Just wrapped up my first column for examiner.com, “Twelve lessons poker can teach you about life.” I’ve started doing some freelance pieces for examimer.com on poker. Officially, I’m the “DC Poker Examiner.” Not exactly my heaviest work, but a fun little bit of freelancing.

Here’s a snippet from the piece:

5. No matter what you do, some days everything will go wrong. Preparation and planning are important, but they won’t spare you from the brutality of bad luck and variance. If you flip a coin, you have a fifty-fifty chance of it landing either tails or heads. Sometimes, if you flip a coin three times in a row, you’ll get heads three times. Unlikely, but it happens. You might flip a coin ten times and get heads each time there as well — less likely statistically, but not impossible. In fact, if you flip a coin a thousand times, you’re bound to have several stretches where heads or tails lands ten or more times in a row. In short: bad luck happens, and it can happen in bunches. Just as you can have a day where you spill coffee on your shirt, wreck your car, and get dumped before dinner, you might have a night where you lose with aces in back-to-back hands, then flop a flush that gets beat on the river by a one-in-twenty long shot. It can feel like a conspiracy, as if supernatural forces are twisting the universe you crush you. And yet, in reality, nothing is after you other than the cold, remorseless cruelty of chance. The lesson: bad luck, like good luck, will come in streaks. Learn to take both in stride.

Read the rest here.

One idea my instructors at Johns Hopkins hammer home is the notion that to be a great writer, you need to “read like a writer.” More and more, I see what they mean. I read newspapers and magazines differently these days, dissecting paragraphs and words as I go, noticing small bits of writing technique and style that work well.

This short Sports Illustrated article on the national champion North Carolina Tar Heels is a good example. I printed it out to read after my Tar Heels won the title, and finally got the chance to read it today. Unlike many articles written about the championship game, this piece by Tim Layden looks beyond the score and tells the story of North Carolina’s season and the different challenges faced by some of its key players. Layden crafts some deft bits of writing in this piece, like this:

On the afternoon of the championship game, Lawson was so nervous that he could barely touch his pregame meal of chicken, steak, rice and potatoes. But hours later he went out and devoured Michigan State with a game-high 21 points, eight steals and six assists, with just one turnover

It works well not only because it is witty, but because Layden did his homework to be able to describe, with detail, the meal Lawson couldn’t eat, and contrast it with his stats from the game. Structurally, he builds two lists of four items and runs them parallel to each other.

Layden also does a nice job blending direct observation and reporting with analysis. He shows scenes that lead the reader back to the outcome of the game:

By 11 the next morning Williams and his assistants were huddled in a private room at the team’s hotel, studying video. They cued up Michigan State’s emotional upset of Connecticut, breaking down the Spartans. They did this, as always, with the sound off. A day later they would silence the Spartans more forcefully.

It’s a small thing, but connecting the observation that the UNC coaches studied the game film of the Spartans with the sound down with the way the team silenced the crowd and their opponent the following night is clever. Layden didn’t just report the game like countless other sports writers; he told the story with narrative and metaphor. Just because an article is a sports story doesn’t mean it can’t be good writing. Layden proves that in this piece.

Read the rest here.

Growing up half-Catholic, half-Jewish and about 90% agnostic, I didn’t really grow up in a particularly religious home. We celebrated four big holidays — Christmas, Hanukkah, Passover, and Easter — but none of them very seriously. Christmas and Hanukkah were about trees, candles, and presents; Easter was about a basket of candy; Passover was a dinner with a lot of pre-meal reading.

Passover tells stories of how the Jews escaped slavery, struggled, then found their way to Israel. As a kid, I understood this was a good and important story, to be sure, but it wasn’t the most relevant thing in the mind of a pre-teen boy.

For most years since I’ve been an adult, I didn’t observe Passover at all. But last week, my wife and I joined some friends for a Passover seder on our block. Unlike the hagaddah (for the gentiles in the house: that’s the book you read from during the meal) from my childhood, we used a more modern version by someone called the Velveteen Rabbi. Maybe it’s this version of the readings, or maybe it’s me, or maybe it’s all my recent study of narrative and storytelling, but I saw the whole idea of Passover in a new light.

The entire meal is a narrative, with symbolic gestures that go along with the story. You eat horseradish to remember the bitter times. You dip parsley in saltwater to remember the tears of suffering. You eat matzoh to recall that Jews had often had to eat on the move. Like Thanksgiving to Americans, Passover is about taking one night to remember the power of perseverance and appreciate good fortune.

I love this passage about the story of Moses:

God spoke to him from a burning bush, which though it flamed was not consumed. The Voice called him to lead the Hebrew people to freedom. Moses argued with God, pleading inadequacy, but God disagreed. Sometimes our responsibilities choose us

The story is about Moses, but who can’t relate to the idea of taking on challenges we don’t want?

And then there’s this section, which explores the idea of slavery beyond the literal reference of the history of the jews, suggesting that in modern times, we often enslave ourselves:

“Avadim hayinu; ata b’nei chorin. We were slaves, but now we are free.” Is this true? Though we no longer labor under Pharaoh’s overseers, we may still be enslaved—now in subtler ways, harder to eradicate. Do we enslave ourselves to our jobs? To our expectations? To the expectations of others? To our fears?

Tonight we celebrate our liberation from Egypt—in Hebrew, Mitzrayim, literally “the narrow place.” But narrow places exist in more ways than one. Let this holiday make us mindful of internal bondage which, despite outward freedom, keeps us enslaved.

This year, let our celebration of Passover stir us to shake off these chains. Our liberation is in our own hands.

It’s taken me a few decades of experience to have a better idea what the holiday is all about. It’s not just old stories of where our people came from; it’s recognizing history in order to better see the world and our life more clearly. Like a good book or a fine piece of writing, the narrative brings with it multiple meanings and interpretations. Sometimes you just have to look at it with a fresh eye.

Browsing the cover story archives of the Washington Post Magazine, I came across this gem of a story, “Comic Book Hero.” by David Rowell. The story profiles Andre Campbell, a 44-year-old legally blind would-be comic book artist.

It’s not the story of how he succeeded in overcoming the odds and cracking into comic book publishing along side D.C. Comics and Marvel — he doesn’t. Instead, it looks at how one man’s dream, no matter how unlikely, has driven him since childhood.

Early in the article, it is clear that the story is about Campbell, not his business prospects as a comic book tycoon. Rowell accompanied Campbell to his first visit to an eye doctor in two years. Campbell is able to try out a “CCTV” device that would greatly improve his ability to read. He tests it out on a Hulk comic from his bag. Rowell captures the moment beautifully:

Garber kept talking, but Campbell was captivated by the eyeball, which belonged to Bruce Banner, who had spent his life trying to rid himself of the Hulk and who, in that moment, had just been hit by a cosmic blast. In the panel, he is laid out in a giant crater. Is he dead? Veins shoot out in little rivers of pale blood from the pupil, and his emerald eye, rendered, as Campbell could see now, with three shades of green, radiated a lifetime of failure and heartbreak. Campbell had never seen a piece of art so clearly, and he was lost in that single eye.

Rowell also closes with a fine scene at his son’s elementary school “Career Day”:

In the last class, Jason’s fourth-grade class, the kids were asking for his autograph — another first. Some had comics from National Free Comic Book Day — a publicity event dreamed up by the industry during more desperate times — and put those in front of him, and others handed him blank sheets of paper. Then others decided that he should sign their backpacks.

Here, no one asked him about his plans for distribution. No one wondered how much of his own money he had spent on Heritage or what he could do with members who didn’t show up for meetings. They didn’t criticize his dialogue or originality as an artist. They didn’t know how long he had worked to keep his dream alive, and they couldn’t understand that, in fact, it was on this very day, with them, that he had finally arrived. He couldn’t see the students clearly, but it was clear to Campbell how they saw him.

Great stuff, especially that closing line.

In addition to the story, the Post does a nice job with some bonus features, including a narrated slideshow, a video of Campbell drawing, a side feature about some of Campbell’s characters, a transcript of a live chat between readers, Campbell, and Rowell the day after thge release of the story, and a few final notes from the author. The beauty of the web is that while the article itself stands alone, all these bonus online features are relatively cheap and simple to add the story, yet add value to readers who want to explore further.