Search Results for: Esquire

How Scientists Are Using Fruit Flies to Find Alternative Cancer Treatments

“His name was Ross Cagan. He did not work for Schadt; he worked as a professor at Sinai. But they met every week, and after Schadt called on October 1 to tell Cagan about Stephanie Lee, he listened to Cagan’s idea for her. A month earlier, Cagan had started doing something that he said ‘had never been done before.’ He started creating ‘personalized flies’ for cancer patients. He took the mutations that scientists like Schadt had revealed and loaded them into flies, essentially giving the flies the same cancer that the patient had. Then he treated them. ‘Why a fly? You can do this in a fly. You can capture the complexities of the tumor.’

“A day after Cagan spoke with Schadt, Stephanie became the fifth person in the world to have a fly built in her image—or, rather, in the image of her cancer. In an ideal world, Cagan would have created as complex a creature as possible, burdening the fly with at least ten mutations. He gave Stephanie’s fly three, because ‘Stephanie is on the shorter course. We’re making the fly as complex as possible given her time.’ By October 11, however, Cagan already had ‘one possible drug suggestion for her’—or one possible combination of drugs, since he always tests at least two at a time. ‘In this center, the FDA will not allow us to put a novel drug in patient. To get a novel drug into a patient, we have to do a novel combination of [known] drugs. We have to use novel drug combinations that people have never seen before'”

– In Esquire, Mark Warren and Tom Junod tell the story of an Iraq War widow named Stephanie Lee who was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, and how scientists at Mount Sinai are using her genetic data to find personalized treatments for her. Read more stories about fighting cancer.

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Photo: John Tann

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What George Clooney Smells Like, According to Tom Junod

“He is fifty-two years old. He is wearing a black hoodie zipped to the neck, blue jeans, and boots laced so assertively they squeak when he flexes his ankles. He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip. Everything is to scale with him. Many people have long eyelashes; he has lashes as long on the bottom as they are on the top. His eyes look like they’ve been caught by Venus flytraps. He is going gray, yes, but if you took a population sample of his hair, there is no doubt that any analysis would reveal that the numbers of black and gray hairs are evenly distributed and have achieved equipoise. He has recently showered, and a careful modicum of product lifts his hair off his forehead. He has surprisingly fine hands. He smells like soap.”

Tom Junod, describing George Clooney in a new Esquire profile. Read more from Junod.

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Photo: botheredbybees, Flickr

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The Vanity Fair Gossip Column That Wasn't

“Senior editor Walter Clemons recruited Truman Capote to write a gossip column for the magazine, which created more turbulence at 350 Madison Avenue—Condé Nast headquarters at the time—and more fodder for the press. ‘Capote finally consented and wrote one,’ Lawson recalls. ‘And at one of the meetings everybody except me said, “Oh, we can’t publish this. It’s just not up to Truman’s quality!” I said, “I think it’s much better than the other stuff that’s coming in.” But it was definitely voted down. He was asked to rewrite a portion of it, which he did. It was still turned down. And then he went right down the street and sold it to Esquire. It’s always been a regret of mine that we did not publish that thing, because we would have had the last significant published report by him.’

“In a Washington Post article timed to coincide with Vanity Fair’s maiden issue, the publicity-mad Capote gleefully laid out his side of the story: ‘I didn’t hear from Mr. Locke for weeks, and then one day this messenger boy shows up at my apartment with my copy, and there are red pencil marks everywhere! You can’t rewrite a stylist. So I just sent it over to Esquire. They don’t touch my copy there. I hope nobody ever attributes Vanity Fair to anybody but Thackeray.’”

From the history of the revived Vanity Fair, which had originally stopped publication in 1936. Read more from Vanity Fair in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Jack Mitchell, Wikimedia Commons

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Required Reading from Journalism Professors

Photo by Seth Sawyers

Below, six syllabi from journalism professors on what you should be reading.

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1. Journalism 494: Pollner Seminar In Narrative Non-Fiction With Esquire’s Chris Jones (University of Montana)

“The purpose of this course is to teach students how to write publishable magazine-length narrative non-fiction: In other words, my aim is to help you learn how to write good, long, true stories. The course outline will mirror a typical writer’s progress through the birth of an idea to a finished, polished piece, including reporting, writing, editing, and fact-checking. In addition to classroom discussion, course readings will help students understand the difference between good and bad work. My hope is that by the end of the semester, you will have written the Best Story of Your Life So Far (BSOYLSF) and it will help you reach your future potential as an award-winning literary journalist.”

2. Journalism 141: Professional Problems and Ethics in Journalism (by Philip Meyer, University of North Carolina)

“The subculture of journalism is no longer as confident of its success. 
Its old values are increasingly under question. The topic of this course
is therefore a moving target. We shall approach it with two organizing principles:

“A critical study of traditional journalistic values, the historical forces that created them. An evaluation of social and technological changes that threaten that subculture – and possibly its value system.”

3. Introduction to Literary Reportage (by Robert S. Boynton, NYU) (PDF)

“The goal of this course is to help you create a distinctive body of work and, eventually, a capstone piece of literary reportage. It has three basic components. First, it will guide you through the research, reporting and thinking to refine and focus the project you will begin in Portfolio I. Second, it will introduce you to some of the authors, editors and publications of the genre. Third, it will familiarize you with some of the journalistic strategies you will use in your own work.”

4. Journalism 676: Investigative Reporting With Pulitzer Prize-Winner Deborah Blum

“I’m happy to share a syllabus, although they’ve gotten more and more abbreviated over the last few years. That’s because, as you know, investigations never seem to follow a planned path. Basically these days, I just do an oral presentation and assignments and we build deadlines, etc. in to the semester, depending on where we are. We do a lot of oral reports and feedback in this class and in the last month of the semester, we start writing/fact-checking/filling in gaps based on the information we’ve assembled.”

5. Syllabus for Telling Stories: the Art of Narrative Non-Fiction (by Alex Kotlowitz, Dartmouth) (PDF)

“This course will explore the art of telling stories – true stories. The craft is often called Literary Journalism or Creative Nonfiction. The writer John McPhee calls it The Literature of Fact, which I prefer for its lack of pretention and for its lack of ambiguity. In this class, we’ll talk about finding story, about reporting and of course about writing, about how one goes about making sense of the tale at hand. I want to push people to find stories outside of the familiar. 
“It’s what makes this craft so exhilarating, to find yourself in places you’d never have reason to be or with people you’d never have reason to meet. What could be more exciting. More challenging.”

6. JOU 6309: Journalism as Literature – Fall 2009 (by Dr. Ronald Rogers, University of Florida)

“This course lies at the crossroads of journalism and literature. During the next 15 weeks we will explore the journalistic, historical and critical tangents that make up the notion of literary journalism as we read and analyze some of the best reportage ever written. In the process of reading the works of many fine journalists, we will weigh how form and content work together to create great factual literature.

“This course has a six-pronged approach. It is a smorgasbord of delectables – all, or any one of which, I hope, you will find tasty. We will explore:

“1. Literary journalism’s historical antecedents – or should we say founders?

“2. Literary journalism’s future in the age of the connected computer.

“3. The criticism literary journalism has received from friend and foe alike.

“4. The theory behind this genre.

“5. The techniques that comprise and define this genre.

“6. Ways of toppling the inverted pyramid in developing our own individual writing styles using the techniques of literary journalism.”

Bonus: What’s On Your Syllabus? (Nieman Storyboard)

Featuring Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Bowden, Madeleine Blais, Robert Boynton, Jeff Sharlet and Rebecca Skloot.

Portrait of a Ten-year-old Girl

Longreads Pick

An intimate look at the life of Caitlyn Pinto, a ten-year-old girl living in Canada who loves Justin Bieber and has thoughtful ideas about racism and bullying:

“Caitlyn has an iPod touch, which allows her to surf the Internet, though she uses it mostly for iMessage, and FaceTime, a kind of one-on-one video chat. She and her friends message several times a day, about dumb stuff: school, music, what are you eating, whatever. On Fridays, they group-message, with everyone texting online at once. The family rule is that Facebook is not allowed until grade seven, and Caitlyn is fine with that. After much discussion at school about cyberstalking and cyberbullying, the prospect of sharing too much in cyberspace makes her nervous. Friends talk about the suicide of Amanda Todd, the BC teen bullied so callously across the Internet and at school. Caitlyn has heard stories about grade seven girls being teased online, and this is scary: an electronic footprint fixes a young girl’s identity when she is most in flux, and it can’t be erased. ‘I like texting more than Facebook, because you know where it’s going. It’ll just go to one friend, and you can’t forward things.'”

(Related: Susan Orlean’s classic profile, “The American Male at Age Ten,” which was published in Esquire in 1992)

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Sep 11, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,622 words)

The Wisdom of Mr. Rogers

The below YouTube video recently resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award:

In just three minutes, he reduced Linda Dano to tears and reminded us how conscientious we can strive to be when it comes to recognizing the important people in our lives and telling them how much they mean to us.

The clip brought me back to one of my all-time favorite stories: Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile or Mr. Rogers:

Can You Say… Hero?

“Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, ‘The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.’”

Read Junod’s 2003 eulogy for Mr. Rogers

…and it then sent me on a Mr. Rogers YouTube-watching binge. Here he is defending PBS before Congress in 1969:

Mr. Rogers Defending PBS before the U.S. Senate (1969, 7 minutes)

Paradise Regained

Longreads Pick

Restoring Howard Finster’s visual art site in Summerville, Ga. Finster died in 2001 at the age of 84 and left behind more than 46,000 pieces of artwork and a garden of attractions:

“Fueled by Coca-Cola, spoonfuls of instant coffee granules, and King B Sweet Twist tobacco, Finster started feverishly creating what would become 46,991 numbered works of art. He perfected an iconography of angels, demons, animals, spaceships, inventors, presidents, Marilyn, and Elvis—mostly painted on wooden cutouts covered over with Bible verses and sermons rendered in urgent all caps.

“Tipped off by Esquire, UGA art professor Andy Nasisse asked Finster to give a talk about his work. The Georgia State Botanical Garden in Athens also invited him to do a show. ‘He blew everyone’s mind at the university,’ recalls Nasisse. ‘Some described that one lecture as a year’s worth of education.’ Other university professors were soon visiting Pennville, from schools like Wake Forest, Lehigh, and Virginia Tech.”

Published: Jun 21, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,947 words)

Celebrating Four Years of Longreads

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Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday, and it’s been a thrill to watch this community grow since we introduced this service and Twitter hashtag in 2009. Thank you to everyone who participates, whether it’s as a reader, a publisher, a writer—or all three. And thanks to the Longreads Members who have made it possible for us to keep going. 

To celebrate four years, here’s a rundown of some of our most frequent #longreads contributors, and some of their recent recommendations: 

#1 – @matthiasrascher


#2 – @hriefs


#3 – @roamin


#4 – @jalees_rehman


#5 – @LAReviewofBooks


#6 – @TheAtlantic


#7 – @nxthompson


#8 – @faraway67 


#9 – @PocketHits


#10 – @legalnomads


#11 – @brainpicker


#12 – @LineHolm1 


#13 – @Guardian


#14 – @stonedchimera


#15 – @MosesHawk


#16 – @James_daSilva


#17 – @chrbutler


#18 – @eugenephoto

#19 – @jaredbkeller


#20 – @morgank


#21 – @dougcoulson


#22 – @LaForgeNYT


#23 – @stephen_abbott

#24 – @venkatananth

#25 – @weegee

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The New Yorker, Esquire, Miami New Times, Columbia Magazine, New York magazine, and a guest pick by Greg Spielberg. 

Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Kruse

Michael Kruse, an award-winning staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times who also contributes to ESPN’s Grantland, this year gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.  

1. Chris Jones on the animals in Ohio. What a way to start: The horses knew first. And want to know how to make people keep reading? End paragraphs and sections with sentences like this: He saw what was unmistakably a bear, giving chase. And: Then Kopchak saw the lion. And: Next she called 911. And: … and they knew that they didn’t have enough time or tranquilizers to stop what was coming.

2. Michael Mooney’s Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever. Because of the question. Will he or won’t he? I had to know. But also because Mooney made me care about Bill Fong. He could’ve taken me anywhere. I would’ve read forever. And because come on—who doesn’t love a well-told tale with a twist at the end?

3. Kelley Benham’s Never Let Go. Granted, Kelley’s cubicle’s not too far from my cubicle, so maybe I’m not too impartial, but I feel like this is a fact: This story is one of the best things that ran in a newspaper in America in the last 12 months. Three parts. One miracle. Life.

4. Caballo Blanco’s Last Run by Barry Bearak. Classic quest story. Looking for True. Also, in print, it was beautifully designed. Which matters.

5. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Cocaine Incorporated. Details. Details like the ghostwriter composing letters to the mistress. Like the dope-stuffed submersibles floating down the Amazon. The Sinaloa pot farm … on U.S. National Forest land … in the remote North Woods of Wisconsin … surrounded by Mexican farmers with AK-47’s. The catapult! The chili-pepper business! The air-conditioned tunnels with trolley lines! Surprises are such intoxicants. Oh, and this sentence: In the trippy semiotics of the drug war, the cops dress like bandits, and the bandits dress like cops.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.