My favorite lines from Eric Scigliano’s Gangland article in this month’s Seattle Met:

"Indeed, fear plays a bigger part in the gang scene than all its swagger and strutting would suggest. It moves kids who are not natural thugs to join gangs and avoid getting beat up by them. Since the beginnings of the Sicilian mafia, gangs have promised to protect the dispossessed—from hostile officials and from other gangs."

I’ve found a key transition in dealing with tragedy is sliding from "mad" to "sad," and, for me, those sentences took me from one to the other.

-web editor Andrew Matson