How One Of America’s Greatest Sportswriters Disappeared

By John Schulian Deadspin March 11, 2013 It was almost endearing how an ink-smudged, deadline-addicted newspaper editor of yore would squint through the smoke from his cigarette and ask a bright young man why the hell he wanted to write sports. An editor like that was...

Fighting and Drinking With the Rats at Yankee Stadium

By George Kimball From Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories 2010 There are things you learned about the old Yankee Stadium once it became your place of work that never would have occurred to you as a kid going to watch a game there. Making your way from the visiting to the...

Bow Down

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader I’ve never read Conversations with Wilder, the hell is wrong with me? Man, I need to correct that. I’m  grateful that I tuned in to Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing interview with Cameron Crowe, who put the book together, and has some...

Thin Mountain Air

By Pat Jordan Philadelphia Magazine April 1994 Durango, Colorado, is a cold mountain community 6,506 feet above sea level. It is known for its thin air, which can make residents light-headed, disoriented. It is surrounded by the La Platta mountain range. Built into...

Robert Penn Warren Finds His Place to Come To

By Steve Oney The Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine September 16, 1979 It was getting into the heart of the Vermont summer, and the air was still and heavy. Resting in a wicker chair on his front porch, Robert Penn Warren, sweat dripping from his sharp, freckled...

The Tools of his Trade

By David Maraniss From Run to Daylight! Foreword to the 2014 edition For two summers while I was researching the biography When Pride Still Mattered, I lived in New York. Day after day I would venture out to Sheepshead Bay, where Vince Lombardi was born and reared; or...

Once There was Elation

By Vince Lombardi with W.C. Heinz From Run to Daylight! 1964 3:15 A.M. I have been asleep for three hours and, suddenly, I am awake. I am wide awake, and that’s the trouble with this game. Just twelve hours ago I walked off that field, and we had beaten the Bears...

Bedtime Story

By Carlo Rotella From Playing in Time 2012 I was in a city far from home, working on a magazine story. I spent the day and evening going around asking questions, watching people do what they do, filling up a couple of pocket notebooks. Among other places, I visited...

Nightmare of the Iguana

By Helen Lawrenson Show 1964 Collected in Latins Are Still Lousy Lovers It would seem that John Huston has an obsessive to make movies the hard way. He picks the most difficult, inaccessible, uncomfortable, even dangerous, locations—where almost everyone in the...

The Untouchables

By Pauline Kael The New Yorker June 29, 1987 Chicago circa 1930—AI Capone’s capital of crime—looks so much better than New York City looks right now that local audiences for The Untouchables may feel somewhat chagrined. Chicago still has solid traces of Louis Sullivan...

My Life in a 36DD Bra, Or, The All-American Obsession

By Eve Babitz Ms. Magazine April 1976 When I was 15 years old, I bought and filled my first 36 DD bra. Since then, no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me in the first hour that he was a leg man. Tits! Why, he hadn’t even noticed! The tacit...