Pete Townshend, playing for nonfans
  • Impm/Wikimedia Commons
  • Pete Townshend, playing for nonfans

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us.

Hey, did you read:

• That support for the death penalty keeps falling and is now at its lowest level in more than four decades? —Mick Dumke

• That reports about the prevalence and horrific effects of a street drug called krokodil may be exaggerated? —Tony Adler

• About the first rule of wearing blackface for Halloween? —Gwynedd Stuart

• Great ideas from the man who invented the calendar? (“I want to double the length of a second so people won’t always have to say, ‘Can you give me two seconds?'”) —Steve Bogira

• David Sedaris on his sister’s suicide? —Tal Rosenberg

• Or seen the work of Jeff Bennett, whose latest series shows Thomas Kinkade paintings under siege by Star Wars spaceships? —Aimee Levitt

• About the Illinois church that looks like a giant penis from above? —Gwynedd Stuart

• That it’s impossible the escape the Saint Louis Cardinals on KMOX? —Aimee Levitt

• About Lou Reed’s transvestite (or possibly transsexual) “muse?” —Tony Adler

• That the Who prefer to play for nonfans? —J.R. Jones