The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver
“All around him, it has been lightless for some time, except for the light from the lamp on his head. If it were to go out, he would not be able to see his hand in front of his face. Given that he’s not breathing, there’s no real sound either. Just: sensory oblivion. Spooky stuff.”
The Making (and Remaking) of Timothée Chalamet
A profile of a Hollywood “It Boy” as he figures out celebrity stardom during a tumultuous year.
We Bet You Miss Weddings. America’s Greatest Wedding Band Does Too.
“The carefree manner in which the guests of the wedding interacted with one another that night stamps this story in a specific time a seeming eternity ago, before social distancing and quarantine and a great big pause on America’s $60-billion-plus-a-year wedding industrial complex.”
The Great High School Imposter
Artur Samarin was a 19-year-old Ukrainian college student when he visited the U.S. via a summer exchange program and met an American couple willing to adopt him so he could stay indefinitely. There was a catch: Samarin would need to change his name to Asher Potts and enroll in school as a 14-year-old high school student.
The Great High School Impostor
What Artur Samarin pulled off at a school in small-town Pennsylvania is one of the boldest hoaxes of our time.
The Great Cocaine Treasure Hunt
A man finds a million dollars’ worth of cocaine washed up on a beach and buries it. A group goes in search of it years later.
Pulp Fever: Interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan
With some of these pop pieces, partly what you’re doing is writing your way out of a confused admiration for the subject. But Axl retains his power to disturb, always his greatest weapon. I don’t remember there being much resistance from the Quarterly. Which suggests either a level of confidence for which I’m grateful, or a level of drug abuse that is worrisome. Granted the brakes did screech a little when I called Joel from Bilbao asking if we could put Axl on the cover. His manager had said it was the only way we’d get an interview. (We didn’t do it.) In retrospect that was dumb of him/them, as it would have been killer PR for Axl and that incarnation of the band to grant us an interview, PR that didn’t really materialize further down the road; but Axl is not always focused on the smart thing to do; he asks himself instead, what is the most “Axl” thing to do?
