Don’t Cry for Tracy Morgan

Michael Paterniti interviews Tracy Morgan. “One time I was walking up the stairs with my son, who was always right there with me… and I almost fell backwards. I was just learning how to walk, and he grabbed me and took me upstairs, and I started crying. He said, ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ And I told him, ‘I remember when I carried you.’ And when my dad was dying of AIDS, I carried him.”

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 26, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,413 words)

Stud: How to Have 106 Babies (and Counting)

Ed Houben is 46 and has fathered 106 children “of whom two-thirds were made the natural way (i.e., by sexual intercourse) and a third made via artificial insemination.” Women and couples come to him because they haven’t been able to have children on their own, and he offers his services to them for free.

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 1, 2015
Length: 24 minutes (6,000 words)

The Dogs of War

The canines and their handlers out on the front line:

Two years of training with your dog, three months in-country, every day with Zenit at your side, eating MREs, packing your gear—and your dog’s—humping, working, waiting, waking at midnight to make sure Zenit pees and poops in the designated spot, and suddenly everything, your life as a soldier and handler, your life as hood rat and outsider and striving human being, gets compressed into 15 minutes and 60 yards.

Jose believes he’s onto the pattern. It seems the Taliban have buried IEDs at the access points to the wadi, assuming the troops would feel safer out of sight down in the dry riverbed than exposed in the open fields. It’s all happening so quickly now. He takes deep breaths to tame his excitement and maintain focus.

Published: May 23, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,585 words)

The Luckiest Village in the World

What happened when the village of Sodeto won the largest lottery in the history of Spain:

“Ana, the Romanian, picks up the ringing phone. ‘Mommy,’ says her daughter, ‘apparently the Gordo was won in Grañén,’ and Ana says, ‘Is this a joke?’ She looks out the window and sees her friend Lolita in her pajamas, running to the mayor’s house, and she sticks her head out, and Lolita screams, ‘WE WON THE GORDO!’

“‘How much?’ asks Ana reflexively, and her friend says a number in pesetas, and Ana yells, ‘Tell me so I can understand!’

“‘One hundred thousand euros per ticket,’ she shouts.

“And Ana, in shock, races down to the bar. She remembers putting her ticket under the cash register, and where is it, and…

There it is!

“Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out.”

Source: GQ
Published: May 6, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,701 words)

The Man Who Sailed His House

Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house. “And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve squandered what time you had, that you must trust this house of concrete you’ve built to stand up to the sea. Your wife joins you on the second-floor terrace, reporting that she, too, saw the neighbor’s house wash away. ‘We should run,’ she says, but you say, ‘It’s too late.’ And then: ‘We’ll be fine.’ Her arms circle your waist and lock there, while you stand stock-straight, gazing at the mountain, without daring to look back at the sea. These will be your last words to her—We’ll be fine. And you’ve already departed your body when everything seems to break beneath your feet and a roaring force crashes over you.”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 13, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,495 words)

Inside Al Jazeera

On a cold March evening in Manhattan, Ayman Mohyeldin rode in the back of a black Lincoln Town Car on his way to an appearance on The Colbert Report. Mohyeldin (pronounced moh-hee-deen) is the Cairo correspondent for Al Jazeera English, which helps explain two things: (1) accustomed to the temperate winters of the Triumphant City along the lazy Nile, he was sorely underdressed for the windy stabs of Manhattan, and (2) after his network’s critically acclaimed coverage of the Egyptian uprising, he was in town to take his star turn on Stephen Colbert’s hot seat, constituting what promised to be a pop-cultural coming-out for Al Jazeera in the United States.

Source: GQ
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,476 words)

The Boy from Gitmo

Eight years ago, an [REDACTED] Afghan kid—some say he was [REDACTED] years old, others say he was 12—was grabbed in a Kabul marketplace after a grenade attack on two American soldiers. He was interrogated, [REDACTED], and then taken to Guantánamo. He spent his teenage years there, seven in all, confined in a [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] with the supposed “worst of the worst.” But then, thanks ot the superhuman efforts of his defense team and one intense [REDACTED] military lawyer, the government’s case against him disintegrated. Now he’s back in Afghanistan, free as a badly damaged bird, in a [REDACTED] country he barely recognizes, wondering where you go when you grew up nowhere

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 1, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,063 words)

The Man Who Wouldn’t Die

Olympic hero (and 2011 “Biggest Loser” contestant) Rulon Gardner has fallen off trucks, tumbled off tractors, and gotten stuck in a baler. He has been impaled on an arrow, broken his neck, and gashed his knee clean to the bone. He has survived several catastrophic high-speed accidents, endured a frostbitten night in subzero temperatures, and most recently, swam away (barely) from a plane crash in Lake Powell. In between, he pulled off one of the great upsets in sports history and became an American legend. Meet Rulon Gardner, the luckiest man on earth.

Source: GQ
Published: Aug 1, 2007
Length: 35 minutes (8,753 words)

The House That Thurman Munson Built

Trust me, he said, and the last great brawling sports team in America did. Twenty years after Thurman Munson’s death, Reggie, Catfish, Goose, Gator, the Boss—and a nation of former boys—still aren’t over it. “I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he’s taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtling his head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 1, 1999
Length: 36 minutes (9,000 words)

The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy

Just over ten years later and with just one fewer soul on board, the vanishing of a French jumbo jet brings back memories of the SwissAir Flight 111 crash. Here, a heartbreaking account that continues to instruct today.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 1, 2000
Length: 32 minutes (8,066 words)