Two Articles Way Too Essential to Recommend

Two pieces of writing I normally wouldn't recommend because they're so obvious:

Gay Talese's Esquire profile "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (with a memorable guest appearance by sci-fi author Harlan Ellison) is widely considered, especially among writers, to be the greatest magazine article ever.

Neil Stephenson's Mother Earth Board, explaining the history and technology of underseas cables, is - all 130 pages of it - widely considered a masterpiece of long-form magazine writing.

Some follow-ups to that Stephenson piece: this week, Meta announced "Project Waterworth", a global subsea cable project spanning 50,000 kilometers). And here's a fancy NY Times thingee about How the Internet Travels Across Oceans.

Finally, here's Kevin Kelly's 2010 list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever . I stumbled upon it while editing this posting, and found that it links to the Talese and Stephenson articles, because both are, again, too obvious to recommend.