34 Days To Nieman

Charlie Pierce in the preface to Sports Guy: They are throwaways, these celebrity stories, and they teach lessons as simple and as tedious as flat blacktop. Oh, there is occasionally a burst of neon to them, but they are not the stories I love. I love the ones that meander, that find themselves turning down into the shadier places, where blood and bone and history hang over the road like fingers of Spanish moss, where there is a stirring in the bushes, a flash of shadows, and then gone again, and you find yourself bursting into a clearing -- not where you'd planned to be, certainly, but a better place than where you were.