The 1999 piece that helped launch Anthony Bourdain’s career as a writer and broadcaster. In it, he offered readers the inside track on the restaurant industry, warts and all. It was apparently sent in to the magazine as an unsolicited manuscript.
An insight into the world of aviation enthusiasts. Their activity is memorably described – “Their interests are so basic that they seem abstract: to appreciate planes; to record them; to appreciate them by recording them; and to record their own passion for recording.” Yet the piece shows how the information that they gather about the comings and goings of air traffic (including military and VIP flights) can fan out into public and political life.
A moving and troubling piece recounting the experience of four boys abducted by a religious militia in Nigeria and forced to join their army. http://www.bit.ly//nyt-boko
Billy Mitchell is really, really good at Pac-Man – his high score is 3,333,360 – a perfect game. The unusual way his mind works is gently unpicked in this profile.
A woman called Merav tells the author the story of how she narrowly escaped from drowning after an impromptu swim at an Australian beach in 1970.
A story looking at the professionals hired by wives in China to deal with their husbands’ mistresses.
The dizzying, multi-layered story of a huge pearl that has been at the centre of elaborate hoaxes, claims and counter-claims, and havoc in the lives of those connected to it for over 80 years. http://bit.ly/atlantic-pearl
An arresting excerpt from Howard Cunnell’s memoir Fathers & Sons, exploring what it is to grow up, to have a family, to be a parent, and through this to examine what he terms (in a phrase borrowed from a poem by another writer) “the shaping axe” of love. A fine piece of writing.