Search Results for: New York Magazine

The Feel Of Nothing: A Life In America’s Batting Cages

Steve Salerno Missouri Review | Winter 2004| 24 minutes (6,016 words)

Steve Salerno’s essays and memoirs have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and many other publications. His 2005 book, SHAM, was a groundbreaking deconstruction of the self-help movement, and he is working on a similar book about medicine. He teaches globalization and media at Lehigh University. This essay first appeared in the Missouri Review (subscribe here!). Thanks to Salerno for allowing us to reprint it here.

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Observed on video at half-speed, through the metal lattice-work of the batting cage, it is a perfectly choreographed pas de deux of man and machine. While the machine readies the pitch, the man executes the idiosyncratic but vital preparatory movements of torso and hand that jump-start his batting rhythm; he leans forward, then rocks his weight back, the bat wavering in a narrow arc above his head much as the young palms visible in the background yield to the soft ocean breezes—slightly forward of true vertical, slightly aft, slightly forward again. As the dimpled yellow ball shuffles down that last segment of the feeder sleeve toward the pair of spinning wheels that will propel it homeward, the batter’s hands twist around the axis of the lower wrist in a subtle cocking mechanism; when the ball drops between the wheels and disappears for an instant, the batter’s front foot lifts, then returns to earth perhaps six inches beyond its initial resting place; the bat itself remains well back, high over the rear shoulder, in obeisance to an ancient admonition—“hips before hands.”

Even in slo-mo, the swiftness of the ball’s flight to the plate startles. At first it seems that there’s no way the man can snap the bat down and around his body fast enough to intercept the sphere (which actually, now, more resembles a yellow antiaircraft tracer) before it blurs by him…. But no, he starts his swing, his lower body leading the way, pivoting sharply on the front foot—now—and in fact, somehow manages to confront the pitch out
 ahead of the ersatz plate. If you pause the video at this precise point—that millisecond before impact—you marvel at the fact that, slicing through the strike zone, the bat, despite being molded from a single sheet of metal, is no longer a straight, rigid line. Rather, the bat- head clearly lags behind the handle in its travel to the ball, a vivid manifestation of the explosive torque all good hitters rely on for generating power. An instant later, post-contact, the ball too is misshapen, flattened on the impact side, shooting off the bat in a shallow upward arc with such velocity that it appears to leave a comet-like contrail in its wake.

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The Writing Genius of Harold Ramis

Bad is usually good in Ramis’s films, if only because good is so obviously bad. In “Groundhog Day,” Ramis’s masterpiece, a jaded Pittsburgh weatherman named Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is forced to repeat Groundhog Day over and over again in the tiny town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. At one point, he devises numerous ways to kill himself:

INT. CADILLAC

PHIL begins to accelerate, turning a fast lap around the square. Gus looks back at the police car chasing them.

GUS

I think they want you to stop… .

PHIL

It’s the same thing your whole life. Clean up your room, stand up straight, pick up your feet, take it like a man. Be nice to your sister. Don’t mix beer and wine—ever.

The car skids around and comes to a stop straddling the railroad tracks… .

PHIL

(eyes gleaming)

Oh, yeah—don’t drive on the railroad tracks.

GUS

Well, now, that’s one I happen to agree with.

The director Jay Roach says that the six films Murray and Ramis made together define a level of achievement he calls “extreme comedy.” “You would watch people in the audience just lose their minds,” he told me. “Harold Ramis is the yardstick of what you want to reach for, of people’s bodies around you going into convulsions of joy while your brain is thinking and your emotions are deeply tied in to the characters, and you’re going, ‘Oh my God, This is the best two hours I’ve ever spent.’ ”

Tad Friend, in The New Yorker in 2004, on the comedy of Harold Ramis. Ramis died in 2014.

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The Innovation That Helped 'El Chapo' Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Drug Trafficking Empire

But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be a water faucet outside the home of a cartel attorney in the border town of Agua Prieta was in fact a secret lever that, when twisted, activated a hydraulic system that opened a hidden trapdoor underneath a pool table inside the house. The passage ran more than 200 feet, directly beneath the fortifications along the border, and emerged inside a warehouse the cartel owned in Douglas, Ariz. Chapo pronounced it “cool.”

When this new route was complete, Chapo instructed Martínez to call the Colombians. “Tell them to send all the drugs they can,” he said. As the deliveries multiplied, Sinaloa acquired a reputation for the miraculous speed with which it could push inventory across the border. “Before the planes were arriving back in Colombia on the return, the cocaine was already in Los Angeles,” Martínez marveled.

Eventually the tunnel was discovered, so Chapo shifted tactics once again, this time by going into the chili-pepper business. He opened a cannery in Guadalajara and began producing thousands of cans stamped “Comadre Jalapeños,” stuffing them with cocaine, then vacuum-sealing them and shipping them to Mexican-owned grocery stores in California. He sent drugs in the refrigeration units of tractor-trailers, in custom-made cavities in the bodies of cars and in truckloads of fish (which inspectors at a sweltering checkpoint might not want to detain for long). He sent drugs across the border on freight trains, to cartel warehouses in Los Angeles and Chicago, where rail spurs let the cars roll directly inside to unload. He sent drugs via FedEx.

But that tunnel into Douglas remains Chapo’s masterpiece, an emblem of his creative ingenuity. Twenty years on, the cartels are still burrowing under the border — more than a hundred tunnels have been discovered in the years since Chapo’s first. They are often ventilated and air-conditioned, and some feature trolley lines stretching up to a half-mile to accommodate the tonnage in transit.

The New York Times reports that Joaquín Guzmán Loera—leader of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel—has been arrested. Nicknamed El Chapo, Guzmán’s cocaine and marijuana trafficking empire is believed to be worth several billion dollars. Patrick Radden Keefe closely examined the Sinaloa Drug Cartel and Chapo’s leadership of the organization for The New York Times Magazine in the summer of 2012.

See also: “Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad.” (GQ, Jan. 12, 2014)

And: “The Narco Tunnels of Nogales.” (Businessweek, Aug. 2, 2012)

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Photo of elaborate cross-border drug smuggling tunnel discovered inside a warehouse near San Diego via Wikimedia Commons

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Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

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I.

In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…

Taking Care of Business: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Orange Coast Magazine, The New York Times, Business Insider, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 16, 2014

David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

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Philip Seymour Hoffman: 1967-2014

Longreads Pick

Here is Lynn Hirschberg’s 2008 New York Times Magazine profile of the actor, who was found dead Feb. 2 in Manhattan:

“In my mid–20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

Published: Feb 2, 2014
Length: 29 minutes (7,250 words)

Philip Seymour Hoffman: 1967-2014

“In my mid–20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman, to Lynn Hirschberg, in a 2008 New York Times Magazine profile. Hoffman was found dead Feb. 2 in Manhattan.

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Photo: justinhoch, Flickr

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What It’s Like to Grow Up Gay in Russia

Edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon | OR Books | February 2014 | 11 minutes (2,575 words)

 

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This week we are proud to feature a chapter from Gay Propaganda, a collection of original stories, interviews and testimonials from LGBT Russians both living there and in exile. The book was edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon, and will be published by OR Books in February. We’d like to thank them for sharing this chapter with Longreads Members. 

 

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TATIANA ERMAKOVA

“I had a career in Russia, a nice apartment, friends, family. 

I sacrificed all that to be with Ana.”

I was born and grew up in Saratov, Russia. It’s a provincial town, built on a mix of old-fashioned Orthodox Christian values (which condemned homosexuality as a sin) and Soviet beliefs (when most people thought that homosexuality didn’t exist in the Soviet Society at all).

Both of my parents worked, and I was on my own a lot. I was a good kid, though. I did my homework, stayed home, and didn’t get into trouble. I was also shy and sometimes had a hard time socializing. My father was a history professor at the university, and my mom worked for a non-profit organization. Read more…

Five Stories About Sports for People Who Hate Sports

OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling.

But that doesn’t mean, as it turns out, that stories about sports can’t be fascinating. The economics! The moral gray areas! The egos! It’s like a reality show in there.

I’m not going to start watching sports anytime soon, but thanks to these stories, I’m starting to see why other people do.

Does Football Have A Future? The N.F.L. and The Concussion Crisis

Ben McGrath | The New Yorker | Jan. 31, 2011

This story has moved on quite a bit since 2011—there is now a book, a movie and something called The Concussion Blog—but McGrath’s story is a good primer on the issue of football players suffering severe mental damage in old age, and foreshadows both the huge pressure on the NFL and its head-in-the-sand response.

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