Great writing by Wollan for the NYT, Grann for The New Yorker and Junod, Warren & Granger for Esquire

Three feature stories I've seen recently that struck me as exceptional were written about a major street gang that took on the branding of a major university sports program, the authentication of art work as having been done by masters and the cutting edge of cancer treatment with one specific person as the test case.

The first of the features was "Fresno State Loves Its Bulldogs, but So Does a Gang" by Malia Wollan for the New York Times. It's maybe the most straightforward of the three pieces noted here, but remarkable nonetheless in how the branding of a university and it's sports teams was in many ways taken over.

The second piece of great writing to note here was by David Grann for The New Yorker. From 2010, "The Mark of a Masterpiece" was a 16,000 word story on the world of fine art and a man, Peter Paul Biro, who declared himself able to authenticate works of art as being done by a particular artist based on fingerprints within the works. It's a fascinating read and what Grann did so well in it was laying out details and facts for the reader to then form conclusions, rather that telling a story and stating what a reader should take from it. Additionally, it was fascinating to read three years after the piece was done some of the aftermath from it and the fairly recent ruling on a lawsuit that came out of the feature.

The last piece of exceptional writing to note was done for Esquire by Tom Junod and Mark Warren. "Patient Zero" was about Iraq war widow and mother of two Stephanie Lee, her initial diagnosis of terminal cancer and subsequent groundbreaking treatment. While reading the piece, I was struck to see that the cancer research genius who took her on was Eric Schadt, the subject of another Esquire story I remember well, and the confluence of these two people and what their interactions could potentially mean for future cancer treatments is nothing less than amazing to think about. 

One thing I felt at the conclusion of the story was that it felt incomplete, an assessment that then made complete sense to me after I saw the front-of-issue note from Esquire editor in chief, David Granger, and realized that the story felt incomplete because that's precisely what it is. The narrative about Lee and her life and then Schadt and his research is captivating reading, but what will come of Lee's treatment unknown... and what could then carry over to the treatment of countless others as they battle cancer... unknown and tremendously exciting.

The aforementioned Granger one-page note is titled "A Second Chance" and while it's not something I typically do when writing about something, I've included roughly the first half of it below as it doesn't appear to be posted online now and for me provides great big picture perspective on the story (especially after having read the feature by Junod and Warren)... 

"October 18, 2013: We've never done anything like this before.

   I've been working at Esquire for more than 16 years. I've been doing magazine journalism for almost 30. I'ts not only that we-especially executive editor Mark Warren and writer-at-large Tom Junod-made a connection between two people. It's not only that a story we published two years ago, about an eccentric math-driven biologist, allowed us to introduce two people who needs each other very much. It's also that we, especially Mark and Tom, are all in on this one. We're involved. We saw an opportunity to arrange for a man in New York who is on the cutting edge of math and science and medicine and has endless resources to help a young mother of two girls from Mississippi whose husband was killed in the Iraq war and who was told earlier this year that her cancer is terminal... to maybe live.

   Maybe.

We don't know how the story ends. We know Stephanie Lee has fought every way she knows, with the help of a military hospital in Mississippi, to stay alive for her daughters. And we know when we first talked to Eric Schadt, who runs the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai hospital, he told us there was virtually no chance he could help Stephanie. And we know that at each of the dozens of points at which hope and possibility could have been derailed, they were not. And now Stephanie is here, in New York, staying with Mark and his family, visiting the city for the first time, to hear what Eric and Several of the best minds in cancer treatment have to tell her about her cancer and about the course of treatment they developed for her through the application of a combination of techniques that she is one the first patients to receive, ever."

Esquire writing on the world we live in - by Granger, Richardson, Marche & Raab

The September issue of Esquire Magazine had a number of great pieces, with many of them around the theme of our world and the government's role in it. Below is quoted much more of the actual text than I usually include when referencing stories I found excellent, but each of the writers noted really hit some big important themes in these pieces.

The opening letter from editor David Granger was titled "American Dread" and made reference to some of the pieces that followed, with the text from Granger that stood out to me the most the following...

"This morning, early, I read the final draft of John H. Richardson's profile of Alex Jones, a man I'd previously known only through the vicious tweets of his many detractors. Jones is the premier vendor of conspiracy theories in the country, to the tune of a million visitors to his sites some days. His ravings about the Boston Marathon bombing being a government plot and the U.S. secretly siding with Al Qaeda are both insane and influential — they, as much as the words of any commentator in the country, help shape the discussions of our national affairs.  

Shortly thereafter, I read Stephen Marche's Thousand Words column, about the state of anxiety in which we live — how our country and its popular culture live under a cloud of the awful things that might happen. 

And just a few minutes ago, I read the ninth installment of Scott Raab's epic series on the rebuilding at Ground Zero. And it reminded me where the paranoia comes from: If 9/11 could happen, then everything is possible. If everything is possible, then we are required to act on our worries to forestall the next possible catastrophe. We've all bought into a variant of the worldview expressed in Dick Cheney's famous calculation: If there is a 1 percent chance that we will be attacked, then we must treat it as a certainty. If there is any chance that the most outlandish rumor could happen — if, say, someone with an Alex Jones–sized megaphone were to equate the infamous government-funded Tuskegee syphilis study from the 1930s with the recent attempt to fluoridate the drinking water of Portland, Oregon — then many assume it's almost certain."

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The aforementioned profile by John Richardson was titled "Alex Jones: Father Knows Best, Updated for the Apocalypse" and while I certainly think Jones a loon, I also had two thoughts that made him important, even if not actually correct. There's many people who hang on his every word and crazy as those words might be, they don't come from nothing. I like the current administration and generally buy the arguments made by it, but I also think what if the power held by the executive branch was in the hands of what I'll loosely call "bad guys"?

Along these lines, I found myself thinking of Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America. It was based on the premise of Charles Lindbergh defeating Franklin Roosevelt for the Presidency in 1940 and the U.S. taking dual paths of isolationism from the war in Europe and discrimination against Jews here at home. Roth's work was fiction, but based on real possibility as there were groups in the U.S. who firmly wanted to let Germany do what they will (a "not our problem" approach) and also wanted to curtail opportunities for Jews.

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The Stephen Marche essay referenced was "The Empire of Anxiety" and the parts of it struck me the most were about government anti-terrorism measures as well as the financial costs of them vs. the likelihood of the events they're preventing...

"America's actual drone policies are based explicitly on how worried its agents are. Killing anywhere in the world is legal so long as 'an informed, high-level official of the U.S. has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.' 'Imminent threat' can mean anything, of course. The NSA surveillance program is operating under this same limitless anxiety. All information must be available, because who knows what is being plotted out there, somewhere, anywhere?

In 2012, only ten American civilians died worldwide from international terrorism. Between September 11 and the death of Osama bin Laden, the United States spent $1.28 trillion prosecuting the war on terror. You are 3,468 times as likely to die from a car accident as from an attack, 2,663 times as likely to die from a fall, 356 times as likely to die from drowning. You are 416 times as likely to die from an injury at work as at the hands of a terrorist. For an ultimately negligible increase in public safety, ancient values have been abandoned and huge quantities of blood and treasure have been expended. In a hundred years, historians of this period will be amazed at the ludicrous outpouring of resources to prevent a few thousand murders while all around the world the poor and hungry die. The psychological mechanism is obvious, a classic case of a phobia, creating a specific fear to hide from a general, more all-encompassing sense of dread. Terrorism has the great narrative advantage of having good guys and bad guys involved in dramatic scenes. The real crises are much more boring and present no Zero Dark Thirty–style solutions. The coming storm is no longer a metaphor. Next summer, a hurricane will come and destroy part of New York City. Or, if not next year, the year after. And then there will be an even worse hurricane a few years after that. And what will the world be like when New York City is destroyed? And what are we supposed to do about it? Nobody knows."

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Additionally referenced by Granger in his Editor's piece was the Scott Raab feature "A Target in Perpetuity". It's the 9th installment in Raab's 8 year-long (so far) series "The Rebuilding" about the new World Trade Center.

This latest piece covered among other things the political infighting around the World Trade Center site and turf battles between the NYPD and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for who will provide site security. Really great work from Raab that included the text below...

"If eight years spent covering and pondering Ground Zero has taught me anything worth calling wisdom, it boils down to this: Our national response to 9/11 has been disastrous. Think first about how useful 9/11 has been to the politicians who trade in fear and piety, whose power at the federal level of our government has grown vast enough to include torture, indefinite detention, secret surveillance of the citizenry en masse approved by a secret court, and the program of inflicting death by drone despite the collateral damage, human and political. 

I'm not suggesting any conspiracy to bring down the World Trade Center beyond that enacted by Al Qaeda. I'm not talking about any black helicopters or Hollywood fantasy. I'm referring to the damage done to America not by terrorists but by our own response to one horrific attack — which, by the way, was but another version of what people around the world have gone and still go through. Gutting the values and principles that we like to think define us as an exceptional nation — you know, that whole Bill of Rights deal — isn't the response of a country confident in its freedom. It's the cowardice of a nation too fractured by fear to face the truth about the human condition: We're always vulnerable — all of us, together and alone. It takes courage to accept that vulnerability and not let it rule our lives, private and public. That's exactly what the rebuilt World Trade Center demonstrates already, already filled with people courageous enough to embrace life and liberty as a matter of fact, not foofaraw. In short: Americans."

The thing I love about Raab's writing in this piece is that it details things that should be different or done better, but it then for me adds a healthy dollop of what could be called hopefulness around who we are as people.

For me personally, I often find myself in need of that hopefulness when thinking about things that could be different in our world, both those covered in these Esquire pieces and those not. One thing that comes to mind specifically is something that I've written about previously with my April 2013 post "writing on Boston and on guns" and the approach our lawmakers all too often seem to take towards meaningful action.

Luke Dittrich on the Joplin Tornado & Other Esquire Pieces

Remarkable feature on the Joplin Tornado in the October 2011 issue of Esquire (which includes an interesting, but not linked to online cover story by Chris Jones about his time hanging in full Bert & Ernie costumes with Justin Timberlake at Comic-Con).



Really, though, what stood out from the issue was the Luke Dittrich feature from Joplin, MO. It's one of those stories that pulls double-duty with being very well written, but also about an absolutely gripping topic. The storm killed 160 in Joplin and Dittrich profiles the experience of a dozen or so whose lives were saved by taking refuge in a convenience store walk-in cooler. Several times during the reading I felt a bit choked up reading about the decision points that led each person to that convenience store and just how arbitrary the difference between living or dying was for many hit by the tornado.

Two other Esquire pieces I found interesting recently...

- From the same Oct 2011 issue was the brief vignette on the Esquire Economy Car of the Year - the 2012 Ford Focus. Much less profound than the Dittrich piece (or Pierce one noted below), but I have grown fond of Ford lately and like quite a bit the looks of this car.

- Mentioned in the same issue's Note from the Editor was a Charlie Pierce profile on Barack Obama some six months prior to his November 2008 Presidential victory. The piece is titled The Cynic and Senator Obama and Esquire editor David Granger referenced the below passage on Obama from Pierce...

"There is a remove to his movements and a distance to everything he does that mutes his charisma and dampens what might be a frenzy in his crowds into a patient, well-behaved enthusiasm."

It's an interesting view and may well factor into how Obama seems to have garnered admiration for his efforts, but has also taking quite a bit of criticism (even from ardent supporters) for not selling his ideas well enough and even for not trumpeting well enough his successes.