I’m a few pages from the end of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, a study of Thatcher-era football hooliganism that doubles as a meditation on crowd dynamics. It’s perhaps best known for its opening set-piece, in which the author tags along with a bunch of Manchester United supporters on a depraved trip to Turin. But […]
Tags:Among the Thugs·Bill Buford·books·psychology·racism·soccer·sports·writing
It’s fair to say this has been a momentous week for Willie Gault, the former Chicago Bears wideout who was also a track star of great renown. Things started off great when police in Los Angeles found his stolen Super Bowl ring, but then took a turn for the worse—the much, much worse—after news emerged […]
Tags:crime·football·Julius Caesar·Scientology·Sports Illustrated·Willie Gault·writing
I was reluctant to read my first Christopher Hitchens work, a thin volume that bore the decidedly loaded title The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. I figured the flap copy told me all I needed to know about the author’s point of view, and that he’d written the polemic more as an […]
Tags:books·Christopher Hitchens·Mother Teresa·politics·religion·writing
The deeper I get into my latest book project—just crossed the 30,000-word mark—the more I keep digging into memories of my formative reading experiences. Doing so goes a long way toward helping me understand why I’m attracted to certain stories, and that self-awareness helps me separate the narrative wheat from the narrative chaff. Loyal followers […]
Tags:defectors·East Germany·Jens-Peter Brendt·sports·Sports Illustrated·swimming·writing
Knocking back a few pints with fellow scribe Doug Merlino last night, the conversation inevitably turned to sports—or, more specifically, the late 1980s heyday of Sports Illustrated, the magazine that taught us both to love the art of storytelling. We both remembered that this vintage era of SI featured a ginormous number of “as told […]
Tags:drugs·football·sports·Sports Illustrated·steroids·Tommy Chaikin·writing
At the risk of alarming folks who have a vested interest in my creative progress, I must confess that the book-writing process is proceeding at a snail’s pace. In a wildly optimistic moment last month, I vowed to have two entire chapters done by Labor Day; now my best-case scenario is that I’ll have a […]
Back in 2009, I meditated upon the question of whether or not wartime propaganda leaflets are actually effective at weakening an enemy’s resolve or ability to flight. The main takeaway was that design really mattered, as only certain kinds of leaflets—those with clear messages that eschewed graphic imagery—made a real impact on recipients. Ever since […]
Coming off a hugely frustrating weekend of writing, in which I ended up deleting hundreds upon hundreds of words that seemed cold and lifeless upon the screen. After much thought and a few of these, I figured out a big part of my problem: In an effort to make the story more vivid, I was […]
Tags:books·crime·drugs·Killing Pablo·Mark Bowden·Pablo Escobar·writing
As I try and focus on the painful act of book-writing, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the unwritten rules of non-fiction‐or, rather, the fact that those rules seem to vary by creator. While I spend time agonizing over which version of a remembered quote to use, other writers seem to have no […]
Moving from Atlah to Queens has been an arduous process, but the act of sifting through one’s detritus has not been without its small pleasures. I’ve had occasion to stumble upon various old magazines that I kept around for one reason or another, and flipping through their pages has often reminded me of why I […]
Tags:Haruki Murakami·magazines·Stephen King·The Paris Review·writing
So pretty momentous day here ’round Microkhan’s new-ish Queens headquarters: after many weeks of inventing excuses to procrastinate, I’m finally starting to write my next book. It’s due in April, so I reckon I have just enough time to craft the tale and fill in the remaining research gaps. But right now the endeavor seems […]
Tags:C.L. Smooth·hip-hop·Jennifer Lopez·music·Pete Rock·The Next Book·writing
In studying various classic works of non-fiction, I’ve noticed that many do an excellent job of setting up a character’s epiphany. This is no mean feat, as it is quite easy to make those sudden revelations come off as artificial. The key is to make us understand the logical trail that led someone to realize […]
Tags:Barbara Demick·books·gadgets·North Korea·Nothing to Envy·writing
I’m just now getting cranking on a sports-related project—my first crack at writing about the athletic games that adults play since I covered the Nagano Olympics as a mere cub. To get into the right mindset for the challenge, I’ve been looking up the old Sports Illustrated stories that influenced me so deeply as young’un. […]
I’m assuming this news will break few hearts, but Bad Movie Friday is gonna go on hiatus for a while. I just got a little sick of sifting through the mountains of cinematic dreck each week; it’s pretty depressing to realize that Invasion U.S.A. is actually the cream of the B-grade action crop. And so […]
Tags:movies·Predator·The Ponchos·writing
I wasn’t going to start plugging my next major project ’til next week, as it won’t be going live ’til Wednesday the 26th. But this piece sort of blew our cover, plus a pending guest shot over at Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ blog threatens to complicate matters, so I’ve decided to end the week with a not-so-hard […]
Tags:Chicago·jazz·music·Shanghai·Teddy Weatherford·The Atavist·writing
I’ve recently taken a lot of comfort from this Paris Review Q&A with John McPhee, in which the non-fiction master confesses that his writing remains a day-to-day struggle. (Celebrities—just like us!) But while most of the interview is dedicated to the creative process and the occasional madness it engenders, there is also this dead-on snippet […]
Tags:Cameroon·geology·John McPhee·language·philosophy·pidgin·writing
I’ve been dealing with some mega writer’s block these past few days, which has got me wondering whether it’s possible for someone to spontaneously lose their most well-developed skills. That’s obviously true in the athletic realm, where the dreaded Steve Blass Disease has ended more than a few baseball careers. The problem with such vexed […]
Tags:baseball·creativity·neuroscience·sports·Steve Blass·writing
It’s not very often that I can boast of a warm personal connection to a recently deceased celebrity, so please let me take a moment to vouch for the key role that Sir Frank Kermode played in my development as a writer. No, I never had the privilege of studying under the lit-crit master. And […]
Tags:music·Richard Kermode·Santana·Sir Frank Kermode·writing
An associate of ours recently told us that John McPhee once stated that he lives in constant fear of being outed as a fraud. Since we share this uniquely writerly anxiety, we’ve been searching high and low for the exact quote in which one of non-fiction’s true masters reveals himself to be a mere mortal. […]
Tags:Atlantic City·Boardwalk Empire·John McPhee·New Jersey·urban decay·writing
Look, we’re as excited as the next khan about the forthcoming FIFA World Cup—if Paraguay wins it all, we stand to make a pretty penny. But our enthusiasm for soccer’s top tournament pales in comparison to the love we feel for the Kabaddi World Cup 2010, currently taking place in Punjab, India. Longtime readers already […]
Mere hours to go ’til the Wired deadline, and we’re scrambling. Really scrambling. Haven’t cut it this close in ages, due to the sheer complexity of the material (which is heavy on neuroscience, psychology, and junkie horror stories). More Microkhan’ing as soon as we’re able; in the meantime, watch the above and keep the ailing […]
Tags:Gang Starr·Guru·hip-hop·music·writing
Sad to report we’re struggling mightily with our current Wired opus. Can’t quite get the lede to sing, and we’re getting lost in the weeds on Section One—so much controversial history to pack into just a few hundred words. Plus we’ve got one last interview to nail down, without which this piece might never gel. […]
With your kind permission, we’d like to try something a little different with today’s installment of our occasional First Contact series: an account of a civilization’s initial experience with written language, rather than its introduction to an alien people. We initially planned on posting something about the development of the Hawaiian alphabet—we’ve long been fascinated […]
Deadline approaches on the piece that sent us out to East Africa. You know the drill—enjoy the Otis Redding as we commit our remaining mental bandwidth to the art of storytelling. More soon.
According to WordPress’s handy dashboard counter, the words you’re now reading constitute my 500th blog post. So what better time to temporarily drop the royal we and think aloud regarding what this whole blogging deal has taught us—and, perhaps more importantly, why we keep at it despite the ludicrously imbalanced labor-to-reward ratio. When I launched […]
Last night we started reading Harp of Burma, a book often touted as Japan’s post-World War II version of All Quiet on the Western Front. It provides a soldier’s eye view of Lieut. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi‘s ill-fated campaign in Burma, which ended up turning into one giant suicide mission as the war turned against the […]
Tags:chemical weapons·Haruki Murakami·Iran·Japan·Tokyo subway attacks·writing
