By Ross Wetzsteon Sport August 1985 Idols grow old like everybody else. Dick Young was once the patron saint, the most respected sportswriter in America, the one who changed all the rules, the guy who brought street smarts into the sports pages. He’s still the dean of...
By Adam Hochschild From Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son 1986 1939. WAR CLOUDS OVER EUROPE. Molotov and Ribbentrop shake hands to celebrate their pact. Germany prepares for the roundup of the Jews. From the American Dust Bowl, thousands of destitute farm...
By Ellen Willis From The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll 1980 Janis Joplin was born in 1943 and grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. She began singing in bars and coffeehouses, first locally, then in Austin, where she spent most of a year at the...
By Brad Darrach Life December 1987 Meryl Streep is gray with cold. In Ironweed, her new movie, she plays a ragged derelict who dies in a cheap hotel room, and for more than half an hour before the scene she has been hugging a huge bag of ice cubes in an agonizing...
By Allen Barra Inside Sports May 1985 It’s hard to think back on this story now without sadness. You hear so often about some running back who could have been the greatest. Well, Marcus really was the greatest, or at least he could have been. I’ve never seen...
By E. Jean Carroll Outside April/May 1981 There is a horse auction establishment on South MacArthur in Oklahoma City. It is a big white building with a dirt arena inside. Actually, there are two arenas, a large one where the horses are exercised and a smaller one that...
By James Wolcott Texas Review May 1982 Coffee and Coca-Cola, the crackling hiss of food on the fry, the ring of laughter in a bustling room—Diner, written and directed by Barry Levinson, is a bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker November 26, 1984 Stop Making Sense makes wonderful sense. A concert film by the New York new-wave rock band Talking Heads, it was shot during three performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in December, 1983, and the footage has...
By Richard Ben Cramer Rolling Stone March 1984 How was I out to lunch? Let me count the ways. I was new to magazines, never having written for a national publication, much less for ROLLING STONE. I was a newspaperman, just returned from the Middle East—a bit unsteady,...
By Richard Ben Cramer Esquire October 1985 You probably heard of the case, the young woman from Bozeman, Montana, who got kidnapped by Mountain Men. Her name was Kari Swenson. She was a world-class biathlete. Last July, as she was training, running a trail near the...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker November 17, 1986 For seven decades of romantic screwball comedies, sexy, smart, funny women have been waking up heroes who, through fear or shyness or a stuffy educational background, were denying their deepest impulses. The women...
By Bill Zehme Spy April 1987 I remember Lee as he himself—were he able to remember anything now, God rest his soul—would have wanted to be remembered. Of this I am certain. Why, it was just two years ago when we huddled together in our booth at the Russian Tea Room,...
