Great sports stories - by Jones, Lake & Watson

There's three pieces of sports writing I've seen over the past few weeks that struck me as particularly solid and are available now to post online.

From the May 13 issue of ESPN The Magazine was the back page column "Boston Strong" by Chris Jones. Really compelling and short piece on Boston and what the 2014 Marathon could be like.

In the Sports Illustrated May 13 edition was a feature by Thomas Lake titled "Drinking and Driving and Dying". It's excellent writing about the long history of high profile DUI accidents caused by professional athletes with particular focus on the death last December of Dallas Cowboys player Jerry Brown with his teammate Josh Brent behind the wheel.

Finally, another piece that struck me was the heartwarming story "Athletic departments work together to save college football reporter’s life" by Graham Watson for Yahoo Sports. Recounted in the piece is how Wyoming assistant athletic director Tim Harkins during a phone interview with freelance journalist Natalie Meisler recognized that she might be having a stroke and tracked down her location so emergency personnel could respond.

Fast Company Writing

The past few issues of Fast Company Magazine had a number of features and short pieces that stood out far a variety of reasons.

Going furthest back, the Feb issue had both an interesting interview piece and really well-written feature story. The interview was by Charlie Rose with Biz Stone and Ev Williams who co-founded Twitter and begins with Stone and Williams making the extremely important point that Twitter not simply about 140-character expression of thought, but also the linking to content of all subjects and length around the web. Also noted in the interview was the blogging site Medium and the feature story from this issue was by Max Chafkin with "The Zen Master of Silicon Valley Chatter" on Kevin Rose. It was a detailed and interesting look at the Digg founder and internet investor who first backed early stage companies on his own and now as part of Google Ventures.

The March issue had "Working Beyond the Cube" by Greg Lindsay on co-working and Fast Company's annual "50 Most Innovative Companies" list.

The April issue had three different feature stories that stood out. Cover story was a lengthy piece by Nicole LaPorte title "The Rebels Saving Hollywood" and then Max Chafkin wrote "Why Kickstarter Won't Sell" on the crowdfunding website (with both features referencing Angel Investor Chris Sacca). Finally, Danielle Sacks contributed the feature "'Fifty Percent Of 'The Tipping Point' Is Wrong' Jonah Berger Shows You Which Half" on the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

Finally, an interesting mention from the May issue was the short pieces "What's Hot in Alaska" on startup companies in the state.

Time Magazine writing - on U.S. manufacturing / Uniqlo / 3 of the Time 100 Most Influential People

There's been a few interesting things out of Time Magazine recently with three of them being short pieces on people in the Time 100 Most Influential People 2013 edition and two feature stories from other issues (and all of them requiring a Time account to be able to read online).

The people whose short profiles stood out were that on Jared Cohen (who founded Google Ideas and co-wrote The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt), Perry Chen (CEO of the crowdfunding website Kickstarter) and the team of Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (co-founders of the online learning site Coursera).

The feature stories of greatest note to me were "Made in the USA" by Rana Foroohar and Bill Saporito and "What They'll Wear to the Revolution" by Michael Schuman. The latter piece was on Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo (which I've previously linked to a Fast Company article on as they make a major push into the U.S. market) and the feature story on increased US manufacturing. In terms of topic, it was very reminiscent of another piece I linked to previously, this one a September 2012 Outside Magazine piece by Tom Vanderbilt on the same trend.

Excellent feature writing - by Pressler, Paterniti & Mooallem

There's been three feature articles I've seen lately that struck me as outstanding, with two from GQ Magazine and one the New York Times Magazine.

From the April issue of GQ was "The King of Oontz Oontz Oontz" by Jessica Pressler and it's a well done profile on Electronic Dance Music DJ Tim Bergling, better know as Avicii. While Avicii not a well known name outside dance music circles, he's gotten probably the most acclaim for his song Levels and Pressler notes him commanding $100,000+ for some of his gigs. Within the profile there's some content not particularly flattering to Avicii (and which he took offense to as detailed in an LA Time story) but it seemed a probably pretty accurate look at a 23-year-old kid whose career is within the party scene.

The May edition of GQ had another excellent story with "The Luckiest Village in the World" by Michael Paterniti. It's written about the Spanish village of Sodeto and experiences of the townspeople with many of them splitting a lottery win one year ago. I've twice posted on GQ writing from Paterniti and both find him to be a really good writer and looking forward to his book The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese coming out July 30th.

In the same vein of a really good feature story by someone with a forthcoming book was the Jon Mooallem piece "Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?" for the New York Times Magazine. The story is about a endangered species that lives around the Hawaiian Islands and has a lot of great material around the conflicting viewpoints between people wanted to protect the seals and those whose lives are negatively impacted by protection efforts. Terribly interesting piece and makes me even more interested to read Mooallem's book coming out the 16th of this month, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.

Writing on people with ALS - by Jeff Pearlman & Pete Thamel

I last Wednesday coincidentally came across two pieces of writing about people afflicted with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). Each work was really well done and showed both the devastating effects of the disease and the support received by each person featured in the respective pieces.

For the Sports Illustrated website Pete Thamel wrote "Dick Kelley gave his heart to BC; now the school is giving back" and as part of an ongoing Q&A series (100 and counting) on his blog Jeff Pearlman wrote "The Quaz Q&A: Adrian Dessi".

Thamel notes in his piece that Kelly has worked in Boston College administration since a BC freshman in 1983 and Dessi is the father of two of Pearlman's childhood friends (with a Pearlman blog post about one of them, Chris Dessi, self-publishing a book being one of the sources of inspiration for me to self-publish).

Both the Q&A by Pearlman and more traditional profile by Thamel are excellent and accomplish well the dual tasks of showing how horrible ALS can be and how great the support received by Dessi and Kelly has been.

Writing on economies in trouble - by Joel Stein & Stephan Faris

Two excellent pieces of writing from Businessweek recently shared the common theme of being about economies in trouble and what's being done in them. Published a little over a month ago in was "Screwed in Cyprus" by Stephan Faris and more recently, was the BW feature story "How Jerry Brown Scared California Straight" by Joel Stein.

Good writing in both and definitely interesting to read about how bad things have gotten in at least one area of Europe and what Brown working to avoid in California. Very reminiscent of the Michael Lewis book Boomerang which I noted in a Nov 2011 review as covering financial trouble for the cities of San Jose and Vallejo.

Jason Collins SI cover story & writing on Collins

While none of it as singularly impactful as the first-person narrative "Why NBA center Jason Collins is coming out now" that Collins did with Sports Illustrated writer Franz Lidz, there were some other excellent pieces of writing done on the heels of the announcement Monday by Collins.

About the piece itself was SI Senior Editor Chris Stone who wrote "The story behind Jason Collins' story: How it happened" and Lidz a day later provided "Jason Collins overwhelmed by enormous support for his announcement".

In terms of pieces published placed other than Sports Illustrated, Bruce Arthur wrote for the National Post the excellent "Jason Collins coming out a new beginning for sports" and specifically about the #98 jersey homage to Matthew Shepard, Sam Gardner wrote for Fox Sports "Collins' act wows victim's parents".

Additionally, "The meaning of Jason Collins' coming out" was written by Cyd Zeigler for SB Nation Outsports and "Just the Beginning" by Chuck Culpepper for Sports on Earth and the last piece to mention here was "The Decision" by Charlie Pierce for Grantland. Like many pieces I've seen from Pierce, it's extremely thought-out and contains the interesting idea that people shouldn't get caught up in basically congratulating themselves and society as a whole for being so accepting of Jason Collins on the heels of his coming out publicly.

Nice sports stories - by Posnanski, Culpepper & Vitez

Three different sports stories I've come across in the past few weeks stood out as being well-written pieces about stories that are just darn... nice.

Joe Posnanski is a writer who often produces work in this category of nice (and being incredibly prolific, he also produces lots of other great work) and he wrote "Ankiel: A Rare Player Reinvented" for NBC Sports. About former Cardinals pitcher and now Astros outfield Rick Ankiel, it's a fascinating look at someone who reinvented himself to maintain a career playing baseball.

Another recent story that brought a smile was by Chuck Culpepper for Sports on Earth. "Uniquely Memorable" was about Frosty Westering, the longtime Pacific Lutheran University football coach who died earlier this month at 85. It was an excellent piece from Culpepper on someone whose teams performed well on the field and were led by a coach that treated his players as people rather than just cogs in a football machine.

The last piece of writing to mention here was for the Philadelphia Enquirer by Michael Vitez. "Wilmington man, 88, got a late start and kept on running" was about Hugh Campbell and a very cool story of someone's achievements.

"Out in the Great Alone" on the Iditarod by Brian Phillips

There was really a remarkable story published today on Grantland. "Out in the Great Alone" was written by Brian Phillips and is close to 20,000 words about several weeks that Phillips spent following via small plane  the 2013 Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska.

I've previously linked to excellent pieces from Phillips on tennis and his writing in this Iditarod feature is interesting in that it seems a blend of colloquial first-person and what felt to be at times brilliant phrasing and scene building. It's certainly true that I'm interested in reading about Alaska having grown up there (and have posted on solid books I've read on Alaska), but the writing from Phillips very much helped make this a memorable piece.

Along with the aforementioned writing itself, the other noteworthy thing about this piece was the construction of it by Grantland editors. In addition to allotting an enormous word count to Phillips, they built the story into an interactive feature with lots of embedded images/video and a different way of scrolling through the story than would typically be found online. In terms of how it was built for the web, the feature was highly reminiscent of "Snow Fall" from the New York Times featuring the writing of John Branch and which I wrote about in a December 2012 post. 

Not to just keep throwing out links, but the other thing that this Iditarod feature made me think of was "Bleacher Report vs. Grantland: The Spectrum of Online Sports Media" by Clay Travis for his site Outkick the Coverage. In this October 2012 piece, Travis writes of how a site like Grantland is well suited to produce thorough journalism (which the features by Phillips certainly qualify as) because as part of the much larger organization that is ESPN it's not wholly reliant on revenue from said journalism to maintain a viable company. It's an interesting idea from Travis and seems to ring even more true to me after seeing what must have gone into producing something as expansive and well done as "Out in the Great Alone".

Writing on Boston & on Guns - by Charlie Pierce & Gabrielle Giffords

It's somewhat remarkable to me that conversation around the Boston Marathon bombing would be completely separate from the larger question of weapons (i.e. guns) and the ease in which people can get them, but that certainly seems to be the case over the past week. While many people (myself included) closely followed the aftermath of the bombing and manhunt yesterday for apparent co-perpetrator Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to block legislation strengthening background checks on gun sales.

On the subject of the Sentate actions (or inactions) were two great pieces of writing, with one from former U.S. Congresswomen Gabrille Giffords and one from Esquire writer Charlie Pierce, with Pierce more recently writing another piece that felt very much related.

The writing by Giffords was "A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip" published in the New York Times and an extremely direct and well written op-ed piece from someone in a position to write about gun violence.

From Pierce for the Esquire website the morning after the Senate inaction around background checks was "The Violence We Live With". It's a powerful essay that opines how we as American people seem to deplore horrific violence while at the same time accept that it's going to happen sometimes and not take steps that could curb it. It was a tremendously interesting idea put forth by Pierce and another Esquire piece of his published this morning had a similar notion in it to me.

"Guns Along The River: A Late Night In Watertown" was about the manhunt for Tsarnaev yesterday and exceptional writing.The thing that got me more than any other from his more recent piece was the repeated phrase "cops being cops" and Pierce writing of how capture of Tsarnaev means he can (and as he should) go to trial in our U.S. court system like any other criminal.

My thought out of this was that while the violence was much more high profile than that done by a "typical criminal with weapons", it's still violence resulting in the death of innocent people, just like the violence perpetrated by Jared Loughner in Tucson, James Holmes in Aurora or Adam Lanza in Newtown. It's a great thing that Tsarnaev will be tried for his crimes, but what will be interesting to see is whether the crimes committed have any impact on U.S. perception of violence or lawmakers reactions around violence through various means.

Would be a shame if the response is for Congressional leaders and other decision makers to either (A) accept that these things can happen and not try to look at additional ways to prevent it (basically what Pierce wrote in his essay about gun violence) or (B) put the Boston bombing in a specific bucket and try to stop that (i.e. make pressure cookers illegal). While this hypothetical option B may seem absurd, anyone that's had to pour out water or take off their shoes in an airport security line may recognize it as an approach that we've taken before.

Writing on the Boston Marathon Bombing

Not to simply list out great writing (well, actually, exactly to simply list out great writing) since the Boston Marathon bombing, there's been some amazing work done, both poignant and well reported with the pieces below being those that have stood out to me the most.

In the poignant essay category were pieces by Patton Oswalt and Joe Posnanski with Oswalt doing a Facebook post about good people and Posnanski's essay on his personal blog containing the same notion with his last sentence of "There are exponentially more good people than bad."

The piece of writing reported from the scene that I found most memorable was "In Grisly Image, a Father Sees His Son" by Tim Rohan for the New York Times. Recounted is the story of Jeff Bauman, a marathon spectator who lost both his legs at the scene. While the piece certainly contains a graphic image and some difficult to read text, it's also an inspiring depiction of helping others with Rohan's description of Carlos Arredondo (the subject of NYT piece from 2007 that Rohan links to) coming to Bauman's aide. Incredibly, there's a story that's come out just this evening on Bauman with "Boston Bombing Victim in Iconic Photo Helped Identify Attackers" by Asjylyn Loder & Esmé E. Deprez for Bloomberg.

The final pieces to note here contained details about the response of emergency personnel to the bombing and injuries with a New Yorker essay "Why Boston's Hospital's Were Ready" by noted author and Boston area surgeon Atul Gawande and "First responders to Boston bombings get relief, postgame beers from grateful Bruins" by Les Carpenter for Yahoo Sports.

Finally, it's of course not a piece of writing, but here was footage from the Boston Garden two nights after the bombing...