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."

Great writing on Medicine & Money - by Fagone, Gawande & Lewis

There's been a few pieces of writing I've seen recently that struck me as particularly excellent on the subjects of medicine and money... which, sadly are inextricably linked perhaps more now than ever.

For evidence of that linkage, one could simply look at the Tampa Bay Times feature series "Never Let Go" I wrote on last week. Included in the third story from the writer, Kelly Benham, was mention of how over a million dollars in micro-preemie infant care cost she and her husband $400, and of course would have financially ruined other parents with different or no health coverage.

A medical story I haven't previously written about and linked to was "Slow Ideas" from the July 29th issue of The New Yorker. It's written by Atul Gawande, a noted surgeon and bestselling author who I've posted about a few times and this latest piece is a fascinating one about how ideas spread and recommendations take hold (in this case recommendations toward reducing infant mortality rates in India).

Another really solid medical piece I've seen lately was "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" by Jason Fagone for the August issue of Philadelphia Magazine. It's a piece I previously linked to under a different post topic and is a tremendously interesting look at a doctor doing cutting-edge work. In that regard, the feature reminded me of a couple of other physician profiles I've seen in past years, "Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World" by Wil Hylton for the New York Times and "Adventures in Extreme Science" written on Eric Schadt by Tom Junod for Esquire.

Going to the second side of this medicine and money topic, two other pieces of writing to mention here were both by Michael Lewis. Among other bestselling books, Lewis wrote The Big Short and Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (which I wrote about in 2011) and an excellent recent feature story of his was "Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?" for the September issue of Vanity Fair. The piece was thoroughly reported and details the length to which Goldman would go seemingly to protect their image as a company worthy of the money they make. It's a compelling story and made me think of another piece of writing by Lewis, his "Princeton University's 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks". Really great stuff from Lewis about life and career choices in this speech with the title "Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie".

BusinessWeek Pieces: Robert Young Pelton on Somali Pirates / Khan Academy / Interesting Companies

Interesting content from the past few issues of Businessweek that stood out for different reasons. There's the interesting story by an interesting writer, the story on an interesting guy with a noble venture and finally some pieces on companies that are just plain... interesting.

Probably the best writing was by Robert Young Pelton in his story Somali Pirates' Rich Returns. One of the points of this blog is to highlight cases of excellent writing on a topic of note and this piece definitely qualifies. I was struck even more by the story after realizing it was written by the author of The World's Most Dangerous Places (which I read years ago). Big fan I am of what seems to be a Businessweek practice of having diverse and fairly well known (and presumably non-staff) writers doing feature stories.

Also standing out as a BW piece lately was Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math. While the writing from Bryant Urstadt was certainly solid enough, the mission of Khan is just plain remarkable. On his Khan Academy website he provides free access to a self-created 2,100+ video library tutorial which began with math education and is now expanded to many other subjects.

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These were the metaphorical big rocks from Businessweek lately, but there were also a number of smaller pieces on companies doing interesting things...

- In the category of "writing on a big and innovative company continuing to do big and innovative things" was Apple's Deals May Transform Digital Music about a potential announcement of cloud storage for a user's music collection. As detailed in the piece, this type of offering has been chased by many... and would be yet another coup for Apple if they can introduce a user-friendly program bought into by the record labels.

- Similar to the aforementioned Pelton story in this regard, the piece Pacific Biosciences' $600 Million Decoder Ring was made more interesting in relation to another story. In this case, that other story wasn't by the same author, but rather on the same guy at Pacific Biosciences. As written about in this Esquire piece (which I posted on here), remarkable guy this Eric Schadt.

- Short, but interesting piece was Innovator: Carnegie Mellon's Richard McCullough on McCullough's efforts at the company Plextronics. His is fascinating work in the field of conductive ink for use in ultra-thin flexible displays (think: cell phones, televisions, magazines, etc). Definitely an area of business with huge potential.

- Finally of interest was SeatGeek Helps Online Ticket Buyers Beat the Scalpers on the ticket search site SeatGeek. Not the most profound offering in the world (digital music storage isn't either), but the company appears to be using technology well to fill a consumer need.

Esquire Writing - on "New Biologist" Eric Schadt & Extreme Health

There's piece of writing in the latest Esquire that both has solid content and makes me think about words and what writers think about when they pen them...

The profile by Tom Junod is "Adventures in Extreme Science" and looks at brainiac Eric Schadt and his "emperor has no clothes" approach to conventional wisdom in the field of molecular biology.

Schadt makes for an interesting topic with his proselytizing about the vast networks and cause-effect relationships within the body... and how that runs counter to the previous belief that things within ran independently enough that successful mapping of human DNA would start us on the road to disease cure. In terms of this new viewpoint, the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is cited as being both the source of the term "paradigm shift" and one of Schadt's early influences around the idea of necessary breaking away from conventional belief.

Junod details not just the intelligence and contrarian viewpoint of Schadt, but also his propensity to get out in front of his ideas and advocate loudly for him. Lest that statement make him appear a simple self-promoter, also noted in the profile is Schadt's collaborative approach to solving problems and curing disease... regardless of whether it's he or his company getting the credit and subsequent revenue. Really interesting reading on the guy.

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Above is about the content of the piece... which by itself is me thinks worth a read. What struck me within it though was a specific anecdote written about the subject. Schadt early on is described as being a breaking from convention kind of guy and torch bearer for "New Biology"... in short, a whole new approach. After this was established about Schadt, Junod related how he "likes to do his supercomputing on planes." The further description of this was how Schadt would figure out what data he needs run and then simply hop onto a plane's WiFi network and order that data run via Amazon servers.

It's a remarkable detail that carries both a "whadda know? that's interesting" feel to it and shot across the bow backing for the "New" advocated for by Schadt. Maybe it's just because I'm a sucker for funky (and yet important) detail, but this anecdote made it much easier for me as a reader to embrace a paradigm shift idea (or someone extolling the virtues of one), simply because the tools available are also a paradigm shift from previously capabilities.

It was a really cool inclusion by Junod and as a interested reader type guy, I really wonder whether he put as much gravitas behind the anecdote about server time via Amazon as I took from it.

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Also of interest from this issue was the concept of Extreme Heath as written about in multiple short pieces. Featured were a number of otherwise common folk who decided to push themselves to do uncommon things... including surfer Laird Hamilton, subject of a "What I've Learned" piece.

Not that I necessarily want to go all crazy with it at this point, but I think there a lot to be said for the idea of pushing to see what you can accomplish.