What we read while assigning baseball allegiances to past assassins…
- It’s been an interesting stretch for magazine features, starting with Luke Dittrich’s Esquire piece — the title is too long to quote here — on the Joplin tornado. Also at Esquire, Tom Junod tackles Jon Stewart (in kind of the same way he tackled Roger Ailes, i.e. obliquely and not quite as effectively as you might like). Over at GQ, Michael Paterniti goes all second-person in a tale of survival surrounding the Japanese earthquake — which the Nieman Storyboard thought was worthy of some dissection.
- Excerpts from Roger Ebert’s upcoming memoir. One alludes to the feature Chris Jones penned on Ebert some months back. Jones was pretty happy with that one, if he may say so himself.
- Our weekly David Foster Wallace bullet: DFW (very politely) threatens an editor via fax. Also, just what is Jonathan Franzen trying to accuse DFW of here? Speaking of Franzen, here’s a reason to get very excited for a new season of television programming.
- In other TV news, Hulu picked its five favorite magazine articles about television, including this great oral history of The Dana Carvey Show.
- One thing Grantland does that we do like is the director’s cut series on old magazine profiles. Gay Talese’s on Joe DiMaggio is one of the best you’ll ever read.
- If we were to begin a series of old, esoteric interviews, this one from the Paris Review of Jorge Luis Borges would be a good starting point. Learn, among other things, what Borges’ favorite fabricated English word is. Unfortunately, while discussing the origin of character names, he does not bring up our resident sports revolutionary.
- Forget baseball; Stephen Marche on what hockey means to Canada.
- PTI, which Tim celebrated two years ago, reached its tenth anniversary.
- The ten most tweeted moments ever offer an interesting (and possibly depressing) look at what humans are engaged by.
