Michelangelo said he didn’t create his sculptures. He just removed the marble that wasn’t the statue.
I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it means to have a collaborator whose job isn’t to add things but to help you find what’s already there. I’ve been doing that kind of work recently — the excavation kind — and it has changed how I write and honestly how much I enjoy the making of it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start with Jay.
There’s a kind of reading that’s really a form of listening — not to what a writer is saying but to how they’re solving a problem. Every great piece of nonfiction is an argument about structure, and most writers never explain it aloud. The argument is in the choices: where the piece starts, when it digresses, what it leaves out, how it ends. You can enjoy the work without seeing any of this. But once you start seeing it, you can’t stop — and eventually, some of it becomes yours.
This guide is for both kinds of reading. Each writer here is worth your time as a reader. Each one also has something specific and stealable for anyone who writes. I’ve tried to name both.
The ten: John McPhee, Robert Caro, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Joan Didion, David Grann, Sam Anderson, Susan Orlean, Tom Junod, and Wright Thompson. Different registers, different obsessions, different methods. What they share is a commitment to making difficult things feel inevitable — and the discipline to make that look effortless.
They fall into three loose clusters, which might help you find your entry point. Structure builders — McPhee, Caro, Grann — write pieces that feel inevitable because the architecture is invisible but load-bearing. Emotional access — Orlean, Junod, Thompson — get you inside feeling before you know you’re there. Voice and form — Didion, Sullivan, Lewis, Anderson — the sentence, the digression, the explanatory seduction, the essay as genuine inquiry. The clusters overlap, and the best writers in each group are doing all three things at once. But if you’re trying to solve a specific problem in your own writing, the clusters tell you where to look first.
I have read a lot of Wright Thompson pieces over the years. Enough to notice that I finish them feeling slightly implicated — like I have been shown something true about a person I thought I understood, and the showing has cost me something comfortable. That’s not a common feeling after reading sportswriting. Thompson’s a different kind of sports writer.
His profile of Steve Kerr, published this week in ESPN, is a case study in how he does it.
Go read it now. Before you continue here. Go read it!
The opening line: “Steve Kerr walked into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire with a secret.”
Thompson doesn’t start with biography or context or the Warriors’ season. He starts with dramatic irony — we are placed inside a moment where the subject knows something we don’t, where the gap between public persona and private reality is already established before we’ve gotten through the first sentence. We know, even before we know what the secret is, that the real story will be about what lives underneath the official one.
The secret is retirement. Kerr had made up his mind — 95% certainty — that this would be his last season. He checked in at the Beverly Wilshire, gave his room number, 516, as “Johnny Bench Joe Montana,” and then leaned across the breakfast table and almost mouthed the words: “I think it’s over.”
That room number detail is worth pausing on. It isn’t decoration. A man who has spent 40 years inside professional basketball has encoded legends into the passwords of his daily life — Bench’s number, Montana’s number, woven together as a mnemonic for a hotel room he’ll forget in three days. Thompson drops it and moves on without comment. He never explains it. He doesn’t have to. The detail does its work the way a good poem does: you carry it with you, and it means more the longer you hold it.
This is the loaded object, and Thompson deploys it everywhere. Late in the piece, the coaches bond over the same memory trick on the road — Thompson tells Kerr he’s in room 2225, “Emmitt Smith Rocket Ismail.” The repetition isn’t accidental. It’s Thompson showing us what the 82-game season actually is: a long chain of hotel rooms and encoded legends, a man building temporary homes out of other people’s greatness.
Thompson earns the loaded objects by earning the access. He spent the entire season alongside Kerr — embedded, unhurried, a still presence at the edge of the frame. The piece has the texture of someone who was there for the small moments precisely because he wasn’t hunting the big ones. He’s in the coaches’ locker room after losses, cracking Peronis on the team bus through the quiet midnight of Atlanta, at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, at the Golden Gate Deli while Kerr eats his usual Honey Baked sandwich and texts “Conflicted” and then adds: “What’s Lulu think?” “She sees both sides.”
That kind of detail — the dog with two minds about retirement — is available only to a reporter who has spent enough time with a subject that the subject has stopped performing. Thompson collects these moments. They are the material.
But access is scaffolding. The building is what Thompson does with it.
Midway through the piece, he lands the paragraph that reorients everything that came before it. On January 18, 1984, a gunman shot Malcolm Kerr — Steve’s father, president of the American University of Beirut — in the head. A family friend reached Steve in his dorm room at 3 a.m. Steve asked if his father was okay. There was a long pause. “Your father was a great man,” the friend finally said.
Steve ran downstairs and pounded on his teammates’ doors. Then he went and sat on the curb. “On Speedway Boulevard,” he says, still remembering the cold concrete and the empty street. Thompson gives us that street name. He tells us Steve started walking, and that he hasn’t slowed down since.
Suddenly the retirement question isn’t about basketball at all.
The sport is Thompson’s vehicle. His real subject is always the wound underneath — what drives a person to keep competing, keep building teams, keep moving, and what it means when the movement finally starts to slow. The question running beneath the entire Kerr piece isn’t “Will he stay or go?” It’s the question Malcolm’s assassination put into his son at 18, still unanswered 42 years later: what do you do when the thing that protected you from the worst moment of your life stops being available?
Thompson makes this explicit in one passage near the end. Kerr describes his fear about retirement: the coaching job, he says, doesn’t just feed his soul — it helps him manage his chronic daily pain. The pain, we’ve learned by then, is rooted in unresolved trauma. Kerr has spent a year journaling every morning about his father’s death and then deleting what he wrote, following a therapy program based on the idea that emotional wounds express themselves as physical ones. The back pain that plagued him for 12 years — the migraines, the spinal leak, the decade of searching for relief from Mayo to Duke to England for stem-cell therapy — began the same year he took the Warriors job. Writing opens the lines of communication. Winning keeps them open. Retirement threatens to seal them again.
Thompson doesn’t editorialize. He just lays this all out, piece by piece, until the architecture becomes visible.
There’s a moment in Minneapolis, late in the piece, that sticks with me.
The NBA has postponed a game after a nurse named Alex Pretti has been killed by federal agents. Kerr gathers the team in a hotel ballroom. Later, working through what to say publicly, he does something Thompson says he’s never heard him do before — he invokes his father.
“My father was killed by extremists,” Kerr says, rehearsing lines. “I know how that story ends.”
Thompson can hear his voice catch between sentences. “I’m crying right now,” Kerr says.
At the press conference, Kerr doesn’t mention his father. He talks about the families who will never get their loved ones back. He didn’t have to say more. And Thompson, who was there for all of it — the hotel ballroom, the phone call, the media room — doesn’t have to explain the connection either. He’s done the work of showing us who Malcolm Kerr was, what his assassination meant, how Steve has carried it. The press conference lands with the full weight of everything we’ve already been given.
This is Thompson at his best: information as infrastructure, detail as detonator.
The piece ends not with a contract signing or a press conference. It ends with a granddaughter.
On the same day Kerr commits to returning — the decision made, the call to Steph placed, the band getting back together — his son’s younger daughter, Charlotte, takes her first steps. Kerr watches her toddle around the room. He thinks about his son as a toddler. He looks at the photograph on the wall of Nick and his older daughter grinning in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. “It all felt intertwined,” Thompson writes. “Blood family, basketball family, family. A cocoon, like his old Arizona manager said.”
That word — cocoon — has appeared once before. It’s what the Arizona manager called the arena the night Steve played two days after his father was killed. The crowd forming a protective warmth around a boy who had just lost everything. The team as shelter.
42 years later, it’s still what Steve Kerr is building and protecting. Thompson knew to plant the word the first time so it could bloom at the end.
That’s the technique. That’s what I mean when I say reading him costs something. In a wonderful way. He shows you that the things people build — teams, careers, dynasties — are sometimes just very elaborate answers to questions they were asked at 18 on a cold curb on Speedway Boulevard. And then he leaves you with a baby taking her first steps, and you feel the whole weight of it all at once.
Tracy Kidder died yesterday, March 24th, of lung cancer. He was 80.
I’ve been sitting with that quiet, heavy fact for a few hours now, staring at the screen, thinking about what his work meant to me—and specifically, about the enduring legacy of The Soul of a New Machine.
On its surface, the book is a chronicle of a team of engineers and coders at Data General Corporation, racing against the clock in the early 1980s to build a 32-bit minicomputer. If you haven’t read it, that description likely sounds like the synopsis for a dry technical manual. It is, gloriously, anything but.
What Kidder did—what hit me with such force when I first turned those pages—was capture the raw, unvarnished pulse of human obsession. He didn’t just document the architecture of a machine; he mapped the architecture of the minds building it. He translated the late-night pizza runs, the bloodshot eyes, the tribal hierarchies of the engineering floor, and the strange, almost religious fervor that overtakes people when they are creating something they profoundly believe in.
He called it:
“An adventure story, a kind of cultural anthropology.”
That is exactly right.
He ventured into a world most journalists would have fumbled or fundamentally misunderstood.
The early computer industry was hyper-technical, fiercely insular, full of impenetrable jargon, and populated by brilliant minds who regarded outsiders with a polite, if dismissive, suspicion.
But Kidder didn’t blink. He embedded himself. His deep reporting and novelistic prose illuminated the basement labs of tech just as deftly as he later illuminated home construction and global disease prevention. He held a fundamental trust that the human drama playing out inside the sterile machine room was worth finding. And he found it.
Reading Soul as someone who has spent years orbiting technology, I continually find myself marveling at a different kind of engineering: how does a writer actually do this? How do you make the arcane feel intimate?
As one reviewer aptly noted at the time, “Kidder makes the telling seem absolutely effortless.” Which is, of course, the ultimate tell. Effortless prose is always the product of staggering effort.
A friend once said of his process:
“Tracy throws up on the page and cleans up afterward. He was absolutely indefatigable in the writing.”
That immense labor shows—not as the sweat of a struggling author, but as the pure clarity of a master.
What the book quietly teaches, if you’re paying attention, is a profound lesson about the nature of craft itself.
Those Data General engineers weren’t just building a minicomputer. They were building an identity, a tribe, a shared sense of purpose. They were transferring a piece of themselves into the silicon and wire. Kidder understood this alchemy. He highlighted people who had mastered their realms, elevating them into characters whose struggles rang true because they were anchored by staggering amounts of research. He believed—and subsequently proved to the world—that ordinary people doing terribly difficult things in obscure rooms were worthy of the full weight of literary attention.
That was his extraordinary gift. And it is far rarer than it sounds.
The honors and brisk sales from the book vaulted Kidder into the top ranks of American nonfiction writers. But his true legacy lives in the narrative talents he inspired. I suspect a vast number of people who went on to write serious, empathetic nonfiction about technology read Soul at some formative moment and thought: This is how it should be done. I know I was one of them.
He will be deeply missed. But the book remains, waiting on the shelf. If you haven’t read it, today feels like exactly the right day to start.
There’s a particular kind of madness that strikes writers late at night, or in the stagnant hours of mid-afternoon, when you find yourself staring at a single sentence for twenty minutes.
You’re weighing a semicolon against an em dash. You’re wondering if “murmur” is too soft or if “whisper” is too cliché. All of this while knowing, with complete certainty, that no reader will ever stop to appreciate this specific choice. They’ll just read the sentence and move on.
So why do we do it?
In Draft No. 4, John McPhee — the legendary literary journalist who spent decades at The New Yorker — shares a principle he still writes on the blackboard at Princeton. It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant: “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” The implication, McPhee explains, is that almost no individual detail is essential, while the details as a whole are absolutely essential.
I find this idea endlessly useful. And a little reassuring.
Think about walking into a beautifully designed home. You don’t notice the precise angle of the crown molding or the specific undertones of the paint. You don’t walk in and say, “Ah yes, Alabaster White.” You just feel warmth, or elegance, or comfort. The impression is singular — but it’s entirely built from a thousand invisible decisions someone made before you arrived.
Writing works the same way. The rhythm of your sentences, the specificity of your verbs, the way a paragraph ends — these are the details. Individually, they’re expendable. Swap “murmur” for “whisper” and the piece survives. Delete the semicolon and the world keeps turning.
But collectively, they are the piece.
Start compromising — reach for the easy cliché, let a clunky transition slide, settle for vague where you could be specific — and the foundation slowly rots. The reader won’t be able to name the moment they lost interest. They’ll just close the tab. The impression shifts from resonant to flat, without anyone quite knowing why.
Writing, then, is an act of quiet faith. It asks you to labor over things no one will applaud. Nobody claps for an em dash. But the work isn’t really for applause — it’s out of respect for the whole.
We curate a thousand invisible things so the reader can feel one visible truth.
So the next time you’re agonizing over a single word at midnight, remember: you’re not just picking a word. You’re placing a tile in a mosaic. Cary Grant understood it. McPhee put it on a blackboard. You might as well make it count.
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