Search Results for: tom junod

One-Minute Readings: Ben Montgomery Remembers Journalist Michael Brick

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Above is a brief tribute to journalist Michael Brick, who died in February at the age of 41. The video features Tampa Bay Times writer Ben Montgomery reading from Brick’s 2006 New York Times story, “Dusk of the Drummer” — and it’s one of many pieces featured in a new collection, Everyone Leaves Behind a Name: True Stories, published by The Sager Group. Proceeds from the book will go to Brick’s wife and children.

In a brief note, Montgomery tells us:

When journalist Michael Brick died from colorectal cancer in February at the age of 41, he left behind a wife, three kids and a body of work that rivals the best of the best. His friends collected his stories in a remarkable anthology, along with original essays from greats like Tom Junod, Gary Smith, Charles Pierce, Amy Wallace, Michael Paterniti, Dan Barry, Chris Jones, Kurt Eichenwald and Wright Thompson. Sales benefit Brick’s family, and the book solidifies his place in American letters.

Thank you, Ben, for sharing, and you can purchase the book here.
March 7, 2016
Categories: Blog Post, Featured, Uncategorized
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A Moment of Zen: Seven Stories Looking Back at Jon Stewart’s Fake-News Legacy

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Photo: Cliff

Tonight, Jon Stewart ends his 16-year run as host of “The Daily Show.” Here are seven stories looking back at how Stewart became the most influential fake-news anchor in the history of television:

1. Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, Aug. 15, 2008)

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Read more…

August 6, 2015
Categories: Nonfiction, Reading List
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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July 18, 2014
Categories: Top 5
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The Story About Pit Bulls That Rarely Gets Written

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This is a story about an American dog: my dog, Dexter. And because Dexter is a pit bull, this is also a story about the American dog, because pit bulls have changed the way Americans think about dogs in general. Reviled, pit bulls have become representative. There is no other dog that figures as often in the national narrative—no other dog as vilified on the evening news, no other dog as defended on television programs, no other dog as mythologized by both its enemies and its advocates, no other dog as discriminated against, no other dog as wantonly bred, no other dog as frequently abused, no other dog as promiscuously abandoned, no other dog as likely to end up in an animal shelter, no other dog as likely to be rescued, no other dog as likely to be killed. In a way, the pit bull has become the only American dog, because it is the only American dog that has become an American metaphor—and the only American dog that people bother to name. When a cocker spaniel bites, it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.

-Tom Junod, in Esquire.

Read the story

More on Junod in the Longreads Archive

Photo: matthewalmonroth, Flickr

July 16, 2014
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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Childhood Heroes: A Reading List

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Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student from the Bronx named Donna Grace Moleta won the chance to meet Bill Nye “the Science Guy.”

“Meeting my childhood hero was one of the greatest experience of my life,” she told the Bronx Times. “It’s something I’ll never forget. He’s such a strong believer in what science and education can do.”

Inspired by Ms. Moleta’s experience, here’s a reading list of some of our childhood heroes:

1. Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. (Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, 2014)

Getting to work with a celebrated comic artist:

…I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply.

And what do you know, he wrote back.

Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

 

Read more…

June 25, 2014
Categories: Nonfiction, Reading List
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David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

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Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

Read more…

February 15, 2014
Categories: Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
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9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List

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Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. Read more…

January 18, 2014
Categories: Nonfiction, Reading List
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How Scientists Are Using Fruit Flies to Find Alternative Cancer Treatments

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“His name was Ross Cagan. He did not work for Schadt; he worked as a professor at Sinai. But they met every week, and after Schadt called on October 1 to tell Cagan about Stephanie Lee, he listened to Cagan’s idea for her. A month earlier, Cagan had started doing something that he said ‘had never been done before.’ He started creating ‘personalized flies’ for cancer patients. He took the mutations that scientists like Schadt had revealed and loaded them into flies, essentially giving the flies the same cancer that the patient had. Then he treated them. ‘Why a fly? You can do this in a fly. You can capture the complexities of the tumor.’

“A day after Cagan spoke with Schadt, Stephanie became the fifth person in the world to have a fly built in her image—or, rather, in the image of her cancer. In an ideal world, Cagan would have created as complex a creature as possible, burdening the fly with at least ten mutations. He gave Stephanie’s fly three, because ‘Stephanie is on the shorter course. We’re making the fly as complex as possible given her time.’ By October 11, however, Cagan already had ‘one possible drug suggestion for her’—or one possible combination of drugs, since he always tests at least two at a time. ‘In this center, the FDA will not allow us to put a novel drug in patient. To get a novel drug into a patient, we have to do a novel combination of [known] drugs. We have to use novel drug combinations that people have never seen before'”

– In Esquire, Mark Warren and Tom Junod tell the story of an Iraq War widow named Stephanie Lee who was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, and how scientists at Mount Sinai are using her genetic data to find personalized treatments for her. Read more stories about fighting cancer.

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Photo: John Tann

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November 22, 2013
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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‘He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip’

Longreads Pick

Tom Junod’s profile of George Clooney, in which the actor takes on Russell Crowe, Tesla and Leonardo DiCaprio:

"And the thing about playing Leo is you have all these guys talking shit. We get there, and there’s this guy, Danny A I think his name is. Danny A is this club kid from New York. And he comes up to me and says, ‘We played once at Chelsea Piers. I kicked your ass.’ I said, ‘I’ve only played at Chelsea Piers once in my life and ran the table. So if we played, you didn’t kick anybody’s ass.’ And so then we’re watching them warm up, and they’re doing this weave around the court, and one of the guys I play with says, ‘You know we’re going to kill these guys, right?’ Because they can’t play at all. We’re all like fifty years old, and we beat them three straight: 11–0, 11–0, 11–0. And the discrepancy between their game and how they talked about their game made me think of how important it is to have someone in your life to tell you what’s what. I’m not sure if Leo has someone like that.”

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 12, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,061 words)

The Wisdom of Mr. Rogers

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The below YouTube video recently resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award:

In just three minutes, he reduced Linda Dano to tears and reminded us how conscientious we can strive to be when it comes to recognizing the important people in our lives and telling them how much they mean to us.

The clip brought me back to one of my all-time favorite stories: Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile or Mr. Rogers:

Can You Say… Hero?

“Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, ‘The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.’”

Read Junod’s 2003 eulogy for Mr. Rogers

…and it then sent me on a Mr. Rogers YouTube-watching binge. Here he is defending PBS before Congress in 1969:

Mr. Rogers Defending PBS before the U.S. Senate (1969, 7 minutes)

July 2, 2013
Categories: Nonfiction, Reading List
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