All The Other Kids

Pumped Up Kicks by Foster The People off of Torches.

Retrospect On David Foster Wallace And Roger Federer

Editor’s Note: In light of today’s great Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic match at the US Open, we found it appropriate to post David Foster Wallace’s classic profile of Roger Federer. Note, however, that the following contains an introduction by Michael MacCambridge before the actual David Foster Wallace article.

The Article: Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace, with an introduction and retrospective, Director’s Cut: Federer as Religious Experience, by Michael MacCambridge of Grantland.

The Text: The New York Times’ ambitious sports magazine, Play, was still in its early days in the spring of 2006 — one issue was published, another was about to go to press — when editor Mark Bryant persuaded novelist David Foster Wallace to write about Roger Federer.

The assignment came as both writer and athlete were at the height of their respective careers. The story (for Play’s third issue, published shortly before the 2006 U.S. Open) constituted a dream pairing of writer and subject, like John McPhee sitting down with Bill Bradley, or George Plimpton hitting the road with Muhammad Ali and his entourage. That wasn’t just because Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was considered by many to be the literary voice of his generation. He had also proved (in both his novel Infinite Jest, and his exhaustively annotated Esquire piece, “The String Theory”), to be a spellbinding writer on the subject of tennis. Wallace had been a regionally ranked junior player during his teenage years in Illinois before giving up competitive tennis because, as he explained to Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky, “just as it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play.”

That summer, the often-reclusive Wallace traveled to tennis’ most hallowed ground, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, to survey the masterful Federer in the midst of a four-year run in which he won 11 of a possible 16 Grand Slam titles. The resulting story, which Wallace turned in 10 days after returning from England, still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sport at its highest level.

The piece almost didn’t happen. When Bryant called Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, to float the idea, she told him it was a nonstarter (“He’s completely focused on his fiction right now,” Bryant recalled her saying). It was only months later, after another writer had bowed out of the assignment just weeks before Wimbledon started, that Bryant called Wallace himself and pitched the story again, saying, “David, I have three words for you: Roger Federer, Wimbledon.” Wallace’s response — “Oh, my god; would you would let me do that?”— showed he was game, and providentially, Wallace was already going to be overseas, at a literary festival in Italy.

Even then, the reporting of the story was an ordeal for both Wallace and Play’s senior editor, Josh Dean, who dealt with Wallace on a daily basis and was privy to the numerous calamities (and near-calamities) the writer encountered in England. At the time, Wallace didn’t have a credit card, a cell phone, or an e-mail address he was willing to share, according to Dean. He was still naïve in the ways of pack journalism, and many routine matters — how to get from his hotel to Wimbledon, how to secure press credentials, even how to enter the grounds — often confounded him, prompting calls back to Dean, some of which came in the middle of the night in New York.

Wallace landed a brief one-on-one interview with Federer during the tournament, but the setting was so sterile and impersonal that Wallace chose to confine his account of it to a lengthy footnote in the story. (Among Wallace’s notes in preparation for his interview with Federer, there was this explanation he presumably shared when they sat down: “I’m not a journalist — I’m more like a novelist with a tennis background.”) After watching Federer conclude the fortnight with his fourth straight Wimbledon title, Wallace returned to the States and wrote furiously, turned in the story on time, then worked closely with Bryant and Dean on everything involving the story’s close — including the cover treatment, the headline, and whether a stray semicolon could be changed to a period. (Per Wallace, it couldn’t.) Wallace had more ammunition than your average precious freelancer, as he was, in Dean’s words, “a remarkable grammarian,” and was on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

The “pre-article advisories” note he sent to Dean along with his first draft provided a peek into his philosophy of footnotes (“the big thing is to avoid breaking footnotes over pages — it gives readers a headache”) and his fiercely protective stance toward his own prose: “I’ve got the fucker down to like 8,400 words. Another maybe 100-200 words can come out without much problem, if need be. Cutting much more from that will cripple the piece, which I’ve worked hard on and feel protective of. (If you decided, for instance, that you want to run only like 5,000 words of it, I wouldn’t do it — I’d settle for the Kill Fee.)”

There was no chance of that. Bryant and Dean did very little editing, and Bryant even sided with Wallace and against the Times’ own fairly rigid policy against serial commas, going high up the masthead to gain approval.

Another 100 or so words were trimmed for space, and the piece ran as Play’s cover story on August 20, 2006.

Federer as Religious Experience

By David Foster Wallace, August 20, 2006

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

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What Would Justify America’s Homeland Security?

The Article: 1,667 Times Square-Style Attacks Every Year: That’s how many terrorism plots we would have to foil to justify our current spending on homeland security by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart of Slate.

The Text: Is it possible to measure the risk of terrorism? Measuring risk can be difficult, but it is done as a matter of course in such highly charged areas as nuclear power plant safety, airplane safety, and environmental protection. There is adequate information about terrorism: There is plenty of data on how much damage terrorists have been able to do over the decades and about how frequently they attack. The insurance industry has a distinct financial imperative to understand terrorism risks to write policies for it. If the private sector can estimate terrorism risks and is willing to risk its own money on the validity of the estimate, why can’t the Department of Homeland Security?

A conventional approach to cost-effectiveness compares the costs of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. The benefit of a security measure is a multiplicative composite of three considerations: the probability of a successful attack, the losses sustained in a successful attack, and the reduction in risk furnished by security measures. This product, the benefit, is then compared to the cost of the security measure instituted to attain the benefit. A security measure is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing the security measures.

The interaction of these variables can perhaps be seen in an example. Suppose there is a dangerous curve on a road that results in an accident from time to time. To evaluate measures designed to deal with this problem, the analyst would need to estimate 1) the probability of an accident each year under present conditions, 2) the costs of the consequences of the accident (death, injury, property damage), and 3) the degree to which a proposed safety measure lowers the probability of an accident (erecting warning signs) and/or the losses sustained in the accident (erecting a crash barrier). If the benefits of the risk-reduction measures—these three items multiplied together—outweigh their costs, the measures would be deemed cost-effective.

These considerations can be usefully wrinkled around a bit in a procedure known as “break-even analysis” to calculate how many attacks would have to take place to justify a security expenditure.

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September 11th And The Legacy Of Islamophobia In America

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was 11 years old. After the first plane hit, teachers took kids in from the playground and quickly ushered them into the classrooms. Some of them turned on TVs; others did not. Mine did. At that age, I was not fully able to comprehend what I saw. Though what I did see — buildings stripped to skeletal foundations, men and women covered in ash wandering the streets like ghosts, and remnants of homes, identities, and belongings strewn about like shattered glass — left quite an indelible mark in my heart. Ten years later, I think that this was my first glimpse into how fragile a nation and its unity can truly be. Funny, then, that we have chosen to rebuild ourselves and attack others with some of the very things that caused the mass destruction to begin with.

Although the neologism that is Islamophobia dates back to the 1990’s, it was not until after September 11, 2001 that the intolerance was so rampantly widespread that Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, stated that “when the world is compelled to coin a new term to take account of increasingly widespread bigotry, that is a sad and troubling development.” While its definition, and for that matter, existence as a term, is contentious, many agree that Islamophobia is the hatred and fear of Islam and by extension, all Muslims. Though as much as I would like to say that American Islamophobia only emerged after 2001, the unfortunate truth is that it and the driving themes behind it have been around for quite some time; it is only after that cataclysmic day that it reared its ugly head that much higher.

According to Hussein Ibish, Senior Research Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, what we recognize today as Islamophobia is merely a reincarnation of 20th century anti-Semitism, a time when it was popular to create fantastical scenarios wherein Judaism and its followers were “dedicated to plotting and carrying out the violent overthrow of American and Christian Capitalist society.” Sound familiar? That’s because it is.

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Hell Is Too Far To Go

Heaven Can Wait by Charlotte Gainsbourg featuring Beck.