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By Marc Velasquez, on December 14th, 2010 [This column highlights the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month, all available free online unless noted. Follow it here.]
 My gift to "the dirtiest man in the coal industry" I couldn’t come up with a theme. Should I take that as a sign that I’m bad at this column writing thing? Perhaps, but I have such a hodgepodge of selections this month that I couldn’t find a single common thread.
I tried a cheesy “Giving thanks” theme that seemed nice and timely, but how can one be thankful about police officers shooting a 7-year-old while a reality TV crew filmed footage? When I realized that I’d chosen quite a few profiles (the filet mignon of magazine writing), I thought about highlighting only those. But that meant leaving out some of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a while. So I’ve decided to run themeless instead. If you can find a common thread, let me know.
Rolling Stone Does It Again
I’m a big fan of profiles. To write them well, a writer has to spend a significant amount of time getting to know the subject, either face-to-face or through creative means of research. But well-written profiles are powerful pieces of journalism. Take, for instance, this recent profile of coal mogul, Don Blankenship—a self made millionaire, champion of mountaintop removal, and first-rate jackass. In a surprise move a week after the article ran, Blankenship retired from his post, and the world is now a better place (sort of like a real-life Freedom, for you Franzen fans).
 No, not this death race. The Death Race in Vermont is actually more badass Vermont Style Death Race
First, go to this website: YouMayDie.com
Are you back? How much time did you spend over there? Did you watch the videos? Did you look up some others on YouTube? I lost half a day to that url after coming across it in a magazine article. I can barely run down the block (I have a bad back, and I love fried food, so back off) but I’m fascinated by anyone for whom a triathlon is too blasé. At one point, for a brief moment, I fancied myself ballsy enough to try the Death Race. But there’s barbed wire involved, and repeated mountain running, and I don’t think there is anyone in my life who would be willing to run along side me in order to hand-feed the gross amounts of granola I would require for sustenance. Luckily, Mark Jenkins participated in it on assignment for Outside Magazine. I’ll settle for the article he wrote and the YouTube videos. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on November 29th, 2010 
[Follow this series here. We're also compiling all our best books in one easy-to-browse page; find it by clicking the stamp, at left or anywhere else you see it on the site. That page will get updated as each new post comes out.]
Without further ado, my favorite books of 2010:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the bizarre story of a tobacco farmer whose cancer cells have been used in scientific research for decades after her death. The book features a rare combination of great writing, fantastic storytelling, and deep social significance. Skloot admirably weaves several storylines—Lacks’s life and death, the growth of HeLa cells, the many scientific advances those cells have made possible, the lives of Lacks’s decedents—into a cohesive and gripping book. But Immortal Life sits on top of my list because of its social importance. The story of Henrietta Lacks was a generation or two from being completely forgotten. It would have been a shame to lose this piece of our history, not just because of the scientific significance of HeLa, but also because of the perspective Lacks’s life and death adds to the Civil Rights struggle. Thankfully, with this book, Rebecca Skloot has made Henrietta Lacks truly immortal. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on November 17th, 2010 [Every day this week, we're posting a quick description of a story from The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology. Comment on this post---or any other post before Friday (11/19/10) at midnight---for a chance to win a paperback copy of the anthology. More details here. Follow the whole series here.]
Dragon, by Steve Frederick
 One morning, after drinking some bourbon and vodka, Wyatt decides to use a can of gas and some matches to rid his fence line of tumbleweeds. After setting his yard on fire and deeply upsetting his wife, Wyatt hops in his truck and starts driving, perhaps looking for his lost youth. What Wyatt finds in the next 24 hours—his long-time friend, Simms, a woman whose entire backside is tattooed with a colorful dragon, the old caretaker of a cemetery and an abandoned church—will change everything about the way Wyatt views his life. But it all may happen too late to matter.
Read “Dragon” in its original environment at Night Train. Download the entire Chamber Four Fiction Anthology for free here.
By Marc Velasquez, on November 11th, 2010  Author: Sebastian Junger
2010, Twelve
Filed under: Literary, Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
In War, Sebastian Junger attempts to chronicle the emotional experience of battle and the mental toll combat takes on soldiers. To do so, Junger embedded himself with a platoon of American soldiers during their tour of Afghanistan’s front line. Thankfully, Junger doesn’t pretend to be an objective journalist reporting impartially. Instead, he uses his embedded experience to deliver a first-person portrayal of the psychological turmoil of war.
In 2007 and 2008, Junger made several prolonged visits with “Battle Company” in and around the Korengal Forward Operating Base in Eastern Afghanistan. Charged with holding the Korengal Valley from the insurgents, Battle Company constantly found themselves under enemy fire. Because a reporter on the front line and a soldier on the front line are the same to the enemy, Junger also found himself looking for cover after hearing the crack of passing bullets. And in Junger’s reaction to the threat of enemy fire, we get our first insight into a soldier’s mentality. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on October 25th, 2010 [This is the last in our series of interviews with authors featured in our anthology of outstanding stories from the web, The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology. You can find more information about the anthology and download it for free here, or you can read all the interviews and find new ones here.
Scott Cheshire earned his MFA in fiction at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is currently working on his first novel. "Watchers" was published on AGNI Online, And can be read here.
Marcos interviewed Scott by email]
 A "sailing stone" of the Racetrack Playa, featured in Scott Cheshire's "Watchers" Chamber Four: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you first about the story’s setting. The Racetrack is real, correct? And stones really do move by themselves across it? Do people really go out to watch?
Scott Cheshire: The Racetrack Playa is in Death Valley, a very flat and now dry lake surrounded by mountains. And the stones are sometimes referred to as “sailing stones,” they’ve been studied since the forties. There are still only theories as to how they move. No footage has been captured. But they do move, depending on size, some as much as ninety miles an hour and some only a few inches each year. To my knowledge, watchers, as I imagine them, don’t exist.
C4: So how did you come to know this place and what about it inspired your writing?
SC: I first heard about the playa on television, not sure how long ago. It was brief, the tail end of a nature show, but it stuck with me. Years later I read about it in National Geographic. I found the idea kind of chilling and beautiful. At some point, I read of viewing benches in the valley and wondered about who sits on these benches.
C4: What, if anything binds these “watchers” together? Do they have anything in common besides the time they spend together hoping to see a stone move?
SC: We live in a strange and special time, we seem to know more and more every day and at the same time we know so little. I’m not one for nostalgia, in fact I generally find it not very helpful and often destructive, but mystery does seem in short supply these days. Or maybe I mean an appreciation of it. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on October 21st, 2010 [This column highlights the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month, all available free online unless noted. Follow it here.]
 Partying with these kooks might be as insane as a gathering with the Republican version Do you have to be an avid fan of The Daily Show or the 24-hour news networks to know there is a giant election in a few weeks?
I feel like I’ve noticed the midterms popping up everywhere, but I wonder if watching too much Jon Stewart has corrupted my thought patterns. In magazines this past month, I’m sure there were as many celebrity profiles and far-flung travel correspondences as there usually are, but for the most part, none of them caught my eye.
There’s just something about gay-hating gubernatorial candidates who email-forward horse bukkake and Delaware witch-cougars running for Senate; I can’t look away. And looking at the articles I’ve picked, it shows. So I’m just going to roll with it.
Tea Party—Just Like the One In Boston Harbor, 1773
That title is sarcastic, by the way. The two tea parties have nothing in common aside from a complaint rooted in taxes. I thought the modern Tea Party would go away, I thought they would be pushed to the fringe—they do, after all, stand on a platform of little substance and contribute almost nothing to the political conversation. Yet they have gained ground by portraying themselves (as white and middle-class as they are) as an oppressed minority.
Not gonna lie, I’m enthralled with this political movement, especially it’s origins which Matt Taibbi covers very entertainingly.* Granted, the article is not as extensive as Jane Mayer’s profile of the Koch Brothers, but it’s a fun read none the less.
*you will only find this article entertaining if you agree with Taibbi. If you are in the Tea Party, you will see it as another attack from the lamestream media
…
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By Marc Velasquez, on September 20th, 2010 [This column highlights the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month, all available free online unless noted. Follow it and other ongoing features here.]
 While wearing these, avoid walking through cappacolla I’m convinced. September is the greatest month of the year. The heat and humidity of July and August are gone. TV shows start airing their new seasons. There’s football games five straight nights each week.
And I’m a glutton especially for football on TV. It’s disgusting, really. My girlfriend puts up with it on Thursday because she’s a nice person. But by Monday night, she’s locked herself in her room and is screaming into her pillow.
I get so school-boy giddy about the approaching TV and football seasons that it even dominates my reading patterns. However, I’d feel like an idiot if I used this column to suggest a bunch of articles about rookie cornerbacks and Don Draper—my MFA requires that I pretend to be a bit more refined. So, in an effort to give you a better impression of my reading habits, here are this month’s suggestions:
Why Not Start With Counterfeit Footwear?
I was in China for the 2008 Olympics, and I found out just how huge the knockoff sneaker industry is. There were vendors selling that shit in every market. A friend of mine bought a pair of orange and black New Balance—the label on the tongue warned against exposure to “intense meat.” For those still buying shoes from shopping malls and not from the corner bodega, this could be mind-blowing.
Also, this article contains the month’s best sentence:
the F.B.I. arrested several people of Balkan origin in New York and New Jersey for their suspected roles in “the importation of large amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, oxycodone, anabolic steroids, over a million pills of Ecstasy and counterfeit sneakers.”
…
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By Marc Velasquez, on August 12th, 2010 [This is the first installment in a new C4 column that will highlight the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month, all available free online unless noted. Follow it here and other ongoing features here.]
 Sea World is a weird place... I love magazines.
I’m not talking People, Us, Maxim, or any of their like-minded counterparts who believe the American public is no longer capable of reading more than 500 characters at a time. When I talk about magazines, I mean the purveyors of substantial, long-form journalism. I mean the type of articles you find later in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. You know, the type that exposes insubordinate generals or brings humanity back to a hated woman.
To me, a magazine article is to a nonfiction book what a short story is to a novel. The best examples of both short forms are self-contained pearls, with dynamic narrative arcs and gripping stories to tell. And if the writer is great, he or she can elevate a simple subject into high literature.
I don’t know if Nico is correct about the ad he recently thumped on this site—don’t know if it is somehow a strange and desperate ploy to stay relevant in the internet age (it’s beyond a Condé thing, by the way. I’ve also seen it in ESPN and Esquire). But I do know that I want more people to read magazines. That’s the point of this little column. I want to highlight articles from the month that caught my attention. They might not all be high literature, but each will have, for some reason or another, stuck with me.
Of course, I will never profess to having read everything, so if you think there is something I left out, feel free to send it along to marcos@chamberfour.com.
And one last thing: a lot of magazines require that you have a subscription to read their articles online. I can’t fault them for protecting their market, but it does cramp my column a bit. I wouldn’t want my suggestions to make your coffee table to look like mine, So I’ll do my best to keep my suggestions to free articles.
Off we go:
Wanna feel bad about killer whales?
What if Free Willy went the killer whale version of psychotic, pulled that nosey little kid into the water, and held him there until he drowned? Next summer’s blockbuster thriller? No, that shit could have happened.
Also this article contains the best sentence of the month:
“Early in the morning, the animal-care crew would take hot-water-filled cow vaginas and masturbate the males in the back tanks,” says John Hall, a former scientist at SeaWorld. “It was pretty interesting to walk by.”
Try to get that out of your mind. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on July 20th, 2010 [This first-hand account of life inside Sing Sing is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Ted Conover
Vintage Books, 2001
Filed under: Literary, Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
When Ted Conover wanted to write a book about the lives of prison guards, he started the way most journalists would: he asked the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) for access. They denied him permission.
Considering Conover’s methods as a writer, he probably wanted to be denied. He’s an immersion journalist—one who embeds himself in the lives he wants to chronicle. He becomes one of his subjects. So after the DOCS said no, Conover became a “Newjack,” or a rookie guard, at Sing Sing, one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Newjack is the result of Conover’s experience.
At it’s core, Newjack reads like a travel narrative, and Conover’s experience is a journey. Conover guides us through the prison block, and shows us its inhabitants. He explains his training, and he points out how it left him mostly unqualified for what he would encounter within the walls. He tells us about Sing Sing’s infamous history—its menacing wardens, death chamber, and well-used electric chair—and he shows us how life inside is still just as nasty as it was when Sing Sing was the death penalty capital of the country.
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By Marc Velasquez, on June 14th, 2010 [A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out the Special Features page.]
I loved Bernard Malamud’s The Natural when I hated reading books.
When I was young, before I was in school, my mother saw me “reading”—book open in front of me, finger tracing the words I pretended to read aloud. She thought it was cute, but something troubled her: my hand, while tracing the words across the page, was moving from right to left.
I’m dyslexic. Throughout my elementary years, I spent large chunks of the school day in a trailer behind the school, slowly learning how to make sense out of the jumbled mess of words I saw on the pages of books. The instructors played games with me that sharpened my concentration and perception, and improved my memory. They also spent a great deal of time reading to me, planting a love for stories that they hoped would eventually lead to a love of books.
For me, reading takes a lot of time and even more concentration. I have to put myself in a zone to read, have to shut myself off from any outside distractions. The words and their context have to be the only thing in my mind. And even when they are, even when my focus is pristine, I sometimes have to reread paragraphs or pages or chapters that don’t coalesce into something meaningful. As a middle school student, I wasn’t willing to put in that much effort.
But my love for stories was in full bloom before I ever even read a book in its entirety. What my instructors wanted me to find in books, I found in movies. The lessons of plot and character and dialog I was supposed to learn through red ferns and life on the Mississippi, became clear for me on the screen—through Jedi knights, and Ripley, and dinosaur experts who can’t stand children. …
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