One Day

No day is ordinary. Take December 28, 1986, for example.

In 2012, Washington Post editor Gene Weingarten came up with what he judged to be a good “stunt.” In the past, he’d found good stories by setting up some other so-called stunts:

• Getting world-famous violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to busk near a Metro stop in Washington, DC. The story: how the rushing passersby responded to the beauty that Bell created in their midst.
• Assigning five writers to profile people they selected by banging a nail into a phone book – wherever it stopped, that person was each writer’s subject. The result was five gripping tales.

Similarly, Weingarten selected a day at random during which he would discover what happened across the United States from one midnight to the next. Then, he wrote a book of the stories. He hoped he could show how an ordinary day is anything but and how every span of time is a “microcosm” containing all the motifs of the human drama.

Weingarten and his book editor put 64 slips of paper in a hat. Twelve showed the name of a month, 31 showed the days of ...