Zócalo Public Square

“What I went through was real. You know, the feelings, the pain, the sorrow—that was all real, and that’s something that I can’t fake.” So said Notre Dame football player and Heisman trophy finalist Manti Te’o in a television interview with Katie Couric recently. By now you know the saga: Te’o was describing his feelings for his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, an attractive young woman he claimed to have met in 2009 after a football game at Stanford University, where she was supposedly a student.

One year ago, in the aftermath of the Internet “blackout” staged to protest copyright legislation, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales explained why the online shutdown was so powerful. The blackout, he said, got “the attention of Congress.” Now, “they realize they can’t just listen to Hollywood.

First, the bad news. That debonair, whip-smart, multilingual, trained-in-martial-arts, computer-code-writing Ivy League grad who works around the clock to hunt down terrorists and defuse bombs just seconds before they explode? He doesn’t really exist. He’s a Hollywood invention. Most of the “spies” devoted to protecting the United States from an array of outside threats are harried, middle-class office workers struggling, like millions of other Americans, to keep the weight off, pay the mortgage, and figure out how to work their gadgets.

It should have been a quiet, forgettable Tuesday night at home. That’s all I wanted it to be. My wife was out of town. I had to pick up both of my boys—4 and nearly 2—from two different child-care locations, which, for very complicated, very L.A. reasons, are 40 minutes apart. I just wanted to get Ben and Tom fed and to bed early, so I could catch up on some work.

As California’s oldest governor, Jerry Brown has gone out of his way to demonstrate his vigorous good health, jogging around the Capitol and even challenging reporters to pull-up contests—which he won. Now that he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer and begun radiation therapy, some news outlets seem to be experiencing a bit of schadenfreude, gleefully calling the 74-year-old governor’s diagnosis a “blow to his healthy image.”

Last March, responding to news of a killing, I found myself walking in the darkness at a crime scene in Quila, a small community outside Culiacán in Sinaloa, the state that is ground zero in Mexico’s drug war. I could hear helicopters overhead complimented by the sound of crickets on the ground as my feet made crunching noises on the gravel road. There was an orange glow from the flames of a bullet-riddled vehicle. There were no bodies immediately visible, until I ventured into the woods, following a police forensics team to encounter the body of a man killed by the Mexican military.