Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'writing'

The Reason That I’m Here

January 19th, 2024 · Comments Off on The Reason That I’m Here

I’m generally against nostalgia, since I think it’s obvious charms can insidiously blot out our ability to live in the moment. But I’ll confess to being overwhelmed with sadness upon learning a few minutes ago that Sports Illustrated has essentially been swept into the dustbin of history. As I’ve discussed on this here site several […]

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Every Story is a Little Cry of Confusion

November 1st, 2023 · Comments Off on Every Story is a Little Cry of Confusion

I used to resist the first-person voice in my stories at all costs, but no longer: I’ve come to accept that everything I write is at least partly about the personal doubts and fixations that keep me up at night, and there’s really no shame in being frank about that aspect of my work. And […]

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Flipping the Perspective

April 11th, 2023 · Comments Off on Flipping the Perspective

Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach […]

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The Big Sleep

November 28th, 2022 · Comments Off on The Big Sleep

The illustration above should give you some sense of how I spent my summer: Learning everything I possibly could about the current state of hibernation research, the unheralded key to getting our species to Mars and beyond. I did so in order to write this new Wired story, which came out on Thanksgiving morning. The […]

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The Accidental Poetry of Horse Names

October 26th, 2022 · Comments Off on The Accidental Poetry of Horse Names

I’ve been trying really hard to fall back in love with the English language, and this gargantuan compendium of racehorse lineages is really helping. There’s such a pleasing alchemy to the way the names evolve over the different generations, and then often end up with a thoroughbred whose moniker can be interpreted as having multiple […]

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How to Pull Off an Ending

October 20th, 2022 · Comments Off on How to Pull Off an Ending

In the name of getting better as a writer, I’ve been grappling with the aspects of the craft that I’m pretty terrible at. High up the list is final paragraphs—I just struggle so much with concocting a hefty parting thought that naturally connects to all that has come before. On the rare occasions I manage […]

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The Bard of Svengalis

October 11th, 2022 · Comments Off on The Bard of Svengalis

When you pick through the work of accomplished nonfiction writers, you’ll usually find that they keep exploring the same general theme through multiple projects. In the case of Randall Sullivan, that theme can be neatly summarized as, “Charismatic individuals whose delusions of grandeur exert a strong gravitational pull on people in search of meaning.” It’s […]

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The Blank Page (Redux)

October 7th, 2022 · 1 Comment

I have a lot of good things planned for next week, including pieces about an obscure cinematic ending I’ve grown to love, a punk band with delusions of grandeur, and mouth-to-snout resuscitation. For the moment, though, I’ll confess to feeling out-of-sorts and thus not up to writing anything of particular value today: I’m pretty burnt […]

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Commitment to the Bit

October 5th, 2022 · Comments Off on Commitment to the Bit

It would honestly have been super-easy for me to blow off posting here today, mostly because—and I have the page-view statistics to support this contention—literally no one is reading what I write. But I didn’t want to betray the main reason I opened Microkhan back up, which is my desperate need to get back in […]

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At the Nadir

October 4th, 2022 · Comments Off on At the Nadir

My Grand Unified Theory of Celebrity Profiles™ is that they should only be written when the subject is smack dab in the creative valley between their early peak and their first real comeback. Because that’s when a writer worth his-or-her salt is able to capture the character traits I find most interesting in accomplished artists: […]

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555 Wins in a Row

September 30th, 2022 · Comments Off on 555 Wins in a Row

I have a heavy writing day ahead: I’m having serious problems with a transition in my lede, and experience has taught me that ironing things out will take a good eight hours. So I’m shirking my Microkhan duties for the day and just tossing up some rare footage of the greatest squash player to ever […]

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Shedding the Past

September 27th, 2022 · Comments Off on Shedding the Past

Over the years here at Microkhan, we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink while paying homage to the Sports Illustrated stories that sparked our love for writing. Another one recently bubbled back up to the surface, mostly because it has one haunting line about the link between the physical and the psychological. The piece is […]

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An Experiment of Sorts

September 13th, 2022 · Comments Off on An Experiment of Sorts

There’s nothing particularly novel about the pickle in which I currently find myself. After gutting my way through some major projects this summer, with bewilderingly mixed results, I hit the proverbial wall around Labor Day. Daunted by the challenges of starting anything new, I instead chose to dither—you’d gasp if I told you how much […]

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A Decisive Moment

October 22nd, 2021 · Comments Off on A Decisive Moment

As is always the case, I had to cut a slew of choice details out of my latest Wired story—the bizarre and alarming tale of a Washington State clinical-trials company that (and this is the vastest of understatements) didn’t play by the industry’s rules. In a lot of instances, material got left on the cutting-room […]

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The Void of Expertise

June 24th, 2021 · Comments Off on The Void of Expertise

One reason I generally shy away from celebrity biographies is that they typically involve too much authorial sleight-of-hand. Though they’re written in the first-person, it’s always obvious that the actor or athlete or entrepreneur behind the “I” didn’t actually commit any words to paper. Even the savviest ghostwriter can’t help but leave their fingerprints all […]

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What Burns Sometimes Returns

June 11th, 2021 · 2 Comments

I’m not entirely sure why I chose today to re-open this blog after five-plus years of silence. Lord knows there have been many times when I’ve toyed with the idea of popping back up on these august pages, but I could never quite work up the gumption to do so. This morning, though, I realized […]

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Hello Again

September 30th, 2013 · 7 Comments

Contrary to what you may have concluded after several months of silence, I have not, in fact, abandoned this long-cherished experiment in storytelling. I had to shift Microkhan to the back burner during a long summer spent spreading the gospel of The Skies Belong to Us, an endeavor that took me to the far corners […]

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The Skies

June 18th, 2013 · 21 Comments

It’s a bit tough for me to believe that The Skies Belong to Us is finally out today. As dedicated followers of this project know, I’ve been working on the book for nearly four years, and there were many moments when its completion seemed an impossibility. The Grand Empress and the progeny can attest to […]

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The Specialist, Cont’d

March 21st, 2013 · 2 Comments

Non-fiction storytelling is ridiculously time-consuming. My latest Wired story, which began life as a Microkhan post in January 2012, has been in the works for nearly a year. Granted, much of that time was wasted on tasks that didn’t pan out—I’m still waiting for a certain FOIA request to come through, for example, not to […]

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Firefighters, Firebugs

August 2nd, 2012 · Comments Off on Firefighters, Firebugs

If I so desired, I could probably make this blog all about firefighters-turned-arsonists and still have enough material to post at least once a week. The latest example comes from Opp, Alabama, where a firefighter allegedly set a mobile home ablaze for no discernible reason. The problem has been serious enough in years past for […]

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Poetry Lives!

May 29th, 2012 · Comments Off on Poetry Lives!

I spent part of the long holiday weekend catching up with Evan Osnos’s account of Macau’s casino scene, a story gorgeously stuffed with details of nouveau riche excess. The mind reels at the thought that Macau’s high rollers require stools upon which to place their handbags, or that they rock $12,000 mobile phones. But the […]

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You Have My Sympathies

April 27th, 2012 · 1 Comment

I have exactly one week to go before my book deadline, so expect the next few posts to spin off my last-minute writing struggles. Over the past several months, I’ve occasionally shouted out great examples of single descriptive details that elevated non-fiction tales into the realm of high art. There was Barbara Demick’s retelling of […]

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Speed Above All

April 20th, 2012 · Comments Off on Speed Above All

I recently spent the better part of a day trying to verify a single, rather insignificant fact for my next book—namely, whether an interviewee’s claim to have received a certain model of Omega watch in early 1978 jibed with Omega’s production schedule. (It did.) Having expended way too much mental bandwidth to accomplish that one […]

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Flying Too Close to the Sun

April 17th, 2012 · Comments Off on Flying Too Close to the Sun

If all had gone according to plan, I would’ve handed in the complete first draft of my next book today. But, much to my discredit, I’m stil a whole chapter away from completion, plus a few more days’ worth of revisions. I can take some small comfort, at least, in knowing that I’m probably not […]

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A Detail Worth a Thousand Words

March 7th, 2012 · 3 Comments

I’ve written before about how a single observation can elevate a work of non-fiction into the realm of true art. That is certainly the case with this New York Times dispatch from Whiteclay, Nebraska, a town infamous for providing alcohol to the neighboring Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It’s a solid piece of reporting, for sure, […]

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Exit the Tripods

February 8th, 2012 · Comments Off on Exit the Tripods

Saddened to hear of the passing of John Christopher, creator of one of my formative sci-fi experiences: the harrowing Tripods Trilogy. As I discussed nearly two years ago, Christopher’s tale of alien overlords was far more than crackling adventure yarn; it also centered on a powerful metaphor for parenthood that I admire to this day. […]

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Word Association

February 6th, 2012 · 1 Comment

Just slammed today, with both reporting for my Wired column and preparations for tomorrow’s performance in Soho. Leaving you with some classic Europop and some salient thoughts on creativity from the great Sean Price: HipHopCanada: What starts your creative process? Sean Price: The beat. The beat’ll tell me what to do. And sometimes I have […]

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The Scribe Mind

January 30th, 2012 · 3 Comments

I recently finished up Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, which is an absolute beast of a book. Aside from that great apocalyptic party scene in Bury St. Edmunds, there’s a terrific set piece in which Buford gets pummeled by Italian riot cops. I love the way he recounts his thought process while being savaged with […]

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The Worst Good Time

January 17th, 2012 · 4 Comments

I’m a few pages from the end of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, a study of Thatcher-era football hooliganism that doubles as a meditation on crowd dynamics. It’s perhaps best known for its opening set-piece, in which the author tags along with a bunch of Manchester United supporters on a depraved trip to Turin. But […]

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Seizing the Narrative

December 21st, 2011 · 2 Comments

It’s fair to say this has been a momentous week for Willie Gault, the former Chicago Bears wideout who was also a track star of great renown. Things started off great when police in Los Angeles found his stolen Super Bowl ring, but then took a turn for the worse—the much, much worse—after news emerged […]

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