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Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire and ESPN and the winner of two National Magazine Awards.

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[Not single-page] The magician Teller (of Penn & Teller) discovers a copycat has taken a trick that he's been performing since 1975:

"When Teller filed his lawsuit, it made news: ROGUE MAGICIAN IS EXPOSING OUR SECRETS!!! read the TMZ headline. Teller did not like the coverage. The publicity might have sold more tickets to the show, but it misunderstood his purpose. Most of the stories suggested that he was suing Bakardy to protect the secret of his trick, the method. 'The method doesn't matter,' Teller says. He has performed Shadows over the years with three different methods, seeking perfection. The first involved a web of fishing line that took a painfully long time to set up; the second version required rigid, uncomfortable choreography; the third, today's version, he has never revealed. Bakardy, who said that he had seen Penn & Teller's show, almost certainly didn't use Teller's present method. He knew only the idea and the effect it had on the audience. He felt the crackle that runs through the otherwise silent theater when Teller wields his knife; he saw that some people start to cry, little soft sobs in the dark; he heard that some people make strange noises and other people try to make noises and fail. What Bakardy stole from Teller wasn't a secret. Bakardy stole something that everybody who has ever seen Shadows already knows."

One of the greatest athletes of all time faded into the background while his wife and daughters became reality TV stars:

"Fathers suffer a curse, and Bruce Jenner knows this curse better than most: The day you become a father, you stop being who you were. In the eyes of your children, your life began when theirs did.

"The strange thing about Jenner, now that he's sixty-two years old: It's not just his glorious past that has disappeared. It's as though all of him, every previous incarnation of him, has been flooded out of view: by the fame of his adopted family — his third wife, the former-and-sometimes-still Kris Kardashian, her son, Rob, and her collection of daughters, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie, the last two also Jenner's — by the glib demands of reality-TV story lines, by dubious plastic surgery and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Even in his own home, that familiar Spanish castle with the fountain splashing out front, you have to look hard to find those few traces of his existence. ('My mom's house,' Kim calls it.) All of the photographs are of the children; all of the memorabilia and props are the product of their successes, not his. There is no red singlet in a frame; his gold medal is nowhere to be found. For the most part, Bruce Jenner, Olympian, has been banished to the garage."

“I wanted to do right by Joey,” Chris Jones now says of "The Things That Carried Him" which Esquire published in May 2008. In 17,000 words, he told the story of one soldier’s return home, structured backward from his funeral to the moment an IED broke his body. He sprinkled details—a girl in a flowered dress and the two yellow ribbons tied to a tree on Elm Street—that act as emotional cues and lend lyricism to the writing. The piece won the 2009 National Magazine Award for feature writing.

In thirty-eight years, The Price is Right never had a contestant guess the exact value of prizes in the Showcase showdown. Until Terry Kniess outsmarted everyone — and changed everything.

It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. Now television's most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, but his words have never stopped.

For one suddenly tortured cynic, at least, it's close to home. Because if there's not a geek playing a hound playing a perfect man in your family, the one being wrung out by the tabloids has still laid bare a new power for men who cheat: the power of the truth

When a helicopter goes down, the men on the ground get to work. From the wreckage of torn metal, black boxes, and lifeless bodies, a model of what went wrong rises.

Why remake a bland but beloved thriller? Because movies should at least try to be as dangerous as life.