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

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.