Longform

Stevie McGuire sought safety and peace of mind living on the streets of downtown Indianapolis. Instead, he met a tragic—and shockingly burtal—end.

The Internet is still in its infancy. We haven’t even reached Web 3.0 yet, so just imagine what Web 10.0 will look like. Crowdsourcing will be a huge part of what comes next. I flew back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently, and I’m beginning to think there will be no more secrets. There are even shirts that say “What happens in Vegas, stays on Facebook and Twitter forever.” I just ordered a new video camera that you wear on your ear like a Bluetooth headset. It’s uploading video constantly. I think a lot of people will wear jewelry that records every minute of their lives and uploads it to the cloud.

"I told my daughter, Angie, 'I wish everybody would stop talking about the officer, because we don't know whose lungs these are," says Cathy Lewis.

A tiny blonde who looks nowhere near her years—she is sometimes mistaken for one of the hip, youthful servers—Hoover has achieved success through a variety of means. The type of restaurant she introduced to the city came at the right time. She ignored the cautions of industry veterans who told her that she could not prepare foods the way she wanted to. And, above all, she focused on details to an extraordinary extent.

"Okay, what are we doing here?" shouts conservative pundit Tom Rose as his three boys and several dinner guests pull up chairs for a Friday-evening meal at his northside home.

Editor's Note: Somehow, despite his hailing from England, the loss of Dan Wheldon has hit our community close to home. For years now, we have felt especially attached to him. There are the two 500 wins, certainly—including this past edition's dramatic and improbable finish—but it was his warmth and humor that made him a favorite with fans and media alike. Once, in July 2007, he even invited us in to his home, letting us showcase his condo in our pages. As a tribute to his all-too-short life, we offer our May 2005 profile, published in the same month he first won our race. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the IRL and to his family.

"Our leverage is a moral argument," says King. "It's about money being siphoned from an important local institution." Although the Guild has never gone on strike, King planned to go into negotiations with every available option in his briefcase.

Five miles east of Monument Circle, on the far edge of Irvington, the railroad runs past factories and warehouses and a tiny asphalt racetrack. There is no infield, just a rubber-streaked oval two-tenths of a mile in circumference, little bigger than a hockey rink, surrounded by a wire fence and grandstands of bleachers and folding metal chairs. During the week, the Indianapolis Speedrome stands as empty as many of the abandoned buildings on the industrial east side. But every summer Saturday night, the place comes alive with beer-swilling fans who’ve paid $11 to watch four  hours of action, semi-pro drivers trading paint in everything from go-karts to jalopies, all of it just prelude to the mayhem that is the main event, a little-known battle royale of bent metal that may just be auto racing’s truest spectacle: the Figure 8.

This article originally appeared in the September 2008 issue.

Editor's Note, September 2011: When we profiled Steve Goldsmith in December 2010, we headlined the piece about New York's deputy mayor, "If He Can Make It There." Apparently he couldn't. Read the original article about his brief time there before the shame of an arrest for domestic violence led him to resign.