I didn’t follow the great Charlie Sheen meltdown of spring 2011. But I read every word of Roseanne Barr’s Sheen-inspired treatise on sitcom fame, in which she opens a window onto the warped and warping world of celebrity. It was a brilliant assignment, sharply executed and highly entertaining.
This is about the most exhilarating piece of business writing I have ever read, mostly thanks to Lewis’s summary of the trope of shit in German culture and its relation to the European financial crisis, which I found both hilarious and totally plausible. It was like stumbling into a graduate seminar on formalist readings of macroeconomics textbooks. I mean that in a really good way.
There’s nothing flashy or attention-seeking about Ken Auletta’s profile of Jill Abramson; it makes my top five because I found it fascinating to watch a picture of her emerge from the figure she cuts in the workplace. It emerges slowly—you have to wade through a lot of meetings—but Auletta was smart to go for inspirational at the outset: as a woman in publishing, I felt invested in Abramson’s rise and in the way she’s cultivated authority, intelligence and ambition.
We all read a ton about Steve Jobs in the days after his death. Then Mona Simpson’s eulogy came along, reinvented the Jobs memoriam and blew the competition away. It was elegant, personal and lovingly attentive to detail—a tribute perfectly fitted to the man it honored. He was very lucky to have a writer for a sister.
I grew up in Cincinnati, back when WKRP was on the air and Jerry Springer was the mayor. It’s a city of in-betweens, and James Pogue’s rambling, evocative essay in n+1 captures its contradictions perfectly. I love the idea of a piece whose main goal is to take you somewhere else—in geography, in history and in memory.
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.
Comedy is also an industry of paying dues: Many long-time performers regard their first ten years as a kind of clueless wandering, and veteran comics tend to treat newbies like replacement troops: They are young, dumb, and could be gone soon, so it’s best to wait till they survive a while before learning their names. This is all to say that the term “comic” is subjective and nebulous, and even geographically variable: larger cities, with their heightened competition for stage time, are famous for relegating working comics from smaller markets like the Midwest or Florida back to open-mic status, causing many visitors to experience a kind of outraged existential crisis. When two comics meet for the first time, they act like dogs sniffing each other’s butts, asking loaded questions like, “You been doing it long?” or “You been busy?”
Comedy is also an industry of paying dues: Many long-time performers regard their first ten years as a kind of clueless wandering, and veteran comics tend to treat newbies like replacement troops: They are young, dumb, and could be gone soon, so it’s best to wait till they survive a while before learning their names. This is all to say that the term “comic” is subjective and nebulous, and even geographically variable: larger cities, with their heightened competition for stage time, are famous for relegating working comics from smaller markets like the Midwest or Florida back to open-mic status, causing many visitors to experience a kind of outraged existential crisis. When two comics meet for the first time, they act like dogs sniffing each other’s butts, asking loaded questions like, “You been doing it long?” or “You been busy?”
The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.
The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.
Anyway, the record will probably be Mike Powell’s for many years to come because, like I say, we just don’t jump like we used to. Nobody in years has jumped close enough that the NFL chain gang would even bother to come out and measure. The longest jump of 2010 wasn’t even 28 feet. And the longest jump this year, by Australia’s Mitchell Watt, is just 28 feet 3/8 inches. Carl Lewis had 24 non-wind aided jumps in competition longer than that in his career. TWENTY-FOUR. No, nobody — at least nobody on the visible horizon — figures to jump as far as Mike Powell. But what if I tell you that the longest jump in the history of the world was NOT Mike Powell’s? What if tell you about a mystery jump by Carl Lewis when he was at the height of his powers?
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:
An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China’s current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai, the financial capital elbowing its way into competition with New York and London, or Shenzhen, the megalopolis built on marshland. But Shanghai was punished by the Communist party for the city’s history of cosmopolitanism, and is still shaking off the effects of that cultural paralysis. Shenzhen, for its part, is a transient place that sanctifies commerce, not ideas. Beijing, by contrast, stands alone in China as simultaneously the center of authority and a hotbed of creative thinking. It is home to thousands of apparatchiks in the machinery of the Communist party, as well as to many of the nation’s most provocative artists, writers, activists, and filmmakers.
Befriend The Other Woman: Always. Seriously. Even if she sucks (expansion on “if she sucks” follows below). Otherwise you will be “jokingly” put into competition with her constantly, and you will be encouraged and generally provoked by some dudes to do this for their entertainment to take focus off the fact that they are in homosocial competition with each other. Befriend her and press your boobs against the glass ceiling together (copyright Kristen Schaal). She is not the enemy. She is never your enemy. The enemy is always any guys who are creating situations that limit the number of females allowed. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down.
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