What I’ve Been Reading the Past 4 Months.

Some of the best long-form articles I’ve come across recently. SportsFeat is responsible for more sports stories making it into this iteration, and as ever, The New Yorker and NYTimes have a disproportionate amount of representation (because I’m a wannabe snob).

• Steve Jobs: The Beginning. I’m pretty torn up, like many others, about the loss of Jobs. He was a very complex guy and this article does a great job illuminating a lot of what made him so unique.
• The Hero No One Knew. Sad profile of Walter Payton post his Hall of Fame career.
• The Rick Perry Hustle. Larry McMurtry eviscerating and obliterating. Love it.
• Back of All Trades. Great profile of Baylor’s Robert Griffin III.
• The Day That Damned the Dodgers.
• The Fierce Intimacy of Tennis Rivalries.
• Coach Fitz’s Management Theory. Michael Lewis is apparently developing a story about Coach Fitz for the silver screen. I’d be there day 1.
• The Art of Winning an (Even More) Unfair Game. Follow-up to the enigmatic Billy Beane and Moneyball.
• Between the Seams. Bo Jackson’s baseball career and how we’ll never see another athlete like him.
• The Journalist and the Spies. Pakistan is the problem.
• What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?
• ?uestlove. 15-year retrospective on The Roots’ drummer and hip-hop historian.
• It’s the Economy, Dummkopf! Michael Lewis’ most famous piece of recent Disaster Travel Journalism, this about the scheisse-obsessed Germans.
• California or Bust. More Michael Lewis Disaster Travel Journalism. 
• Planning and Executing the Mission to Get Bin Laden. The New Yorker’s essential report on killing the world’s biggest supervillain.
• “The Iron” by Henry Rollins. Oldie but goodie. Come back to this every time I get on a health jag.
• Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Such a talented writer.
• How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet.
• Sheryl Sandberg and Male-Dominated Silicon Valley. Big, big fan of hers.

What I’ve Been Reading the Past 2 Months.

More great long-form articles I’ve come across recently.

• Paper Tigers
• US Support for Pakistan: A Long, Messy History
• Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg
• How Heavy Metal is Keeping Us Sane
• What Do You Think of The Rangers Now?
• Story of the Tokelau Teenagers Lost in the Ocean for 51 Days. Absolutely incredible what a human body can withstand.
• Bagging Bambi
• That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stronger
• Won’t Get Fooled Again
• Can Bill Simmons Win The Big One?
• Hashtags. Great non-techy coverage of one of the most important features on Twitter.
• Man with a Plan. Great profile on Andrew Luck. One of my only heroes that’s younger than me.
• Preet Bharara Takes on Wall Street Crime

What I’ve Been Reading the Past 2 Months.

I’m planning on keeping this type of post, where I list out some of the best long-form journalism I’ve encountered over the previous 2 months, rolling. This is what I posted 2 months ago. Here’s more:

• The Tallest Woman in the Room.
• How Carrots Became the New Junk Food.
• The Runaway General. I’m conflicted about MacChrystal. I think he’s a badass, but I also think he handled Pat Tillman’s death really scummily.
• Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs: Seeing God in Tsunamis and Everyday Events. I am fascinated by cognitive biases.
• The Stoner Arms Dealers.
• Hermes: Handbag Heritage Under Attack.
• Secret Fears of the Super-rich. Man, I want to have complete financial freedom but I have no desire to be so rich that it undermines a happy life.
• Video Games: The Addiction. Excellent auto-biographical piece about an addict who uses cocaine and GTA IV to feed his neuroses. 
• Microsoft’s Odd Couple.
• Woody Allen’s Movies: What I Learned Watching Every Single One.
• How Slavery Really Ended in America.
• Why You Should Care About Cricket. Hope to see this level of sports writing quality on Bill Simmons’ new site.
• Bad Nights in the NFL. Sad story about Darrent Williams’ death.
• When Alan Met Ayn: “Atlas Shrugged” and Our Tanked Economy. Alan Greenspan’s legacy is rightly starting to be tarnished.
• The Real Housewives of Wall Street.
• The Straight Dope. More hard-hitting realness from David Simon, a real American hero.
• Welcome to the Far-Eastern Conference. Marbury in China!
• How Two White Guys Wound Up in This Kendrick Perkins Family Photo. More awesome sports writing for people who don’t like sports.
• Unlocking the Mystery of Paris’ Most Secret Underground Society.
• Chinese Citizens on Tour in Europe.
• Cranking. Merlinn Mann getting to what really matters in life.
• Who is WikiLeaks Suspect Bradley Manning?
• Mad German Auteur, Now in 3D. I would seriously consider making Werner Herzog one of the three people in the world I’d invite to my dinner party.
• The Joy of Stats. Mark Cuban and the vanguard pulling hoops into the 21st century of sabermetrics.

What I’ve Been Reading the Past 2 Months.

Here are some of the best articles I’ve read recently:

• Taste for Makers.
• The Someone You’re Not. Heartbreaking story of a man falsely imprisoned for 30 years, and his newfound freedom.
• The New Virology and A Declaration of Cyber-War. Stuxnet and the scary future of virtual wars.
• North Korea’s Digital Underground.
• Is It Dunk and Done for Perry Jones?
• The Stock Market is for Suckers.
• The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. The Church of Scientology. Pulitzer-worthy reporting, in my opinion. Can’t even imagine the amount of fact-checking this required.
• The Riddle of Jimmy Carter.
• How ‘The Fridge’ Lost His Way.
• Barry Levine Tabloid Takedown. Interesting look into The National Enquirer.
• The Day the Movies Died.
• Can’t Be Tamed: A Manifesto. How to be a woman in a boy’s club. Fantastic writing.
• The Rude Warrior. The grey area in Mel Gibson’s recent travails.
• What Was He Thinking? On Jake Plummer’s post-NFL career. Dude is awesome.
• The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson.
• The Trouble With Liberty. 

Kindle + Instapaper = Win

The Kindle is one of my favorite gadgets ever. I was already a voracious reader but ever since I got the device about a year ago, my gaming, TV watching, and general internetting have been displaced even more by reading.

I’ve read several great books on the device, but I’ve also used it heavily in conjunction with Instapaper. With Instapaper I can save long-form articles and posts on the web, spit out several at a time into a Kindle-friendly .mobi file, and sit back for hours without having to deal with eye strain and incessant internet distractions.

Anyways, I thought it would be cool to completely cop an idea that I saw on another blog and start to curate a few articles and blog posts I’ve read recently that I’ve really liked.

• When Irish Eyes Are Crying. Michael Lewis’ investigation into the meltdown of the Irish banking industry. He’s been a harsh critic about what happened in the US but he absolutely holds no punches in describing the ego and stupidity that brought down Ireland’s economy.
• Glock: America’s Gun.
• No Objections. On the history of marriage and its changing definition.
• Separation Anxiety. Always-connected human beings and their mutable, ever-shifting identities.
• Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell are the Living Dead. Sad article about the lead singers of Sublime and Alice in Chains. Part 7 in a series about 90’s alternative music by AVClub.
• The Man Who Wouldn’t Die. Profile on Olympic Wrestler, bumpkin, Mormon, and overall total badass Rulon Gardner.
• The End of Men. Role-reversal in the American workplace.
• It Happens. The (not so) lurid history of athletes pooping themselves during competition.
• Bill Murray Is Ready To See You Now.
• The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Scary and hopefully not prophetic.
• Alexander Ovechkin, the Mad Russian.
• Revolt of the Elites.
• The Stock Market is for Suckers. Must-read if you invest and manage your own money.
• Tom Ford in Interview Magazine. Obscenely talented dude.
• Sabermetrician in Exile.
• Dealing with Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets. More of a Michael Moore figure than I’d originally thought - personally agree with a lot of his libertarian-leaning politics but I also think he’s a wanking self-aggrandizing freak.