Writing by Peter Bach on losing his wife to cancer

Really a remarkable and said story was done recently for New York Magazine with "The Day I Started Lying to Ruth," a first-person piece by Peter Bach with the subtitle "A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer." It's a painful read throughout and then the part at the end where she says goodbye to her second-grader... just so sad.

Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón & writing on the movie by Jones & Lee

Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón has been a much talked about and written on movie since it's release and after seeing it a few days ago, it seems all the attention for good reason. It's a remarkable film and two pieces I've since read about it's director and the movie struck me as excellent.

For the Sept 30th issue of New York Magazine, Dan P. Lee wrote "The Camera's Cusp: Alfonso Cuarón Takes Filmmaking to a New Extreme With Gravity" and it's a fascinating 6,000 word feature. Another solid piece of writing, and more on the movie itself, was the fairly short Esquire website post "Gravity Isn't Quite Accurate, and That's Okay" by Chris Jones.

In terms of my own views on the movie, the visuals were stunning in 3D (and perhaps more so in IMAX), but the big thing about the movie for me was the tension and drama. In fact, there was a portion of it where I found the emotional drama perhaps too much with the choice Cuarón made in having Sandra Bullock's character in Dr. Ryan Stone having experienced a particularly horrific moment in her past. Watching things unfold on screen as Stone in pretty much ceaseless peril and combining those with her past, it felt both that the tragic backstory might be excessive and given that backstory, logical that Stone might just say "no más" (guess I couldn't get enough of the accent in Cuarón's name) and stop trying to figure out a way to survive. Related to this, I was watching and thinking there no way NASA would have sent to space anyone in Stone's emotional state.

From that point of skepticism I had, though, I thought her past then well dealt with by Cuarón in the film, and as Jones wrote about, whether something would have actually occurred the way it was portrayed (whether a technical detail about space or selecting of science specialists for the mission) doesn't have to detract from the movie.

The other thing I loved about the piece by Jones was his mention of the attempt to make a movie out of his book Too Far From Home, the subject of the first real blog post I wrote five years ago. Not that my blog writing has been like performing life-saving surgeries, but this book kind of got me started with it.

Great Magazine writing - by Dan P. Lee, Tom Junod & Julian Rubinstein

As I a few days ago posted on recent great newspaper stories I've seen, it seemed fitting to move on to posting about some excellent magazine writing I've come across lately.

The oldest piece (from May, but which I just recently read) was "Welcome to the Real Space Age" by Dan P. Lee for New York Magazine and a look at the pending wave of commercial space travel. It's a fascinating story and included was one of the major players in the industry, Elon Musk... with this inclusion reminding me of the excellent Esquire profile "Triumph of His Will" on Musk by Tom Junod that I wrote about and linked to last year.

In the same area of writing about larger the life type people was another profile by Junod for Esquire, "A Life So Large" on Brad Pitt. The piece was the second in a sort of "celebrity actor cover story profile series" done in recent months by Junod, with the first on Leonardo DiCaprio and third on Matt Damon. While all three very well written, the one on Pitt struck me as particularly interesting with the actor constantly working the balance between the celebrity life he's chosen and the private life with his family. Additionally of interest to me around the profiles was a short Esquire essay by Junod in the latest issue (with the Damon profile). Titled "Assimilation! The Fame Trilogy" it's about writing the three pieces and includes the interesting note from Junod that "If I had to say anything about all three of them collectively, it would be that they are better than they have to be and quite relieved they are not worse."

Another great feature piece I've seen recently was well written to be sure, but initially fascinating to me just for who wrote it. "Operation Easter" was done for the New Yorker by Julian Rubinstein, author of The Whiskey Robber, a non-fiction account account of Attila Ambrus, an Eastern European bank-robbing folk-hero of sorts. I read the book in late 2005, enjoyed it quite a bit, and up until now hadn't seen anything else by Rubinstein. This recent New Yorker piece an excellent one about rare bird eggs in Great Britain, the collectors who try to illegally take them and inspectors tasked with preventing that. Definitely an obscure topic on animal obsessives that made me think of the recent Jon Moallem book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, which I reviewed here.

Interesting pieces on writers - by Boris Kachka and James Andrew Miller

There were two tremendously interesting pieces I've seen in the past few days that dealt with writers and work they've produced.

For New York Magazine, Boris Kachka wrote "Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah Lehrer" on the former superstar writer and it's a fascinating view into someone's downfall. Lehrer initially got himself in trouble with news that he was recycling his old blog posts into new magazine articles, but then  deeper problems when questions arose about sources referenced and veracity of his claims.

It's a fascinating read about someone working in the the same cognitive science area as Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics guys, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I've enjoyed tremendously work from Gladwell, Levitt and Dubner, but can also see how someone writing in this realm of squishy science could potentially use liberties in supporting stories to tell and points to make. Unfortunately for Lehrer, he took it too far... with an additional supporting anecdote from the Kachka piece being how Lehrer was becoming less of a writer and more of a speaker and insight guy with an entertaining story.

The other piece on writers and writing to note here was "A Problem of Churchillian Proportions" by James Andrew Miller for the New York Times. Miller along with Tom Shales wrote the tremendously entertaining Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN and in this piece he examines the circumstances around the upcoming book The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965. As detailed by Miller, William Manchester wrote two volumes on Churchill and then realized he wasn't going to be able to finish the third book and would need a co-writer. Manchester developed a friendship with newspaper writer Paul Reid and after he was contracted to co-write the book, Reid found himself taking over upon Manchester's death in 2004.

Miller relates in his Times piece how at that point, Bill Phillips came in as editor of the book and helped Reid work through the writing process over the next six years. It's really a fantastically interesting view into the impact a great editor can have on writing.

John Branch on Derek Boogaard / Sports Journalism Today

Remarkable profile of former NHL player Derek Boogaard earlier this month in The New York Times. Written by John Branch, the three-part series is titled Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer with first Learning To Brawl about his early years and then Blood on the Ice about his National Hockey League career. Finally, A Brain 'Going Bad' covers both his accidental overdose (from painkillers and alcohol) death last summer and then damage found upon study of his brain.

It's captivating reading about first the idea of sixteen and seventeen year-old hockey players seeking to make a career with their ability to fight during games and then those same players having severe neurological trauma later in life... in Boogaard's case, a life of just 28 years.

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Branch's piece is an extremely thorough profile that's sports journalism by virtue of it's athlete subject, but does more than hold it's own in the broader category of journalism. To this point, there's been several interesting stories come across lately about sports journalism and the great work being done in the field.

For New York Magazine, Gabriel Sherman wrote Blitz!: How sports journalists learned to go for the hard tackle which uses the Branch series as an example of the deep investigative reports being done into sports topics in recent years.

A second piece lately on sports journalism is The Sporting Scene column for the New Yorker by Reeves Wiedeman. It's an interesting short missive about the volume of solid beyond the boxscore sportswriting being generated online.

Working... & Writing on Michael Lewis Working

Having previously done a number of posts on work (the most involved probably being Working on the Railroad... with help from Robert Fulghum & Patrick Swayze), it seemed high time to revisit the subject... and link to a guy doing work very very well right now.

A couple of concepts around work have been floating in my head lately... that of everything counts and taking a path.

Everything counts as a perspective is something to employ (pardon the pun) when looking at where we want to go or want we want to be doing career-wise. It can oft be a daunting task looking at something new, but the past shouldn't be discounted when looking to the future. Past experiences (whether those be education, past jobs held or roles within those jobs) can very well provide the linkages to the go-forward ideal.

The old jobs held may not related to the future jobs sought, but the connections and relationships from those prior roles could well provide that entree to what is desired... just gotta be proactive about looking. At the same time, skills from the past may not necessarily be the skills that a desired job would employ, but perhaps the skills learned could either get a foot in the door of something new, or even be used in the finding of thing new.

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Taking a path in relation to careers and job changes is the principle of just doing something. In cases of uncertainty as to how to reach an end goal (or even knowledge of of what that goal may actually be), it's best to just... do something and be going forward. One may not know whether it's the right path or not, but if the current state isn't an ideal one, it's best to be moving... and maybe the ideal will reveal itself eventually.

So... if you want to do something not done previously, think of what you have done and how that can help and then just start doing something new. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't, but the movement probably won't hurt.

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Granted, all of this can seem a bit fluffy and hypothetical, but it should be noted that with talent, work, utilization of past efforts and action-taking, work efforts can come up roses.

To that point in the writer world, there's the subject of It’s Good to Be Michael Lewis. Pretty fascinating on the author by Jessica Pressler for New York Magazine. It's a solid piece and Lewis an excellent writer deserving of success... and he's certainly knee-deep in success right now.