Stop shopping for your Easter bonnet, and put down those 1040s – it’s time for a new Editors’ Roundtable! This session, our editors are looking at Michael Paterniti’s “The Boy from Gitmo,” which ran in the February issue of GQ. Paterniti’s piece explores the relationship between Mohammed Jawad, a boy who was sent to Guantánamo Bay [...]
Tag Archives: GQ
Jeanne Marie Laskas on voice, point of view and accountability to her subjects: “this is the human story of a guy suffering”
February 25, 2011 – 3:12 pm
In our latest Notable Narrative, “The People V. Football,” GQ correspondent Jeanne Marie Laskas looks at a former football player who has already lost much of his life and is in the process of losing his mind. Laskas has won a slot in the “Best American Sportswriting” anthologies four times, written five books and been [...]
The People V. Football: the case for the prosecution
February 24, 2011 – 9:43 am
In our latest Notable Narrative, “The People V. Football,” Jeanne Marie Laskas follows former NFL linebacker Fred McNeill into the abyss of his ruined life. Touching intermittently on the larger conversation about brain-damaged players and their short-circuited lives, Laskas returns relentlessly to what existence is like for the injured McNeill. Laskas brings together two classic [...]
What we’re reading: novelists do nonfiction, a witness recants, and two friends jump into the Charles River
November 5, 2010 – 11:29 am
Today, we set aside election reporting (which we’ll return to soon) in order to gin up some reading for your Thursday anxieties: dubious conviction and cultural claustrophobia, not to mention suicide and delusion. But there are surprises – and hope – tucked in here: the rich life of the first child diagnosed with autism (now 77), the [...]
Richard Morgan on payback, freelancing and the myth of the “made man”
August 12, 2010 – 3:57 pm
Richard Morgan recently found a new measure of fame writing about writing, with his funny/terrifying piece “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup.” Though Morgan’s work has appeared in some of the best-known outlets in print journalism – from New York magazine to Wired and The New York Times – [...]
Joe Donnelly on Slake, long-form journalism and launching a vision: “it’s about finding the right rhythm and the right way of presenting it”
July 21, 2010 – 1:22 pm
Last month, we heard rumors from the West Coast of a new magazine devoted to long-form storytelling – a magazine that existed in print only and had no digital presence. The ghostly enigma turned out to be Slake, an upstart publication run by an editing team formerly with the L.A. Weekly. (Slake has since rolled out [...]
GQ and The New Yorker: two takes on brain damage from football
October 26, 2009 – 4:35 pm
For a primer on different approaches to storytelling, take a look at two recent narratives on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In GQ, Jeanne Marie Laskas’ “Game Brain” follows a pathologist who discovers CTE through an autopsy on a football player. The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell also addresses the current science of football head trauma in [...]
