From the Old City to Tel Aviv is just 34 miles as the bird flies but a fast-forward in time: There, high-tech rules, and the walkway along the Mediterranean Sea is packed with young Israeli professionals and their families.

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From our place to Fort Smith was about seventy miles as a bird flies, taking you past beautiful Mount Nebo where we had a little summer house so Mama could get away from the mosquitoes, and also Mount Magazine, the highest point in Arkansas, but it might as well have been seven hundred miles for all I knew of Fort Smith.

NPR: Excerpt: 'True Grit'