Best Magazine Articles

Here's an excellent list of the greatest magazine articles of all time. I'm a huge fan of long form journalism, so this is right up my alley. Here's what I've read off of this list:

****** David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.

***** David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.

****** Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.

** John Hersey, "Hiroshima." The New Yorker, August 31, 1946.

** John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." The New Yorker, October 22, 1960. About Ted Williams career framed by his last game. I read it every opening day without fail.

** Norman Mailer, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Esquire, November 1960.

** Tom Wolfe, "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" Esquire, March 1965.

****** Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.

*** Hunter Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Scanlan's Monthly, June 1970.

* Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Rolling Stone. Part I: November 11, 1971; Part II: November 25, 1971.

*** Richard Ben Cramer, "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" Esquire, June 1986.

* David Foster Wallace, "Ticket to the Fair." Harper's Magazine, July 1994.

** David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise." Harper's Magazine, January 1996.

*** David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory." Esquire, July 1996.

** David Foster Wallace, "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage." Harper's Magazine, April 2001. A tome to the politics of language.

***** David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.

****** David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.

** Gene Weingarten, "Pearls Before Breakfast." The Washington Post, Magazine, April 8, 2007. Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?

* David Grann, "The Chameleon: The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin." The New Yorker, August 11, 2008.

** Michael Lewis, "The End." Portfolio, November 11, 2008. Breaks down supposedly complex economic cause and effect into very engaging, easily understood analysis. Real life characters as interesting and entertaining as the best fiction. A must.

** Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra." Vanity Fair, April 2009. It's an in depth analysis of the financial collapse of Iceland. Excellent. There are some great one liners (this isn't actually one of them, but it'll give you the idea): "This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously."

* Michael Lewis, "The Man Who Crashed the World." Vanity Fair, August 2009. About the collapse of AIG.

* Matt Taibbi, "Wall Street's Bailout Hustle." Rolling Stone, February 17, 2010.

* Michael Hastings, "The Runaway General." Rolling Stone, June 22, 2010. An entertaining read and because of impact it had on Army leadership it has become historically important.

I couldn't possibly recommend one of these pieces over another, so just start at the top and work your way down - this is great beach reading. Also, I know that there are more than a few all-time-greats missing from this list, so I'll have to give it some thought and write an update.

Also, I just realized how many of my posts contain the journalism tag. It looks like I've already written about several of the items on this list. Nice.

(via Kottke)