A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids–and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.

Published: Feb 1, 1997
Length: 29 minutes (7,379 words)

The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue

The tenth graders heading up Madison Avenue at 7:30 A.M. to the private high schools are freshly liberated from their dental braces, and their teeth look pearly and magnificent. They are fifteen years old. During the week, they arrive, by bus or on foot, singly or in pairs or in clusters, and they make their way up the west side of Madison — they call it the “cool” side — toward their schools: Dalton, on East Eighty-ninth; Sacred Heart and Spence, on East Ninety-first; Nightingale-Bamford, on East Ninety-second; the Lycee Francais, on East Ninety-fifth. Brearley and Chapin are farther east; Collegiate, Columbia Prep, and Trinity are in the west; Browning is south; Horace Mann, Riverdale, and Fieldston are in the north. On the weekends, the tenth graders from all points will find a way to get together. Today is only Tuesday.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Feb 20, 1995
Length: 6 minutes (1,534 words)

Three by Sedaris

In the early sixties, during what my mother referred to as the “tail end of the Lassie years,” my parents were given two collies they named Rastus and Duchess. We were living in upstate New York, out in the country, and the dogs were free to race through the forest. They napped in meadows and stood knee-deep in frigid streams, costars in their own private dog-food commercial. According to our father, anyone could tell that the two of them were in love.

Source: Esquire
Published: Mar 1, 2000
Length: 33 minutes (8,486 words)

Playboy Interview: Metallica (2001)

HETFIELD: We had our battles with spandex, that’s for sure. You could show off your package. “Wear spandex, dude. It gets you chicks!” On the first tour through America, my spandex—I fucking hate saying, “my spandex.” It’s a pretty evil phrase. They were wet from the night before, and I was drying them by the heater. A big hole melted right in the crotch. It was like, “They’re not real pants, are they? They’re like pantyhose.” I just opted to keep my jeans on, and that was the best thing that ever happened.

Source: Playboy
Published: Apr 1, 2001
Length: 43 minutes (10,905 words)

Into Thin Air

Everest deals with trespassers harshly: the dead vanish beneath the snows. While the living struggle to explain what happened. And why. A survivor of the mountain’s worst disaster examines the business of Mount Everest and the steep price of ambition.

Source: Outside
Published: Sep 1, 1996
Length: 66 minutes (16,590 words)

Death of an Innocent: Excerpt from ‘Into the Wild’

How Christopher McCandless lost his way in the wilds. “James Gallien had driven five miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaskan dawn. A rifle protruded from the young man’s pack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn’t the sort of thing that gives motorists pause in the 49th state. Gallien steered his four-by-four onto the shoulder and told him to climb in. The hitchhiker introduced himself as Alex. ‘Alex?’ Gallien responded, fishing for a last name. ‘Just Alex,’ the young man replied, pointedly rejecting the bait. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and ‘live off the land for a few months.'”

Source: Outside
Published: Jan 1, 1993
Length: 33 minutes (8,370 words)

Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter (1976)

I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. But that doesn’t mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.

Source: Playboy
Published: Nov 1, 1976
Length: 51 minutes (12,870 words)

How Apple Does It

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he’ll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. “Here’s what you find at a lot of companies,” he says. “You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

Source: Time
Published: Oct 16, 2005
Length: 8 minutes (2,184 words)

The Mussolini of Ass

Sure, you could focus on the corrupt, quasi-fascistic side of Silvio Berlusconi’s long reign over Italy. But as his adoring supporters will tell you, that’s not the point of “Silvio!” What sustains a nation is the man’s dyed hair and shameless libido. Devin Friedman goes in search of the self-appointed dictator of macho hedonistic unprosecutable pleasure.

Source: GQ
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 24 minutes (6,149 words)

Playboy Interview: Sergey Brin and Larry Page (2004)

PLAYBOY: Is your company motto really “Don’t be evil”? GOOGLE GUYS: Yes, it’s real. PLAYBOY: Is it a written code? GOOGLE GUYS: Yes. We have other rules, too. PAGE: We allow dogs, for example. PLAYBOY: Who ultimately decides what is evil? Eric Schmidt, your CEO, once said, “Evil is whatever Sergey decides is evil.” GOOGLE GUYS: That was not one of his best quotes, though it’s memorable.

Source: Playboy
Published: Sep 1, 2004
Length: 26 minutes (6,725 words)