Four pieces of excellent writing - by Follman, Kristof, Fagone, and MacGregor

A few pieces of great recent writing to note here included ones that are important, uplifting, disconcerting, and just plain smile-inducing.

What felt to be the most important of the four was by Mark Follman for Mother Jones with "Inside the Race to Stop the Next Mass Shooter," a fascinating look at how police and school staff can identify and assist those youth that potentially could be a threat to others. The piece is thoroughly researched, covers the horrible fact of how Columbine viewed as a blueprint by some, and told through the lens of looking at one troubled Oregon teen who was kept tabs on and guided while in school, and then left that environment and eventually caused great harm.

The uplifting piece was from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof with the fairly short "In Five Minutes, He Lets the Blind See." About Nepali ophthalmologist Dr. Sanduk Ruit, the pioneer of a low-cost cataract surgery that he's performed to restore sight for some 100,000 people, it's an awesome story.

Squarely in the disconcerting camp was a well-written feature by Jason Fagone for the New York Times Magazine with "The Serial Swatter" about internet stalking, particularly of females. Featured in the piece was one disturbed Canadian teenager whose methods would include digging up private information on others, taunting them with it, and making fake 911 calls that would send SWAT teams with guns drawn to the house of his harassment victims.

On a much, much lighter note, another great piece to mention was a cool story by Jeff MacGregor for Smithsonian Magazine with "Meet Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Genius Behind "Hamilton," Broadway's Newest Hit." The piece makes Miranda and his play sound very interesting and entertaining.

Great business writing - on MLB Advanced Media, Tesla, Amazon, and working a career

There's been some really interesting business writing lately to note here, including several company profiles as well as pieces around the topic of the work people put into their jobs.

The first company profile to mention was for The Verge by Ben Popper with "The Changeup: How baseball’s tech team built the future of television," a fascinating piece on Major League Baseball Advanced Media. The company (known also as BAM) started out as MLB's technology division and has since done extensive work for HBO, just signed a technology and rights holder deal with the NHL, and is almost certain to spin off from MLB into it's own company.

Another profile I found excellent was "Decoding Tesla's Secret Formula" by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen for Forbes Magazine. The company a fascinating one to me and as with other piece I've read on Tesla, this story paints a picture of the cars as remarkable feats of engineering.

Additionally of interest recently was another solid company profile, "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace," one that has in the past week generated a huge amount of discussion. For the New York Times by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, the piece has the subtitle "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve it's ever-expanding ambitions." I found it to be a well-balanced story and part of me reads it and thinks that it fine for people to be pushed so hard if those employees feel the positives outweigh the negatives from the hours and pressure. However, the larger part of me then thinks of how unsustainable it seems to have a large company made up of people either young enough to not have family to go to after work or older people willing to spend so much time in pursuit of work goals and away from family. It just feels like that abandonment of balance is eventually going have a detrimental impact on one's work. Granted, those people can then be forced out when their work suffers, but it's a cycle that it seems would eventually hit it's limits and negatively impact the company.

A couple of other pieces that the Amazon story inspired and which I found interesting were "Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Way," a column by Joe Nocera for the New York Times and "Work Hard, Live Well," published to Medium by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The Nocera commentary is about Amazon following the lead of Bezos and that from Moskovitz on the negatives, to both employees and the company itself, that can come from too many hours put into work.

Related to the idea of how someone goes about their job, there was a great career advice post to his blog done last month by entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis. "The most important piece of advice for folks starting their careers" contains a number of interesting and highly relevant suggestions. To say it's simply a counter-argument to the idea of balance in work and life would be to miss many of the ideas Calacanis puts forth, but a theme throughout his post is about hustle and how to succeed especially when starting out in something, you gotta hustle.

Great New York Times writing - by Cook, McFadden, Dove, Mooallem, and Weiner

There's been some remarkable writing for the the New York Times I've seen over the past few weeks, including four recently done stories and one from 2012 that I not long ago saw linked to on Twitter.

The first story to note here was written by Gareth Cook with "The Singular Mind of Terry Tao," an interesting account of a math genius who also happens to be very normal and grounded.

The three other recent Times pieces share the common bond of being about people doing great things for others. "Nicolas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children from Holocaust, Dies at 106" was an obituary written by Robert McFadden, "Black South Carolina Trooper Explains Why He Helped a White Supremacist" a piece by Robert Dove and for the New York Times Magazine was "You Just Got Out of Prison.Now What" by Jon Mooallem. This last piece has the subtitle "Carlos and Ruby are two ex-convicts with a simple mission: picking up inmates on the day they're released from prison and guiding them through a changed world" and is just a very cool read.

The last piece to mention was by Eric Weiner from 2012 with "Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer," a piece about "thin places," those that as Weiner writes "transform us - or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves."

Interesting business pieces - on Dropbox, Chris Sacca & Ron Conway

There's been a few interesting pieces of business writing I've seen lately, including pieces recently published and related ones from a few years ago.

The latest issue of Fast Company Magazine had the feature story "Dropbox Versus the World" by J.J. McCorvey on the cloud storage company and the recent Forbes cover story was "How Super Angel Chris Sacca Made Billions, Burned Bridges And Crafted The Best Seed Portfolio Ever" by Alex Konrad.

Sacca is a venture capital who I've a few times posted on writing from and about him and after reading the Forbes profile, I then read two interesting older pieces, both written by Miguel Helft. "A Post-Google Fraternity of Investors" was from the New York Times in 2007 and in part about Sacca and "Ron Conway is a Silicon Valley startup's best friend" was done for Fortune in 2012 on the venture capitalist noted in the Forbes piece as a former mentor of Sacca's.

Writers on writing & pieces about New York Times writer David Carr

There's been a number of great things I've seen recently on writers and writing, with a majority of them related to New York Times writer David Carr who died on Feb 12th.

Three really profound remembrances were "David Carr, friend of journalism" by Erik Wemple for the Washington Post, "King David" by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic, and (with this last one the shortest) "David Carr was one of my dearest friends" by Andrew Rossi for CNN. Related to Rossi, he directed the movie Page One: Inside the New York Times, an awesome film for anyone interested in writing.

Written in the New York Times as a final "Media Equation" column of Carr's (the byline was "with David Carr") was "David Carr's Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students," a piece that included the link to Carr's syllabus to his Boston University Journalism class, a pretty fascinating document about writing that Carr posted to Medium. The last thing to note about Carr in this post was something published by Longform with "David Carr, 1956-2015" containing five pieces by Carr and one interview done of him.

Two other pieces about writing were compelling works starting off with "I never intended to write a Starbucks story" posted to Nieman Storyboard and on an interview with New York Times writer Jodi Kantor done by Lisa Pollack. It's interesting content from Kantor about writing a story that's incredibly fascinating to me in that it appears to have quickly brought about a large change for the better from Starbucks in how they schedule employees' work shifts.

The final piece to mention here was a sort of oldie, but goodie with "Stephen King's Top 20 Rules for Writers" taken from his brilliant book On Writing, originally published in 2000.

Pieces on writing - about a Justin Heckert story, thoughts from Wright Thompson & a speechwriter profile

Three different great pieces I've seen recently about the craft of writing included a story annotation with the author of the feature, a first-person piece on writing by a great sports writer, and a profile of the lead speechwriter for President Obama.

The annotation was done for the site Nieman Storyboard as part on an ongoing series and this edition "Annotation Tuesday: Justin Heckert and 'Lost in the Waves.'" The feature story that's discussed between Heckert and Matt Tullis is a long piece that ran in Men's Journal in 2009 and which I read just just a few weeks ago. The story itself was really interesting to me in that it was just so darn... memorable. This sticking power for me came out of how I found myself as a reader conflicted about one of the people written about. It would have been a great piece just as a heroic adventure yarn, but while the adventure part definitely there, one of the main characters was someone that was portrayed as complicated and conflicting in how he could be viewed. In this regard, I found fascinating that this idea of a complicated and conflicting narrative felt to also be very much in effect in a prior feature by Heckert, "Susan Cox" is No Longer Here," about which in Dec 2013 I wrote the following:

It's a fascinating piece that begins with details on someone dying and a wonderful hospital program that provides companionship for those who need it. The story then takes a sharp turn into events that makes one think about tidy narratives, what we expect to happen with things and what actually can occur instead. Heckert writes something that doesn't lend itself to a simple take-away for the reader, but that seems to be what makes it such a great and though-provoking story.

With this idea of being intrigued by the character depiction in "Lost in the Waves," it was really cool to see the recent annotation with Heckert's story of writing the feature story.


The first-person piece was "Wright Thompson...in his own words" as part of a project Still No Cheering in the Press Box done out of the University of Maryland Journalism School and which features a number of great sports writers dishing on writing. What I loved the most from Thompson was the following...

"I write about things that are interesting to me. Which are often very different. All of these stories, the thing they have in common is that they were somehow interesting. I feel like they’re all dispatches from a worldview."

Also of great interest to me from Thompson was his mention of one of the favorite stories he's written and it being one I hadn't seen, "The Last Days of Tony Harris" from Dec 2007 and which Thompson did a Q&A on.


The last excellent piece to note here was the fairly short New York Times profile "State of the Union Speechwriter for Obama Draws on Various Inspirations" by Michael Schmidt on Cody Keenan. Just interesting reading about someone in a pretty remarkable job.

Great sports stories - by Branch, Jenkins, and Castrovince

Three great pieces of sports writing I've seen recently included a pair of stories about an amazing climb done in Yosemite, a piece about an incredibly free-spirited and whimsical NBA player and one about an MLB umpire that's a tale of loss and moving forward.

The climbing pieces were by John Branch for the New York Times with first "Abduction. Lost Finger. Now a Rock Climber's Tallest Hurdle." and a week later "Pursuing the Impossible, and Coming Out on Top" with both on Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgensen and their epic first ascent of El Capitan's Dawn Wall.

The NBA player story was "The Man Behind The Swag: Nick Young" by Lee Jenkins for Sports Illustrated and an amusing and interesting tale on Young, perhaps better known for dating pop star Iggy Azalea than being a Los Angeles Laker.

On almost the complete opposite end of the profoundness spectrum was a piece by Anthony Castrovince for Sports on Earth with "John Hirschbeck's Survival Guide" on the man who had two children die from the rare genetic disease Adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD, just over 20 years apart. It's a solid piece that brought to mind Lisa Pollak's 1997 Pulitzer Prize winning story "The Umpire's Son" on Hirschbeck.

Writers on writing - Hylton on Hillenbrand, Leitch on Boyhood & Tullis on Journalism class wisdom

There's been a few pieces I've come across over the past month that featured writers on writing (a subject I've oft rambled about on this site), including a profile of a great author, review of a brilliantly done movie and Journalism professor on great writers who talked to his class.

The author profile was "The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand" by Wil Hylton for the New York Times and an in-depth look at a fantastic writer (I wrote here about her book Unbroken) with a really remarkable back-story as someone forced to largely remain at home as an adult due to chronic fatigue syndrome. Just fascinating details from Hylton on Hillenbrand's life as well as her writing process.

The movie review was actually written in July 2014, but one I waited to read until actually seeing the film this last weekend. For Deadspin, Will Leitch wrote "High On Life: The Divine Boyhood, Reviewed" on the movie written, directed and produced by Richard Linklater. It was a pretty monumental film in both scope (a fictional work filmed over eleven years) and actual delivery, with how, for lack of a better word, human it was.

The piece on writers and wisdom from them was by Ashland University professor Matt Tullis who did "What 14 Great Writers Taught One Journalism Class" for the website Nieman Storyboard. It was a tremendously cool piece that at the end had a link to another Nieman post, "10 Pieces of Wisdom from Top Writers" with axioms taken from class speakers.

Writing on important things done - with pieces by Grady, Montgomery, Martinez & Strawser

There's a few stories I saw in the past month that stood out to me as important writing on things done in the face of horrible situations, with two pieces features about heroic work and two pieces short, first-person accounts of inspiration.

The stories on particularly important work were "An Ebola Doctor's Return from the Edge of Death" by Denise Grady for the New York Times on Dr. Ian Crozier and the two-part series "The Lost Bones" by Ben Montgomery for the Tampa Bay Times. The series by Montgomery followed up on writing he did previously on decades-ago atrocities at the Dozier School for Boys and these recent pieces about efforts led by University of South Florida anthropologist Dr. Erin Kimmerle to find and identify remains on the grounds of the former reform school.

The other two pieces to note here were first one from 1986 with "He understood not only what we did but what we were supposed to do. : Reck of the Tribune" by Al Martinez for the L.A. Times and then "An Extra Angel on Top of the Tree" by Jessica Strawser for the New York Times in early December. Each story definitely trafficked in extremely sad topics and both also well worth reading.

Great sports pieces by Powell, Saslow & Parrish along with ESPN video segment on Lauren Hill

Three recent pieces of great sports writing were from the New York Times, CBS Sports and ESPN, with an additional powerful ESPN video segment.

The ESPN article was "The Long Way Home" by Eli Saslow on Broncos wide receiver Demaryius Thomas. It was the same type of brilliant and detailed storytelling that Saslow regularly provides for ESPN and the Washington Post and this particular piece began with an 11-year-old Thomas being woken up by police bursting into the house and arresting his mother and grandmother for manufacturing and distributing crack cocaine.

The Times piece was an interesting one in that it came from an approach so different than traditional sports writing. "‘OMG. You’re So Much More Than Awesome.’" was done by Michael Powell out of time he spent in rural North Carolina with Kevin Bumgarner who was proudly watching his son Madison Bumgarner make history with his World Series pitching performance against the Royals.

For CBS Sports was a story by Gary Parrish with "More Than a Game" on John Redman and Brittany Huber. Redman is a 24-year-old assistant basketball coach at Dalton State near the Georgia-Tennessee border and he last May barely survived a car accident, caused by a blown tire, that took the life of Huber five days prior to their wedding. Just really well done and solemn writing from Parrish.

Also very much worth noting here was the ESPN video segment "Lauren Hill: One More Game." Filmed leading up to and including her first collegiate basketball game, moved up by the NCAA so she could play prior to dying of cancer, it's a great story told well.

Atul Gawande essays - on Ebola & end-of-life care

Noted surgeon and author Atul Gawande had two solid pieces of writing publish recently in The New Yorker and New York Times, respectively.

I've read three of Gawande's books and posted on his writing a number of times and was particularly interested to see the Times piece as noted a new book Gawande has coming out. "The Best Possible Day" is excerpted from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and a fascinating personal story of an end-of-life care approach that came out of taking the time to understand what a patient really wants.

The other recent piece to note here was "The Ebola Epidemic is Stoppable" out of The New Yorker that Gawande is a staff writer for and it's a very measured telling of how the dangerous disease not easily transmitted from person to person.

Writing on fascinating people - by Mooney & Weil

Two recent stories on fascinating people included one on a female explorer and one on a woman's struggle with her sexuality.

For the New York Times, Elizabeth Weil wrote "The Woman Who Walked 10,000 Miles (No Exaggeration) in Three Years" on Sarah Marquis and Michael Mooney for D Magazine wrote "A Changed Woman" on Amanda Barbour. Both stories are remarkable tales of people with their own individual struggles and each piece really well-written.

Great writing on outdoor danger / adventure - by Sundeen, Murphy & Sanchez

Three really excellent recent pieces of writing that seemed to group together for me were on travel deep into Mexico, attending a wilderness survival course and calamitous flooding in Colorado last year.

For the New York Times, Mark Sundeen wrote "Ignoring the Warnings for a Honeymoon in Mexico" and it's a short piece that pulls the reader in with the question of what's going to happen next. Really well written from Sundeen and brings to mind for me his 2012 feature "Why Noah Went to the Woods" for Outside Magazine.

Another interesting recent short piece was "I Will Survive: Going Wild at the Bear Grylls Survival Academy" by Austin Murphy for the Sports Illustrated website and a great recent lengthy feature was from Robert Sanchez with "The Rising" for 5280 Magazine. Sanchez wrote of the September 2013 cataclysmic flooding of the Big Thompson River near Loveland, CO and it's a great tale of danger and heroism. Seeing the piece in the Denver-based 5280 brought to mind for me the excellent essay for 5280 "Yesterday's News" by J.R. Moehringer about starting out as a writer at the Mountain News.

Writing on careers - by Horwitz, Woolever, Hoffman, Cashnocha & Yeh

There's been a few interesting pieces of writing I've come across over the past month that dealt with the subject of careers & work, each piece doing so in a very distinct way.

On writing as a career, there was the fascinating New York Times opinion piece "I Was a Digital Best Seller!" by Tony Horwitz a month ago. In it, the author wrote of his experience in online publishing and how the exciting new digital world of the writer not all he dreamed of.

Also a few weeks ago was "From Botanical Gardens Intern to Anthony Bourdain’s Assistant" for The Billfold. Written by Laurie Woolever, it's a remarkable first-person walk through Woolever's career and all its twists, turns, ups and downs.

The third piece to note here isn't traditional writing, but rather a slideshow about the new book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age from LinkedIn Founder and CEO Reid Hoffman and his co-authors Ben Cashnocha and Chris Yeh. One idea from the book that's covered in the slides is how employers and employees should focus on a mutually beneficial relationship based on what each gets from working together and the knowledge that the working relationship won't continue if no longer mutually beneficial to both parties. This approach of "we're both benefiting for now" is in opposition to the idea of employees feeling a company owes them jobs or companies viewing an employee as disloyal if they leave for another job.

Again, each of these pieces very different than the other two, but there's fascinating stuff in all three.

One thing that reading these makes me think of is in relation to my own career I feel good having this blog and three books compiled from it as a body of work. I'd rather have my career progress and work opportunities come from what I've done rather than what I say I can do and the blog is as much if not more of a representation of what I've done than my education or actual work experience.

Great feature stories by Kleinfeld, McCrummen & Baron

Three great recent pieces of feature writing included a story of heroism, one of mental illness and one of a near disasterous situation.

For the New York Times was the story of heroism with "Baptism by Fire" by N.R. Kleinfeld. Just a captivating piece on a rookie New York City firefighter and him in a rarely encountered situation. The story of mental illness was by Stephanie McCrummen for the Washington Post who wrote the incredibly sad "Behind the yellow door, a man’s mental illness worsens" and for GQ, Zach Baron wrote "Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic," a piece that stood out with it's depiction of an armed standoff between the government and U.S. citizens that could have gone horribly horribly wrong.

Very different topics to be sure, but great writing in each piece.

Great writing by Price, Sandomir & Jacobsen

Three pieces of recent great writing I hadn't previously posted on were from Sports Illustrated, the New York Times and Outside Magazine.

For SI was "As Reds' Chapman recovers, dangers of line drives hit close to home" by S.L. Price and reminiscent of the excellent 2009 book Heart of the Game by Price, which I wrote about here.

The Times story was "A Story of Perseverance" by Richard Sandomir on ESPN SportsCenter Anchor Stuart Scott and his battle with cancer and the feature for Outside was "The Gourmet Invasivore's Dilemma" by Rowan Jacobsen on the havoc wreaked by invasive species and one chef's small-scale approach towards the problem.

"Young Money" by Kevin Roose

Young Money by Kevin Roose was an interesting and very fast read about junior investment bankers working on Wall Street. The book chronicled under assumed names the early in career lives of eight different people and, while the approach seemed to diminish the amount of narrative throughout, there were fascinating stories told of these workers at heavyweight financial firms like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.

The jobs embarked on were difficult to get with the top Wall Street firms recruiting top-level students from elite colleges and most of the positions two-year programs that people work as analysts and those wanting to stay in banking either getting hired as an associate at that firm or take what's viewed as the ideal next step in investment banking with a job at a leading hedge fund or private equity firm. Roose details in the book how these positions are also pitched and viewed by many as a sort of way-station stop, with many people spending the two years in investment banking and then making a decision to either remain in the field or leave, with now more than ever there being opportunities to take the experience and move into technology start-ups.

In terms of the two-year investment banking analyst roles, Roose notes how annual salaries out of college typically around $70K, with a bonus of anywhere from $20-70K on top of that. He also covers how as a junior analyst, you're on call for whatever associates or executives want you to do for oftentimes 100 hour work weeks with the deliverable typically large Excel spreadsheet (incredibly to me as it seems there would be a better tool to use) models about company valuations and what might happen if a particular mergers or acquisition were to occur through that particular investment bank.

It's an interesting book and one thing I found noteworthy was the categorization of investment banking and finance as falling under the category of work not necessarily creating anything. Not that everyone in a position to get a fulfilling job where they create, but it's an interesting thing to think about. Related to this, I found compelling in the book mention of 2012 Yale graduate and writer Marina Keegan and an essay she wrote for the campus news magazine about working in investment banking, with her then adapting the essay into "The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting" for the New York Times website. Roose at the end of the epilogue dedicates his book to the memory of Keegan, who died in a car accident a week after graduating Yale and had her essay "The Opposite of Loneliness" for the Yale Daily News distributed at commencement.

Writing I liked - with pieces by Moallem, Schur and Hampikian

Three excellent pieces of non-sports writing from the past few weeks which I haven't posted on yet included pieces from Grantland and the New York Times.

For Grantland, Michael Schur wrote "A Particular Kind of Genius: Remembering Harold Ramis" on the Hollywood actor, writer and director and there were two Times pieces I found of note including a Jon Moallem written feature "A Journey to the Center of the World" on Jacques-André Istel and the strange town of Felicity, Arizona he built near Yuma.

The other piece of really good writing from the Times was the op-ed column "When may I shoot a student?" by Greg Hampikian on the state of Idaho considering a bill that would allow guns on college and university campuses.

In-depth newspaper features - on Christopher Dorner, a homeless child in NYC & a man overboard

There were three recent in-depth newspaper features that stood out to me as particularly excellent.

Two of them were for the New York Times with "Invisible Child" by Andrea Elliott on Dasani Coates, an 11-year-old in New York City and "A Speck in the Sea" by Paul Tough. Written about John Aldridge who fell off a lobster boat into the Atlantic, it was also interesting to me that the piece written by Tough who wrote the book How Children Succeed which I read earlier this year.

The L.A. Times feature was "The Manhunt for Christopher Dorner" and written by Christopher Goffard. What struck me from the story was both the scope of the LAPD protection of people named by Dorner as targets and multiple instances of innocent people being injured by police during the manhunt. Really great detail in the story and credited for the reporting along with Goffard were Joel Rubin, Louis Sahagun, Kurt Streeter and Phil Willon.

Writing on Edward Snowden - by Barton Gellman & the NYT Editorial Board

Two interesting pieces of late on NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden (who was also profiled along with Glenn Greenwald in an excellent Rolling Stone feature) were "Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished" by Barton Gellman for the Washington Post and a New York Times Editorial Board opinion "Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower" arguing for the U.S. Government to reduce charges against Snowden.