Tuesday, November 24, 2009
My entire Wired story is now available in the December issue, on newsstands now, or online here (the same spot that held the Vanish blog throughout the contest). It includes an interactive map that shows my route with some of the locations of the people who hunted me, and way more pictures of me than should ever have appeared in public. Between that and my extensive use of the third person in writing about myself, I think I’ve set some sort of magazine record for self-indulgence.
Those looking for yet still more info can find some of the hunters stories in their own words, photos of my disguise changes from day to day, and the behind-the-scenes of Wired’s challenges and clues.
Sometime next week, we’ll also set up a live chat of some sort to answer any remaining questions that anybody has. We’ll put out word on the Twitter #vanish stream, of course, with details.
Posted at 10:39 am | 12 Comments | Filed under Vanish, Wired |
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
In advance of my upcoming piece in Wired recapping my effort to Vanish, I can be found hawking it in multiple mediums this week. First, tonight, live on CNN’s Campbell Brown Show at 8:30 pm. [UPDATE: It's not terribly easy to find, but the video from this is available at the site. (You'll have to click the "On TV" button and then go to the Campbell Brown show.)]
Then, this Saturday, on Weekend All Things Considered, in a piece by reporter Alex Cohen. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the piece.]
I’ll post clips if and when I get my hands on them. In the meantime, here’s a recap of some of the other stories about the whole thing, from during and after:
Posted at 4:56 pm | 3 Comments | Filed under Articles, Media appearances, Vanish, Wired |
Monday, September 14, 2009
Twenty-five days. That’s how long I lasted on the lam. Most people arriving at this site will already know the basics: Last month, after writing a story for Wired about people who faked their own deaths, disappearing from their lives to start again, I set out to do something similar myself. I would drop out of my own life for a month, and act like I was starting a new one. Wired, meanwhile, would offer a $5000 bounty for anyone who tracked me down. We set a few basic parameters and then, journalistically speaking, we turned out all the lights and plunged headlong into the darkness. You can read a summary of what happened here.
I’ll be describing those 25 days in great detail in the December issue. There were almost daily surprises, both in what I found myself doing, and what I saw (and, of course, failed to see) the “hunters” doing to find me.
But for now I wanted to offer an extended thanks. First, to my friends and family, some of whom were made unwitting participants in this privacy-obliterating endeavor, and all of whom—especially my wonderful girlfriend (whose name the dedicated hunters know already)—were incredibly understanding and played along. Also to Nick Thompson, who sacrificed an insane amount of hours from other work and from promoting his own book (“The Hawk and The Dove,” which is getting a fantastic response, and which everyone should check out), to serve as the lead investigator. Without Nick, the whole thing would have failed in a multitude of ways. As well everyone at Wired and Lone Shark Games (particularly Teeuwyn Woodruff and Mike Selinker), both for enabling it and putting in many of their own hours. And finally to all the folks who hunted me—and aided me—for contributing their obsession and ingenuity, and especially for (with a few pretty harmless exceptions) honoring the rules about harassing my family. Many have emailed—and I want to hear from anyone who followed it: eratliff@atavist.net—to let me know they were glad I was caught. I don’t blame them. And although I was disappointed, I’m pretty pleased that at least it was by a clever bunch like Jeff Reifman and the guys at Naked Pizza.
I’d also like to offer an apology, to people I encountered along the way and deceived about my identity. It was one of the worst parts of the whole experience. I’ve been contacting them individually to explain whenever possible (a strange journalistic endeavor, that), and they’ve so far been gracious and forgiving, taking the whole thing in the spirit of fun it was intended. But many I won’t be able to find, and to them I am sorry. I won’t write about anyone by name who hasn’t given me explicit approval to do so.
To critics who griped that it wasn’t “real” enough; that it was either too easy to find me or (as people argued right up until I was caught) too difficult; that a “true” man-on-the-run would or wouldn’t have done this or that; I can only say: You nailed it! I wasn’t, in fact, a “real” fugitive. Very well observed, and I fully support your conviction that you would have done it better. But in our case, we were trying to remain, as much as possible, both authentic and engaging, two goals that were often in conflict. In compressing my time on the lam into 30 days, with the general public as the investigators, we didn’t exactly have a model to follow. You may also find that many of the things people found most “unreal,” like me using my ATM and credit cards at times, were not at all what they seemed.
Finally, to accusations of carrying out a “stunt,” I plead guilty to all but the pejorative assumption—given that category would include the journalistic “stunts” behind “Hell’s Angels,” “The Paper Lion” (and other Plimpton adventures), “Into Thin Air,” and “Nickled and Dimed,” among other pieces of narrative nonfiction that I greatly admire. We attempted what we thought was a unique, albeit self-indulgent and inevitably flawed, reporting venture. We’re hoping readers will find the results as fascinating as we did. But you can check out the December article and decide for yourselves.
Posted at 4:32 pm | 10 Comments | Filed under Articles, Crime, Disclosures, Recent stories, Vanish, Wired |
Sunday, August 16, 2009
What does it take to up and disappear these days? Not to head off the grid for a few days, mind you, but to actually vanish from your life? That question is the subject of a two-part feature I’ve been working on for Wired over the past few months, the first piece of which is in the September print issue, and out online now. It tells the story of an Arkansas man named Matthew Alan Sheppard who faked his death last year and took off on the run, and the cops who pieced together his plan and tried to track him down alive. The story is also a broader look at the evolving cat-and-mouse game between investigators and the intentional missing — be they fugitives from the law, insurance scammers, or people under pressure who just walk out the door one morning and never come back. The short answer is: going on the lam is not like it used to be.
The trouble with stories of people caught faking deaths, or just lighting out on the run, however, is that in hindsight they always seem to fall victim to a singular dumb error. (Or, in the case of plane-jumper Marcus Shrenker, probably the recent fake-death attempt people are most familiar with, a tidy collection of dumb errors). “If I had just…” is the refrain of the caught fugitive, while stories of successful lives on the lam — for obvious reasons — never get told. Even the Matthew Alan Sheppards of the world can’t tell us what I think we really want to know: so how hard is it really, to disappear?
So I decided to try it.
For part two of the story, I’m going on the lam for 30 days. The magazine has put a $5000 bounty on my head for anyone who finds me. The contest has a variety of rules, for both me and my presumptive pursuers, to try and make it a reasonable simulation of a real life on the run. The most important of which, for me, is this incentive: if I am found before September 15, most of that $5k comes out of my story fee.
You can find the details, and follow or participate in the speculation, at www.wired.com/vanish. They’ll have any info on my bank account usage, cell phone, email, and the like, along with disturbingly large professional photos of me taken from every angle (which are also in the magazine). The man running that site, my editor Nick Thompson, wants me found, and he doesn’t have a clue where I’m going. So anything that comes from him is trustworthy. Anything that purports to come from me, well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
I’m not dropping out, though, heading for a cabin or living in a cave. So security permitting, I’ll be posting more thoughts and leftovers from the first piece here over the month — or however long I make it. But if you are reading this, it means I’m already gone.
Posted at 5:23 am | 10 Comments | Filed under Crime, Wired |
Monday, July 6, 2009
Somewhat belated in this round of story hyping, but my latest for Wired is out in the July issue. Headlined “Origin of Species: How a T. Rex Femur Sparked a Scientific Smackdown,” it concerns a research dispute that grew out of the discovery of T. Rex protein fragments, announced in Science in 2007. The takeaway from that claim, as it was elegantly put in one headline at the time, summed up as: “Study Tyrannosaurus Rex Basically a Big Chicken.” (Not to be confused with the Big Chicken). Several researchers, however, found fault in the initial study.
I won’t spoil the ending, but I daresay it’s the most exciting mass spectrometry protein detection story you’ll read this month….and maybe even all year. But it’s also about dinosaurs! And more than that, about how science operates and scientific disputes — even entertainingly acrimonious ones — get resolved.
For anyone who has already read it, here’s a response from U. Maryland professor Steven Salzberg–whom I interviewed for the piece–on the story and the latest T. Rex research.
Posted at 7:31 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Recent stories |
Monday, June 1, 2009
My story from this week’s New York magazine, in which Mr. Lewis helms the squad in a tense late-inning affair, and I draw the ire of parents in the Berkeley-Albany Softball League for nine and ten-year-olds.
Posted at 12:36 pm | Comment | Filed under Recent stories |
Friday, April 24, 2009
[If you are a New Yorker subscriber, you can read it here. For a PDF copy, click here.]
THE NEW YORKER
February 23, 2009
Shoot!
An Appalachian gunsmith’s robot army.
BY EVAN RATLIFF
At the age of seventy-four, Jerry Baber has winnowed his primary interests in life to four subjects: shotguns, robots, women, and cars. When Baber is holding forth—his default mode of communication being the filibuster—his conversation tends to fall somewhere among these categories. Often his passions intersect, as in the question of whether or not a Corvette is an ideal car for picking up women. (It is.) Similarly, Baber might be discussing his love of robots and shotguns, and whether, by combining the two, he is helping to shape the future of warfare from his garage. (He is.)
Baber, an engineer by training, is an expert in investment casting—a method for making small pieces of finely shaped metal. He lives down the road from the Bristol Motor Speedway, in Piney Flats, Tennessee, a hilly town dotted with cattle farms, just south of the Virginia border. There he operates a small foundry, where he manufactures gun parts. Over the years, he has contributed triggers, barrels, hammers, and other components for half a million firearms. “I probably know as much, or more, as any one single person about manufacturing guns,” he told me one afternoon, while driving through the Appalachian foothills in his cherry-red Chevy Impala. (”The best buy on the road today, barring none.”) Post continued…
Posted at 6:01 pm | 7 Comments | Filed under Recent stories |
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
UPDATE 2: Thanks to everyone who attended, and also to all the contributors for their truly fantastic pieces. The whole thing surpassed our wildest expectations. If you couldn’t make it, you can check out the Chronicle’s write-up here. And for those curious about the final lineup, here was the Table of Contents. And keep watching the Pop-Up site!
SHORTS:
DESIGN
What the World Needs Now
By Allison Arieff
MUSIC
Psych Garage Rock
By Jennifer Maerz
FOOD
Chinese Food And The Economy
By Andrew Lam
TRAVEL
Airsickness
By Joshua Davis
FAITH
Awesome Pope
By Roman Mars
PRODUCTS
Mobility
By Steven Leckart
FEATURES
LITERATURE
This Grubbing Art
By Jon Mooallem
MUSIC
Doom Versus Lil Wayne
By Brandon Mcfarland
SOCIETY
Foreclosure
By Todd Hido
SPORTS
Fear
By Jennifer Kahn
HISTORY
A Delta Town
By Sandy Tolan
CULTURE
Pink By Peggy Orenstein
SCIENCE AND NATURE
The World at Night
By Christina Seely
CULTURE
STRAND: A Natural History Of Cinema
By Christian Bruno
SOCIETY
Born By Tania Ketenjian And Ahri Golden
SCIENCE AND NATURE
Termites By Lisa Margonelli
BIOGRAPHY
A Soldier’s Tale
By Larry Sultan
SOCIETY
Health Care
By Alex Gibney
Q&A
Megan Prelinger
With Todd Lappin
THE CITY
The Commissioner
By Nathanael Johnson
SCIENCE AND NATURE
Botany, The Movie
By Michael Pollan
THE ARTS
One Big Soul
By The Kitchen Sisters
MEMOIR
The Devil’s Water
By Glynn Washington
Post continued…
Posted at 9:10 am | 2 Comments | Filed under PopUp magazine |
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
It’s difficult to say for certain, but if you look closely at the illustration immediately to the left, you might conclude that it is a rendering of a man, in silhouette, bent over and having just vomited (and quite possibly standing in the results). That man is me. The fact that this is an apt illustration for the story to which it is attached is unlikely to encourage you to read the story. But so it is.
A while back, Outside GO magazine asked me if I had any travel philosophy that I might spin into an essay for their “Ready to Go” column. It turns out that I do have one, of sorts, and you can read about it in their Spring 2009 issue, or online here. To be honest I hadn’t grandiloquently referred to it as the One Great Thing(tm) philosophy before, and I often wondered whether it was driven more by laziness than wisdom. But I do practice it, and it works for me.
Lost in the editing was my disclaimer/hedge that while I have been on some rough trips, I haven’t been to any truly horrible places nor witnessed truly horrible things. I’m not, for instance, a war reporter. So take my travel wisdom, such as it is, as the musings of only a pseudo-professional journeyman.
Posted at 5:02 pm | 2 Comments | Filed under Outside, Travel |
Thursday, April 9, 2009
On the heels of the stunning success of Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog and Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, comes a new tale of an animal connection, a gossamer love, and a lesson you thought you’d never have to learn, in:
Mongo: The Animal that Taught Me Things and Changed Lives
