PARADISEBURNING

I’ll never forget being four years old and watching Elvis’s Aloha from Hawaii satellite broadcast back in ’73. My diaper days were behind me, I owned the fastest Big Wheel on the block, and now this: a comic-book man-god dressed in a red-white-and-blue American eagle suit and cape, singing “Dixie” with sweat running from his eyes like tears. It would remain the coolest image of my life until I caught my first glimpse of tit a year later. The future seemed blessed with an infi

In the coming months, you will be hearing a lot about White Boy Rick, which is the street name of Richard Wershe Jr., who, while still a teenager, managed to be sentenced to life for cocaine distribution. A large part of the reason people are now being hipped to Rick’s story is due to the journalism of Seth Ferranti, who himself did 21 years in prison on a drug conspiracy charge when he was a young man. And while the two have never met in person, a correspondence Wershe and F