Coming April 13th!
Rolling Stone and Longreads present: A night of long-form journalism.
Join us at Housing Works in NYC for a special panel with Rob Sheffield, Jeff Goodell, and more. Moderated by Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana.
Coming April 13th!
Rolling Stone and Longreads present: A night of long-form journalism.
Join us at Housing Works in NYC for a special panel with Rob Sheffield, Jeff Goodell, and more. Moderated by Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana.
Gerald Marzorati, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine, is an Assistant Managing Editor of the Times
“Early Innings,” by Roger Angell. (The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1992) (sub. required)
America’s baseball belletrist here writes of how he came to love the game.
“The Silent Season of a Hero,” by Gay Talese. (Esquire, July 1966)
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? The author finds him in retirement, uneasily.
“The Streak of Streaks,” by Stephen Jay Gould. (The New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 1988)
More DiMaggio, this from the renowned paleontologist and ponderer of evolution—contemplating, here, what it means to have a hot streak (i.e., to cheat death).
“Final Twist of the Drama,” by George Plimpton. (Sports Illustrated, April 22, 1974)
The boyishly witty inventor of field-level participatory journalism here is a careful observer—of everything surrounding Henry Aaron’s home-run that broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime record.
“Coach Fitz’s Management Theory,” by Michael Lewis. (The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2004)
A piece I coaxed Michael to write—about his high-school baseball coach, and much, much more.
Princeton vs. UCLA: Reflections on a Historic Upset
I had a courtside seat for that game in Indianapolis, on the Princeton bench. I was a sophomore, small — too small, and slow — forward on that 1996 team. The only action I saw was the pregame layup lines. But countless times over the past 15 years, my former teammates and I have all had conversations, even with people we’ve just met, along these lines:
“Oh yeah, you played basketball at Princeton? Were you in that team that beat UCLA?”
“Yes.”
“Man, I remember that game, I was at my frat house at Scranton going wild.” Or “I was at a sports bar in Baltimore,” or “I was in my den, screaming at the television.” People — and, believe me, not just Princeton or UCLA alums — know precisely where they were, what they were doing and what they were drinking (often alcohol) during that game.
By Sean Gregory, Time
Incredible Edibles: The Mad Genius of ‘Modernist Cuisine’
The most instructive dish, however, was one of the failures, a slow-and-low chicken, cooked for several hours and served when its internal temperature had hit 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem was that, with all its juices still inside, it tasted far too chickeny. If you oven-roast chicken the regular way, you get used to the drying effect of the heat, and to the fact that some juices go into the pan and are recycled as gravy. With this version, the bird was so moist that its texture was almost jellied, the flesh was a faint pink, and the chicken-explosion of flavor was overwhelming. In a sense, it was too good. My roast-chicken-obsessed children threw down their cutlery in protest after a single mouthful.
David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business. To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America’s military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After Bush took office, private military contracts soared from $145 billion in 2001 to $390 billion in 2008. Federal contracting rules were routinely ignored or skirted, and military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin cashed in as war profiteering went from war crime to business model. Why shouldn’t a couple of inexperienced newcomers like Packouz and Diveroli get in on the action? After all, the two friends were after the same thing as everyone else in the arms business — lots and lots and lots of money.
By Guy Lawson, Rolling Stone
The work has changed remarkably little over the course of the past century, except in its increasing scarcity. Ninety percent of American lookout towers have been decommissioned, and only around five hundred of us remain, mostly in the West. Nonetheless, when the last lookout tower is retired, our stories will live on. Jack Kerouac worked a summer on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades, in 1956, an experience he mined for parts of two novels, The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. He secured the job through a recommendation by his friend the poet Gary Snyder, who worked summers on two different lookouts in the same national forest and wrote several fine poems about that world, “up there above the clouds memorizing various peaks and watersheds.” During the ’60s and ’70s, that old raconteur Edward Abbey worked at various postings, from Glacier National Park to the Grand Canyon. He wrote two essays on the subject and made a fire lookout the main character in his novel Black Sun, the book he claimed he loved most among all his works. And Norman Maclean, in his great book A River Runs Through It, wrote a lightly fictionalized story about his one summer as a lookout on the Selway Forest in northern Idaho, over the Bitterroot Divide from his home in Missoula.
By Philip Connors, Lapham’s Quarterly
Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters
On the Cannibal Café’s forums were men looking for men, men looking for women (the ideal: short, buxom, thin redheads) and women looking for men—very few posts, if any, were for women looking for women. There were people who wanted to be eaten and people who wanted to do the eating. There were stories, artwork and users seeking advice on the best to way to cook someone. “I am ready!” announced that the poster was prepared for slaughter. Entire threads were devoted to “human meat for sale fresh frozen.” Email addresses were freely exchanged, with posters using handles like “Pigslut” and “Masochist Mr. Waye.”
By Josh Kurp, The Awl
A month ago, he’d been working at Parris Island, South Carolina, capping a distinguished career during which he’d won more than 95 percent of his cases. He’d recently bought a big house with a huge kitchen and a fountain out back for his wife and two boys-and had begun to turn his attention to finding a civilian job. And then an e-mail pinged his in-box. Copied to a couple of hundred Marine lawyers, it called for applications to help with the military commissions trials at Guantánamo. Montalvo responded impulsively, stirred by the call to duty. Within a couple of hours, he received word. His retirement had been pulled: He was going to Washington, D.C.
The timing was terrible. The real estate market was imploding, the house couldn’t be sold, and Montalvo was forced to leave his family for an indeterminate amount of time. Still, there was worse to come. When he found out he’d been placed on the defense side-when he realized that he’d actually be defending the terrorists-he was stricken. The phone started ringing, colonels he knew on the line repeating the same mantra: “This isn’t going to be good for your career, Major.” Then the call with his parents. On September 11, Montalvo’s uncle Tony had responded with his Harlem fire company to Ground Zero, and Montalvo’s parents believed it was black lung that killed him not long after.
Please don’t do this, Montalvo’s mother told him.
By Michael Paterniti, GQ
The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson
Kiki, who is 34, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.”
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