Ed Caesar

Tennis

2011-01-03T09:47:00.003Z

I'm thinking of writing about tennis. For inspiration, I read David Foster Wallace's "Federer As Religious Experience" for the NY Times Magazine in 2006. If a British writer had described the Swiss tennis player in the same terms, he would have been heading straight for Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. Thank heavens, then, that DFW was American, and unencumbered by such self-consciousness.

The Recent Stuff

2010-12-29T17:18:00.003Z

I have not blogged for a long time. This is largely because the principal purpose of the blog - to direct readers to enriching, long-form magazine-style journalism - has been taken on with more vigour by sites like www.longform.org. My efforts feel slightly amateurish in comparison, but I will endeavour to be more purposeful in 2011.

In the meantime, it might be helpful to those who pick up my notes only by RSS feed, that I have written a few things lately. I attach a couple of links below. Happy New Year.

Bradley Manning: Wikileaker for The Sunday Times Magazine, and The Beauty of Risk for GQ.

Bye for now.

Readability

2010-10-11T09:55:00.002+01:00

If you're reading this, you probably like reading long magazine-style pieces online. And, if you like doing that, you should get Readability. I discovered it last week - it's an application to make reading long pieces on your computer screen more bearable - and it's a beauty.

Check it out here. Doesn't take more than a minute to download and it will, I guarantee, improve your life.

The Best Mag Pieces Ever Written List

2010-07-29T09:44:00.002+01:00

Someone just sent me this list, of the best magazine pieces ever written. They've missed a few, but this is pretty special. Below, for your reading pleasure, is the list:

And the link to the cooltools site that assembled them, is here.

The Best Magazine Articles Ever

The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Works are arranged in chronological order. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Reader notes are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review here.

This is a work in progress. It is a on-going list of suggestions collectively made by readers of this post. At this point the list has not been vetted or selected by me. It is woefully incomplete. You may notice that your favorite author or piece is missing. This is easy to fix. Simply recommend your favorite magazine articles to me via this form.

-- KK

* R. A. Radford, "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp." Economica, 1945.

* Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think." Atlantic Magazine, July 1945.

** John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." The New Yorker, October 22, 1960.About Ted Williams career framed by his last game. I read it every opening day without fail.

** Norman Mailer, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Esquire, November 1960.

* Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Harper's Magazine, November 1964.

* John McPhee, Profiles, "A Sense of Where You Are." The New Yorker, January 23, 1965. A portrait of Bill Bradley from his Princeton days, and a good analysis of the sport of basketball.

** Tom Wolfe, "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" Esquire, March 1965.

**** Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.

* Joan Didion, "Farewell to the Enchanted City." Saturday Evening Post, January 14, 1967. [Ed.'s note: No official version available online, but you'll find it with a little searching. Also reprinted in Slouching Towards Bethlehem as "Goodby to All that."]

** John Sack, "M." Esquire, October 1966.

** Hunter Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Scanlan's Monthly, June 1970.

* Tom Wolfe, "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." New York Magazine, June 8, 1970.

*** Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Esquire, October 1971. The first and best account of telephone hackers, more amazing than you might believe.

** Stewart Brand, "Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Dearth Among Computer Bums." Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972. Written nearly 40 years ago, this account of virtual realities has all the classic props: midnight hours, geek humor, nerd hubris, and other worldliness.

* Howard Kohn and David Weir, "Tania's World: The Inside Story." Rolling Stone, October 23, 1975. About Patty Hearst's kidnapping.

* John McPhee, "Coming into the Country~I." The New Yorker, June 20, 1977.One of the best articles about Alaska, and Alaskans.

* John McPhee, "I-Basin and Range." The New Yorker, October 20, 1980. Clear and interesting explanations about geology and plate tectonics for the layperson.

** Edward Jay Epstein, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" Atlantic Magazine, February 1982. Diamonds, De Beers, monopoly & marketing.

* Frank Deford, "The Boxer and the Blonde." Sports Illustrated, June 17, 1985.Story of a hard Pittsburgh boxer and the woman who captured his heart.

* Calvin Trillin, "Covering the Cops." The New Yorker, February 17, 1986.Terrific profile of Edna Buchanan

* Calvin Trillin, "Black or White." The New Yorker, April 14, 1986.

** Richard Ben Cramer, "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" Esquire, June 1986.

** John McPhee, "The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya." The New Yorker, February 23, 1987.

* Bill Barol, "I Stayed Up With Jerry." Newsweek, September 1987.

* Gary Smith, "Shadow of a Nation." Sports Illustrated, February 18, 1991.Feature on the Crow Indians -- the story that won him his first National Magazine Award.

** Richard Preston, "The Mountains of Pi." The New Yorker, March 2, 1992.Two brothers build a supercomputer from mailorder parts in the New York apartment. All it does is compute new digits of Pi.

* Russ Rymer, "I-A Silent Childhood." The New Yorker, April 13, 1992. "II-A Silent Childhood." The New Yorker, April 20, 1992. The two-part article was later reworked into the book, Genie: a Scientific Tragedy, the story of a feral child discovered in LA in 1970, and how she was used as a guinea pig to test linguistic theories.

* Susan Orlean, "The American Man at Age Ten." Esquire, December 1992. [Ed.'s note: Not available in Esquire's online archive, but you'll find it with a little searching. Also republished in Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeupand Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction.]

*** Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds." Outside Magazine, January 1993. Article that became Into the Wild.

* Karl Taro Greenfeld, "The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds (Otaku to You)." Wired, March/April 1993.

* Mark Danner, "The Truth of El Mozote." The New Yorker, Dec 6, 1993.

* Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace." The Village Voice, December 21, 1993.

* David Foster Wallace, "Ticket to the Fair." Harper's Magazine, July 1994.

* James R. Kincaid, "Tom the Misunderstood." The New York Times, Books, December 18, 1994.

** Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu." Wired, June 1995. The story of Ted's Nelson attempt to heal his personality with his invention of hypertext.

* Susan Orlean, "Orchid Fever." The New Yorker, January 23, 1995.

* Hunter S. Thompson, "Song of the Sausage Creature." Cycle World, March 1995. Unfortunately the magazine's web site doesn't include the article, but it's available on various other sites without permission; just Google the title. [Ed.'s note: Also republished in Thompson's Kingdom of Fear and Klancher's The Devil Can Ride.]

* George McKeena, "On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position." The Atlantic Monthly, September 1995. I don't agree with the political position, but I do recall it as one of the most rational, thoughtful articles I've read on the subject.

* Barry Lopez, "On the Wings of Commerce." Harper's, October 1995. An excellent view inside the hidden world of commercial air freight, which powers a big chunk of the global economy. Think Neal Stevenson's glass necklace (see below), but airborne.

** David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise." Harper's Magazine, January 1996.

* Edwin Dobb, "A Kiss is Still a Kiss (Even if the Sex is Postmodern and the Romance Problematic)." Harper's Magazine, February 1996.

** David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory." Esquire, July 1996.

* Jon Krakauer, "Into Thin Air." Outside Magazine, September 1996.

****** Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.

* John Gregory Dunne, "The Humbolt Murders." The New Yorker, January 13, 1997.

* Katie Hafner, "The Epic Saga of The Well." Wired, May 1997.

* Michael Paterniti, "Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain." Harper's Magazine, October 1997.

* Tom Junod, "Can you say- Hero?" Esquire, November 1998. A profile of Mr. Rogers.

* Robert Kurson, "My Favorite Teacher." Esquire, March 1, 2000.

** Bill Joy, "Why the future doesn't need us." Wired, April 2000. The best magazine article I've ever read-- by which I mean the piece that came out of nowhere and just knocked my socks off and changed the way I think about the human species.

* Malcolm Gladwell, "The Pitchman." The New Yorker, October 30, 2000. Part story teller and part sleuth, he gets beyond the simple sound bite to the core of what drives Popeil and his process. The fundamental takeaway is the inseparability of product design and product marketing in building products designed to be coveted by the customer they are target for.

* Rebecca Mead, “You’ve Got Blog.” The New Yorker, November 13, 2000.Profile of two bloggers before I knew what a blog was.

* Mark Singer, "The Book Eater." The New Yorker, February 5, 2001. Profile of Michael Zinman, turbine trader and collector.

* George Gurley, "Pleasures of the Fur." Vanity Fair, March 2001.

* David Foster Wallace, "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage." Harper's Magazine, April 2001. A tome to the politics of language.

* Edward W. Said "The Clash of Ignorance." The Nation, October 22, 2001. In response to Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations."

* William Langewiesche, "The Crash of EgyptAir 990." Atlantic Magazine, November 2001.

* James Fallows, "The Fifty-First State?" Atlantic Magazine, November 2002.

** Steven Kotler, "Vision Quest: A Half Centure of Artificial-sigh Research has Succeeded. And Now This Blind Man Can See." Wired, September 2002.

* Calvin Tomkins, “His Body, Himself.” The New Yorker, January 27, 2003.Profile of Mathew Barney.

* Katherine Boo, "The Marriage Cure: Is Wedlock Really a Way Out of Poverty?" The New Yorker, August 18, 2003.

*** Tom Junod, "The Falling Man." Esquire, September 2003.

* David Grann, "The Brand." The New Yorker, February 16, 2004. A look inside the most murderous prison gang in America.

* Stephen Dubner, "The Silver Thief." The New Yorker, May 17, 2004.

* Chris Jones, "Home." Esquire, July 1, 2004. A lovely meditation on loneliness and homesickness. Follows the astronauts on board the International Space Station when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, grounding the shuttle program and leaving them stranded in orbit.

**** David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.

* Gene Weingarten, "Fear Itself: Learning to Live in the Age of Terrorism." The Washington Post, August 22, 2004. About riding a bus in Jerusalem.

* Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail." Wired, October 2004. See the Wikipedia article on Long Tail.

* Andrew Corsello, "The Wronged Man." GQ, November 2004 (republished November 2007).

* Jesse Katz, "The Recruit." Los Angeles, March 2005.

* Gene Weingarten, "The Peekaboo Paradox." The Washington Post, Sunday Magazine, January 22, 2006. Story about the weirdest clown, the Great Zucchini, you'll never want to meet. Keep reading....

* David Foster Wallace, "Host." Atlantic Magazine, April 2005.

* Malcolm Gladwell, "Million-Dollar Murray." The New Yorker, February 13, 2006. In it, he follows a homeless alcoholic and talks with the hospital he is constantly in and out of and determines that the man costs them about a million dollars a year because he is uninsured. Besides the fabulous writing and the incredible way in which Gladwell argues his point about how paying for insurance for the man is infinitely smarter, it is a story of how the argument that the gov't shouldn't take care of people in this way is leading us into economic hell.

* C.J. Chivers, "The School." Esquire, June 2006.

****** David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.

* Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." Harper's Magazine, February 2007.

** Gene Weingarten, "Pearls Before Breakfast." The Washington Post, Magazine, April 8, 2007. Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?

* Chris Jones, "The Things That Carried Him." Esquire, May 2008. It’s extremely moving without being saccharine or twee. It’s a military story, but utterly without jingoism or indictment. And it’s wonderfully observed.

* Chris Anderson, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." Wired, June 23, 2008.

* David Grann, "The Chameleon: The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin." The New Yorker, August 11, 2008.

*** Gene Weingarten, "Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?" The Washington Post, Magazine, March 8, 2009. Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing.

* Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra." Vanity Fair, April 2009. It's an in depth analysis of the financial collapse of Iceland. Excellent. There are some great one liners (this isn't actually one of them, but it'll give you the idea): "This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously."

* Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, "Stealing Mona Lisa." Vanity Fair, May 2009.

** Skip Hollandsworth, "Still Life." Texas Monthly, May 2009. A Texas teenager is paralyzed from the neck down in a sports accident. His condition requires that he always lay down. Skip Hollandsworth's moving, detailed account captures a family who lived in a time capsule for over 30 years.

* Mike Sager, "Todd Marinovich: The Man Who Never Was." Esquire, May 2009.

* Thomas Lake, "The Debtor." Atlanta Magazine, November 2009.

* Justin Heckert, "Lost in the Waves." Men's Journal, November 9, 2009.

* Evan Ratliff, "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened." Wired, November 20, 2009.

* Errol Morris, "The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is." The New York Times, Opinion, June 20, 2010. There's been a lot of well-written, breezy books on the brain in the last--well, I don't know; since I've been paying attention?--but this series maps the concepts of perception and the physiology behind perceiving reality and the harsh truth of reality to interesting, practical anecdotes, some of which are recent, and some of which are historical. It's fascinating.

Ecclestone reads Caesar over Schulman

2010-06-09T16:08:00.004+01:00

Christopher Ecclestone reading from my Congo piece over Susan Schulman's epic photographs. Someone just put this up online, and I can't resist putting it on here...

Wikileaks and context

2010-06-07T10:17:00.002+01:00

Raffi Khatchadourian has a measured, insightful look at Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website that published the Collateral Murder video of an American Apache crew. Predominantly, it's a profile of Wikileaks' will-o-the-wisp founder, Julian Assange, and his messianic quest to bring sensitive documents into the public domain. You understand so much more about Wikileaks when you know that Assange once spent two months straight working in a room in Paris on a new story. He is an obsessive, and he lets his obsession blind him to some of the ethical difficulties around his work.

Collateral Murder was a game-changing scoop. As a journalist, you can only admire Assange's balls in bringing the video to the world. But one also has sympathy with the view of the American general, who said "there's no before, and no after." The video is entirely shorn of useful context. Journalism, at its best, should aim at the truth. Collateral Murder was highly truthful in one sense - the video is basically unmediated. But how can we know the more significant truth about the incidents shown in the video without access to a raft of other facts?

Anyway, a fine piece of reporting - and well worth a look, because Wikileaks, or websites like it, will play a significant role in the future of journalism.

Cartel

2010-05-27T16:21:00.003+01:00

Apologies to the handful of people who occasionally check this site for new stuff - I've been a bad blogger. That's partly due to a shed load of other work, and also because a number of the pieces that I've wanted to write about have been difficult to access except in print (notably a too-lengthy, but occasionally inspired piece by Janet Malcolm about a murder trial which ran a month ago in the NYer, and which is only available to subscribers online).

My work will soon suffer the same fate. The paywall is going up around the Sunday Times website in three weeks or so, after which time, people will have to pay a pound for a day's access to thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk, or two pounds for a week's.

Anyway, in the May 31 edition of the New Yorker, William Finnegan has a finely observed, and disturbing feature about organised crime, drugs, and the collapse of the state in Mexico. And, like much of the magazine's best stuff, you need to be a subscriber to read it online. On the strength of this piece, I would thoroughly recommend becoming one. A typically chilling piece of testimony about the drugs cartels comes from a Mexican ex-governor:

"There were these incredible scenes in small towns all over Michoacan," he said. "I would get a call afterward from the mayor. Ten pickup trucks full of armed men had arrived at the municipality. The local police could do nothing. They were outgunned. But the criminals were very respectful. They would tell the mayor, 'We want to work here. There will be no trouble, no crime, no drunkenness, nothing.' They they would take over the town, and enforce their rules. If a boy hit his mother, they would punish him and dump him in the plaza for people to see. If he did it again, they would kill him. It was a strategy to gain popular sympathy, and it worked." Mayors are typically paid for their hospitality. It is plata o plomo - silver or lead. You take the money or we shoot you and your family.

The New Yorker has a "web-only" talk with Finnegan about his reporting from Mexico here.

The Hunted

2010-04-06T17:47:00.002+01:00

This is a remarkable piece about a pair of American conservationists fighting back against ivory poachers, and going too far. Probably the best part of a book here - 20,000 words, or 30,000 words - but like all good magazine pieces, you keep going because the story drags you deeper. Above all, this is a serious, well-resourced, sensitive example of investigative reporting.

The Man Who Sold The War

2010-03-30T19:19:00.003+01:00

I've just come across this piece from Rolling Stone, about lies, PR, and warmongering in Bush's government. An exquisite skewering of the neoconservatives, and a quite shocking delineation of the road to shock and awe...

It won the National Magazine Award in 2006.

The Things That Carried Him

2010-03-02T15:46:00.003Z

On the basis of his excellent Roger Ebert piece (see last post) I took a look at Chris Jones's National Magazine Award-winning 2008 beast, The Things That Carried Him. It concerns a US soldier's last trip home, and has a brilliant narrative structure that I'll let you enjoy without ruining it for you here. The Things That Carried Him is, above anything, an unbelievable piece of reporting. Writing not bad either.

Months away

2010-02-21T16:03:00.003Z

I have been a bad blogger. That's partly laziness, and partly the depressing sensation of writing into the void. Anyway, I recently read something that made me want to blog again - a piece about the film critic Roger Ebert in American Esquire. Ebert had cancer, and had his jaw removed. He can no longer talk, except through a computer voice programme, and he writes a phenomenal number of words a day. The story, by Chris Jones, is wonderful.

Enjoy.

Titmuss, The Darkness, and the darkness of Sendak

2009-11-22T13:23:00.003Z

In today's Sunday Times Culture, I write about the casting of Abi Titmuss in Lady MacBeth. She made me toast, with raspberry jam, which was nice of her. I interviewed her in Lowestoft, which is, incidentally, both the most easterly point of Britain, and the home of ersatz 70s rock outfit, The Darkness.

Which leads me to another piece in Culture, Bryan Appleyard's compelling discussion of darkness and orphans in children's literature and cinema. I like "airless" as a description of Maurice Sendak's cartoons. I had a recurring nightmare when I was little about the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Every night for about a year, he was on the hunt for me. It didn't matter what precautions I put in place, he was always too wily. I normally woke up just as he was about to pounce, but the lingering sensation of airlessness, or suffocation, remained.

Congo, Gleeson, Cameron, Predator Drones, Bushfires

2009-11-06T08:57:00.002Z

I've been in the Congo, hence the silence. Did anyone notice? Possibly not. It's probable I'm talking in a void here, but I like that. My wife reads my infrequent posts, when she has the time.

Anyway, while I was gone, the Times almost failed to webtify this interview with Brendan Gleeson, which ran in the Sunday Times Magazine on 1 November. The New Yorker, meanwhile, provided me with considerable solace on my travels with the Congolese bandits, by producing their crackerjack Oct 26th edition. Three interesting pieces: one on the CIA's Predator Drone programme, one on the Australian bushfires (subscribers only), and one on the blowhard director James Cameron.

The crucial things I learnt from this trifecta are as follows:

1) Private ontractors fly predator drones remotely from offices in suburban America, thereby allowing them to obliterate Taliban leaders and any innocent civilians who happen to be standing nearby, and be home in time for dinner.

2) Seriously hot bushfires create their own weather. Very hot ones make their own lightning.

3) You should never, ever, call James Cameron "Jimmy". He also doesn't like to be touched by strangers.

Dexter Filkins' Long War

2009-10-20T09:42:00.003+01:00

Dexter Filkins is an outstanding reporter and feature writer for the New York Times, who has filed dispatches from such holiday destinations as Fallujah (Second Siege of), the tribal badlands of Waziristan, and almost anywhere in the Middle East where bombs go off. His book, The Forever War - a collection of novelistic reportage from his various assignments over the past decade - was among the best nonfiction I have ever read. He has the keenest eye for detail.

Anyway, he frequently writes long features for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and his latest, Stanley McChrystal's Long War, is an epic. It tells the story of the ascetic warrior-bibliophile at the heart of America's campaign to turn Afghanistan around: his challenges, strategy, and likely prospects of success.

Required reading.

New Yorker on a hot streak

2009-10-05T13:10:00.002+01:00

This piece about the gang-ruled favelas of Rio is breathtaking both for the cast-iron balls of its writer - Jon Lee Anderson - and its insights. It confirms what I've thought for a while: the New Yorker is on a hot streak.

It also got me wondering. Why didn't Chicago and Madrid simply print a copy of the article for every IOC member? Rio wouldn't have made it past the first vote.

Exploding computer and the death penalty

2009-09-14T11:07:00.002+01:00

I have been a bad blogger - although, I suspect only my wife will have noticed. My computer exploded. It is now being nursed back to health.

Anyway, for my handful of fanatics, here is a piece you ought to read. David Grann explores the case against Cameron Todd Willingham, a man executed for killing his children in a house fire in Texas.

The piece is long, even for the New Yorker. Added to that, you know the outcome. So why is it so compelling? Great reporting. Fact built on fact. Details rendered minutely. The story given permission to develop. This story is the best argument for long-form journalism I have come across in a while.

2009-09-02T11:14:00.002+01:00

The Paris Review has an interview with Gay Talese, the journalist who wrote Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - the quintessential New Journalism story. The interview is here, and well worth reading. One of the nuggets that emerges is that Talese writes his notes on shirt boards. The plan for Frank Sinatra Has A Cold (written on a shirt board) is below.

Mountbatten, The Falling Man etc...

2009-09-01T07:48:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, I reviewed Timothy Knatchbull's memoir in the Sunday Times. He was 14 years old when the IRA planted a bomb on his family's boat in Ireland, injuring himself, his mother and father, and killing his twin brother, his grandmother, his grandfather - Lord Mountbatten - and an Irish teenager called Paul Maxwell. He writes well.

Talking to Colum McCann on Saturday - who has written a novel called Let the Great World Spin, which I will be writing about on Sunday - he reminded me of a wonderful piece in American Esquire shortly after 9/11 called The Falling Man worth 20 minutes of your time.

Sedaris

2009-08-23T17:33:00.003+01:00

I took a copy of David Sedaris' When We Are Engulfed in Flames to Tehran in April. I remember reading it in cafes, waiting for my translator to turn up, giggling. Crybaby - a story about sitting next to a grieving hulk on a transatlantic flight - never fails to make me feel better. When a strange man from the secret service phoned my hotel room in the middle of the night, I took out Crybaby, read it again, and went back to sleep like - well - a baby.

There are many remarkable things about the way Sedaris writes. He is so poised, for a funny writer, a little like Alan Coren in the way that he squeezes so much joy from the mundane.

Anyway, he has a new piece, about Australia, in the New Yorker, which is not his best, and still very much better than almost anything else you will have read this weekend.

The Brazilian Joyce

2009-08-08T20:38:00.003+01:00

In tomorrow's Sunday Times I have a piece about Clarice Lispector, a writer considered to be the Brazilian James Joyce, and a stone-cold fox to boot.

The unlovely ES Magazine

2009-08-05T10:43:00.004+01:00

The unlovely ES magazine - home to lengthy features about the sons and daughters of people who used to be famous, and purveyor of the world's most baffling standfirsts - published an oustanding interview with the bonkers Heather Mills on Friday. My old pal Hermione Eyre did the work. It was so funny, coffee came out of my nose.

I particularly enjoyed this:

Heather fancies herself a plain talker, no airs, definitely no graces. There's a sign in her loo that says: 'If any items apart from toilet paper get dropped in here, the bog monster will reach out and grab your dick or punani!' 'You need to be real,' she says, enlarging on why she has never had trouble attracting men. 'Down-to-earth, not fussy, not pretentious. I'll carry boxes, I'll clean toilets. I peeled 260 potatoes the other Sunday. That's why my nails are gone.'

Kindle and the future of reading

2009-08-03T08:26:00.001+01:00

Loved this piece by Nicholas Baker on Kindle, and its greyness.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization.

You just don't get that kind of conversation in London anymore.

Sunday Times Magazine

2009-08-03T08:24:00.001+01:00

I have a piece in the Sunday Times Magazine about Torquay, and the British seaside holiday. See it here with lovely photographs by Leo Maguire.

Build The Wall

2009-07-27T10:58:00.003+01:00

This piece about the future of high-end journalism, by the great Simon, is interesting. Wrong, in parts - particularly that NYT and WaPo should charge for everything on their site. That would rule out any possibility that someone might follow a link to the NYT or WaPo out of interest, and then subscribe. Self-defeating. Anyway, I have no time for this now, I have more dead trees to publish.

Gladwell on overconfidence

2009-07-26T16:22:00.003+01:00

This week's New Yorker carries a Malcolm Gladwell piece about overconfidence - how it contributed to the collapse of Wall Street and everything else. So, the bankers were overconfident? No kidding. In another writer's hands, this might have been an investigation into ursine defecation patterns, but MG handles his topic with typical elegance. I liked this:

Of course, one reason that over-confidence is so difficult to eradicate from expert fields like finance is that, at least some of the time, it’s useful to be overconfident—or, more precisely, sometimes the only way to get out of the problems caused by overconfidence is to be even more overconfident.
From an individual perspective, it is hard to distinguish between the times when excessive optimism is good and the times when it isn’t. All that we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, “globally maladaptive.” When one opponent bluffs, he can score an easy victory. But when everyone bluffs, Wrangham writes, rivals end up “escalating conflicts that only one can win and suffering higher costs than they should if assessment were accurate.” The British didn’t just think the Turks would lose in Gallipoli; they thought that Belgium would prove to be an obstacle to Germany’s advance, and that the Russians would crush the Germans in the east. The French, for their part, planned to be at the Rhine within six weeks of the start of the war, while the Germans predicted that by that point they would be on the outskirts of Paris. Every side in the First World War was bluffing, with the resolve and skill that only the deluded are capable of, and the results, of course, were catastrophic.

Still, not classic Gladwell, and certainly not the wonderful underdog story from earlier in the year.

New Stuff

2009-07-26T16:19:00.002+01:00

Towards the back of today's Culture section you will see a short review of a bad book.

Cartoon Despot

2009-07-15T15:56:00.003+01:00

One man who takes a significant chunk of Newhouse's payroll is Michael Lewis (I read somewhere that he signed to Vanity Fair on a two-pieces-a-year contract worth six figures, which is decent work if you can get it). On the evidence of this month's Vanity Fair, he may be worth the money. His disturbing piece about the extraordinary risks taken on by AIG in the lead-up to the financial collapse introduces a new villain into our understanding of the apocalypse, a toy-throwing bully named Joe Cassano.

I particularly liked this section:

According to traders, Cassano was one of those people whose insecurities manifested themselves in a need for obedience and total control. “One day he came in and saw that someone had left the weights on the Smith machine, in the gym,” says a source in Connecticut. “He was literally walking around looking for people who looked buff, trying to find the guy who did it. He was screaming, ‘Who left the fucking weight on the fucking Smith machine? Who left the fucking weight on the fucking Smith machine?’” If that rings a bell it may be because you read The Caine Mutiny and recall Captain Queeg scouring the ship to find out who had stolen the strawberries. Even by the standards of Wall Street villains, whose character flaws wind up being exaggerated to fit the crime, Cassano was a cartoon despot.

Si Newhouse and the Conde Nasties

2009-07-15T13:46:00.003+01:00

I missed this lovely piece by Steve Fishman, about Si Newhouse, head honcho at Conde Nast, and the future for his magazines. The whole thing's worth reading, but two money quotes:

"Si loves being surrounded by divas and egomaniacs," says one former editor. When one editor called another a "fucking bitch", Newhouse didn't mind. "Yes, but she's our bitch," he said.

And another, about David Remnick:

As we walk to a nearby diner in New York's West Village, Remnick checks in with his wife, greeting her in Russian - he won a Pulitzer for his book on the fall of the Soviet empire. Remnick is charming but wary, a working journalist who prefers the role of interviewer to interviewed. He reviews for me the differences between off-the-record and background conversations, and then we order salads. ("That's pretty gay," says Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, and patently not a salad eater, when I mention my meeting with Remnick.) Remnick salts his conversation with references, and they are all over the place, proudly high and low - JD Salinger; the baseball legend Mel Stottlemyre, Perry White, Clark Kent's editor at the Daily Planet, and Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher in the 6th century BC. Much like in his magazine, there's showy, apparently effortless cultural fluency, though part of the message seems to be: Can you keep up?

New stuff

2009-07-13T08:45:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, in the Sunday Times, I interviewed the staggeringly-gifted Eleanor Catton and reviewed Buzz Aldrin's Magnificent Defecation.

Five Easy Pieces

2009-07-03T11:53:00.000+01:00

This blog is about the dying art of the magazine feature.

I don't mean "at home with" interviews in Hello!, as wonderful as they are. I mean in-depth feature reporting, as practised most notably by several American magazines, such as Harper's, Esquire, GQ, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and also by my employer, the Sunday Times Magazine. It's the kind of journalism accountants don't like.

Here are five features I love. Read them, then we'll talk.

First, the original new journalism masterpiece, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Gay Talese wrote it for American Esquire in 1966, after a proposed interview had gone tits-up.

Then, go up and down on Nick Paumgarten's epic New Yorker piece about elevators.

Admire Sebastian Junger's cojones in Blood Oil, a profile of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2007.

Watch Jennifer Senior bring Graydon Carter to a park bench in 2000, for New York Magazine.

And know hope, with Barack Obama and Larissa MacFarquhar, in the New Yorker.