Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!

The daring German filmmaker Werner Herzog once walked a thousand miles to propose to a woman. He once plotted to firebomb his leading man’s house and once ate his own shoe to square a bet. He once got shot in the stomach during a TV interview, then insisted on finishing. And despite it all, his latest adventure—a 3-D documentary about cave paintings—still sounds batshit crazy.

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 29, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,269 words)

Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference

Exiled from the NBA, vilified by the press, and ridiculed for a serious of questionable YouTube videos (eating Vaseline? c’mon!), Stephon Marbury is seeking redemption—and vast riches—in basketball-mad China. Now, if he can just win over his Communist bosses, he’ll be the biggest thing since Yao Ming

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 18, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,683 words)

Too Much Information

When the generation-defining writer David Foster Wallace took his own life in 2008, he left behind an unfinished novel, “The Pale King,” that will either serve to round out his transcendent body of writing or place a haunting question mark at the end of his career. John Jeremiah Sullivan holes up with the new book and considers the legacy.

Source: GQ
Published: Mar 31, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,190 words)

Going…Going…Gone

Since his final at-bat, on September 26, 2007, Barry Bonds has been living in near total seclusion. He’s made only a handful of public appearances and declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story. But from more than thirty conversations with his friends, former teammates, agents, and baseball insiders, a portrait of Bonds in hiding emerges. He’s at an inflection point between his baseball past and an uncertain future. On many days, he enjoys his involuntary retirement and the privacy it affords him. But part of Bonds still desperately wants to play. He looks around, sees a sport that’s lousy with known juicers, and can’t comprehend why no one will make him an offer, even for the league minimum of $400,000 a year.

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 1, 2009
Length: 18 minutes (4,552 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)

Schemes of My Father

He’d been doing very well in Baltimore, earning six figures as the vice president of a bank, but he tossed his job out the window when some Reaganomics-drunk investor (“an admirer,” my father called him) phoned him out of the blue to see if he wanted to direct a savings and loan out west. And for a while after we moved, he seemed to live up to the opulent vision he’d dazzled me with on my first visit. Unsatisfied with our first house in Rolling Hills, he leased us a big Mediterranean nearby for $5,000 a month, roughly $11,000 today. There was a swimming pool and a tennis court and a barn where my father put up a pen for his two hunting dogs. I didn’t know what he was doing to make so much money, but I wholeheartedly endorsed it.

Source: GQ
Published: Mar 8, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,483 words)

Robots Say the Damnedest Things

“I’ve got a brother,” she finally says. “He’s a disabled vet from Vietnam. We haven’t heard from him in a while, so I think he might be deceased. I’m a realist.” Bina48’s eyes whir downward. “He was doing great for the first ten years after Vietnam. His wife got pregnant, and she had a baby, and he was doing a little worse, and then she had a second baby and he went kooky. Just crazy.” “In what way did he go crazy?” I ask. I can feel my heart pound. Talking to Bina48 has just become extraordinary. This woman who won’t meet the media is talking with me, compellingly, through her robot doppelgänger, and it is a fluid insight into a remarkable, if painful, family life.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: GQ
Published: Mar 8, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,721 words)

Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat

“Here’s a peek into my insanity,” Charlie Sheen tells me one afternoon in February. “People say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and here’s the truth. It’s generally a quote from ‘Apocalypse Now’ or ‘Jaws.'” It’s Sheen’s fourteenth day of sobriety (this time around), and he’s calling from a baseball diamond on the west side of Los Angeles. Batting practice is like therapy for the former star athlete, people who know him say, and he’s spent the past few hours hitting balls with his friend Tony Todd, whom he met in Little League when they were 8 years old. This has been “the best day ever,” says Sheen, 45. His voice is relaxed and fluid. He sounds like he’s on the mend. But when I say as much, he’s quick to correct me. “We’re past ‘on the mend,’ ” he says. “We’re not dealing with normal DNA here, you know what I’m saying? All those other sissies and amateurs, they can take their fucking time.”

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 27, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,254 words)

The People V. Football

When Jeanne Marie Laskas started reporting on the devastating impact of repeated hits to football players’ brains in 2009, the NFL was still in denial. By now the evidence is irrefutable, and every bloody Sunday (and Monday and Thursday) it becomes a little harder not to cringe with each collision. But if you’re a guy like former star linebacker Fred McNeill who’s living with the effects of those hits, the question is: How can we keep watching the game—and how can we keep asking our kids to play it?

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 22, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,582 words)

The Day the Movies Died

“Fear has descended,” says James Schamus, the screenwriter-producer who also heads the profitable indie company Focus Features, “and nobody in Hollywood wants to be the person who green-lit a movie that not only crashes but about which you can’t protect yourself by saying, ‘But at least it was based on a comic book!’ “

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 17, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,177 words)