Jonathan Coleman's books include AT MOTHER'S REQUEST: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was made into a CBS miniseries); EXIT THE RAINMAKER; LONG WAY TO GO: Black and White in America; and a collaboration with basketball icon and NBA logo Jerry West, WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life.

He began his career in London on Ian Hamilton's legendary journal The New Review, became a book editor at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, then worked as a journalist for CBS News. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications, and is a contributing editor of The Sunday Long Read. He is also an award-winning voiceover talent and recently narrated the audiobook of Ken Auletta's HOLLYWOOD ENDING: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. For many years, he taught narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia.

Jonathan's essay on Jerry West, from The Hedgehog Review.

Aaron Latham's 1973 New York Magazine piece on Gay.

"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," by Gay Talese, originally published in 1966 in Esquire.

"Your moment of Nan Talese" source is a Library of America conversation with her author Margaret Atwood.

Photo is of the Taleses' wedding day in Rome, 1959. Credit: Elio Cardone.

Jane Leavy grew up on Long Island, where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. She worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, up the street from Yankee Stadium, where her grandmother’s synagogue held services on the High Holidays.

She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, covering baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the sports section and writing profiles for the Style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including profiles of comic Danny Kaye, Jane Fonda, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and basketballer Muggsy Bogues, which was longer than he is tall.

Then she moved to writing books, beginning with Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball”. Then she wrote the national bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy Book: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood , Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and now Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It.

Jane's website

Sandy Koufax career statistics

Vin Scully's call of the final inning of Koufax's 1965 perfect game

Koufax's 2022 speech at the unveiling of his statue outside Dodgers Stadium

The photograph shows Koufax after his perfect game--the four balls he's holding in his very large hands represent his four no-hitters. Credit: Bettmann

Tim Page has been the chief classical music critic for the Washington Post and New York Newsday and a regular contributor to the New York Times, where I first encountered his byline. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for work for the Post. He’s a professor emeritus of musicology at USC and his many books include The Glenn Gould Reader, Dawn Powell: A Biography, the memoir Parallel Play, and four books for the Library of America imprint, on Powell and Virgil Thompson.

Tim grew up in Storrs, Connecticut, where as a kid he was the subject of a celebrated short documentary film, A Day With Timmy Page. Over the course of his career, he has done a stint as a cocktail pianist; played keyboards and composed for his own rock band, Dover Beach; and served as the host of New, Old and Unexpected, a daily program on WNYC-FM, where he presented hundreds of radio premieres.

Stephen Merritt's website

Tim Page's Subtack

Stephen Merritt and the Future Bible Heroes, "Memories of Love"

Photo of Merritt by Kevin Yatarola