Starting Five

Let's say you're starting a new magazine. You've got unlimited money and the power to choose any five writers in the world. I was thinking about this today, and this is the team I built.

William Langewiesche: The testimony rings all too true, with compensation for some light twisting of facts. It is very likely that the Marines did indeed begin taking fire on Route Chestnut, a short while after the occupants of the car were killed, and possibly in angry response. Someone is bomb me, I am shoot him, but he is just shoot at me, and I am just shoot him back. This is the kind of fight that Donald Rumsfeld could not imagine.

Gary Smith: No, Al, No....

Those who knew race walking muttered those three words as he went after Curt. They all wanted to protect Al. They all knew the story of Al and the monsoon in the 2000 U.S. Olympic Trials. They all knew how he'd had one of the three Olympic berths in the bag that day, leaning into the 30 mph winds and frigid downpour to share the lead with Curt and Andrew Hermann, opening up a seemingly insurmountable 2½-minute advantage over Philip Dunn after 37 kilometers when Philip pulled a hamstring and stopped dead. How Al had slowed a little then, had lost the protection of the other two walkers and begun to shiver, then shake and finally shut down with hypothermia, watching in a daze as Philip bit back the pain and stormed past him to become the third Olympian. How Al had swooned into a race official's arms before the finish, been cocooned in blankets for an hour before comprehending the catastrophe and weeping. Then lapsed into a deeper fog, finally departing from the Olympic Training Center by mutual consent because no man that depressed could remain there.

Malcolm Gladwell: McCready then hit a button on his computer, which had the effect of eliminating all the songs that had not made the Billboard Top 30 in the past five years. The screen went from an undifferentiated cloud to sixty discrete clusters. This is what the universe of hit songs from the past five years looks like structurally; hits come out of a small, predictable, and highly conserved set of mathematical patterns.

Tom Junod: In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom.

Richard Preston: Pi is by no means the only unexplored number in the Chudnovskys' inventory, but it is one that interests them very much. They wonder whether the digits contain a hidden rule, an as yet unseen architecture, close to the mind of God. A subtle and fantastic order may appear in the digits of pi way out there somewhere; no one knows. No one has ever proved, for example, that pi does not turn into nothing but nines and zeros, spattered to infinity in some peculiar arrangement. If we were to explore the digits of pi far enough, they might resolve into a breathtaking numerical pattern, as knotty as "The Book of Kells," and it might mean something. It might be a small but interesting message from God, hidden in the crypt of the circle, awaiting notice by a mathematician.

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There it is.

Let's see yours.