“One of the best pieces I ever wrote in my life, which no one ever heard of,” as Gay Talese put it on his recent Longform podcast, has been republished on longform.org: “Mr. Bad News,” Talese’s 1966 Esquire profile of the Times obituary writer Alden Whitman. Talese says that, despite the fame of his larger-than-life portraits of larger-than-life people (Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio), he has often preferred less exalted subjects. You also get the sense that Talese derives a quiet thrill from exploring a great literary theme by way of the everyday: “While death obsessed Hemingway and diminished John Donne,” Talese writes, “it provides Alden Whitman with a five-day-a-week job that he likes very much…”
In the November/December issue of Washington Monthly, Stephanie Mencimer pieces together the saga of Jamie Leigh Jones, a former Iraq-based employee of a Halliburton subsidiary who, in 2005, began an advocacy and litigation campaign based on allegations that she had been gang-raped. Her story eventually drew members of Congress, documentary filmmakers, ABC’s “20/20,” and the federal-court system into its orbit—yet as Mencimer’s investigation demonstrates, the disturbing story masked a tangle of conflicting accounts, rooted in everything from a lack of physical evidence to Jones’s history of questionable rape claims.
The worlds of brain science, cryptography, and crime form an unlikely network in Virginia Hughes’s feature in the latest issue of the online science magazine Nautilus. A couple of University of Pennsylvania neuroscientists, Hughes explains, are adapting a Second World War-era code-breaking algorithm, which the British once used to counter the Nazis’ message-scrambling Enigma machine, to their own research, alongside a mathematical sequence frequently used to break into cars.
With the World Series upon us (and Roger Angell blogging about it), it’s worth returning to a surprising baseball-related read: “The Woman Who (Maybe) Struck Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig,” from the July/August issue of Smithsonian. Tony Horwitz uncovers the mostly forgotten story of a seventeen-year-old named Jackie Mitchell—described in newspapers as “organized baseball’s first girl pitcher”—who pitched against the Yankees on April 2, 1931, allegedly striking out the team’s two biggest stars. “Mitchell’s story,” Horwitz notes, “was even stranger than I supposed, with subplots involving donkeys, long beards and a lingering mystery about what transpired when she took the mound.”
A more sobering sort of mystery—what is it like to regularly kill from afar while operating an American drone?—is the focus of GQ’s new “Confessions of a Drone Warrior,” in which Matthew Power profiles Airman First Class Brandon Bryant. From a dark room in Nevada, Bryant watches suspected insurgents through an infrared camera, their warm, white bodies standing out against the black earth. “His blood is hot,” Bryant tells Power, describing his first shot. “But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”
