My relationship with the first-person voice gets a little deeper in the latest issue of Wired, which features my account of going full gonzo in the world of OnlyFans chat specialists. This is probably the most immersive assignment I’ve tackled since my 2010 foray into the culture and science of Alcoholics Anonymous; it also required […]
A few weeks ago, after a lengthy writing session, I switched my phone off Work mode and noticed that I had a voicemail from an unknown number with a Los Angeles area code. I’ve been noodling with a couple of long-term projects connected to the city of my birth, so I figured it was a […]
I’m generally against nostalgia, since I think it’s obvious charms can insidiously blot out our ability to live in the moment. But I’ll confess to being overwhelmed with sadness upon learning a few minutes ago that Sports Illustrated has essentially been swept into the dustbin of history. As I’ve discussed on this here site several […]
Tags:basketball·Gary McLain·journalism·magazines·sports·Sports Illustrated·writing
I used to resist the first-person voice in my stories at all costs, but no longer: I’ve come to accept that everything I write is at least partly about the personal doubts and fixations that keep me up at night, and there’s really no shame in being frank about that aspect of my work. And […]
Tags:art·creators·culture·tacos·TikTok·Ursus Magana·Wired·writing
Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach […]
The illustration above should give you some sense of how I spent my summer: Learning everything I possibly could about the current state of hibernation research, the unheralded key to getting our species to Mars and beyond. I did so in order to write this new Wired story, which came out on Thanksgiving morning. The […]
Tags:exhuastion·hibernation·Mars·mental health·philosophy·Wired·writing
I’ve been trying really hard to fall back in love with the English language, and this gargantuan compendium of racehorse lineages is really helping. There’s such a pleasing alchemy to the way the names evolve over the different generations, and then often end up with a thoroughbred whose moniker can be interpreted as having multiple […]
Tags:horse names·horse racing·Jack Gilbert·language·poetry·writing
In the name of getting better as a writer, I’ve been grappling with the aspects of the craft that I’m pretty terrible at. High up the list is final paragraphs—I just struggle so much with concocting a hefty parting thought that naturally connects to all that has come before. On the rare occasions I manage […]
Tags:Blank Check·Bob Fosse·Dorothy Stratten·endings·movies·narcissism·podcasts·Star 80·Teresa Carpenter·Village Voice·writing
When you pick through the work of accomplished nonfiction writers, you’ll usually find that they keep exploring the same general theme through multiple projects. In the case of Randall Sullivan, that theme can be neatly summarized as, “Charismatic individuals whose delusions of grandeur exert a strong gravitational pull on people in search of meaning.” It’s […]
Tags:adolescence·crime·FFF·gangs·Gizmondo·Los Angeles·Randall Sullivan·writing
I have a lot of good things planned for next week, including pieces about an obscure cinematic ending I’ve grown to love, a punk band with delusions of grandeur, and mouth-to-snout resuscitation. For the moment, though, I’ll confess to feeling out-of-sorts and thus not up to writing anything of particular value today: I’m pretty burnt […]
Tags:Stephen King·writing
It would honestly have been super-easy for me to blow off posting here today, mostly because—and I have the page-view statistics to support this contention—literally no one is reading what I write. But I didn’t want to betray the main reason I opened Microkhan back up, which is my desperate need to get back in […]
My Grand Unified Theory of Celebrity Profiles™ is that they should only be written when the subject is smack dab in the creative valley between their early peak and their first real comeback. Because that’s when a writer worth his-or-her salt is able to capture the character traits I find most interesting in accomplished artists: […]
Tags:addiction·celebrity profiles·drugs·Esquire·Gregg Allman·writing
I have a heavy writing day ahead: I’m having serious problems with a transition in my lede, and experience has taught me that ironing things out will take a good eight hours. So I’m shirking my Microkhan duties for the day and just tossing up some rare footage of the greatest squash player to ever […]
Tags:Jahangir Khan·Pakistan·sports·squash·writer's block·writing
Over the years here at Microkhan, we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink while paying homage to the Sports Illustrated stories that sparked our love for writing. Another one recently bubbled back up to the surface, mostly because it has one haunting line about the link between the physical and the psychological. The piece is […]
Tags:hair·horse racing·literature·psychology·Raymond Carver·sports·Sports Illustrated·William Nack·writing
There’s nothing particularly novel about the pickle in which I currently find myself. After gutting my way through some major projects this summer, with bewilderingly mixed results, I hit the proverbial wall around Labor Day. Daunted by the challenges of starting anything new, I instead chose to dither—you’d gasp if I told you how much […]
Tags:housekeeping·life·writing
As is always the case, I had to cut a slew of choice details out of my latest Wired story—the bizarre and alarming tale of a Washington State clinical-trials company that (and this is the vastest of understatements) didn’t play by the industry’s rules. In a lot of instances, material got left on the cutting-room […]
One reason I generally shy away from celebrity biographies is that they typically involve too much authorial sleight-of-hand. Though they’re written in the first-person, it’s always obvious that the actor or athlete or entrepreneur behind the “I” didn’t actually commit any words to paper. Even the savviest ghostwriter can’t help but leave their fingerprints all […]
Tags:books·celebrities·Col. Sanders·fried chicken·KFC·medicine·writing
I’m not entirely sure why I chose today to re-open this blog after five-plus years of silence. Lord knows there have been many times when I’ve toyed with the idea of popping back up on these august pages, but I could never quite work up the gumption to do so. This morning, though, I realized […]
Contrary to what you may have concluded after several months of silence, I have not, in fact, abandoned this long-cherished experiment in storytelling. I had to shift Microkhan to the back burner during a long summer spent spreading the gospel of The Skies Belong to Us, an endeavor that took me to the far corners […]
It’s a bit tough for me to believe that The Skies Belong to Us is finally out today. As dedicated followers of this project know, I’ve been working on the book for nearly four years, and there were many moments when its completion seemed an impossibility. The Grand Empress and the progeny can attest to […]
Tags:1970s·books·hijacking·skyjacking·The Skies Belong to Us·writing
Non-fiction storytelling is ridiculously time-consuming. My latest Wired story, which began life as a Microkhan post in January 2012, has been in the works for nearly a year. Granted, much of that time was wasted on tasks that didn’t pan out—I’m still waiting for a certain FOIA request to come through, for example, not to […]
If I so desired, I could probably make this blog all about firefighters-turned-arsonists and still have enough material to post at least once a week. The latest example comes from Opp, Alabama, where a firefighter allegedly set a mobile home ablaze for no discernible reason. The problem has been serious enough in years past for […]
I spent part of the long holiday weekend catching up with Evan Osnos’s account of Macau’s casino scene, a story gorgeously stuffed with details of nouveau riche excess. The mind reels at the thought that Macau’s high rollers require stools upon which to place their handbags, or that they rock $12,000 mobile phones. But the […]
Tags:China·Evan Osnos·gambling·Macau·poetry·The New Yorker·writing
I have exactly one week to go before my book deadline, so expect the next few posts to spin off my last-minute writing struggles. Over the past several months, I’ve occasionally shouted out great examples of single descriptive details that elevated non-fiction tales into the realm of high art. There was Barbara Demick’s retelling of […]
I recently spent the better part of a day trying to verify a single, rather insignificant fact for my next book—namely, whether an interviewee’s claim to have received a certain model of Omega watch in early 1978 jibed with Omega’s production schedule. (It did.) Having expended way too much mental bandwidth to accomplish that one […]
If all had gone according to plan, I would’ve handed in the complete first draft of my next book today. But, much to my discredit, I’m stil a whole chapter away from completion, plus a few more days’ worth of revisions. I can take some small comfort, at least, in knowing that I’m probably not […]
I’ve written before about how a single observation can elevate a work of non-fiction into the realm of true art. That is certainly the case with this New York Times dispatch from Whiteclay, Nebraska, a town infamous for providing alcohol to the neighboring Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It’s a solid piece of reporting, for sure, […]
Saddened to hear of the passing of John Christopher, creator of one of my formative sci-fi experiences: the harrowing Tripods Trilogy. As I discussed nearly two years ago, Christopher’s tale of alien overlords was far more than crackling adventure yarn; it also centered on a powerful metaphor for parenthood that I admire to this day. […]
Tags:books·comics·John Christopher·sci-fi·The Tripods Trilogy·writing
Just slammed today, with both reporting for my Wired column and preparations for tomorrow’s performance in Soho. Leaving you with some classic Europop and some salient thoughts on creativity from the great Sean Price: HipHopCanada: What starts your creative process? Sean Price: The beat. The beat’ll tell me what to do. And sometimes I have […]
I recently finished up Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, which is an absolute beast of a book. Aside from that great apocalyptic party scene in Bury St. Edmunds, there’s a terrific set piece in which Buford gets pummeled by Italian riot cops. I love the way he recounts his thought process while being savaged with […]
