And the stories were about Tucson and she's from Tucson. So it didn't make any sense.

And but then, the Post named her today and published her apology, and said they'd looked at all her stories from "this year" (this calendar year?) and spot-checked some older work, and found no other evidence of plagiarism. (I would go a little deeper? But, sure, I know, who has time.)

So she's been suspended for three months, and not fired—because they have both familiarity bias and probably resume bias too. (Also: it would be stupid to fire her anyway.)

But in her apology, she touches on neither how or why it happened, and that's something I'd love to know. How do you end up with 15 paragraphs of someone's story in your own? That's literally impossible to execute as an "oh my sources document got mixed up in my story" maneuver. (I think so, at least? I mean, maybe someday it'll happen to me! Everyone is afraid of doing something stupid.) So but how? It's either a cry for help, a statement of anger at the institution or the act of a person so preoccupied with other things that she no longer is even thinking about her job. In plagiarism cases we so rarely understand why it happened, and this is frustrating, because we almost have a window into finding out.

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Moonstrips are matzos but they are not plain and tasteless and cardboardy. They are delicious. (And, okay, maybe just a little cardboardy? But not in a terribly off-putting way.) Do you like everything bagels? Of course you do. You live in New York. Or somewhere else. You love everything bagels. They are probably the best kind of bagel. (Them and sesame, if you have some particularly subtle smoked salmon or sturgeon.) Well, Moonstrips, which are made by the kosher food company Streit’s, taste like an everything bagel. They are a crunchy, salty, poppy-and-onion flavored treat.

I learned about them from my kid. He described them to me and my wife once after coming in from the playground outside our apartment building. He said they were crackers that he had tried because there was another kid at the playground whose mom shared them. He said they were the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. But he’s six, and given to grand hyperbole. My wife and I thought maybe “moonstrips” was just a nickname some parent had made up—maybe for some kind of cheese puff thing or something. It didn’t sound like an official product name to us. Especially for matzo.

But we learned that that’s what it was. That’s the name Streit’s chose for their onion-and-poppy flavored matzo. I don’t know why. The other varieties have more normal names, like “Egg & Onion,” “Salt & Pepper,” and “Mediterranean,” which is flavored with sun dried tomatoes, garlic, basil and olive oil. (Which, yuck. But then, I’ve never tried them. And I never imagined I’d like any matzo as much as I like Moonstrips. So, you never know.)

The Streit’s bakery happens to be located just a couple blocks from my apartment building. It's at 150 Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side, where Aron Streit started the company in 1925. Aron, who was Jewish and born in Austria, passed the company on to his sons Jack and Irving when he died in 1937. They then passed it on to their daughters, who run it now. This is a point of pride for the company, as it says on the Streit’s website:

“Streit’s still occupies the same four buildings on Rivington Street where Aron and his sons started baking matzos more than seventy years ago. And the matzo bakery is still a family business. Today, Aron’s granddaughters and great-grandsons run the company. Streit’s is the only family-owned and operated matzo company in America. While others have sold out to large corporations, we at Streit’s continue our family tradition of bringing you the best matzo and kosher food products for Passover and year round.”

The Streit’s bakery is a favorite place of mine to stop into and look around. It’s pleasing to the eye; all white tile, with big, industrial ovens and cool conveyer-belt machines tracking in and out of and around them like a Rube Goldberg contraption. I really like old-fashioned food packaging, too, and there’s a small shop attached to the bakery that has the company’s products, in all their colorful cans and jars and boxes, neatly arranged on a three long shelves. Streit’s makes lots of products other than matzo: soups, macaroons, candies, egg noodles, chow mein noodles, soy sauce. You can tell they don’t sell very much if the stuff there, though. I’ve never seen anyone else in the store. I imagine most of their business is in shipping.

So when we found out that the snacks the kid had taken such a liking to were made so close to us—and that they were considerably less loaded with day-glo chemical powder and triple-fried hydrogenated corn starch than most of the snacks he clamors for—we made a point to pick some up. And, again, I was surprised to learn that they’re really good! I’ve been enjoying them plain, or with cream cheese, or whitefish salad or, most recently, with the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company’s camembert cheese, which is what French camembert cheese would taste like if the French knew anything about making camembert cheese.*

It was with the camembert that I finished off our last box. And my kid is supposed to bring in a snack to share with his art class this weekend. And he wants to bring Moonstrips. And I wanted more Moonstrips to keep in the house, too. (Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to the stealing part, we’re almost there.) So on Tuesday, walking home from a lunch meeting, I stopped back in to Streit’s.

There was no one at the counter in the shop when I got there, so I waited, perusing the goods, wondering if I should buy a can of soup for the collection of cans I keep in my kitchen. I don’t have any Streit’s cans. I decided against. They’re good-looking, but not really display worthy. (Not like Roland Hearts of Palm, say, or The Allens Cut Okra. Now those are beautiful cans!) I found the Moonstrips on the bottom shelf and grabbed two boxes. Then I waited. Through an open door, I could see into the oven area, where two men were working. One of them stood at the bottom of a ramp, catching the two-by-two-foot sheets of matzos that came sliding out of the oven even thirty seconds or so and arranging them neatly in a tray. Once he had a stack of maybe ten, he’d push the tray to his right, where a colleague broke the sheets into smaller sections and put them in metal baskets moving past him on an elevated track. Swinging like the chairs on a chair-lift at a ski resort, the baskets then carried the matzos to another part of the factory. It was fun to watch.

Still, when, after ten minutes of this, no one had shown up at the counter. I was a little frustrated. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to bother the bakers. They were busy keeping up with a conveyor belt. That’s a stressful situation. I remembered what happened to Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory. (These guys might have been under more pressure. These might have been Passover matzos they were making, as Passover’s coming up next month. The kosher requirements get extremely strict this time of year. The matzos have to go from oven to box in under 18 minutes, according to Rabbinical law, or they’re considered leavened.) I didn’t want them to have to push the stop button, shut down their whole operation. I didn’t know if they even had a stop button.

I walked to the back of the shop and poked my head through another open door, which led to a stairwell. “Hello?” I called out. No answer.

I considered just putting the Moonstrips back and the shelf and leaving. But I’d already invested all this time. And then I would have to come back to the store later in the week. Who has time for that?

I finally went over to the door to the even area. It was loud in the there, the machinery, so I had to shout: “Excuse me?”

The guy putting the matzos into the swinging trays looked up.

I shouted again. “Is there anyone here? I’d like to buy something.”

He shrugged and smiled.

I walked back to the door in the back again. No one was coming down the stairs.

I thought about just walking out of the store with the matzos. It would serve them right, I thought, for leaving a store so unattended. For inconveniencing one’s customers like this. What kind of way is this to run a business? But then I felt guilty. I didn’t want to be a thief. I didn’t want to steal stuff. Especially not from such a nice, local, family owned business; one that I imagine is not exactly thriving as the old world changes to the new.

I went back and looked into the oven room. “I’m just gonna leave money on the counter!” I shouted.

The basket guy smiled and waved.

I went back at looked at the matzo shelf. A price-tag under the Moonstrips spot said “$2.00.” I opened my wallet. I had a couple twenties, a five dollar bill and three singles. I felt some coins in my pocket, and fished them out. Two quarters, two dimes, a nickel and two pennies. So I had $3.78.

So, an ethical question. Do you leave an extra dollar extra? No big deal. Just a dollar. But then I’m, what, tipping the place for shitty service?

I guess I could have just bought one box, the one for my kid to take to his art class. But I wanted some Moonstrips for home, too. For myself. Like I said, they’re very tasty.

Technically, I suppose, I am a thief. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. I’m thinking of it more like I owe Streit’s 22 cents. Maybe I’ll drop it off sometime if I’m passing by. Or maybe I won’t.

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Darcey and I met the summer we were both three, soon after our families moved into mirror-image bi-levels in a new development. Situated on opposite ends of a U-shaped street, our houses faced each other so that the windows to our bedrooms aligned, both of them at the end of a hallway next to slightly smaller rooms belonging to younger brothers named Zach. If we stuck our heads out those windows and yelled loud enough, we could share crucial information across the short distance of two other houses and backyards—like what we were having for dinner—without having to pick up the phone. From pre-school (we were enrolled at Happiness Hut) through high school, we sat together on early morning bus rides, walked into each others’ houses without knocking, planned elaborate Halloween costumes that would invariably end up hidden under heavy jackets, rode our bikes into unexplored corners of our neighborhood looking for mysteries to solve, traded Christopher Pike books, and painted our nails in tandem during Sunday night viewings of "The X Files."

In elementary school we borrowed the “S” volume of the encyclopedia from the library and holed up in my room with it to see what we could learn about sex. A little later, we pored over the dirty passages in Peter Benchley’s Jaws. When we were 15, we got caught smoking pot, and our parents—who took turns chauffeuring us to the mall and the movies and various friends’ houses—grounded us and kept us apart for a month. In high school, Darcey tried repeatedly and with incredible patience to teach me how to divide fractions, and was ready with ice when I used a safety pin to pierce my ear in her bathroom. We started spending our weekends at local punk shows, coming home late and savoring the stink on our clothes, both of us casually competing to be the one who was better friends with more people, and who knew more lyrics by heart. We made three issues of a zine, took guitar lessons from the same teacher and spent hours thinking up names for our band. We went through a brief and thrilling shoplifting phase, obsessed over boys, shared make-up and clothes despite wildly different body types, and mostly kept each other’s secrets.

And then we went off to college. The distance between our campuses was hardly insurmountable, but it was just enough to be a reasonable excuse. It wasn’t just about the miles that stretched between us; those just made literal the clichéd divergence of our paths, which seemed to me even then like the plot of some novel I’d read, down to the symbolism of our opposing majors (the sciences for her, the humanities for me). I was invested in being in a different place, and saw her attachment to our hometown as a sort of weakness. Now I think her loyalties were just stronger than mine, that she was less cynical, less restless, maybe more at ease when we were growing up. She wasn’t always plotting her escape.

Of the two of us, she was always easier to like. People were a little wary of me, and for a long time I thought this meant I was doing something right.

The last time Darcey and I had spoken was nearly four years ago, when she called to tell me that an acquaintance of ours—who had been more of a real friend of hers—had died suddenly. We managed to have a nice if surface-y conversation in the wake of the grim update, but the fact of the call stayed unsettling. Half by accident, I’d managed to cut myself off from the people we used to know, assuming we’d reached the point when everyone else would be moving on, too. If Darcey and I couldn’t stick together, I figured, no one else could. But it turned out that I was actually the exception, the outlier who now required special delivery of bad news. She was telling me because she knew no one else would.

Despite this precedent, she didn’t call a year or two later to tell me she was engaged—to a guy we’d gone to high school with, someone she’d loved for years and years. But it was fair to assume I’d just find out. Information like this just trickles out, getting passed along—between friends and parents and the woman who used to cut both of our hair and still cuts both Darcey’s and my mom’s—until everyone knows and you start to feel a little awkward for not acknowledging it to the person at its center, even if she’s someone you can’t say with any conviction you still know.

* * *

The process of accumulating friends on Facebook is pretty much the opposite of making a guest list for a real-life, in-person event like a wedding. A guest list has a limited number of spots, and it should be pretty clear who makes the cut and who doesn’t. On Facebook, your network is at once sprawling and concentrated, a group of friends and enemies and acquaintances keeping cautious, largely superficial tabs on each other. Hanging out in alphabetical order, everyone looks sort of interchangeable.

Darcey and I weren’t the kind of kids who fantasized about our weddings, except maybe once or twice, half-jokingly, to Keanu Reeves—whose headshot she had photocopied and taped up so it formed a border of identically scruffy, vacant-eyed but indisputably handsome faces just below the ceiling of her room. We played with Barbies when we were little, but Darcey’s big plastic tub of them was there mostly to provide a halfhearted counterweight to her tomboy tendencies, and my parents only conceded to Sleepover Skipper after she and her plastic bed arrived as a sly birthday present from my grandparents. Our Barbies had lots of wardrobe changes and complicated, confusing sex with our twin New Kids on the Block Donnie dolls (far superior versions of Ken), but I don’t remember them ever getting married.

Still, the kid I was would have understood that Darcey’s wedding—the wedding of anyone I knew, really—was a big deal. And since I tend to regress to a child’s perspective when I think about her, it was impossible for me to ignore the fact that her marriage was a milestone in the most literal, loaded way, one of those eventualities we grew up with a hazy sense of, but at the time seemed as distant as pretty much everything beyond the current school year. Back then, all we really knew about the future was that we would be a part of each other’s. These years later, I was taking her upcoming wedding very personally and I couldn’t tell if this was indulgent or unavoidable.

So, a phone call. Sitting on the couch with a tumbler of whiskey as I got ready to dial her number, I was reassured by the idea that our history made us special to each other. It may not have been enough to keep me in the running for a wedding invitation, but it was enough to warrant the use of something as old-fashioned and intrusive as a telephone. If I joined Facebook without actually talking to her first, I felt sure we wouldn’t stand a chance of getting out of that online purgatory. On the most basic level, for the most selfish, possessive reasons, I wasn’t ready to let that happen. As I listened to the phone ring, I got the same cold sweat and butterflies I used to get before calling a boy I had a crush on. When Darcey didn’t pick up, it was a little anticlimactic, but I was also a little relieved; I left a rehearsed message conveying a belated congratulations and saying that I was hoping to catch up. On voicemail, so long after the fact, it suddenly felt painfully, even opportunistically overdue.

A few weeks later—after some phone tag and a preliminary chat—we met for dinner at a chain Italian restaurant not far from our high school, and attempted to bond over bowls of gluey pasta fagioli and glasses of okay wine. Even kitted out in corporate business attire, her face looked reassuringly, unnervingly the same. She told me about a string of years stuck working in retail, long bus rides to visit the once-hesitant guy she was now about to marry, the sturdy new SUV she recently bought after totaling her Civic when she hit a deer. I told her about the hole in my bathroom ceiling, a scarf I was slowly and semi-ineptly knitting for my boyfriend, the dubious freedom of freelancing. We talked about our favorite new TV shows in almost the same breath as the status of our childhood pets (the latter all dead but one).

It felt like there was a space in my brain waiting for all of this, a designated slot next to the major themes and tiny details of Darcey’s life that I’d accumulated and sorted over the years. Even if it hadn’t been enough to forestall this kind of polite sit-down, we knew each other too well to pretend not to know certain things, or to act like it was even possible to have forgotten them. Darcey seemed settled, happy. And she seemed to have a better understanding of boundaries than I did—at least, she knew when to end a dinner that I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull myself away from until the restaurant was turning off the lights.
It had been really good to see her. When I got back home a few days later, I finally joined Facebook and made her my “friend.”

* * *

One day—one day soon—all of this will become too mundane to be worth mentioning, but for now, while all this access still feels at least a little bit surreal, there are stages to move through as you test the limits of connectivity and your own willingness to connect. Sign on, and suddenly everyone is right there, posting exclamation-point-ridden messages to your wall about how “It would be so great to see you! We should get together!!!” that you quickly come to understand are mostly symbolic, a kind of conventional shorthand similar to the uncaptioned sonograms that passive-aggressively announce new pregnancies and changes to the clinical-sounding “relationship status” that don’t need to be conveyed personally because Facebook delivers the news itself, as a weirdly neutral intermediary. All this blatant good cheer butts up against a steady stream of updates from people saying they hate their jobs, are exhausted, feel sick, feel fat, feel nostalgic for the days when they used to look forward to the life they now have.

In my first few months on Facebook, I was just as fixated on it as a feared I would be. I exchanged messages and exultant wall posts with old friends from summer camp and college-era political campaigns and former jobs and, of course, high school. With minimal effort, I found out who was married, who was (already) divorced, who was drifting, who was successful, whose home birth had been featured on A Baby Story. I looked at photos of ex-boyfriends’ infants and a one-time mean girl’s beach vacation and the new apartment of a guy who sat next to me in chemistry class. Some people’s good news and contented lives made me smile. Others appeared to have gotten what I once thought they deserved.

And then, a few reconnections managed to make their way offline. They weren’t always the ones I would have expected or chosen. I had a pleasant, macrobiotic lunch with a girl I was last tight with in fifth grade, when we co-founded an exclusive environmental club before abruptly shifting our attention to Native American crafts. Now she was three months pregnant, and spoke with a vaguely European accent.

On one of the hottest nights of the year, I got dinner with an old friend from Hebrew school, who I once helped run for junior high student council (an optimistic effort which ended in miserable defeat) and who had been the first person I knew to French-kiss a boy—an experience she modestly, infuriatingly refused to describe in much detail.

I went out for an impromptu drink with a guy I was torturously close to when we were 16, who wrote me pained letters about his unrequited love and would sulk in corners at the parties we went to together. Now he was a burly, talented tattoo artist who turned sappy after a couple of beers and told me that in spite of everything, I probably knew him better than almost anyone else. In that moment—in a tight, sweaty hug outside the bar before I pulled away and headed home—I even believed him.

Darcey and I exchanged no more than two messages. She got married, beaming and surrounded by people I used to know. I wasn’t at the wedding, but I gave myself a headache staring at the pictures as they were posted online. I clicked through hundreds of snapshots taken by various friends and family: not just the professional portraits, but the awkward candids and blurry mistakes that these days don’t always get immediately edited out, but will eventually be stricken from the official record.

It’s so strange, this way that you can be left out of something but still have such a clear window in. How can I know so much about so many people without actually knowing them? Everything I used to know about Darcey, I knew because I was standing right next to her. If I squint a little, it still feels sort of like I’m just looking over her shoulder.

Eryn Loeb is a writer and editor in New York.

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It ends like this: "Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, 'The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.'"

A letter to the editor revealed that there was more to his last words than that, however.

Also back in October, but apparently, near-totally unnoticed, there was a post over on the legal blog Crime and Consequences that finally did print all of Willingham's final words. (That blog is a project of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which describes itself as "the only public interest law foundation in the nation working full time to strengthen law enforcement's ability to assure that crime does not pay." Its advisers include Edwin Meese III, who is also associated with the Heritage Foundation.)

They wrote:

That poignant end reads almost like a Hollywood script, doesn't it? He reasserts his innocence, and his very last words are religious. Fade to black. Well, Grann doesn't actually say those words are the very last, but that is certainly the picture the reader gets. And the statement as Grann reports it is consistent with what we might expect from a person who actually was innocent. Is Grann's report the truth? Yes, if one defines truth in the Clintonesque way of defensible as not literally false. Is it the whole truth?

After reading in a local paper that a witness to the execution said that there was more to Willingham's last words than Grann conveyed, Crime and Consequences' Kent Scheidegger contacted the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to retrieve a full transcript. Here is what they sent him:

Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man-convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return-so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby. I hope you rot in hell, bitch; I hope you fucking rot in hell, bitch. You bitch; I hope you fucking rot, cunt. That is it.

The witness believed the "bitch" in question was Willingham's ex-wife Stacy, the mother of his daughters.

Scheidegger takes Grann to task for depicting an execution scene more dramatically in line with the article's assertion of Willingham's innocence, and suggests that the omitted vitriol points to a possible motive in the case-something the prosecution struggled to establish in court.

"As incomprehensible as it seems," Scheidegger wrote, "we know that some fathers do kill their young children, and anger at the mother is one common reason."

Might Willingham have been guilty after all? I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the way Grann structured his ending, in light of Willingham's full statement-but I'm not content with Scheidegger's takeaway, either. Grann's story establishes that, after years of supporting Willingham as he waited on death row, Stacy had lost her faith.

Grann wrote:

He asked Stacy if his tombstone could be erected next to their children's graves. Stacy, who had for so long expressed belief in Willingham's innocence, had recently taken her first look at the original court records and arson findings. Unaware of Hurst's report, she had determined that Willingham was guilty. She denied him his wish, later telling a reporter, 'He took my kids away from me.'

Having your wife, who'd fought in your corner for so long, change her mind and convict you along with the powers-that-be-well, that's an experience that could easily bring out such a statement right before one is executed. Does knowing the full scope of his final statement change the way you feel about Willingham?

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I'm sorry I ate your carrot cake.

We were at college, and living off campus in the house on Bragaw Street. You had bought the cake earlier that day, when we'd all gone to Super Stop n' Shop for groceries. You'd paid for it separately and left it in the fridge while you went to an afternoon class. But our roommate Scott and I didn't have afternoon classes that day. Or if we did, we decided to skip them and stay home and smoke pot instead. Whatever the case, we stayed home while you were out and smoked pot. I got hungry, on account of the pot smoking, and went to the fridge, where I found the piece of carrot cake wrapped in cellophane. I knew it was yours. I knew you were saving it to eat later. I don't even like carrot cake that much. Still, it looked good, with that thick layer of cream-cheese frosting on top, and self-discipline was not a strong suit of mine. I decided to have just one little piece. Then I ate the whole thing. It was delicious.

You came home and looked in the fridge and came into the living room where Scott and I and Pete from downstairs were sitting and asked what had happened to the carrot cake. I told you I had eaten it. You were angry-as well you should have been. That was very inconsiderate of me.

But that's not the worst of it. As you've pointed out many times since that day (as somehow, miraculously, we've remained friends), what really made you as mad as you ended up being was the fact that I refused to admit any wrong doing.

"You know this is a house where people smoke pot," I said. "You know people tend to get hungry when they smoke pot. It's unreasonable to expect a piece of carrot cake left alone in a fridge near where pot is being smoked won't be eaten. Under the standard conditions of this house, I can't take responsibility for what happens to a piece of carrot cake."

I remember smiling a stoned smile at you while you frowned, so obviously not stoned. "Especially," I continued, just to be a dick, "a piece of carrot cake as delicious as that one was." You called me a dick and turned around to find something else to eat. Scott and Pete were laughing. I remember feeling happy with myself for constructing such an ironclad argument. I felt like a lawyer. Like Sam Waterston.

Embarrassingly, thinking back, a good part of me actually believed that bullshit. Like, since we smoked so much pot, we somehow lived under a different code: The Marijuana Rules, unbeholden to logic or common decency. I'll slough responsibility again now and blame the environment: Our life at that college was just that divorced from reality-tuition paid for by our parents, the extent of our responsibilities being to show up for, what, eight hours of classes a week? Make it to a professor's office at some point and ask for another extension on an overdue philosophy paper? How could we not fall into spoiled, utopian thinking?

But, God, in hindsight, what an ugly utopia. Where any self-indulgent doofus is free to rationalize away transgression so long as there's a couple other doofuses there to laugh along with him. Where right and wrong can be spun out of thin air, and "pack the bong" is the last word on any subject. (I think there was a Star Trek episode about something like this....)

Anyway, I officially apologize. I was wrong. I hereby accept full responsibility for my actions. I owe you a piece of carrot cake.

Regards,

Dave

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