“Why We Travel” by Pico Iyer and Anne is Headed for Bad Bunny in Poland

If you travel, why do you go where you go? I’ll bet your reasons are different from Pico Iyer’s, as explained in his essay “Why We Travel.” We pick out some lines for discussion below as well as look toward Anne’s trip to Poland that will include attending a Bad Bunny concert in Warsaw.

“Why We Travel” is an essay by Pico Iyer published on Salon.com on March 18, 2000. Click here to read it. 

Before I read Iyer’s piece, I jotted down some thoughts I have on my own travel: 

  1. I don’t seem to be able to enjoy traveling without doing a research project first. From the Charlotte concert we went to (train, where to eat, stores to walk through) to walking around Savannah or going to Maui.
  2. Parts of my travel preparation: multiple books, lots of Google Earth scrolling, following social media accounts, and lots of Google Doc notes. 
  • Also: I’ve presented on multiple trips to the family and they’ve picked 
  • Also: I write out the directions for the bus before I travel to an away basketball contest 
  1. I’ve become more fearful / anxious. Maybe why? daughters and wife, getting older. 
  2. I have right next to zero travel abroad experience. 

If I could go anywhere this summer, where would I chose?

My daughter Izzy asked me if I could travel to any country, where would I go?

  • I said Switzerland, and here are the reasons I could think I would want to go to Switzerland:
  1. Wherever I’m going with my family, the connections formed doing something such as waiting to board the plane can’t be underrated. Speaks to that cliche, the journey not the destination. 
  2. I’ve seen the beauty in pictures or videos, and I’d like to walk within it all myself. 
  3. Experience a place different than I’ve been before. Look how it’s done here, whether that’s Queens, Winamac Indiana, Charleston, Miami, Phoenix, LA, Maui, or London. 

Here’s the opening paragraph of the essay. There’s a lot to discuss in it: 

  • We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. 

Some lines I chose from the essay to discuss: 

  1. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.
  2. Our only exchange like this is money? I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
  3. The idea of seeing with new eyes: By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes.
  4. Anne, you probably don’t know what you will do? On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
  5. Reminds me of Geoff Dyer bringing in Nietzsche on habits: This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear” — disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide.
  6. The metaphor that travel is a love story: All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
  7. What do you call yourself? I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman.
  8. What have you brought back from previous trips? The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center. (Torg remembers his French Broad Trip, the mushroom hunt with his father) 

What new reasons in this essay might there be to travel? 

  1. We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home.
  2. holidays help you appreciate your own home more
  3. All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips,
  4. So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake.

This piece of loaded with references to what other writers say. Sometimes it’s a quote and other times the author refers to just talking with someone. 

  • I counted 22 references to what other writers said.  In the piece. This sort of thing impresses me that the writer is familiar with all of those facets of the conversation within travel writing.

Anne, does reading this and discussing it change your thinking at all about your trip? 

Trump is the United State President. Does that impact how you think about your trip? 

  • I think those here for the World Cup are finding that we all aren’t Trump or Trump Disciplines. 

What’s your prep like for a trip like you are taking? Buying guidebooks? Working on notes? Working on an itinerary? 

Some notes on the author Pico Iyer: 

  • @PicoIyer on X. Click here for profile. 
  • From Wikipedia: English born in Oxford son of Indian parents, both academics, moved to California when father started teaching at Univ of California at Santa Barbara, studied English Lit at Magdalen College Oxford, taught writing at Harvard and then started writing at Time, has lived in Nara, Japan since 1992 and has a Japanese wife, I counted 18 books written on his Wikipedia page 

For today’s episode, I almost picked a chapter from this book: 

  • Michael Palin wrote a book called New Europe in which there is a chapter about him travelling to Poland. I almost bought it and had us read that. 

Thanks for taking time to visit Torg Stories!

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with Particular Reference to Doughnut Plant Doughnuts)

My sister Anne spells it donuts and I use doughnuts. We both went out and ate some for this post, and we had a good time discussing Geoff Dyer’s essay “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with Particular Reference to Doughnut Plant Doughnuts” as the catalyst for this week’s conversion.

Click above to listen to our donut or doughnut themed podcast

Sometimes donuts are trash (sometimes I still eat them)

-Anne on her donut consumption

Torg got his doughnuts from Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee in Boone, NC.

  • Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee. 791 Blowing Rock Road. Boone, NC. 
  • I appreciated this about the owners of Local Lion from their website: Josiah was born and brewed in Boone NC . He met Meredith as she was serving coffee on Appstate Campus and they settled into this beautiful mountain town.  Together they founded Local Lion in Spring of 2012. Early mornings making scratchmade doughnuts and  fresh roasting coffee are an excellent way to serve community. We love being an integral part of the high country.

Los Angeles Doughnuts from Anne:

Dyer’s piece opens with Effra Road as the metaphorical (and literal for the the writer) roads we all have to travel. Here are the opening lines of the piece:

  • For many years I lived in various flats either on or just off Brixton Water Lane. So I was always walking, cycling, or taking a bus down Effra Road. How many times did I walk down Effra Road? How many hours did I spend walking down Effra Road? If I was going to Brixton Rec to play squash, or to Franco’s for a pizza or a cappuccino (this was before I acquired the refinement of taste in cappuccinos that, in the years since then, has invariably been a source of torment and frustration rather than enhanced satisfaction), or to the aptly named Effra to meet friends for drinks, or just to take the tube to some other part of London, I always had to trudge or cycle down Effra Road. Wherever I was going, the journey began and ended on Effra Road. One of the reasons I moved away from Brixton was that I could not face trudging, cycling, or taking the bus down Effra Road again.

Torg’s potential Effra Roads: 

  • Ditmars Blvd in Astoria, Queens, NYC. 
  • It was a half mile walk from my apartment near Astoria Park and the East River from the N and W stop of NYC subway. Didn’t live there long enough to get that tired of it. 
  • It did have Martha’s Country Bakery, which we have never forgotten. Click here. Cookies and cakes but I don’t remember doughnuts. 
  • Would I usually rather have a cookie than a doughnut? 
  • AND, Dewitt Barnett Road near Valle Crucis, NC. We’ve got this 10 minute very curvy drive almost every time we leave the house. 

Anne’s potential Effra Roads:

  • La Brea and Melrose. I start on these streets all the time, maybe throw Santa Monica Blvd. in there.
  • Great donut place in Brownsburg IN. Hilligoss Bakery
  • Also Long’s Bakery in Indianapolis, kind of by Speedway
  • In Brownsburg, I would often go to a great gas station right by work. Get a Diet Mt Dew from fountain (not frequently available elsewhere) and a cinnamon type cake donut. Best donuts I ever had from a gas station. Casey’s gas station, a chain. I do not see them out here.
  • In Indiana, I used to go most Sundays and read the Sunday paper at Einstein Bagels I think around 82nd street on the west side where I would hope they would have a chocolate chip cookie cake that was round, I forget the name, but loved that sometimes they would run out just like in the story. I would get it warmed up.

The Nietzsche “enduring habits” section: 

  • Nietzsche loved what he called “brief habits” but so hated “enduring habits” that he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that caused him to break free of the chains of enduring habit. (Though most intolerable of all, he went on, would be “a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.”) Unlike Nietzsche, I succumb all too easily to enduring habits. Programmed by habit, I kept going to Patisserie Valerie until I met the woman who became my wife.

 I am challenged about my enduring habits: 

  • Morning coffee and yogurt with Megan, right to the desk to work, a feel of needing to be at the desk 
  • To what degree, if any, do these need to be broken? 

Reminds me of how I used to say instead of going on vacation there we should just move there for a while. That feels different now.

Anne’s LA Habits

  • Used to get a fountain drink most mornings from 7-eleven. Do not do that as much. Used to also get a bagel maybe once a week, also do not do now. Now I get to work, have a diet coke and a protein bar.
  • My morning routine for work is simple, wake up, shower, dry hair get ready/dressed, sit on couch for 10 minutes and browse internet, then leave around 6:55 am.
  • Weekend habit. Work out and hike on Sat and Sun, hoping always to be done by 10 am. Mostly Runyon, occasionally Griffith

Torg Golden Lines from the piece for brief discussion: 

  • Psychologically, the location of a place is not fixed. It is determined not by where it is but by how we get to it.
  • Funny!: I went back to Delectica the following day and ordered another cappuccino and a doughnut. The doughnut I ordered that day was a ring doughnut, and it was an amazing doughnut. This was a major turning point in my New York life. As such, it will feature prominently in my forthcoming book Great Pastries of the World: A Personal View.
  • Not what happened to us at Bruno’s Pizza in Logansport: It was still there and we ordered cappuccinos and croissants, and the croissant, while it was just about tolerable, was nowhere near as good as I remembered and the coffee was pretty terrible (too milky and the foam was all bubbly, and although it seemed okay at first, by the halfway stage I decided it was totally revolting).
  • The last sentence. As we keep this up Anne, I am seeing that writers often like to go long in the last or second to last sentence: It did not seem like that at all now; now it became a symbol of the healing potential of the doughnut, of a world community of doughnut lovers living in peace and harmony, bound together by the vision and ambition of a Czech immigrant who went to New York, opened his Doughnut Plant, and then forged a doughnut empire, extending from New York to Tokyo while regrettably bypassing London, where we still have to make do with croissants that are like stale buns so that at times the whole of London seems like nothing else so much as an interminable extension of Effra Road.

What does he mean “the human condition” in the title? 

Anne: My general notes on book. I hate becoming known at a place, even though I know I do become known, esp because I have weird orders (Quiznos which is now closed used to be this for me). Writer likes going to a place and being a regular.

Anne’s LA Move:

  • Opened up my life to a more city feel, a walking city feel, even though everyone says LA is not a walkable city. It is not for the expanse of the city, but it is very much walkable in certain neighborhoods.
  • I feel energy and happenings here much more, I feel more connected to people even though I myself am quite to myself.

We could order Doughnut Plant doughnuts shipped to us. Click here to check that out. 

Anne’s Fav Desserts:

  • Cake. No fruit type cake (like a little layer of jam, yuck) Best cakes are the basic cakes IMO. Vanilla/Vanilla. I prefer that over chocolate. Birthday cake flavor also great.
  • Warm cookies
  • A great donut 

Thanks for checking out Torg Stories!

Untold Epstein Story, San Antonio Love Triangle, World Cup Mbappe, Widow’s Bay, and Three Billboards

Anne and I share the stories we read or watched on this week’s Torg Stories Podcast. Check out the links to some of the stories below:

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of June 15, 2026

“The Infamous San Antonio Love Triangle That Ended in Murder” by Katy Vine 

  • https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/san-antonio-three-emmas-legend/
  • Pearl Beer magnate Otto Koehler killed by one of his mistresses in 1914. His wife, his mistress & wife’s nurse and his 2nd mistress all named Emma. The Three Emmas
  • After his death his wife reemerged back into society. Was her sickness something he kind of forced on her? A “nervous disorder”. She became the pres if the beer association even
  • Authorities wanted to protect rep and the city’s brewers from investigators so sort of swept it under the rug.
  • Who was the man who was allowed to leave?
  • The 2 emma nurses lived in a house together bought by Otto. Affair stopped when the 1st mistress met a man and got married, so then he got with 2nd mistress. Then the next year he decided to do a payoff and break it off. They thought she was going to be possibly killed by him? She claims he started to choke her, then the other Emma came in and so she got a gun to save the other emma.
  • Site of the Pearl Brewing Co. is now a mixed use site called the Pearl which is very popular, including the previously mentioned in our podcast (in relation to the NBA), San Antonio’s best hotel in San Antonio “Hotel Emma”
  • Cocktails are named after the emmas etc.

Kylian Mbappe is Scoring All the Goals – and Taking All the Heat”

Vanity Fair, by Aidan Mclaughlin

Widow’s Bay, AppleTV final episode, Creator Katie Dipold, was a Parks & Rec writer, wrote the movie “The Heat” which is a terrific comedy

  • Got renewed, nice twist at the end
  • Good laughs again at the end.
  • Had some nods to Lost with the underground ladder

Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of June 15, 2026

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 

  • Stars Frances McDormand as a mom whose daughter was raped and killed, Woody Harrelson as the town sherriff with cancer, and Sam Rockwell as a racist drunk town cop. Peter Dinklage (Elf and I Care A lot are two of my favorites of his) 
  • Set in Sylva, North Carolina! 
  • Came out in 2017. 
  • My kind of title! 
  • 7 academy nominations and 3 wins for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor 
  • Rockwell is in another great movie you haven’t seen: The Green Mile. 
  • Interesting stuff from Wikipedia about McDormand: grew up in IL, adopted and name change from Cynthia Ann Smith, adopted dad a Disciples of Christ preacher
  • Married to Joel Coen! 
  • Amazing job from moving around the Midwest and South eventually to the Yale School of Drama. 
  • I watched it on HBO Max. 
  • There’s a screenwriting book called Save the Cat and it tells you to just have someone state the theme out loud. I feel like it’s this for this film: violence begets violence. 

“The Untold Story of Jeffrey Epstein’s Death,” a NY Times Exclusive by Charles Homans, Steve Eder, Jan Ransom, and Michael Rothfeld 

  • Click here for the article. 
  • It’s one of those amazing interactive multimedia articles with lots of pictures from the jail and the scene where Epstein died. Also… shot of the outside of the prison that zooms inside, shows a map, and then labels the areas of the prison where Epstein was, 3D tour of the hub of that floor like you’d see on a real estate listing
  • Really works to bring to life the story. Here are the opening two paragraphs: Late in the afternoon of July 6, 2019, about a dozen F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department officers gathered at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, waiting out of view of the tarmac so as not to spook their quarry. The day before, they received an email informing them that a private jet would be arriving at 5:20 p.m. Attached to the email was an arrest warrant for its lone passenger, Jeffrey Epstein.Returning from Paris, Epstein was making plans on his phone: a trip to his private island in the Caribbean, a documentary interview with Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser. When the plane touched down, customs agents boarded to check the passports of Epstein and the plane’s two pilots. Then they escorted Epstein into the terminal, where an F.B.I. agent and a detective told him he was under arrest.
  • Bad working conditions for the guards. Guards not doing their jobs in some ways understandably. Cameras not working. Just a dysfunctional situation. 
  • Interviews and pictures with guards. 
  • Interesting Epstein could be scared, shocked and depressed, but also intimidating because of his wealth and access to lawyers who could cause lots of problems for everyone he encountered. 
  • It would have taken a massive conspiracy given all the levels of security, different sets of keys, etc. 
  • Last two paragraphs: In the end, the autopsy photos were like everything else in the Epstein case, offering more possibilities than conclusions. Every question was easier to ask than to answer. It made the case the perfect petri dish for conspiracy theories, a space in which nothing could definitively be proved wrong, as long as someone wanted to believe in it. It is fitting, then, that the last known image of Epstein alive appears to be a brief fragment of surveillance camera footage at 7:49 p.m. on Aug. 9, the last full day of his life, after his final phone call, as he was led back to his cell for the last time. In it, he is little more than a silver head of hair, visible for a split second — stripped of his wealth and influence, reduced to something vague, elusive, a blur, a ghost. He is there, and then he is gone.

Thanks for taking time to visit Torg Stories!

Knicks Win NBA Finals, MVP Brunson, Wemby as a Villain, Matricide, Office Romance and Other Stories We Read or Watched

We discuss the stories we read and watched including articles about the Knicks winning the NBA Title, the essay “Matricide,” the film Office Romance, and the Apple tv show Widow Bay. (Check out video podcast near the end of this post)

Click player to listen to episode on stories related to Knicks, NBA Finals, Wemby, Matricide, Office Romance

Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of June 8, 2026

“The New York Knicks Just Won a Championship of a Lifetime” by Danny Chau on The Ringer

  • Click here to access the article. Chau on X: https://x.com/dannychau 
  • Opening paragraph: Fifty-three years is a long time for an echo to travel, from the legendary Forum in Inglewood back in 1973 to the Frost Bank Arena in San Antonio on Saturday night. The one tether, the one constant, across two landmark moments in New York City history was the Knicks’ blue away uniforms, with orange and white trim.
  • This is reference Wilt Chamberlain scoring his last basket vs. Knicks losing to them in finals: Where the Knicks’ last championship served as a farewell to a walking myth, their current triumph coincides with the arrival of Wilt’s spiritual successor—a modern-day Goliath who, if this series was any indication, will be the object of awe and derision for the rest of his career.
  • And, most importantly, an all-time night from Jalen Brunson, the 2026 Finals MVP, who stands alongside Jordan with the most points in a championship-clinching performance on the road with 45. These 2025-26 New York Knicks? One of the greatest postseason teams ever. Let it sink in. Let it linger. 
  • Mitchell Robinson proved himself to be the best offensive rebounder in basketball, bulldozing Wemby underneath the basket with 22 seconds remaining in the game to effectively clinch the title.
  • Interesting sentence about Alvarado diving into former Mayor Bloomberg: “Alvarado—who was raised in an affordable housing co-op in Williamsburg that was the most ethnically diverse apartment building in the country—crash-landing into former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg (whose net worth exceeds $100 billion) in Game 3 is the kind of metaphor that could take years to fully unpack.”

A Few More Torg Notes on the NBA Basketball Season: 

  • The #1 difference stats wise I saw in game 5 was that Brunson was 13-15 from the line. The only statistical advantage for either team was FTs made and attempted and it came from Brunson. Nobody on the Spurs can do that right now. 
  • On Game 4: one of the most exciting games we’ve ever seen with the 29 point comeback, the Wemby missed FTs, the Fox try the lay up, and the OG tip in for game 4. Oh yeah, the KAT tip of the inbound pass. 
  • I wondered if Jalen Brunson could do what he does against teams and defenders such as those on OKC and the Spurs. Yes he can! 
  • Wemby is some version of KD on offense. He’s the best defender in the league and looks like he could be the best defender since the Celtics Bill Russell. 
  • Jordan and Scottie Pippen went 6-0 in the Finals. John Havlicek went 8-0. Bill Russell went 11-1. What would you set the over/under for finals appearances and finals wins for Wemby and the Spurs? 

“Matricide,” an essay, by Meghan Daum

  • It’s the opening essay in Daum’s 2014 collection The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion 
  • Daum is a fellow born in 1970 human being with me. 
  • Another Columbia MFA graduate like Beller and the H&H Bagel story we read. 
  • Webster’s defines Matricide as the “murder of a mother by her child.” 
  • The opening paragraph: People who weren’t there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue. A hospice nurse had been over a few hours earlier and said my mother was “very imminent.” She was breathing in that slow, irregular way that signals that the end is near. Strangely, I hadn’t noticed it despite listening for the past several weeks (months earlier, when her death sentence had been officially handed down but she was still very much alive, my mother had casually mentioned that she’d noticed this breathing pattern in herself and that I should be prepared to walk into the room and find her gone at any moment) but apparently it was here now and when I reached the third paragraph of the second page of the Hillary Clinton article (this remains imprinted on my brain; I can still see the wrap of the words as my eye scanned the column; I can still see the Annie Leibowitz photo on the previous page) I heard her gasp. Then nothing more.
  • A second quote: My mother would die nine months later, and what most people don’t know is that of all the sad things about this fact, the saddest by far is that she did not have one day on this earth where she was both healthy and free of her mother. All her life she’d waited to be relieved of the burden of being unseen, only to have that relief perfectly timed with her own death sentence. FROM The Contemporary American Essay (p. 179) Kindle edition. 
  • Quote: It’s amazing what the living expect of the dying. We expect wisdom, insight, bursts of clarity that are then reported back to the undying in the urgent staccato of a telegram: I have the answer. Stop. They’re waiting for me. Stop. Everyone Who Died Before. Stop. And they Look Great. Stop. We expect them to reminisce over photos, to accept apologies and to make them, to be sad, to be angry, to be grateful. We expect them to clear our consciences, to confirm our fantasies. We expect them to be excited about the idea of being a bird.
  • Makes me think of when I bought our grandpa Bill a little waterfall with a picture of us in it to put by his bed. What the heck…
  • Love this: In the beginning, I’d laughed and told her there was no cat, but with the dying you soon learn the folly of raining on a parade, especially one that might produce that holy grail of darnedest things: insight into the afterlife.
  • A report on our mom. Yesterday, she went to some live music. I came in and she was in the atrium. She didn’t realize she’d seen it by the time I got her in her room. She took a few bites of a sandwich and fell asleep. She remarked their were bites in her sandwich when she woke up again. How does that work? 
  • Was our mom a big talker? A conversationalist? Did I ever talk to her about a book? 
  • Quote: It started with a fever. Actually it started before that. Of course it did. Nothing ever begins when you think it does.
  • Why did mom’s short term memory go? One year she was taking care of dad and coming out back to watch the girls shoot and in less than a year she could barely stand up.  
  • The writer gets sick: Even in my delirium, I cringed the way adult children cringe when they look down and realize the hands sticking out of their arms are actually their parents’ hands. I remember thinking that everyone was on to me now. My husband, the doctor, whoever else was there: they all knew not only that I was my mother’s daughter but that I was no different from her. Just as she had outlived her own mother by less than a year, I, too, would be denied a life outside of her shadow. The message was so obvious it might as well have been preordained: no woman in this matriarchal line would escape punishment for not loving her mother enough, for not mourning her mother enough, for not missing her enough, for refusing to touch her. None of us would be allowed out in the world on our own.
  • For a review of the collection in Electric Lit, click here. 
  • She’s @Meghan_daum on X and click here for her X page. She has a WKRP shirt on in her X profile pic. I said this from the show this week: As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. 

Office Romance on Netflix: 

  • Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) with Jennifer Lopez. 
  • Written by Brett Goldstein. Goldstein also in Shrinking with Harrison Ford. 
  • Directed by Ol Parker who also directed Ticket to Paradise. 
  • Some funny stand alone scenes. A really good scene where Goldstein’s understated lawyering style works well and the romance starts to kindle. 
  • Some beautiful shots of the DR! 
  • Ends like Notting Hill. Hits romantic comedy tropes hard, which is no problem. 

Secret Window rented on Amazon. Came out in 2004. 

  • Based on the long short story Secret Window, Secret Garden 
  • Directed by David Koepp (sounds like Kep to me) who also directed some Jurassic Park movies, Death Becomes Her, Mission Impossible, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones, 
  • Film summary spoiler alert: The writer Johnny Depp character gets away with murdering his wife and her new boyfriend. 
  • Love this about the short story: The Shooter character manifests by supernatural powers, kills the writer, and the wife and boyfriend survive. 
  • Starring Johnny Depp, John Turturro (was in San Antonio for the Knicks Finals win), Maria Bellow and Timothy Hutton. 
  • Great shots of the window and the garden in the film. They are telling us the whole story what’s going to happen. A running commentary on writing. The ending is the most important part. 
  • Strengths: Spoiler alert that the Shooter character isn’t real and is just a creation of the writer character Johnny Depp’s mind. Depp’s performance is dark and funny. 
  • Weakness: hits me today in a way it didn’t 20 years ago that this is a story about a man who gets away with killing his ex wife and her new boyfriend. Lots of Johnny Depp napping. 
  • An alternate ending was included on the home media release, explicitly showing both Ted’s and Amy’s dead bodies underneath the corn patch in Mort’s garden.

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of June 8, 2026

Why the NBA Champion Knicks are the greatest team in New York Sports History by Ian O’Connor, (The Athletic) X: @Ian_OConnor 

The Knicks Logo Almost Included the Empire State Building by Jeremy Rellosa (Curbed)  Is this him? @jrello9 

Widow Bay on Apple TV 

  • Scary/Comedy combination
  • Well acted, interesting actors.
  • Some real scares but not too many. Lots of references to other scary movies. 
  • “A reminder that It’s not mandatory that you speak” at funeral 
  • Renewed for 2nd season 
  • Matthew Rhys

Thanks for checking out the Torg Stories website! 

Stories We Read and Watched: Knicks and Spurs, University GenAI, Caitlin Clark, Castaway and Obama Library

We read or watched stories related to the NBA Finals, the billionaires who charter jets to the games, Spike Lee, University GenAI, Contagion, Caitlin Clark and Stephanie White, Castaway, The Bourne Ultimatum, Yellowstone, and the new Obama Library in Chicago.

Click player above to listen to this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast

Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of June 1, 2026…

NBA Story: “2026 NBA Finals: Storylines, Matchups that will define Knicks-Spurs”

Now that the Knicks are up two games to zero and heading home, how can I apply what Zach wrote to what’s happened: 

  1. These two teams played in the finals in 1999. Average final score back then was 85-80. 
  2. Jalen’s Brunson’s dad played for the Knicks then. Spurs Coach Mitch Johnson was in middle school. 
  3. Knicks were better head to head during regular season and NBA Cup and now they are again. 
  4. KAT has done most of the defending on Wemby and he’s doing great. KAT has attacked Wemby on offense and took it right at him. Players have attacked Wemby in a way I didn’t think was possible. 
  5. Thought was Wemby might roam and Hart might have a lot of open shots. Hart had a big rebounding game in game 1 and his minutes were way down to 18 in game two. Shamet has played those minutes and hit enough threes. 
  6. Spurs won Wemby minutes by 6 last game. 
  7. Spurs won by 12 when Harper played. 
  8. Some of these stats come from Basketball Reference, a great site that I am not a pro at using. Click here to access. 

Do you remember your NBA Finals pick? 

  • I think you said Spurs in six and I said Knicks in seven. 
  • ESPN writer Zach Kram said Spurs in Six. 

Wemby is Going Down by Spike Lee 

From the Spike Lee Article: 

  • Since that 1999 series, a lot of terrible things happened to New York: 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, the pandemic and the recent ICE raids targeting immigrants, a direct affront to Ellis Island.
  • I dreamed a vision that it’s going to happen in Madison Square Garden. I don’t believe that the basketball gods are going to let us win the deciding game in San Antonio. By the decree of God, Jehovah, Allah and Black Jesus (that was Earl “The Pearl” Monroe’s nickname), whatever you want to call it, on this day, June 16 in the year of our Lawd 2026, the New Yawk Knickerbockers will defeat the San Antonio Spurs in Game 6 at da world’s most famous arena to win the N.B.A. championship. New York is Fun City again.

“Caitlin Clark and Stephanie White say all is good while Downplaying Sideline Spat Video”

  • By Michael Marot on AP news click here. 
  • I watched a good win over ATL and Angel Reese. White and Clark looked good. 
  • Fever did lose to NY 83-75. 
  • Fever are in last playoff spot, 8th. Lynx are on top without Collier. Wings are 4th. Valkyries and Fire are in 6th and 7th. 

Castaway the screenplay by William Broyles JR. 

  • You can get the script on Script Slug here. 
  • I’m writing Hurricane Drive about our drive home from dad’s funeral to Boone during Hurricane Helene. I wanted to look at how Boryles handled all of that no dialogue time. (Wilson the volleyball and mom with dementia). 
  • Came out in 2000. 
  • Zemeckis directed and he directed Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Contact, and The Polar Express. 
  • Broyles wrote Apollo 13, The Polar Express, and Jarhead. (he’s 81). 

The Bourne Ultimatum starring Matt Damon and directed by Paul Greengrass.  2007

  • I own all the Bourne movies. I watch them running on the treadmill. 
  • This is the third one, in 2007. (Damon wasn’t in the 4th one). 
  • Has that Waterloo Train Station scene early with the reporter that is killed by the CIA.
  • Has Julia Stiles, who you said you liked. 
  • The “I doubt that” comment. “We’d be having this conversation face to face.”
  • Awesome ending where Bourne starts swimming in the river, and we know he’s alive. 

Yellowstone on Peacock starring Kevin Costner 

  • Written by Taylor Sheridan who lived in rural Texas and Wyoming. 
  • This is set in Montana. 
  • Jeez: inspired two prequels and spin offs Marshals and Dutton Ranch.
  • 5 seasons 
  • The first season has two big stories: Costner’s kid has married a Native American and lives on the reservation. The ranch and the tribe are arguing over cattle and property lines. Also, there’s a guy who wants to build a big condo development. 

“Obama Center’s Two Sides: A Lovely Park and a Forbidding Tower” by Michael Kimmelman. 

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of June 1, 2026

Whatever NBA finals article you read here. (prob wait until after first two games? 

  • “The Billionaires Booking Private Jets to See The Knicks” by Adriane Quinlan in Curbed
https://www.curbed.com/article/billionaire-knicks-vip-nba-finals-msg-private-jet-stylist.html

Delta Sky 360 club (ca. 150 people) or Suite 200

Spike and Ben Stiller pay for their tickets

San Antonio the city

Highlights that we just don’t know what future is. Fear loss of job, critical writing and thinking skills.

  • Contagion – kind of ho hum since we lived thru it? On Max
  • National Treasure – old throwback, it was fine On Prime
  • Tuned – pretty good about a piano tuner / safe cracker. Leo Woodhall, Dustin Hoffman

Some of the writers on X: @zachkram @AdrianeQ @lindakinstler

Thanks for checking out this Torg Stories post!