October 2010
51 posts
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Once I was summering in Binghamton with the... →
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“The host didn’t say much, allowing Zucker to lay it all out, repeating the...”
– Bill Carter’s new book, excerpted in Vanity Fair, which called it The Unsocial Network. Of course.
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LOLeBron
Last night, as you may know, there was a basketball game, and one of my duties at the Journal was to edit a live logging of the Web of this basketball game. And last night, at least, that involved the immense, hilarious pleasure of receiving about a joke a minute from the Journal’s daily sports columnist, Jason Gay—who, if you don’t know, now you know.
This is a small sampling of...
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And rather than make the exquisitely obvious and... →
On Longreads.com →
markarms:
Most-tweeted writers (also: not too surprising)
1. Andrew Rice 2. Jill Lepore 3. Malcolm Gladwell 4. Matt Taibbi 5. Chris Jones 6. Gary Smith 7. Tom Junod 8. Clive Thompson 9. Eli Saslow 10. Joe Klein
Oh, also:
The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Esquire, Vanity Fair and others are now tagging their big pieces with #longreads, and The Awl and Capital New York have dropped the...
“Ansari retreated to the comedy trailer, where he sat down on a blue floral couch...”
– Kelefa Sanneh’s profile of Aziz Ansari in this week’s New Yorker—behind the paywall, yes, so please just work your way around it—is as fun as you’d think it would be, and I really enjoyed this one sentence. I also loved the last three paragraphs of the piece, which I won’t...
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Omar (perhaps-maybe-please-let-this-happen) comin'... →
What about feature film scripts?
To do something in a 120-page script is another framework and format, and it’s harder for us to unlearn what we know about story in the long form. I often come into these projects with a 180-page script that I have to cut down. It often takes me longer to do. But there are two that I’m actively working on. One is the story of a piano marathon in Scranton in...
I know, I know
I understand that nitpicking about one single sentence in a 5,000-word magazine takeout is like complaining that there’s an off-color grain on a black-sand beach—you know what I mean, I hope—especially when this New York profile probably was re-written, completely and hastily, in the last week alone. (There’s no beach-related equivalent, at least not on Monday morning.) But! The fact...
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This is the best thing I read today
Well, maybe not the best thing, but it should come as no surprise that I loved pretty much all of this interview with Nolan Smith (and Kyle, too, but it was mostly the Nolan parts that made me want to tell everyone I know about it).
A few choice Q&As:
Q. Tell me an idea you wish you had thought of. Singler: The iPod. It makes sense and has great applications. I use it all the time. Smith: ...
“And then, “The Suitcase,” that episode — I never could have imagined...”
– Vulture’s interviews this week with “Mad Men” stars have all been enjoyable, but this conversation with Elisabeth Moss is especially delightful. Read till the very last line, too.
“When I won, I watched TV, mostly reality shows and televised poker tournaments....”
– Jay Caspian Kang’s essay in The Morning News about poker—well, let’s just say it’s about poker—is the best thing you’ll read all week.
Signs You've Made It
timbritton:
In ascending order of made-it-ness:
—Getting a business card
—Making the first page of a Google search of your name
—Getting a company email address and receiving criticism from readers
—Being referred to, in the general sense, as a “sportswriter” by The New York Times
—This:
Happy Birthday to me.
Have I made it, too?
Even with Eli Manning as its new spokesman (at a... →
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(He was nicknamed Mr. Double-Double for his Scotch... →
I could read Alan Sepinwall and Matt Weiner's... →
“They must have seen what I saw: a celebration of Dr. Naismith’s great game, and...”
– Andy wrote this about this very day last year, when that last line, especially, just seemed like a lot of upbeat nonsense. It’s basketball season, guys!
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“GIFs (the name stands for graphics interchange format and can be pronounced with...”
– This is the most important part of Jonah Weiner’s ode to the animated GIF.
Editor's Note: Poynter has a longtime association... →
Tommy Craggs wins, as always.
Pitchfork Reviews Reviews: post is on the website... →
These are my two favorite parts:
and i texted back “I would prefer to print it and have you read it on paper, i don’t really want it floating around on the internet” and i thought about this newspaper story i read today about this girl at Duke University who wrote something embarrassing and sent it to a few people and then it was floating around on the internet and then a lot...
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Part 2 in a series. →
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Somehow, a series of blog posts called Baseball... →
From today’s rundown of Giants-Brave for kids, by the hysterical Jason Gay:
Hopefully Mom and Dad let you watch a bit of the Giants-Braves game, because it was pretty exciting, and it’s lot healthier for you than Monday Night Football. Not sure if Mom or Dad talked to you about the Vikings and Jets, but some grown-up stuff has happened lately with those teams.
See if you can talk Mom...
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So, one of those bigwigs on the American Cancer... →
This is a public service announcement
You know how we’re always supposed to think it’s a big deal when some news outlet, with the expressed mission to serve its audience, joins Tumblr to post links to its stories and to re-blog other news outlets posting links to their stories and to, you know, serve its audience? Well, if that’s the standard, then consider this a really, really big deal: Nolan Smith—referred to in...
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“He said he put his bookbag down and [the gun] went off—he said he didn’t know it...”
– Nothing, maybe just the best story of the year in today’s Chronicle.
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The baseball post-season games started yesterday... →
“To the person who wrote an editorial (“Davis should go,” Oct. 4) concerning...”
– This letter to The Daily Tar Heel just made my morning.
Hi! Welcome to my blog, which represents my views and my views alone, etc.
I’m a freelance sports reporter and online editor for The Wall Street Journal, which means I’ve written about athletes doing the Dougie and the snow dances of ski resorts; champion lushes in college sports and impromptu basketball pickup games on the college campus; how New Yorkers keep up with Jeremy Lin and...
“It was the students at Duke who convinced me to bring the The Sopranos into the...”
– Tom Ferraro, speaking at a Founder’s Day dinner last night, and basically proving why he just won the school’s most prestigious teaching award.
