The Illuminated Donkey

This month's award for the best of example of why you shouldn't snottily dismiss an all-time great in a magazine with a two-month lead-time: Andrew Corsello, in his terrible profile of Pete Sampras in this month's GQ, "Curse of the Succubus." (not available online, but I was able to find this lovely poem of the same name)

How sad it is for a tennis fan to write [...] about Sampras's glorious zonedness and notice only upon their completion how they gravitate towards the past tense. Sad but appropriate. For Sampras is not coming back. He may play another year or two, but he will not come close to winning another Grand Slam, and he will not break the top five.

The whole article is relentlessly awful, not too surprising for a subject that rarely inspires great writing. My personally favorite is David Foster Wallace's Esquire article "The String Theory," which I can't find online but is available in his universally discounted "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."