6 ms·

I am a runner also (finished one marathon with a time that is nothing to write home about), and was looking forward to an interesting story. I read this whole a

I am a runner also (finished one marathon with a time that is nothing to write home about), and was looking forward to an interesting story. I read this whole article with a growing feeling of incredulity, not about the cheating that it describes (yes, I understand that there are confabulators of this type - Stephen Glass was already mentioned in the comments), but about the effort and space that a national magazine would spend on this story. I kept waiting for SOMETHING of momentous importance towards the end somewhere that would justify all this buildup, but it never came. Yup, a guy cheated in a bunch of races. Yup, he is a confabulator who will invent any number of details and fake personas to build up his fantasies. Yup, he was caught in due time. You could summarize this in five lines. This is not just beating a dead horse, this is shooting it with a howitzer, repeatedly. The only truly interesting detail would be the method by which he cheated, which the reporter, at long last, admits that nobody has figured out. This leaves the possibility that other people are cheating the same way, although maybe less brazenly. Again, this could be summarized in a line (it's clear that he cheated, the method is difficult to figure out). What is this, a slow news year?

w1ntermute 14y ago
The New Yorker likes to publish long, meandering human interest pieces. If you don't like those kinds of articles, skip them.
- yaakov34 14y ago
  It's not my favorite magazine, but I've read long New Yorker human interest pieces, and they've always had more, well, interest than this. The problem is that when you see a long piece in a respected magazine on a subject that you are interested in, it's hard to decide at some point that all the rest is garbage, and put it down. I started reading this story expecting a tale of a middle-aged dentist who transformed himself into a remarkable marathon runner. Pretty quickly, the story veered into a tale of cheating. I could see there is another 30 pages left to go, and kept wondering what I'd learn about. A secretive group of marathon cheaters who jet around the country and subvert race after race? A group of vigilante marathoners who help bring them to justice? Maybe Kip Litton's whole life is a lie, and he is not a dentist, but a spy from Gondwana? Maybe we at least get some fascinating psychological portraits painted by the masters of investigative journalism? No, in the end, it's a pile of boring and irrelevant details. "At 7:34 the next morning, Joe Blow leaned over his model M keyboard, and, with keystrokes echoing crisply through his split colonial house, posted a message to the forum revealing that he has a photo of Litton at the 10K timing mat". Ok, that's not a quote, but the article is very much like that. In the end, Kip Litton is indeed a dentist from somewhere in Michigan, who for some unfathomable reason decided to start cheating at marathon races for amateurs. And that's it. Nobody knows why, and in some cases, we don't know how. This is a 10,000 word article in a major magazine. 30 to 40 printed pages. Come on. I have just as much right to express my disappointment, as the New Yorker has to print this nonsense in the first place.
  - Johngibb 14y ago
    I'm with you. I enjoy a well written long and meandering article, but this one was just a dud. The story just wasn't that interesting. I kept expecting it to pick up right until the very end; then I just felt disappointed.
    - thebigshane 14y ago
      Exactly. It was very well written and held my interest to the end. But the article didn't have an ending at all. Not the fault of the author really, the real story really didn't have an ending either. It just ended like "...and I guess we'll never know. The End."
- rotskoff 14y ago
  I also felt that the quality of this article didn't meet the standards I usually expect from The New Yorker. The basic calculus for a New Yorker article usually accounts for a meaningful (often globally-stated and overwrought) thesis. This article, however, read as gossip.
batgaijin 14y ago
I wish there was a way to tell the article wasn't going anywhere, but I guess that would ruin the surprise.
- mhb 14y ago
  One way would have been not seeing it on the HN front page.
  - Johngibb 14y ago
    True. Any word from the up voters on why they enjoyed this particular article? Or did the votes come mostly because people like The New Yorker, and were expecting it to be good?
    - bhousel 14y ago
      I upvoted it because I like "long meandering human interest pieces". I thought it was fascinating the extent to which a pathological liar will go to maintain such an elaborate false identity. I shared the article with a few other non-HN people into running and they thought it was an interesting story as well.
hollerith 14y ago
Either cheaters and liars are common (and consequently unremarkable) among the people you have met or you do not share my anger at cheaters and my pleasure when someone who is definitely a serial cheater is publicly shamed. Either way, that makes me a little sad.
- batista 14y ago
  Your point has nothing at all to do with whether a specific article about cheaters and liars is good. And. this. one. is. not.
hapuka 14y ago
I appreciate the tl;dr.
DanBC 14y ago
People who cheat one marathon are not common, but they do exist. People who cheat multiple marathons are rare. People who go as far as to invent a marathon, and to create fake runners for that fake marathon, are very rare. The article isn't about how or why a man cheats. It's about a man who cheats; and everyone knows that man cheats; and yet he still maintains his innocence; and so he still hasn't "had his comeuppance yet".
themgt 14y ago
This is a very strange perspective, demanding a five-sentence summary and details on the technical aspects of the cheating, rather than this a well-written close-lens narrative of a fascinating person and his bizarre, borderline-inexplicable behavior This isn't being presented as "news", whatever that even means. I think you should reflect on what you're looking for from the world - I would consider this kind of work a form of art, and one I very much appreciate. You don't have to appreciate it, but you're asking it to be some other thing you'd rather have - raw facts and data, summarized into as few words as possible Some of us would rather the world still have some art
- yaakov34 14y ago
  This was a piece of reporting that simply never took off. The reporter was not able to get the subject of the story to open up, and the whole article contains nothing that was not found in the endless discussions on the forum that he referenced. The result is a meandering and repetitive article which seems bloated and full of fluff. I don't see any really compelling or three-dimensional characters in it. Mark Singer should have had the guts to say "I didn't get the story. The guy wouldn't open up, I've got nothing interesting to say about him". Instead, he holds the reader's attention with every trick in the book, leaving us with nothing at the end of all the buildup. I do appreciate literature, but this just isn't literature, and it's bad reporting.
  - opminion 14y ago
    A failed story but not bad reporting. I learned a lot about marathon races and how are they managed. Only the end is disappointing.
    - nacker 14y ago
      I enjoyed the article, and found the end disappointing and surprising in equal measure. It certainly confounds the readers expectation of "closure". It made me think of that classic Rumsfeld line: "There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that's just a fact." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/donald_rumsfeld_4.html http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/donald_rumsfeld_...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pxue 14y ago
if you need a tldr, reddit is that-a-way.

w1ntermute 14y ago

The New Yorker likes to publish long, meandering human interest pieces. If you don't like those kinds of articles, skip them.

yaakov34 14y ago
It's not my favorite magazine, but I've read long New Yorker human interest pieces, and they've always had more, well, interest than this. The problem is that when you see a long piece in a respected magazine on a subject that you are interested in, it's hard to decide at some point that all the rest is garbage, and put it down. I started reading this story expecting a tale of a middle-aged dentist who transformed himself into a remarkable marathon runner. Pretty quickly, the story veered into a tale of cheating. I could see there is another 30 pages left to go, and kept wondering what I'd learn about. A secretive group of marathon cheaters who jet around the country and subvert race after race? A group of vigilante marathoners who help bring them to justice? Maybe Kip Litton's whole life is a lie, and he is not a dentist, but a spy from Gondwana? Maybe we at least get some fascinating psychological portraits painted by the masters of investigative journalism? No, in the end, it's a pile of boring and irrelevant details. "At 7:34 the next morning, Joe Blow leaned over his model M keyboard, and, with keystrokes echoing crisply through his split colonial house, posted a message to the forum revealing that he has a photo of Litton at the 10K timing mat". Ok, that's not a quote, but the article is very much like that. In the end, Kip Litton is indeed a dentist from somewhere in Michigan, who for some unfathomable reason decided to start cheating at marathon races for amateurs. And that's it. Nobody knows why, and in some cases, we don't know how. This is a 10,000 word article in a major magazine. 30 to 40 printed pages. Come on. I have just as much right to express my disappointment, as the New Yorker has to print this nonsense in the first place.
- Johngibb 14y ago
  I'm with you. I enjoy a well written long and meandering article, but this one was just a dud. The story just wasn't that interesting. I kept expecting it to pick up right until the very end; then I just felt disappointed.
  - thebigshane 14y ago
    Exactly. It was very well written and held my interest to the end. But the article didn't have an ending at all. Not the fault of the author really, the real story really didn't have an ending either. It just ended like "...and I guess we'll never know. The End."
rotskoff 14y ago
I also felt that the quality of this article didn't meet the standards I usually expect from The New Yorker. The basic calculus for a New Yorker article usually accounts for a meaningful (often globally-stated and overwrought) thesis. This article, however, read as gossip.

batgaijin 14y ago

I wish there was a way to tell the article wasn't going anywhere, but I guess that would ruin the surprise.

mhb 14y ago
One way would have been not seeing it on the HN front page.
- Johngibb 14y ago
  True. Any word from the up voters on why they enjoyed this particular article? Or did the votes come mostly because people like The New Yorker, and were expecting it to be good?
  - bhousel 14y ago
    I upvoted it because I like "long meandering human interest pieces". I thought it was fascinating the extent to which a pathological liar will go to maintain such an elaborate false identity. I shared the article with a few other non-HN people into running and they thought it was an interesting story as well.

hollerith 14y ago

Either cheaters and liars are common (and consequently unremarkable) among the people you have met or you do not share my anger at cheaters and my pleasure when someone who is definitely a serial cheater is publicly shamed. Either way, that makes me a little sad.

batista 14y ago
Your point has nothing at all to do with whether a specific article about cheaters and liars is good. And. this. one. is. not.

hapuka 14y ago

I appreciate the tl;dr.

DanBC 14y ago

People who cheat one marathon are not common, but they do exist. People who cheat multiple marathons are rare. People who go as far as to invent a marathon, and to create fake runners for that fake marathon, are very rare. The article isn't about how or why a man cheats. It's about a man who cheats; and everyone knows that man cheats; and yet he still maintains his innocence; and so he still hasn't "had his comeuppance yet".

themgt 14y ago

This is a very strange perspective, demanding a five-sentence summary and details on the technical aspects of the cheating, rather than this a well-written close-lens narrative of a fascinating person and his bizarre, borderline-inexplicable behavior This isn't being presented as "news", whatever that even means. I think you should reflect on what you're looking for from the world - I would consider this kind of work a form of art, and one I very much appreciate. You don't have to appreciate it, but you're asking it to be some other thing you'd rather have - raw facts and data, summarized into as few words as possible Some of us would rather the world still have some art

yaakov34 14y ago
This was a piece of reporting that simply never took off. The reporter was not able to get the subject of the story to open up, and the whole article contains nothing that was not found in the endless discussions on the forum that he referenced. The result is a meandering and repetitive article which seems bloated and full of fluff. I don't see any really compelling or three-dimensional characters in it. Mark Singer should have had the guts to say "I didn't get the story. The guy wouldn't open up, I've got nothing interesting to say about him". Instead, he holds the reader's attention with every trick in the book, leaving us with nothing at the end of all the buildup. I do appreciate literature, but this just isn't literature, and it's bad reporting.
- opminion 14y ago
  A failed story but not bad reporting. I learned a lot about marathon races and how are they managed. Only the end is disappointing.
  - nacker 14y ago
    I enjoyed the article, and found the end disappointing and surprising in equal measure. It certainly confounds the readers expectation of "closure". It made me think of that classic Rumsfeld line: "There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that's just a fact." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/donald_rumsfeld_4.html http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/donald_rumsfeld_...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pxue 14y ago

if you need a tldr, reddit is that-a-way.