Tom Junod

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Tom Junod, one of the great longform journalists of the Magazine Age, is probably best known for his 2003 Esquire piece, “The Falling Man.” If I could only tell people to look at two things related to the WTC, I would recommend Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit, who didn’t tumble from the buildings’ heights, and Junod’s article, about a man, on 9/11, who did.

Junod just did a predictably smart Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Here’s an exchange about a contemporary figure he once profiled, the serial groom and bible salesman Donald Trump:

Question:

From a journalist’s point of view, What do you think of Donald Trump running for President in 2016?

Tom Junod:

Well, he’s been a treasure trove for journalists, hasn’t he? But there’s lesson here, because his campaign has been driven by the fact that he doesn’t sound like anybody else. He doesn’t sound like a politician, so he can get away with stuff people think that politicians shouldn’t say. But a lot of journalists want to sound like journalists. A lot of journalists want to sound like everybody else. Trump speaks to the advantage of having your own voice.

Question:

Thank you for your answer, I agree and that is why I think a lot of people really like him. But do you think it seems like he is making most of us feel dumb by the way he is talking to the press? Or do you think he is trying to appeal to more of the uneducated voters in America by making this run for President a Circus?

Tom Junod:

I’ve met Trump — I wrote a story about him, oh, a long time ago. I don’t think he’s trying to make anybody feel dumb, or even that he’s trying to turn the whole campaign into a circus. That’s just the way he is. The interesting thing is that it makes people think he’s authentic, think he’s telling the truth, when he’s flat out the most insincere person I’ve ever met. That he’s ridiculously needy, and responds to everything situationally and by instinct, doesn’t make him a truth teller.•

 

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New technologies take time to perfect, but it’s tough to be patient when you’re an A-Lister. In an Esquire profile by Tom Junod, George Clooney complains that his Tesla Roadster was overrated junk that took him nowhere. Coincidentally, that’s how I felt about Syriana. From the article:

“’Hey, where’s the Tesla?’ I said when I was leaving his house. I was just giving him shit; I didn’t know if he had a Tesla or not, and was trying to see if even George Clooney was susceptible to Hollywood cliché.

‘I had a Tesla. I was one of the first cats with a Tesla. I think I was, like, number five on the list. But I’m telling you, I’ve been on the side of the road a while in that thing. And I said to them, ‘Look, guys, why am I always stuck on the side of the fucking road? Make it work, one way or another.’ ”

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Life is a fight that’s long and bruising, the score changes regularly yet surprisingly, and no one really wins in the end. And that’s for the fortunate ones. When we’re at our best or worst, it seems like it will go on forever, that no fall or rise is possible. But the sands shift and the tides are unimpressed. We can spend our time marking down who’s leading, but we’re all falling behind.

Two fighters, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, brought out the best and worst in one another. Their three fights in the early 1970s made them legends and made them old. Ali used ugly, racist words to describe his fiercest opponent. It was the Greatest at his lowest. Frazier relished Ali’s eventual physical decline, diminishing himself in the process. They were both winners, but it wasn’t enough–the other had to lose. Ali seemed better about letting go of the feud in later years, but let’s remember that he won two of the fights. FromThe Lonesome Death of Smokin’ Joe Frazier,” Tom Junod’s 2011 Esquire piece about the rivalry that couldn’t end on its own terms:

The only time I ever met Joe Frazier was in downtown Atlanta, outside the arena used as a boxing venue during the 1996 Summer Olympics. The week before, Ali had once again “shocked the world” when he was handed the torch at the opening ceremonies, and then he elicited both pity and awe when he shakily climbed the stairs and ignited the Olympic flame. Despite winning the gold medal in the 1964 Games, Joe wasn’t invited to the stadium that night, and now he was selling T-shirts in a jerryrigged shack outside the boxing arena, just another of the carnie barkers who infested downtown during the games and turned Atlanta into an eyesore. His son Marvis — the former heavyweight contender who had been knocked out as if by a gunshot by a Larry Holmes right hand and then almost killed by Mike Tyson — was working the shack, making change. ‘Hey Joe!’ I said, and walked up to him as my father had 25 years earlier. He held out his hand horizontally, and held it still. ‘Hey Joe!’ I repeated, and Joe, looking at his hand and then at me, said with a familiar smile: ‘Still steady.’

He was saying that he had won. He was saying that while Ali was a rattling relic with Parkinson’s Syndrome, he, Joe Frazier, was still steady, and capable of keeping his hand still. He was saying, above all, that wherever Ali was, he, Joe Frazier, put him there, and that he was vindicated by the split decision handed down by the fullness of time.

Now Joe Frazier is dead, and Muhammad Ali has once again miraculously outlasted him. But that’s the thing about fighting your battles over the fullness of time: You fight when you’re a young man, and you fight until the final bell. You keep fighting when you’re an old man, and you keep fighting to the death.”

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I don’t agree with the great Esquire writer Tom Junod that Jon Stewart has lost his sense of humor over the years, but here’s an excerpt from his interesting new profile of TV’s most-lauded truth-teller:

“Now, you have to understand Jon Stewart is just like everybody else: He can be a dick. His father took off when he was a kid, leaving a hole in his heart approximately the old man’s shoe size. He’s damaged and is capable of doing damage in return, especially in close quarters. There are plenty of Daily Show staffers, present and former, who love and revere their boss for his difficult brilliance. There are also plenty — mostly on the former side — who have been, well, fucked up by him and his need to dominate. When he arrived at The Daily Show in 1999, its humor was goofy and improvisational, based on the interplay between the fake-news host and the fake-news correspondents and dependent on whimsy and happenstance. But Stewart knew what he wanted right away, and it wasn’t that. He wanted the show to be more competitive, almost in a news-gathering sense, and he wanted it to have a point of view, which happened to be his own. There are writers and producers from the first five years of the show, both male and female, who are described as ‘battered wives’; hell, there are people who used to work for him who are scared to talk about him because they’re scared of not being able to work again. And before he pushed out the show’s cocreator, he notoriously threw a newspaper at her in a story meeting and then, according to a staffer, apologized to her later with the words ‘Sorry, that was the bad Jon — I try not to let him out…'”

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Jon Stewart in less complicated times:

Interviewing Anna Nicole Smith, 1994.

Romantic leading man, 1998.

Related posts:

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Jesus. H. Christ. Don’t forget Tony Junod’s excellent Esquire article about ants.

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From “Invasion,” Tom Junod’s 2010 Esquire piece about his house being besieged by an army of those tiny colonists known as ants:

“A few years ago, I interviewed the great biologist E. O. Wilson right before he and his colleague Bert Hölldobler published their magnum opus, The Superorganism. The book, a study of ant societies, was an exploration of the notion that ants are such organized organisms that they almost don’t count as individual organisms at all but rather as cells of the colony they serve. The colony is the superorganism, and as Wilson told me, ‘an ant colony is far more intelligent than an ant.’ I’ll say. An ant by itself is an inoffensive creature, at worst a crunchy annoyance, smidgeny and obsessively clean and, above all, dumb, with a pindot of a brain. An ant by itself is not going to get any ideas… the problem being that it’s rarely by itself, that it’s representative of something, and that what it represents not only has ideas — it has designs. Wilson’s book proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out — what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you — is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.” (Thanks Atlantic.)

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Ant-sploitation horror movie trailer from 1977:

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"Jobs was being Jobs: He was telling the truth, he was simplifying the truth, he was exaggerating the truth, he was leaving part of the truth out." (Image by acaben.)

Tom Junod’s 2008 profile about Steve Jobs in Esquire becomes an even better read now for very unfortunate reasons. (Thanks Longform.) The article’s opening:

One day, Steve Jobs is going to die.

First, he is mortal. Second, the odds against him are not only actuarial — the inevitable odds we all face — they are clinical. Four years ago, he announced in a memo to his employees that he had undergone surgery, that the surgery was for the removal of a malignant tumor, that the tumor was on his pancreas, and that the surgery was, as he put it, successful. An exceptional man who specializes in exceptionalizing himself — he has been an economic force for thirty years, and it’s still hard to put him in a category, or even to say exactly what he does — he responded to his disease by exceptionalizing it as well. He was at pains to say that the pancreatic cancer he had was not that kind of pancreatic cancer — not the kind that kills you, without much room for exception, in six months or so — but rather ‘a very rare form of pancreatic cancer… which represents about 1 percent of the total cases…each year, and can be cured by surgical removal.’ Even in extremis, Jobs was being Jobs: He was telling the truth, he was simplifying the truth, he was exaggerating the truth, he was leaving part of the truth out. It is true that his cancer, originating not in the ductwork of the pancreas but rather in the islets of Langerhans, is slow growing and, in the words of one expert, can be addressed ‘with curative intent’; it is also true that even after surgery, the average patient lives about five years.”

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