I'm Brandon Sneed. This is my blog. It's basically an online notebook where I highlight good writing, storytelling, journalism and other acts of creativity, and explore how such things are made.
I'm an author and journalist who writes about people, sports, science, nature, and more. I love learning, adventures, life, and stories. I've covered everything from a guy who played Division I basketball while battling cancer ... to golf courses that eat golfers ... to turkey vultures invading a town. You can read all those and more below.
More about me and the blog: here.
The Good Hurt: How Ray King Lives and Plays Basketball with Cancer
(SB Nation Longform)
Golfer Swallowed By Golf Course
(Outside)
How A Tiny Southern Town Handles A Turkey Vulture Invasion
(Outside)
Blind Ambition
(ESPN The Magazine)
Mad For Carolina
(GQ)
Nobody Walks Alone
(ESPN: The Magazine)
The First Legend
(SLAM magazine)
Came across this nugget whilst reading Joe Posnanski's piece about Kevin Youkilis, the beloved Red Sock who was just traded to the White Sox. On Gay Talese:
The magnificent writer Gay Talese used to write out a sentence in big block letters, hang the sentence on his office wall, and then go to the other side of the room and look at it through binoculars.
“That’s always been the trouble with standing on the shoulders of giants; if we see what they see, they won’t look like giants anymore. Suddenly they’ll just be men, trying to get along, and who would want to cheer for anyone like that?” — Chris Jones, "Access Denied" in the Dec. 12, 2011 issue of ESPN: The Magazine
If you haven't read Jones's back-page column in the new issue of ESPN: The Magazine, do so soon as you can. It's quite good. (It's the issue with the cover of a bulldog French-kissing Ozzie Guillen. Yah.)
Writing