Jeremy Lin’s sudden stardom has also put the spotlight on how Asian Americans are viewed in the U.S.:
Not since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has there been so much national discussion about the appropriateness of discussing race. The 2008 election set the groundwork for an aggressive sort of colorblindness — as long as you voted for Barack and/or can celebrate, say, Jackie Robinson, you now have the right to flag down anything that might shake us from our post-racial dream. Statements like “I see everybody equally, therefore everyone should just talk about him as a basketball player” and accusations of “playing the race card” have become even more ubiquitous. And although the former signals a nice sentiment, it also provides convenient cover for those of us who benefit most from the status quo, regardless of race. Yes, Jeremy Lin became Linsanity because he has been playing at a level that has recalibrated expectations of any obscure player. And yes, there’s nothing more tiresome than a long-winded meditation on a basketball player, especially if he’s clearly been hijacked to promote some other agenda. But to strip Jeremy Lin of his status as the Great Yellow Hope not only seems dishonest and lazy, it also deprives the community he represents — willfully or not — of the unabashed joy of seeing one of its own succeed in the most improbable arena.
A trip to John Madden’s man cave, and whether sports video games can ever be described as “art”:
Clearly, the way sports games are played, and the way Madden in particular is played, is ripe for some massive paradigm shift. Why doesn’t the quarterback position feel as visceral and pinpointy as firing a rifle in a first-person shooter? Could you make the experience of being an offensive lineman as interesting as anything on the ball? Why, for that matter, is running the ball such an isometric experience? When I put these and other questions to the Madden team in Florida, many of them smiled.
What helmets can’t fix when it comes to concussions and high school football:
Because of its national reputation — and extremely well-funded athletic department — Mater Dei has been on the leading edge of concussion prevention and treatment for high school football players. The coaches are vigilant; the equipment is top of the line; the latest medical recommendations are exactingly followed.
And yet, even when a football program does everything right, it’s still not clear if it’s enough. This uncertainty haunts the Mater Dei coaching staff, who struggle on a daily basis to effectively manage the risk of concussions among their players. The new research on concussions has allowed them to prevent many of the worst injuries, but it has also made them increasingly aware of the ubiquity of injury. They know better than anyone that if an elite program like Mater Dei can’t solve the problem of head trauma, it seems unlikely the problem can be solved. The sport may simply be too dangerous for teenagers.
I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled me to re-read them, over and over, but I do know that you’ll find yourself doing the same. In any case, you don’t need me to explain how to enjoy these stories, or why you should adore them. They speak for themselves. So, in the spirit of the season: gifts that keep on giving!
When ESPN and Bill Simmons’ Grantland debuted in early June, the knives were out and its initial reaction was mixed at best. Like many, I approached the new project with simultaneous skepticism and optimism, but it wasn’t Simmons or Chuck Klosterman that sold me on the site’s potential. Bissell’s searingly accurate review and analysis of Rockstar’s supposedly groundbreaking video game L.A. Noire was the revelatory pice of writing that said, “Grantland will be around for a long time.” With his wit and contemplative style of placing L.A. Noire in the context of where the video game industry is headed, Bissell brought two much-vaunted products (Grantland and the game) down to Earth.
Perhaps no story from the New Yorker this year was more under-recognized than Stillman’s devastating expose on the third-country nationals working on U.S. military bases. The never-ending strata of deception piled upon political indifference was staggering. Her reportingwas a mash-up between the existential dread of The Wire with Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight and it deserves to be recognized for its brilliance.
3. The Film Nerd 2.0 Series on Star Wars: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6
The six posts that encompass Drew McWeeny’s adventure in introducing his two sons to the six Star Wars films are a joyous series that reawakened the film nerd in me as well. McWeeny does the impossible: he makes me appreciate the Phantom Menace. For any parent (or eventual parent) who dreams of showing their own kids the two trilogies, McWeeny offers an endearing road map for how to do so. For those who want to just show the original trilogy, he’ll show you why you’re wrong.
In 2005, with the introduction of the Washington Nationals, I had to choose between my hometown’s new team and the team I had grown up rooting for, the Baltimore Orioles. I picked the Nats and have never looked back. Here are Bernhardt’s catalogues of Angelos’ transition from working class hero to the most despised owner in professional baseball. Taken in aggregate, the list of misdeeds gets to the heart of loving a team that will always disappoint.
In his Atlantic cover story, Fallows relates what everyone’s biggest nightmare, losing control of their gmail, happened to his wife. I sent the piece around to friends and family, insisting that they implement the steps Fallows recommended. Service journalism at its best.
Our new history blog is a great source for so many #longreads, but Gilbert King’s retelling of Minter Dial’s lost ring is a stirring tribute to the “Greatest Generation.”
Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch. He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square.
I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a critical mass people have finally accepted the deep role social media plays in the way we live our lives, a progress I’ve measured largely through 1. former New York Times head honcho Bill Keller’s decreasingly humiliating comments about Twitter and 2. this brilliantly droll smoker by Paul Ford, who writes about social media’s arrival the way some people write about coming to terms with their mortality. I don’t think the tone in Ford’s essay would have been possible even last year, which is what makes it so definitive of the moment, and it has that David Foster Wallace quality of articulating deep feelings about a phenomenon I didn’t quite realize I’d felt and certainly never could have expressed so wonderfully.
Levé was a photographer, but right before he committed suicide in 2007, he wrote a book called, um, “Suicide.” His prose here, distracted and fissiparous, reads like a kind of literary pointillism: Each individual fleck doesn’t make much sense on its own, but by the end the mass agglomerates into something dark and quite beautiful. It’s like tossing through a box of unsorted and unmarked photographs to deduce the life of the man who shot them — and damn, what a life it must’ve been.
I’m still not sure what to make of Grantland, but I liked it a lot more after I read this oral history of The National, which was an national sports daily with huge ambitions whose collapse read like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novella set in contemporary New York. In a lot of ways, The National is Grantland’s forebear, and so if Grantland doesn’t work out, the least we could hope for would be an autopsy as funny as this one.
Over the summer, I reported on a Libyan-American trapped in Libya during the civil war. He’d grown up there, and after he escaped, we became friends. On the day Qaddafi died, I texted him to see if he’d heard — he lived in a van because he didn’t have any money, and nor did he have a TV — and I didn’t hear back. While walking through a park later, he told me that when he got my text about Qaddafi, he sat down and didn’t move for several hours. It’s tough to explain how deeply Qaddafi had engrained himself into Libyan psyches, creating a distortion field where it was impossible to imagine existence without him. While walking, I told him about the New Yorker and how it writes these comprehensive takes on a subject that often become the final word, and I told him we could expect something from the New Yorker on Qaddafi. And shortly later, there it came: A brilliant postmortem by Jon Lee Anderson to explain the man-cum-phenomenon. My friend had trouble finishing it because it hit so close to home, and that’s what great journalism should do.
This monster on the deep unhappiness behind the contemporary gaming experience came at me from out of nowhere a few months ago, and it hasn’t left me since. I still have questions about it, actually: How much is real? How much is fiction? In the end, the particulars didn’t matter so much as the dark way Rogers captures the Pavlovian sickness behind games created by companies like Zynga, whose games thrive by creating an itch in users rather than aiming for real joy.
One of these days, after The Big One hits, we’re going to wish we’d stuck more narrative writers on the tech beat to explain the malevolent 1s and 0s secretly undermining our lives online and, increasingly, our relationship with the world at large. There will always be the Nicholas Schmidles to write the Osama bin Laden takedown (which might’ve been on this list if not for transparency qualms), but the day is soon coming where our most important national security enforcers write code instead of rappelling out of helicopters — if they aren’t already. Zetter’s piece is a brilliant argument that that day has already come. (Bonus points for Wired’s visual presentation of the story.)
Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling.
Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical combat is not rare. It’s in that spirit that you’ll find some cross pollination in the picks below. You’ll also see some good stuff that hasn’t shown up on the Top 5 lists so far. That’s on purpose. Hope you enjoy, and please know you’re welcome to come join us for last call over at gangrey.com. Drinks are on Wright.
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Wright Thompson
Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, and he lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Johnson is a 2010 Pulitzer winner who covers health and science for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and once played guitar for a Rockford, Ill., grunge band called The Bloody Stumps.
Kruse, a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and contributing writer to ESPN’s Grantland, won this year’s ASNE award for distinguished non-deadline writing.
It was another strong year for long-form content and journalism. There was no shortage of attention-grabbing longreads in traditional media, online-only outlets, alt-weeklies and literary journals—both in the U.S. and abroad, and written as profiles, personal essays, historical accounts and op-eds. And many take residence in Instapaper and Read It Later apps, including mine. My top five for the year:
A stirring and richly reported narrative of a Florida woman who vanished from her neighborhood and society.
“The neighbors said that they seldom saw her but that for more than a year they hadn’t seen her at all. One called her ‘a little strange.’ Another said she ‘just disappeared.’ The How could a woman die a block from the beach, surrounded by her neighbors, and not be found for almost 16 months? How could a woman go missing inside her own home?”
The overwhelming majority of terrorism in the United States has always been homegrown, even while fear is diverted elsewhere in the wake of 9/11. Pierce provides an engrossing narrative of a bomb that was planted along a parade route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Spokane, Wash., this year. It didn’t go off. (Update: The man who planted the bomb was recently sentenced to the maximum 32 years in prison.)
“There’s a spot by the Spokane River where they would have built the memorial, and what would it have looked like, the memorial to the victims of the bag on the bench? Would it be lovely and muted, the way the grounds of what used to be the Murrah Building are today in Oklahoma City, with their bronze chairs and the water gently lapping at the sides of the reflecting pool? Maybe they’d buy one of the pawnshops downtown for the museum. Maybe there would be an exhibit of children’s shoes there, like the display case in the Oklahoma City museum that’s full of watches frozen at 9:02, the time at which the bomb they didn’t find went off.”
The definitive account of the top news event of the year.
“Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away…
“A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, ‘For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.’ After a pause, he added, ’Geronimo E.K.I.A.’—‘enemy killed in action.’
“Hearing this at the White House, Obama pursed his lips, and said solemnly, to no one in particular, ‘We got him.’ ”
Acclaimed writer Saunders discusses the writing process, storytelling technique (“Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey”) and whether a man can ever really experience true happiness without an icicle impaling him through the head. Former student Patrick Dacey effectively guides the multi-part Q&A.
“I vaguely remember seeing something, when I was very young (maybe 3 or 4), about Hemingway’s death on TV. My memory is: a photo of him in that safari jacket, and the announcer sort of intoning all the cool things he’d done (‘Africa! Cuba! Friends with movie stars!’). So I got this idea of a writer as someone who went out and did all these adventurous things, jotted down a few notes afterward, then got all this acclaim, world-wide attention etc., etc.—with the emphasis on the ‘adventuring’ and not so much on the ‘jotting down.’ ”
Waldmeir, the adoptive mother of two abandoned children, discovered an abandoned baby behind a Dunkin’ Donuts in Shanghai one winter night. In this personal essay she tracks the baby from hospital to police station to orphanage, with side trips into reflection on her daughters’ stories.
“This child’s mother had chosen the spot carefully: only steps from one of the best hotels in Shanghai, beside a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise patronised mostly by foreigners. I had been meeting my friend John there for a quick doughnut fix, and it was he who heard the baby’s cries as he chained his bicycle to the alleyway gate. ‘There’s a baby outside!’ John exclaimed as he slid into the seat beside me, still blustery from the cold. ‘What do you mean, there’s a baby outside?’ I asked in alarm, bolting out of the door to see what he was talking about.”
It’s difficult to stop at only five. A few bonus reads:
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