Taren had grown up on the fifth floor of a public housing development in Denver, living out the usual hardscrabble urban latchkey narrative, with crucial mentors and social awakenings; at Berkeley he did coke and studied public pedagogy and community organizing theory, graduating in journalism at the exact moment that O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky cratered his faith in news. His girlfriend, a development economics grad student, was abruptly deidealized by an unplanned pregnancy, and Taren married her in the same civic building where she would pauperize him six years later. He waited tables
...more
