There’s an enclosed pedestrian bridge that spans Locust Street in Akron. It connects a parking garage and medical building to the third floor entrance of Akron Children’s Hospital. I crossed that bridge on January 4, 1991. I was scared, tired, still not sure of what was going on. I didn’t know why I was in Akron, other than the fact that I had been exhausted for the last couple weeks, that I had a severe […]
I wrote this story in December 2006 for the Columbus Dispatch as Colo, the world’s first captive-born gorilla, was about to turn 50 years old. Even then, she was the oldest-known gorilla in the world. Hard to believe she has just turned 60 years old. One of the things I loved most about doing this story was watching Tom Dodge make the amazing portrait of Colo that ran as dominant art on Page 1. ____________________________________ By […]
This piece was written Yohuru Williams, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Fairfield University (my new dean, by the way, something I couldn’t be happier about, both in my joining Fairfield and having him as a dean) on school inequality, why charter schools are not the answer and outlining why those salivating over charter schools are misappropriating the Civil Rights Movement. There’s one thought that really stands out in a piece […]
From The Daily Record in Wooster, Ohio. This is the first story I wrote on Sept. 11, 2001. It ran in a special edition that the newspaper put out the same day as the attacks. I was at the Wayne County Fair working the subscription tent when what was happening finally started to dawn on everyone there. I ended up using the back of subscription forms to take notes. By Matt Tullis Staff Writer WOOSTER […]
I was cleaning out the file cabinet in my office at Ashland University when I came upon a bunch of folders that contained a lot of my writing from grad school. This included three short stories and an essay that, when I read it, made me realize that its real life was only the first section, and only as a piece of fiction. Two of the four pieces of writing (the essay, specifically that first […]
For the last couple weeks, I’ve been watching the reaction to SB Nation Longform’s “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw” story. I’ve read just about everything, I think, that has been published online about how the story came to be, and then the aftermath, which included SB Nation’s firing Longform editor Glenn Stout and then Deadspin’s attempt to explain how the story happened, a poorly-reported piece that put the blame solely on Stout. I’ve watched this as someone […]
After promising to do this months ago, I’ve finally started reading through the contents of Esquire’s “The Greatest Table of Contents of All Time” thanks to Esquire Classic. And by “started reading through,” I mean I’ve read Arnold Gingrich’s inaugural Editor’s Letter in the Autumn 1933 issue. I’m going to go ahead and blame Jonathan Franzen for my delay, primarily because I’ve spent the last three weeks reading “Purity.” It’s a good novel, although not […]
Esquire’s 1,000th issue — it’s October 2015 issue — was in my mailbox on Wednesday. I was excited because I had just pushed out a Gangrey: The Podcast episode a couple days earlier, in which I talked with Esquire editor Tyler Cabot about the new Esquire Classic. Through Esquire Classic, one can now read every issue of Esquire; all 1,000 issues and counting, online. The magazine scanned in more than a quarter-million pages in order […]
Matt Tullis 