Bethlehem Shoals (The Good Men Project): Yesterday, the NBA had the good sense to schedule Knicks-Heat—a marquee game even before the Carmelo Anthony trade that everyone saw coming, and regardless of the Knicks’ recent slide—at the same time as the Oscars. In years previous, this would have been an all-too-gendered line in the sand: dudes on one side, chicks on the other. But in our enlightened era, a real man’s man can, without embarrassment,snark away at the Oscars, even going so far as to take in some of the red carpet coverage. There’s a good chance your favorite comedian, sports pundit, or rapper will be doing so, if not on Twitter, then certainly the morning after.
We live in magical days, where stereotypes, false binaries, and prejudice are falling away by the second. Life is a spectrum. Lots of my best friends have Oprah posters. Everybody wants it all, and that’s not a bad thing. Even if Carmelo Anthony hadn’t been dealt to the Knicks, making Sunday’s matchup with Miami’s Big Three into must-watch basketball, the NBA still would appear to have made a huge blunder. When it makes less sense than ever to schedule sports against “ladies’ programming” like the Oscars, ESPN did exactly that. Considering the relatively worldly, or at least ADD-riddled, audience that pro basketball tends to draw, they might simply be running behind the times.
-eddie
February 28, 2011
The Best of Brief Reads: The Academy Awards
To up the intensity of each (already spectacular) story, we recommend listening to The Social Network's Oscar-winning score while reading. Or if you prefer something a little lighter, why not tune into Randy Newman's Oscar-winning song "We Belong Together."
Post your favorite Oscar Brief Reads in the comments section.
The Show:
@WashingtonPost The kids were all right, and all that.
The Stutterer (and best picture winner):
@Slate The King's Speech raises more questions about stuttering than it answers
Can Pixar do satire?
@TheOnion I've got you dumb motherfuckers eating right out of my hand.
The Winklevi:
@WashingtonPost 'Social Network' twins played by unrelated men. The solution? Use only one face.
Climber cuts off own arm to save his life / Rick Reilly on Aron Ralston (from 2003):
@SI_24Seven Extreme Measures
Did you know the police offer who trains Mickey in the fighter was playing himself?
@BostonGlobe It's the role of his life
The Coen Bros.:
@GuardianNews The cartographers of cinema
The Black Swan:
@NYTimes To some, 'Black Swan' is a cautionary tale
A visual brief read on the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job:
@ProPublica Welcome to CDO World
The After-Party:
@WashingtonPost Inside the after party
Thanks for reading! We hope you all won your Oscar pools.
Post your favorite Oscar Brief Reads in the comments section.
The Show:
@WashingtonPost The kids were all right, and all that.
The Stutterer (and best picture winner):
@Slate The King's Speech raises more questions about stuttering than it answers
Can Pixar do satire?
@TheOnion I've got you dumb motherfuckers eating right out of my hand.
The Winklevi:
@WashingtonPost 'Social Network' twins played by unrelated men. The solution? Use only one face.
Climber cuts off own arm to save his life / Rick Reilly on Aron Ralston (from 2003):
@SI_24Seven Extreme Measures
Did you know the police offer who trains Mickey in the fighter was playing himself?
@BostonGlobe It's the role of his life
The Coen Bros.:
@GuardianNews The cartographers of cinema
The Black Swan:
@NYTimes To some, 'Black Swan' is a cautionary tale
A visual brief read on the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job:
@ProPublica Welcome to CDO World
The After-Party:
@WashingtonPost Inside the after party
Thanks for reading! We hope you all won your Oscar pools.
-matt
February 22, 2011
Super Bowl Losers and its T-Shirts
Stephen J. Dubner (The New York Times): The Pittsburgh Steelers played in this year’s Super Bowl, but did not win it. Which means that, sitting in a warehouse somewhere, are lots of preprinted “Pittsburgh Steelers 2011 Super Bowl Champion” t-shirts. Ever wonder what happens to them?
-eddie
-eddie
February 17, 2011
'My Puny Human Brain'
Ken Jennings (Slate): When I was selected as one of the two human players to be pitted against IBM's "Watson" supercomputer in a special man-vs.-machine Jeopardy! exhibition match, I felt honored, even heroic. I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines—which, if Hollywood is to be believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York's Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn't the hero at all. I was the villain.
-eddie
-eddie
February 15, 2011
A record for love
Colleen Mastony (Chicago Tribune): The year was 1927. The setting was rural Nebraska, on the eve of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. She was 14 years old, a little shy and "too young to date," she recalls. He was 19, an outgoing, blue-eyed farm boy who made his living picking corn by hand.
"We met on the dance floor," he remembers, then turns to her for confirmation. "Wasn't it at a dance?"
Yes, she nods and smiles.
They married in 1930, just five days after she turned 17. "A neighbor told Grandma, 'That ain't gonna last,'" she says.
-eddie
"We met on the dance floor," he remembers, then turns to her for confirmation. "Wasn't it at a dance?"
Yes, she nods and smiles.
They married in 1930, just five days after she turned 17. "A neighbor told Grandma, 'That ain't gonna last,'" she says.
-eddie
An orphan and his owl
Lane DeGregory (St. Petersburg Times): LARGO — When he got to work that Saturday morning, Joel Quattlebaum did what he always does: walked straight to the refrigerator and took out a frozen mouse.
He put it on a paper towel to defrost. Dinner for JR.
Then he headed out back to talk to the owl.
Quattlebaum, 20, is the only paid employee at George C. McGough Nature Park in Largo. He oversees the 34 acres along the Intracoastal Waterway, makes sure the pier is sturdy and the trails are clear.
But his favorite part of the job is JR.
The great horned owl has lived in a cage behind the nature center for more than a decade. He has enthralled countless students while tethered to Quattlebaum's arm. Everyone who comes to the park visits JR.
But the only person who handles him is Quattlebaum, who has cared for JR for seven years.
He calls the bird "Kiddo" and "my partner in crime." He tells him about his troubles, takes him on walks. In that orphaned owl, he sees some of himself.
That Saturday in January, Quattlebaum was going to tell JR about the Lightning tickets. He couldn't wait to take his new girlfriend to the hockey game.
But when he opened the back door, he gasped. Someone had cut a huge hole in the owl cage.
JR was gone.
-eddie
February 12, 2011
Rage Against the Machine
Chris Jones (Esquire): Ken Jennings — the legendary contestant who won seventy-four consecutive games of Jeopardy! in 2004 — is sitting on a bench in Seattle, watching his kids play at the park. He's also running down the reasons why Watson, the IBM artificial-intelligence machine that will one day kill us all, should beat him at the game he once owned.
Funnily enough, they're a lot of the same reasons why Jennings was so good at it. IBM's engineers first began toying with the idea of creating a Jeopardy! supercontestant while they watched Jennings on his run. Like the Watson of their dreams, Jennings seemed purpose-built to win the game.
In a lot of ways, he was.
Weingarten
Chris Jones (Esquire/Son of Bold Venture):
1. You’ve won two Pulitzer prizes for stories that might seem, on the surface, very different. But both of them, in some way, are about inattention, about carelessness. Was that a conscious choice of yours—are you particularly struck by our modern rush?
Specifically, each of these pieces was occasioned by an event. In the first case, at rush hour, I watched commuters ignore a talented street musician playing Beethoven on a keyboard outside a Metro station. It occurred to me that Beethoven himself probably wouldn’t have turned a head, either. In the second case, a baby died in a car in suburban Washington. There, I had to do the story because I had an emotional connection too strong to squander. See below.
-eddie
1. You’ve won two Pulitzer prizes for stories that might seem, on the surface, very different. But both of them, in some way, are about inattention, about carelessness. Was that a conscious choice of yours—are you particularly struck by our modern rush?
It’s an interesting observation, but no, it was not a conscious choice. I don’t tend to think in terms of themes. Mostly, I’m looking for the potential for surprise: Will this story defy people’s expectations, cause them to think more deeply about their assumptions?
Yes, in fact, we will walk blindly past incomparable beauty. A good, loving parent could negligently kill his child.
-eddie
February 9, 2011
The Baby Bird
The Rumpus (Dear Sugar column): Dear WTF,
My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn’t want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat. I hated having to rub my grandfather’s cock, but there was nothing I could do. I had to do it. My grandfather babysat my older sister and me a couple times a week in that era of my life and most of the days that I was trapped in his house with him he would pull his already-getting-hard penis out of his pants and say come here and that was that.
-eddie
February 7, 2011
Most Interesting Man
Nick Paumgarten (The New Yorker): The most interesting thing about the man who plays the Most Interesting Man in the World, in those TV ads for Dos Equis beer, is that he is interesting, too, perhaps even superlatively so. His name is Jonathan Goldsmith. He’s the one who says, in a Spanishy accent, at the end of each spot, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis.” What makes his Most Interesting Man character interesting, besides a preference for spirits, is other traits invented for him by copywriters: At museums, he’s allowed to touch the art. . . . His blood smells like cologne. . . . Sharks have a week dedicated to him. . . . He once had an awkward moment, just to see how it feels. . . . The police often question him, just because they find him interesting. These lines are recited gravely by the narrator of “Frontline” over faux-grainy clips of our Man cliff-diving in Acapulco, or splashing down in a space capsule, or lying in a hospital bed stitching up a wound on his own shoulder while surgeons and nurses stand around idly, chuckling at his jokes.
Goldsmith is not this man. Still, he has more in common with him than you do.
-eddie
Goldsmith is not this man. Still, he has more in common with him than you do.
-eddie
February 6, 2011
The Best of Brief Reads: Super Bowl
Whether you wave a Terrible Towel or wear a Cheesehead (or a Troy Polamalu wig and a bushy beard), Brief Reads has the best short stories about the Super Bowl for you. Post your favorites in the comments section. Enjoy!
The Hosts:
@NYTimes Welcome to Jerry's World
The Columnist:
@StarLedger The Star-Ledger's Jerry Izenberg is one of three active sports writers to cover every Super Bowl.
The Coach from Pittsburgh:
@NYTimes Packers’ Coach Has Fans in a Small Slice of Steelertown
The Governors' Bet:
@NewYorker Wager
The Terrible Towel:
@UStClairPatch Steeler Nation Welcomes New Arrivals
The Cheeseheads:
@ESPN All that, with cheese on top
More Cheese:
@NPR The 'All Songs' Guide To Embarrassing Green Bay Packers Novelty Songs
The Vault:
@SI_24Seven Packers win first ever Super Bowl (1/23/1967)
Thanks for reading!
@Briefread's prediction: Brett Favre will be mentioned during the broadcast at least 3 times, there will be at least one Lambeau Leap during the game and the Gatorade color dumped on the winning coach will be orange.
-matt
February 4, 2011
The Brief Reads of Dan Jenkins
This is our monthly series of briefreads written by some of the most respected bylines to date. It’s a look at how these reporters got to where they are now — at national magazines, writing novels, winning major awards — because they mastered great stories on deadline. We ask: Can you see the evolution of a journalist?
• • •
On the brink of the Super Bowl remember Dan Jenkins: A foremost football and golf reporter who started his career at the Fort Worth Press. Still a high school student, then sports editor Blackie Sherrod advised him, “Don’t write a morning lead for an afternoon paper, dumb ass." Sixty years later, Jenkins’ leads appear in vintage magazines, novels and defunct newspapers — he's still remembered. Because you can’t forget classic stories like “The Sweet Life Of Swinging Joe.”
We scoured the archives for stories about football that helped Jenkins define how to write the game:
“The Royal Treatment,” Fort Worth Press, Oct. 11, 1958
Those plans of substituting Wayland’s College of Women for Oklahoma on the University of Texas football schedule were abruptly canceled here today by a Longhorn team that wouldn’t accept defeat. . .
“A Look At A Footballer,” Fort Worth Press, 1960
The college football player to most people is a distant object to be alternately cheered, booed, praised, criticized and inevitably forgotten. He is at least this many things: (Pg. 133/search “Jenkins”)
“Army’s Future Is Still Ahead,” Sports Illustrated, Dec. 2, 1963
Alarmists have hinted that, should Coach Paul Dietzell lose again to Navy, he is through at West Point.
“Texas By An Eyelash,” Sports Illustrated, Dec. 15, 1969
All week long in Texas the people had said the Hogs ain't nuthin' but groceries and that on Saturday, in the thundering zoo of Fayetteville, the No. I Longhorns would eat—to quote the most horrendous pun ever thought of by some Lone Star wit—"Hog meat with Worster-Speyrer sauce."
“Dallas Feels The Steeler Crunch,” Sports Illustrated, Jan. 26, 1976
For all of those gaudy things that happened throughout the afternoon, memories of the 1976 Super Bowl will keep going back to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Lynn Swann climbing into the air like the boy in the Indian rope trick, and coming down with the football.
• • •
Post your favorite Dan Jenkins briefreads or tweet us @briefreads. Who else's career should we look back at? (Send us the journalist and the briefreads that made the reporter.)
-eddie
• • •
On the brink of the Super Bowl remember Dan Jenkins: A foremost football and golf reporter who started his career at the Fort Worth Press. Still a high school student, then sports editor Blackie Sherrod advised him, “Don’t write a morning lead for an afternoon paper, dumb ass." Sixty years later, Jenkins’ leads appear in vintage magazines, novels and defunct newspapers — he's still remembered. Because you can’t forget classic stories like “The Sweet Life Of Swinging Joe.”
We scoured the archives for stories about football that helped Jenkins define how to write the game:
“The Royal Treatment,” Fort Worth Press, Oct. 11, 1958
Those plans of substituting Wayland’s College of Women for Oklahoma on the University of Texas football schedule were abruptly canceled here today by a Longhorn team that wouldn’t accept defeat. . .
“A Look At A Footballer,” Fort Worth Press, 1960
The college football player to most people is a distant object to be alternately cheered, booed, praised, criticized and inevitably forgotten. He is at least this many things: (Pg. 133/search “Jenkins”)
“Army’s Future Is Still Ahead,” Sports Illustrated, Dec. 2, 1963
Alarmists have hinted that, should Coach Paul Dietzell lose again to Navy, he is through at West Point.
“Texas By An Eyelash,” Sports Illustrated, Dec. 15, 1969
All week long in Texas the people had said the Hogs ain't nuthin' but groceries and that on Saturday, in the thundering zoo of Fayetteville, the No. I Longhorns would eat—to quote the most horrendous pun ever thought of by some Lone Star wit—"Hog meat with Worster-Speyrer sauce."
“Dallas Feels The Steeler Crunch,” Sports Illustrated, Jan. 26, 1976
For all of those gaudy things that happened throughout the afternoon, memories of the 1976 Super Bowl will keep going back to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Lynn Swann climbing into the air like the boy in the Indian rope trick, and coming down with the football.
• • •
Post your favorite Dan Jenkins briefreads or tweet us @briefreads. Who else's career should we look back at? (Send us the journalist and the briefreads that made the reporter.)
-eddie
February 2, 2011
Best of Brief Reads: Egypt
The best and the briefest: 1 must-read and 7 other great articles on Egypt. All features can be read in 12 min. or less. Suggest other stories in the comments section.
The Must-Read:
1. @NYTimes: The future of the Arab world, perched between revolt and the contempt of a crumbling order, was fought for in the streets of downtown Cairo on Wednesday.
The Explainer:
2. @MotherJones: What's Happening in Egypt? Explained. (post can be divided into 9 separate, briefer days...and counting)
The Narratives:
3. @LATimes: At Cairo bakery, protest is a luxury; bread is not
4. @LATimes: Nobel Prize laureate, enduring tear gas and riot police, joins Egyptian protesters
5. @NYTimes: For Americans stranged in Egypt, no quick exits
The Columnist:
6. @NickKristof: Dispatches from Nick Kristof's "Report from Cairo" blog. And also a superb Op/Ed column called "Watching Thugs with Razors and Clubs at Tahir Sq."
The Archive:
7. @Jerusalem_Post: In June, the Jerusalem Post wondered what will happen to Egypt "After Murbarak"
The Soooo-Slate Story:
8. @Slate: Do Egyptians play baseball? And other questions loosely related to the protests.
-matt
The Must-Read:
1. @NYTimes: The future of the Arab world, perched between revolt and the contempt of a crumbling order, was fought for in the streets of downtown Cairo on Wednesday.
The Explainer:
2. @MotherJones: What's Happening in Egypt? Explained. (post can be divided into 9 separate, briefer days...and counting)
The Narratives:
3. @LATimes: At Cairo bakery, protest is a luxury; bread is not
4. @LATimes: Nobel Prize laureate, enduring tear gas and riot police, joins Egyptian protesters
5. @NYTimes: For Americans stranged in Egypt, no quick exits
The Columnist:
6. @NickKristof: Dispatches from Nick Kristof's "Report from Cairo" blog. And also a superb Op/Ed column called "Watching Thugs with Razors and Clubs at Tahir Sq."
The Archive:
7. @Jerusalem_Post: In June, the Jerusalem Post wondered what will happen to Egypt "After Murbarak"
The Soooo-Slate Story:
8. @Slate: Do Egyptians play baseball? And other questions loosely related to the protests.
-matt
February 1, 2011
Stuck in snow
Michael S. Rosenwald (Washington Post): At 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, I left my house in Germantown to pick up our dog at doggy day care. Five hours and 10 minutes later, we're sitting, Andy and me, in the parking lot of a sold-out hotel, unable to get back home. We're five miles away.
Andy stares out the window, a hopeless little white Schnoodle keeping his hopeless father company in a Toyota minivan. We watch the lights in the hotel rooms flicker off. I shut off my car lights, tilt the seat back, preparing for a slumber that never comes.
-eddie
Andy stares out the window, a hopeless little white Schnoodle keeping his hopeless father company in a Toyota minivan. We watch the lights in the hotel rooms flicker off. I shut off my car lights, tilt the seat back, preparing for a slumber that never comes.
-eddie