can Dance” or the great “khakis swing” Gap ad from 1998. These joyful, loose-limbed performances concealed a rather startling truth. The young men and women of this 1,200-person college were dancing alongside, and in some cases bumping smack into, their president, dean and chaplain — the men who only six months ago could have expelled them for doing so. From the school’s founding in 1919 by John Brown Sr. — not the abolitionist but a Salvation Army itinerant turned preacher — until last October, dancing had been seen at J.B.U. as a gateway to sin. Students danced, but in private.
6.
The Mahestan mall in South Tehran is sometimes called “the honeycomb” of the Basij, the Iranian youth militia, because it is here that Basijis, as the militia members are known, buy and sell banners for the Shiite festival of Ashura, as well as religious books and posters. Somber, bearded young men in collarless shirts linger over tea behind stands selling tapes of religious singers — cult celebrities who belt out tear-jerking laments for the martyrdom of Hussein and make a small fortune performing at memorial services. Omid Malekian, a 28-year-old employee of a Tehran petrochemical refinery and the son of a carpenter, was shopping at Mahestan on Dec. 16, the day after Iran’s elections for city councils and for the Assembly of Experts, the 86-member clerical board that will select the next supreme leader should anything happen to the current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the 2005 presidential election, Malekian voted for the winner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and when I asked if he was happy with the president, he answered frankly.
“Sometimes I am analyzing myself and thinking, Oh, we have done wrong,” he mused. “He is very popular and friendly with the people, but sometimes when he is expressing his ideas, he doesn’t think about the future or the consequences. He is a simple man.”
In particular, Malekian suggested that Ahmadinejad had been incautious in his promises to improve the economy — promises he has yet to keep. There was another area, too, in which Ahmadinejad had faltered: “About the Holocaust,” he said. “I don’t know much about it, but from the reaction of the world, it seems he should have said something different.”
Still, Malekian said that he voted for the most severe fundamentalist among the candidates running for the clerical Assembly of Experts. The campaign turned on the competition between two incumbents, Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi — widely reputed to be Ahmadinejad’s spiritual leader — and Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the pragmatic former president who lost the presidential race to Ahmadinejad in 2005. Each hoped to increase his share of the vote and thus his power on the assembly.
7.
In the early morning of Jan. 18, 2002, a Canadian Pacific Railway train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed just outside Minot, N.D., spilling roughly 240,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia into a woodsy neighborhood on the outskirts of town. The resulting toxic cloud grew to some five miles long, two and a half miles wide and 350 feet high, enveloping the homes of approximately 15,000 people. Confused and afraid, thousands of Minot residents turned on their radios to get public warnings and instructions on how to stay safe.
Yet no such information was available. Minot’s six nonreligious commercial stations, all of which were owned and operated by the nation’s largest radio company, Clear Channel Communications, were broadcasting prerecorded programs engineered in remote studios. Police dispatchers couldn’t reach anyone in Clear Channel’s local offices: the town’s new emergency-communications system failed to automatically issue an alert, and no one answered the phones at the stations. What ensued was horrific: as one man died and hundreds became ill from inhaling the poisonous gas, the airwaves were filled with canned music and smooth-talking D.J.’s.
Five years later, America’s emergency-communications system remains woefully inadequate. Consider, for instance, the basic question of where you would turn for information if disaster struck your hometown. The Internet puts up-to-the-minute information at your fingertips, but not if you can’t turn on your computer or your local network is down. Mobile phones allow for voice conversations and text messaging, but not when the system is jammed from overuse. Cable television offers hundreds of channels, but not one of them works when the power is out. Radio, when accessed by battery-powered receivers, provides the optimum combination of reliability and accessibility — but not if local stations have no one in the studios to report the news.
8.
On a hot day in July last year, Nancy Pelosi, then the House Democratic leader, took a gang of reporters to a gas station near the Capitol. At that spot, with the gasoline pumps as a backdrop and the price of fuel skyrocketing, and with the Democratic senator Charles Schumer and the congressmen Rahm Emanuel and Ed Markey in tow, the future speaker launched a campaign with a slogan that fizzled but a phrase destined to have a delayed impact.
“Democrats are proposing a New Direction,” she said, and the phrase was capitalized in the subsequent handout. I remembered that grand old wheeze from the Hubert Humphrey campaign against Richard Nixon, along with “New Dawn” and a few other News that strained to evoke F.D.R.’s New Deal and J.F.K.’s New Frontier. In political sloganeering, no News is good news.
Ah, but then — like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, as Elijah’s servant used to say in I Kings 18:44 — there appeared in the Pelosi statement a phrase destined for a much later thunderclap. “In the first hundred hours of a new Congress if elected,” she said, and then went off into a blast against “obscene profits” of Big Oil (may her diatribe increase).
Now, six months later, in the aftermath of the tsunami of tsuris that swept Republicans from the Congressional majority, the phrase that seized every headline writer is the first 100 hours. Atlanta’s Daily World: “Important domestic issues, including minimum wage, are on the front burner for the first 100 hours.” Time magazine: “Any close look at Nancy Pelosi’s first 100 hours has to start with the obvious — it’s not really 100 hours. Only in the U.S. Congress . . . could 100 hours last two weeks — as time stands still so members can take a day off to see the college-football championship game.” (Though most voters might have taken her pledge literally, to mean the first hundred actual hours — four days and change — it meant 100 hours in session. By that measure, six promised bills passed with 13 hours to spare.)