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 […]
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Gerald Marzorati: Five Longreads for Opening Day
Gerald Marzorati, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine, is an Assistant Managing Editor of the Times “Early Innings,” by Roger Angell. (The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1992) (sub. required) America’s baseball belletrist here writes of how he came to love the game. “The Silent Season of a Hero,” by Gay Talese. (Esquire, […]
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The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with […]
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Howie hemorrhaged information about Winfield and Steinbrenner, the mafia, prison, baseball, women, clothes, the weather, his parents, his health. He jumped from one tangent to another, many of them fascinating and relevant, some bizarre, others difficult to fathom. Like the time he told me Winfield held a gun to him. Or the time he said […]
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GQ's Sean Fennessey: My Top Longreads of 2011
Sean Fennessey is the editor of GQ.com. (See more stories on his Longreads page.) I’ll try to follow a few guidelines for the sake of imagined objectivity, so, no friends; no GQ pieces; no pieces published before January 1, 2011; no stories pseudonymously submitted by my mom; no sandwiches. Here we go, with apologies, to, […]
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Julia Ruth Stevens, his sole surviving daughter, calls him Daddy. Odd as it is to hear a nonagenarian refer to a man 60 years gone as Daddy, it is also a tender reminder of the limits of hyperbole, how grandiose honorifics obscure the messy, telling details of an interior life. To others he is a […]
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Brian Wolly: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Brian Wolly is an associate web editor at Smithsonian Magazine. ••• 1. Tom Bissell’s Breakdown of L.A. Noire on Grantland 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 […]
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On the 1988 presidential campaign: 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 […]
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Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics: Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him […]
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How the former baseball star went from unlikely business success to financial ruin—and now sentenced to three years in prison: Even after his financial and legal troubles came to public light, Dykstra refused to give up the trappings of the gilded life. He continued to fly on private planes, and the charges that landed him […]
