A man, brought to the U.S. as a toddler, is suddenly deported to Mexico. He’s now trying to get back:
The train had covered 10 miles through the high desert when it stopped at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint. An inspector and his canine walked by on the gravel path. Luna stifled his breath and prayed. Then he felt a sharp tug and a dog’s hot breath.
A German shepherd sank its teeth through Luna’s two shirts, locked onto his ribs and dragged him out from under the train. He clutched his side.
Cain, writer of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce,” on the pros and cons of living in Southern California in the 1930s:
There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference, and that is the one thing the human imagination cannot stand. It withers, or else, frantic to make itself felt, goes off into feverish and idiotic excursions that have neither reason, rhyme, nor point, and that even fail in their one, purpose, which is to attract notice.
Now, in spite of the foregoing, when you come to consider the life that is encountered here, you have to admit that there is a great deal to be said for it.
Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these “events” they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (“They hope he won’t make any big mistakes,” the NBC correspondent covering George Bush kept saying the evening of the September 25 debate at Wake Forest University, and, an hour and a half later, “He didn’t make any big mistakes”), events designed only to provide settings for those unpaid television spots which in this case were appearing, even as we spoke, on the local news in California’s three major media markets. “On the fishing trip, there was no way for television crews to get videotapes out,” the Los Angeles Times noted a few weeks later in a piece about how “poorly designed and executed” events had interfered with coverage of a Bush campaign “environmental” swing through the Pacific Northwest. “At the lumber mill, Bush’s advance team arranged camera angles so poorly that in one set-up only his legs could get on camera.” A Bush adviser had been quoted: “There is no reason for camera angles not being provided for. We’re going to sit down and talk about these things at length.”
“Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these ‘events’ they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (‘They hope he won’t make any big mistakes,’ the NBC correspondent covering George Bush kept saying the evening of the September 25 debate at Wake Forest University, and, an hour and a half later, ‘He didn’t make any big mistakes’), events designed only to provide settings for those unpaid television spots which in this case were appearing, even as we spoke, on the local news in California’s three major media markets. ‘On the fishing trip, there was no way for television crews to get videotapes out,’ the Los Angeles Times noted a few weeks later in a piece about how ‘poorly designed and executed’ events had interfered with coverage of a Bush campaign ‘environmental’ swing through the Pacific Northwest. ‘At the lumber mill, Bush’s advance team arranged camera angles so poorly that in one set-up only his legs could get on camera.’ A Bush adviser had been quoted: ‘There is no reason for camera angles not being provided for. We’re going to sit down and talk about these things at length.'”
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.
I’m a thousand percent certain that I’ll wake up in a cold sweat tonight, having suddenly remembered a slew of tremendous stories that I really should have given some year-end love. With that important caveat, I do hope you’ll check out the five tales below; each one is guaranteed to occupy a hallowed place in your brain.
I was sorely tempted to fulfill my New Yorker quota by shouting out David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold,” about the assassination of a powerful Guatemalan attorney. As with all Grann stories, I literally cut that piece apart with a pair of scissors, then pinned the various sections to a cork board in an effort to better understand his mastery of structure. But Anderson’s account of the Tamil Tigers’ violent twilight gets the nod, primarily because it features the year’s most chilling scene: an alleged female spy is dragged in front of the author by a louche guerrilla commander, then carted away to be shot in the head. That brief passage may well be the most vivid description of casual brutality ever committed to the page.
The official story was that surfing superstar Andy Irons died of dengue fever, allegedly contracted during a competition in Bali. But the reality, carefully concealed by friends and family alike, was that Irons was an addict, one whose self-destructive habits had nearly killed him at least once before. Melekian’s heartbreaking story illustrates how the deeply troubled Irons was failed by those around him, who felt that no real harm could possibly come to such a prodigiously talented athlete.
When I first read this story, about the young activists who helped launch Egypt’s revolution, I was bowled over by the characters’ bravery and gumption—it’s no small thing to risk torture for the sake of righteous principles. But in light of how Egypt’s political situation has changed in recent weeks, the piece reads quite differently now—you can see the haziness of the activists’ idealism, and perhaps even a dash of arrogance in their tactics. The fact that “The Instigators” contains such varied narrative strands at its core is a testament to its expert craftsmanship and deep reporting. And the use of video in the iPad version is an object lesson in how storytelling can be enriched by digital technology—one brief glimpse of the central character in the thick of the protests adds volumes to the yarn.
Confessional writing seems so easy in theory, especially since there is seldom any original reporting involved. But, man, is it ever hard to pull off with any appreciable degree of success. The vast majority of such stories get bogged down in artificial sentiment or cheesy philosophizing. But that’s not the case with Baker’s glorious tale of adolescent mendacity, in which she recounts a minor scam she ran on an older guy—a scam that ended in hilariously embarrassing fashion. As The Great Gatsby showed, there are limits to America’s tolerance for personal reinvention, a lesson that Baker had to learn the hard way. But there is also solace to be had in the company of like-minded souls, a task now easier than ever thanks to the power of the Internet—a realm that, as Baker so eloquently puts it, provides “a clean, well-lighted place for your real self.”
The Homicide Report, an online project of The Los Angeles Times, tabulates and describes every single killing in my native city. When it first began, I focused on the brief accounts of each death—there’s no better way to be overwhelmed by the senselessness of daily violence. But I’ve since become a devotee of the project’s comments, which are frequently provided by acquaintances of the deceased—as well as blog regulars who possess, shall we say, hard hearts. When those two sides clash, the resulting mess makes for some epic reading. This year’s best example is the thread that follows the entry on Michael Nida, killed by the Downey police in bizarre circumstances. Was he involved in a bank robbery? Targeted because of his race? The victim of out-of-control cops? The commenters battle it out, and in doing so provide a snapshot of the fundamental beliefs that divide us. The comments admittedly contain large heapings of idiocy, insensitivity, and racism. But keep reading—the unabashed rawness of the views on display is what makes the “story” so compelling.
The women who’d ogled him worked for Butler’s detective agency. Sharon, who told Dutcher she was a divorcee employed by an investment firm, actually was a former Las Vegas showgirl.
A man who once worked for Butler had blown the whistle. He told authorities Butler arranged for men to be arrested for drunk driving at the behest of their ex-wives and their divorce lawyers — and that entrapment was only one of many alleged misdeeds.
Maria had nothing of her own besides socks and a blouse, potentially giving a pimp an opening to woo her with niceties. So Quintero pawed through V-necks, corduroys and bags of underwear at an on-site donation center. She packed a bag: hair spray, razors, lavender shampoo-conditioner, “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul,” and a flowered journal because Maria liked to write poems. Quintero tried to shake off her misgivings: With a bag of stuff, was it easier for Maria to run? A week later, in Voy’s courtroom, the judge was grim. The night after Maria’s hearing, she ran off. Quintero never found out if she took the bag.
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