The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  This explicitness about the process of reporting is true for many of the writers in this collection. It’s a shame this technique is forbidden to most daily newspaper reporters and broadcast journalists, because a lot of the power of these stories comes from the writers telling you step by step what they’re feeling and thinking, as they do their reporting. For example, here’s how Michael Lewis explains his interest in the story of a fifteen-year-old named Jonathan Lebed—a minor who got into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for trading stocks online: “When I first read the newspaper reports last fall, I didn’t understand them. It wasn’t just that I didn’t understand what the kid had done wrong; I didn’t understand what he had done.”

  Much later in the story Lewis interviews the Chairman of the SEC about Lebed’s supposed crime, and he does something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a reporter do in an interview with a government official. Lewis tells us what he’s thinking, moment by moment, as the SEC Chair trots out one unconvincing argument after another. It’s breathtaking, and skewers the guy in a way I’ve never seen before or since in an American newspaper. What’s even more breathtaking is that somehow, Lewis doesn’t come across as unfair. He doesn’t seem like a hothead, or someone with an agenda. He comes off as a curious, reasonable guy, the most reasonable guy in the room in fact, a guy who’s both annoyed and amused at the hokum being peddled. It’s done so deftly you don’t even realize how delicate it is, what he’s pulling off. Especially when you consider the big policy questions he’s juggling at the same time. In the middle of telling this great yarn, he’s actually explaining an entirely original way to look at the regulation of the stock market and online trading, an analysis he invented himself over the course of his reporting. And he’s made his explanation simple enough that people like you and me who may know absolutely nothing about the markets will understand what he’s talking about and why it matters at all.

  Which brings me to my next point. What I’m about to say doesn’t apply to breaking news stories, which have their own rules and logic, but does apply to stories like the ones in this book, or on the radio show I host. When you’re writing stories like these, I think you’ve really only got two basic building blocks. You’ve got the plot of the story, and you’ve got the ideas the story is driving at. Usually the plot is the easy part. You do whatever research you can, you talk to lots of people, and you figure out what happened. It’s the ideas that kill you. What’s the story mean? What bigger truth about all of us does it point to? You can knock your head against a wall for days thinking that through.

  The writers in this book are geniuses when it comes to the ideas. In fact usually their stories would have trouble existing at all, without the scaffolding of ideas they’ve erected to hold the thing up. And some of the moves they pull to deploy their ideas! There’s a section in Lawrence Weschler’s story “Shapinsky’s Karma” where every character in the story walks up to Weschler to tell him the meaning of the story he’s writing about Shapinksy. Some of them even offer titles for his story. Susan Orlean’s “The American Man, Age Ten” is a tour de force on this score, as she tries to think through what it means to be ten. She’s profiling a random suburban kid named Colin Duffy. I could almost pick any three sentences from the story at random and they’ll make my point, but this passage just kills me:

  The girls in Colin’s class are named Cortnerd, Terror, Spacey, Lizard, Maggot, and Diarrhea. “They do have other names, but that’s what we call them,” Colin told me. “The girls aren’t very popular.”

  “They are about as popular as a piece of dirt,” Japeth [Colin’s friend] said. “Or you know that couch in the classroom? That couch is more popular than any girl. A thousand times more.”

  That is a very efficient way to explain a ten-year-old boy’s attitude toward girls. I love the overall tone she invents to write this story. It’s a voice that’s halfway between hers and his.

  If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. . . . We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement—probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.

  Much later in the story, Orlean states more explicitly some of her conclusions about Colin’s view of the world.

  The collision in his mind of what he understands, what he hears, what he figures out, what popular culture pours into him, what he knows, what he pretends to know, and what he imagines makes an interesting mess. The mess often has the form of what he will probably think like when he is a grown man, but the content of what he is like as a little boy.

  One thing I love about Weschler and Orlean (and, come to think of it, most of these writers) is their attitude toward the people they’re writing about. Weschler is clearly skeptical of his protagonist, Akumal. Orlean is not in agreement with her ten-year-old. But they try to get inside their protagonists’ heads with a degree of empathy that’s unusual. Theirs is a ministry of love, in a way we don’t usually discuss reporters’ feelings toward their subjects. Or at least, they’re willing to see what is lovable in the people they’re interviewing. (Weschler’s an interesting case when it comes to this, because he’s mildly annoyed by his main character for the early part of his story, and then comes to have an obvious and real affection for him.)

  David Foster Wallace’s story kind of sneaks up on you in this regard. He’s writing about right-wing talk radio, which is, depending on how you look at it, either very easy or very hard to write about well, since it’s something everyone already has an opinion about. And after laying out a series of eye-opening details about how the whole talk industry actually works, at some point Wallace just starts to get very, very interested in the question of what sort of guy would be holding forth with these sorts of opinions on the radio. He then produces a set of unusually frank anecdotes and quotes to answer that question. The unusual honesty, by the way, is explained with this helpful footnote:The best guess re Mr. Z.’s brutal on-record frankness is that either (a) the host’s on- and off-air personas really are identical, or (b) he regards speaking to a magazine correspondent as just one more part of his job, which is to express himself in a maximally stimulating way.

  Part of what’s most interesting about this story, I think, is Wallace’s attitude toward Mr. Z. When he analyzes what Mr. Z. says on the air, he questions some of the most basic premises of Mr. Z.’s occupation. But it’s all done in a way that’s somehow still sympathetic to the guy.

  This empathetic mission gives the writing a warmth, and—not incidentally—it helps Wallace and all these writers get away with saying certain unflattering things about their subjects, because it’s clear the overall project of their writing is not a malicious or demeaning one. I like that. And as a reporter, I understand it. I have this experience when I interview someone, if it’s going well and we’re really talking in a serious way, and they’re telling me these very personal things, I fall in love a little. Man, woman, child, any age, any background, I fall in love a little. They’re sharing so much of themselves. If you have half a heart, how can you not?

  Chuck Klosterman even makes Val Kilmer sympathetic. Klosterman is both an essayist and a reporter, and as an essayist, he has this fantastically agile brain. He tears through one idea after another with a speed and fierce confidence that I always find kind of inspiring. Som
e of the essays in his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs I’ve read over and over, like the one explaining how Star Wars and Reality Bites are actually the same movie, and how that movie perfectly captures everything about Generation X, which is Klosterman’s generation. (“There are no myths about Generation X,” he writes. “It’s all true.”) When Klosterman does reporting, the superstructure of ideas and the aggressiveness with which he states those ideas are a big part of what makes the stories stand out. And the ideas are especially important when he writes about celebrities. I think celebrity journalism is one of the toughest assignments you can do, because the super-famous are usually guarded about what they reveal, and because they’ve been interviewed so many times before, what’s left for you to explore? Klosterman’s Val Kilmer story is a good example of someone taking a celebrity interview and creating a context and structure that gives the quotes and moments so much meaning. In general, Klosterman writes with a lot of sympathy for his subjects, while still simultaneously pointing out all sorts of things about them that they might find unflattering.

  I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one thing, it would’ve made titling this collection a lot easier. Sometimes people use the phrase “literary nonfiction” for work like this, but I’m a snob when it comes to that phrase. I think it’s for losers. It’s pretentious, for one thing, and it’s a bore. Which is to say, it’s exactly the opposite of the writing it’s trying to describe. Calling a piece of writing “literary nonfiction” is like daring you to read it.

  In choosing stories for this book, I haven’t tried to include every great nonfiction writer who’s working right now, or even all my favorites. I ended up rereading dozens of essays and stories I’ve loved, some of them by regular contributors to the radio program, some by people I’ve admired from afar. In the end I returned to my original premise—to select journalism I’ve found myself talking about and recommending over the years. And I decided to stick with stories that are built around original reporting of one sort or another, not essays.

  Some of these stories are very well-known; some barely known. There’s a whole class of stories I’ve included because the writers are trying to document such remarkable experiences they’ve had. Dan Savage tells how he got so sick of the homophobic policies of the Republican Party that he decided to join the party himself and became a delegate to their state convention, where he caused various sorts of trouble. Coco Henson Scales describes what happens inside a trendy New York restaurant and—even more interesting—inside her head as the hostess there. In her story, celebrities show up and perform exactly as you’d want them to, but never get to see in print. It is possibly the greatest New York Times “Styles Section” feature that will ever be written.

  Jim McManus’s poker story is amazing because the facts shouldn’t lay out the way they do. He enters his first poker tournament—the World Series of Poker—to write about it for Harper’s magazine, and he ends up at the final table, pocketing a quarter-million dollars. This is the poker equivalent of showing up at the Olympics, never having competed on track or field, and taking home the bronze for the 100-meter dash. At one point, McManus squares off against one of his heroes, a guy whose poker manual he’d read and reread to prepare for the tournament, and—if that’s not enough—they end up playing one of the hands the guy wrote about in his book. “I’ve studied the passage so obsessively,” McManus writes, “I believe I can quote it verbatim.” His Harper’s article, by the way, was published two years before the full-blown poker craze hit America, which explains why he’s so patiently explaining rules and customs of the game that are now familiar to most high school students.

  While this is the golden age of this kind of reporting and writing, it’s also a golden age for crap journalism. And for some of the most amazing technological advances for stuffing it down your throat. A lot of daily reporting and news “commentary” just reinforces everything we already think about the world. It lacks the sense of discovery, the curiosity, the uncorny, human-size drama that’s part of all these stories. A lot of daily reporting makes the world seem smaller and stupider.

  In that environment, these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing. They make the world seem like an exciting place to live. I come out of them feeling like a better person—more awake and more aware and more appreciative of everything around me. That’s a hard thing for any kind of writing to accomplish. In times when the media can seem so clueless and beside the point, that’s a great comfort in itself.

  JONATHAN LEBED’S EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

  Michael Lewis

  On September 20, 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission settled its case against a fifteen-year-old high-school student named Jonathan Lebed. The SEC’s news release explained that Jonathan—the first minor ever to face proceedings for stock-market fraud—had used the Internet to promote stocks from his bedroom in the northern New Jersey suburb of Cedar Grove. Armed only with accounts at AOL and E*Trade, the kid had bought stock and then, “using multiple fictitious names,” posted hundreds of messages on Yahoo! Finance message boards recommending that stock to others. He had done this eleven times between September 1999 and February 2000, the SEC said, each time triggering chaos in the stock market. The average daily trading volume of the small companies he dealt in was about sixty thousand shares; on the days he posted his messages, volume soared to more than a million shares. More to the point, he had made money. Between September 1999 and February 2000, his smallest one-day gain was twelve thousand dollars. His biggest was seventy-four thousand dollars. Now the kid had agreed to hand over his illicit gains, plus interest, which came to $285,000.

  When I first read the newspaper reports last fall, I didn’t understand them. It wasn’t just that I didn’t understand what the kid had done wrong; I didn’t understand what he had done. And if the initial articles about Jonathan Lebed raised questions—what did it mean to use a fictitious name on the Internet, where every name is fictitious, and who were these people who traded stocks naively based on what they read on the Internet?—they were trivial next to the questions raised a few days later when a reporter asked Jonathan Lebed’s lawyer if the SEC had taken all of the profits. They hadn’t. There had been many more than the eleven trades described in the SEC’s press release, the lawyer said. The kid’s take from six months of trading had been nearly eight hundred thousand dollars. Initially the SEC had demanded he give it all up, but then backed off when the kid put up a fight. As a result, Jonathan Lebed was still sitting on half a million dollars.

  At length, I phoned the Philadelphia office of the SEC, where I reached one of the investigators who had brought Jonathan Lebed to book. I was maybe the fiftieth journalist he’d spoken with that day, and apparently a lot of the others had had trouble grasping the finer points of securities law. At any rate, by the time I asked him to explain to me what, exactly, was wrong with broadcasting one’s private opinion of a stock on the Internet, he was in no mood.

  “Tell me about the kid.”

  “He’s a little jerk.”

  “How so?”

  “He is exactly what you or I hope our kids never turn out to be.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “No. I don’t need to.”

  Cedar Grove is one of those Essex County suburbs defined by the fact that it is not Newark. Its real-estate prices rise with the hills. The houses at the bottom of each hill are barely middle class; the houses at the top might fairly be described as opulent. The Lebeds’ house sits about a third of the way up one of the hills.

  When I arrived one afternoon not long ago, the first person to the door was Greg Lebed, Jonathan’s fifty-four-year-old father. Black hair sprouted in many directions from the top of his head and joined together somewhere in the middle of his back. The cur
l of his lip seemed designed to shout abuse from a bleacher seat. He had become famous, briefly, when he ordered the world’s media off his front lawn and said, “I’m proud of my son.” Later, elaborating on 60 Minutes, he said, “It’s not like he was out stealing the hubcaps off cars or peddling drugs to the neighbors.”

  He led me to the family dining room, and without the slightest help from me, worked himself into a lather. He got out a photocopy of front-page stories from the Daily News. One side had a snapshot of Bill and Hillary Clinton beside the headline “Insufficient Evidence in Whitewater Case: CLINTONS CLEARED”; the other side had a picture of Jonathan Lebed beside the headline “Teen Stock Whiz Nailed.” Over it all was scrawled in Greg’s furious hand, “U.S. Justice at Work.”

  “Look at that!” he shouted. “This is what goes on in this country!”

  Then, just as suddenly as he had erupted, he went dormant. “Don’t bother with me,” he said. “I get upset.” He offered me a seat at the dining-room table. Connie Lebed, Jonathan’s forty-five-year-old mother, now entered. She had a look on her face that as much as said: “I assume Greg has already started yelling about something. Don’t mind him; I certainly don’t.”

  Greg said testily, “It was that goddamn computer what was the problem.”

  “My problem with the SEC,” said Connie, ignoring her husband, “was that they never called. One day we get this package from Federal Express with the whatdyacallit, the subpoenas inside. If only they had called me first.” She will say this six times before the end of the day, with one of those marvelous harmonica-like wails that conveys a sense of grievance maybe better than any noise on the planet. If only they’da caaaawwwwlled me.