Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee

Plucked from a Japanese baseball all-star team roster in 2007 and introduced at a lavish news conference, Igawa was expected to be a staple in the Yankees’ starting rotation. He lasted 16 games, most of them regrettable outings that were sometimes spectacularly inept. Booed off the field, he was called one of the worst free-agent signings in Yankees history. After his last, losing appearance for the Yankees in early 2008, he was banished to the farm system and he has not come back.

Published: Jul 23, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,520 words)

The Diva and Her Demons: Rolling Stone’s 2007 Amy Winehouse Cover Story

Alongside the world’s tallest free-standing tower, one of the world’s tiniest pop stars is crouched next to a garbage pail, collecting a pile of eyeliner pencils and mascara tubes between her hands. While Amy Winehouse wanders the courtyard of Toronto’s 1,815-foot CN Tower in search of a plastic bag to hold her cosmetics, the man who was her fiancé on that May but who would be her husband five days later smokes a cigarette from my pack and looks bored. Blake Fielder-Civil — or “Baby,” as Winehouse calls him, in an array of inflections that strains imagination — gestures toward the trash can. Her soda spilled inside her fake Louis, he says, pointing at the beaten-up mock Lois Vuitton purse atop the rubbish. “She had that bag for ages.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 14, 2007
Length: 14 minutes (3,725 words)

The Dogs In Renoir’s Garden

(Fiction) Her little Renoir painting which she missed most was not allowed her. The insurance company had pronounced the security at the nursing home inadequate. May considered that ironic. She had found the security so effective that in the year and ten months of her stay, and in spite of the unlocked doors, she had never ventured out of the home by herself. But then her daughter had placed her there, and May was always ready to accept the appraisal of others.

Source: VQR
Published: Jan 1, 1982
Length: 14 minutes (3,730 words)

Ten Things I Have Learned

1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE. This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection.

Published: Nov 22, 2001
Length: 11 minutes (2,866 words)

A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home

Inside was an old silver sedan. The doors were locked. He looked inside and saw a white blanket on the back seat. There was a pillow on the floor. Hanging from the rearview mirror was an air freshener shaped like a pine tree. Wedged against the console was a thin white candle. He stopped on what he saw in the passenger seat. In the passenger seat was the mummified body of what looked like a woman.

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Jul 22, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,735 words)

Scott Storch Raked in Hip-Hop Millions and Then Snorted His Way to Ruin

(AltWeekly Award Winner, 2011) When Scott Storch was 8 years old, he was dizzied by a soccer cleat to the head. His mom did not take such injuries in stride. She had been apoplectic when Scott lost his baby teeth in a living-room dive five years earlier, leaving him with a Leon Spinks grin. “I was an overly worrisome mother,” admits Joyce Yolanda Storch, who goes mainly by her middle name. “I was overbearing to a fault.”

Source: Miami New Times
Published: Apr 22, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,188 words)

What’s Killing Carbon Capture?

Yet only two years in, the future of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is in jeopardy. On July 14, American Electric Power pulled the plug on its CCS efforts, citing a weak economy and the “uncertain status of U.S. climate policy.” CEO Morris said AEP and its partners “have advanced CCS technology more than any other power generator with our successful two-year project to validate the technology. But at this time it doesn’t make economic sense to continue.” The dimming of CCS’s promise reflects a broader national retreat from the goal of reversing climate change. In private and, to some degree, in public, the company and its executives express frustration that they tried to do the right thing—only to end up burned.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 22, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,356 words)

Capital Gains

There is nothing superficial about brands in contemporary Delhi. This is a place where one’s social significance is assumed to be nil unless there are tangible signs to the contrary, so the need for such signs is authentic and fierce. And in these times of stupefying upheaval, when all old meanings are under assault, it is corporate brands that seem to carry the most authority. Brands hold within them the impressive infinity of the new global market. They hold out the promise of dignity and distinction in a harsh city that constantly tries to withhold these things.

Source: Granta
Published: Jul 28, 2009
Length: 43 minutes (10,961 words)

I Love You Christopher Hitchens, You Irritating Bastard

But Christopher Hitchens! Ach, Christopher Hitchens. How I have loved him, despite the ordeals he has put me through. He’ll go and be a fearful crank about atheism or “Islamofascism” for ages and I get all mad, and then he writes this freaking brilliant column about the Murdoch scandals and I’m crazy about him again. Old loves are like that.

Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 20, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,447 words)

Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia: Part Two

I threw myself into my training. It was nice to have a diversion from how I usually spent my days, which was basically me attempting to quantify, to the highest degree of accuracy, the true magnitude of my failures — their mass, volume, and specific gravity. It passed the time in the absence of hobbies. Sure, I worked on my nagging sense of incompleteness a lot, when I had a spare moment, but that was more of a calling than a hobby. The World Series of Poker was my intro to the world of mano-a-mano competition. I’d never been much of an athlete. Perhaps if there had been a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I’d have taken an interest. I attacked my training on three fronts:

Source: Grantland
Published: Jul 21, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,444 words)