user: Problem: Tennesse Couple First to Claim Powerball Jackpot

A Tennessee couple stepped forward Friday to claim their share of the Powerball jackpot.

Lisa and John Robinson had one of three winning tickets for $1.6 billion prize drawing, the Tennessee lottery president Rebecca Hargrove announced. Appearing at a news conference at Tennessee lottery headquarters Friday afternoon, the Robinsons told the media that they have elected to take their earnings as a lump sum payment since they are “not guaranteed tomorrow.”

The Robinsons say they bought their tickets at a local grocery store in Munford, T.N. at the behest of Mrs. Robinson, who watched the Wednesday night drawing, carefully writing down the winning numbers. Two other winning tickets were sold in Chino Hills, California, and Melbourne Beach, Florida, but the winners there have not been announced yet.

Lump sum payments for each of the winners will payout about $327 million after taxes, the Associated Press reports. The first thing the Robinsons say they plan to do? Pay off their daughter’s student loans and show up for work on Monday.

Write a one or two sentence summary.

Summary: They will take home a $327 million lump sum payment


Input: Book Review: Lev Grossman on Stephen King's 11/22/63
I’ve only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read The Long Walk, one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read The Dark Half, which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read 11/22/63.

It’s not like I was avoiding King. I just never felt drawn to his stuff. I’m not a big horror reader, and his prose isn’t unmissably lapidary or anything. Judging from other people’s reactions to his work, something important was going on in there, but I could never really feel it. It’s like he was transmitting on a frequency I wasn’t calibrated to receive.

And plus Gilbert Cruz — who edits this blog, or whatever it is — is practically a one-man King bureau, so I got in the habit of just forwarding everything King wrote to him. But with 11/22/63, I took matters into my own hands. I turned vigilante. Like Lee Harvey Oswald.

(MORE: Stephen King talks to TIME about his 10 Longest Novels)

I started 11/22/63 because I was curious, just from a technical, writerly point of view, what King was up to. I finished it because I liked it. 11/22/63 isn’t your typical King outing: it’s a time-travel novel about a guy who finds a portal back to 1958 and uses it to try to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy. It’s not a horror novel. It’s hard to say what it is, exactly.

But whatever it is, it’s obviously the work of a master craftsman. You feel safe immediately: sit back, relax, a professional will be handling matters. Everything is in sharp focus: the details are precise, and even minor characters and extras are given distinct individual faces (it’s surprising how few writers bother to do that). The boxes you need a book to check are firmly and methodically checked. By page 5 we’ve got our hero, Jake, and we’re already firmly on his side. He’s a teacher; his wife just left him; he’s nice to a borderline-mentally disabled janitor; he likes John Irving. We like him. Check.

Then there’s another kind of box, which doesn’t get checked: King opts out of the cliches of the genre. No mad scientists, no gleaming time machine, no grandfather paradox, no Tesla coils, nobody coming back from the deep past with a dinosaur for a pet. You’ve read plenty of time-travel stories, so your sensors will be on high alert, but King walks right past them. No alarms go off. Nothing here is stock or off-the-rack: this story is custom-made, one of a kind. The first hint Jake gets that he’s dealing with a time-portal is that a friend of his goes from healthy to wasted-by-cancer in a day. Turns out the friend, Al, just spent four years in the past. He came back because he was dying.

Al owns a diner, which has a pantry, and the pantry is a hole into the past, specifically to September 9, 1958. King doesn’t try to explain this, which is just as well. Jake and Al decide that Jake is going to go back and stop Lee Harvey Oswald.

As it turns out, Jake likes the past. King does too. The root beer was better. The music was better. Life was simpler. Neighborhoods were safer. The best thing about 11/22/63 is King’s warm, precise portrait of the 1950’s, for which he clearly feels a powerful longing. It’s pleasant watching Jake set up his life there. He has a fake identity. Like Biff in Back to the Future Part II, he bets on sporting events that he knows the outcome of. He’s clever and efficient. It’s like watching Robinson Crusoe set up house on his island.

Since the time-hole is permanently set on 1958, and JFK died in 1963, Jake has five years to kill. So he rights a few local historical wrongs in Derry, Maine (where King has set a couple of other novels; according to Professor Cruz, some characters from It make a cameo), then he moves to Texas, the better to surveil Oswald. Jake becomes a teacher in a small town near Dallas, where he finds a tall, lovably gawky librarian named Sadie to fall in love with.

We have a lot of time to kill too. The big question, of course, is will-he-won’t-he stop Oswald, but it’s a long haul to the fateful day, and the wires go slack from time to time. Much of the book’s tension comes from the fact that the past doesn’t like being changed. It throws up barriers to keep Jake from changing the timestream—a fallen tree, a sudden illness, a stalled car—and the more major the change, the more serious the barriers. (There’s a whiff of Final Destination in 11/22/63.) But Jake spends a lot of time noodling around inspiring his students and flirting with Sadie, too. The book wanders in the middle, from genre to genre, from thriller to romance to mystery to period piece to Friday Night Lights.
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assistant: I started 11/22/63 because I was curious what Stephen King was up to. I finished it because I liked it.