some of my other writing — matthew klam

an essay about friendship from the new Yorker

Nineteen seventy-eight, eighth grade: I’m five feet nine, a hundred and three pounds, and am often mistaken for a girl. Dave, a kid in my homeroom, same height, blond like me, is somehow fat and skinny at the same time. We both know “Let’s Get Small,” the Steve Martin album (“We’re basically into the intellectual scene”), and, although we use it to transfix girls and keep cretins off balance, there’s something else going on. In a romantic coupling, you turn inward, but friendships put you shoulder to shoulder to take on the world.

a story from the new york times about the drug ecstasy

The pill was white and smelled like No-Doz. Although it had come to us in the mail inside a tennis ball, it was legal then, fresh from a lab in Texas. No rumors, no culture surrounding it. We took it on a whim, on blind faith -- because it was Saturday and there was nothing better to do. It was late afternoon, warm for November in New Hampshire.

a story about political bloggers on the campaign trail

Nine blocks north of Madison Square Garden, next door to the Emerging Artists Theater, where posters advertised "The Gay Naked Play" ("Now With More Nudity"), the bloggers were up and running. It was Republican National Convention week in New York City, and they had taken over a performance space called the Tank. A homeless guy sat at the entrance with a bag of cans at his feet, a crocheted cap on his head and his chin in his hand. To reach the Tank, you had to cross a crummy little courtyard with white plastic patio furniture and half a motorcycle strung with lights and strewn with flowers, beneath a plywood sign that said, "Ronald Reagan Memorial Fountain."

a profile of robert downey jr

Standing there in his kitchen, I feel like I've known him for years. His private life, his tortured psyche, have been so familiar for so long that I almost feel like I'm visiting a family member, one who went crazy last Thanksgiving and tried to fuck the turkey, but is fine now and applying to law school.

A story about a US Navy pilot

Standing on the newly resurfaced deck of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower sixty miles off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, last spring, I watched a group of F/A-18 Hornets approach from the southeast, three black crosses against a pale sky. The enormous ocean lay flat and gray in the morning haze, and as the three crosses assumed their more familiar and menacing shapes, I tried to imagine the reverse perspective of the pilots intending to do well what almost no one can do at all: land a jet on a ship. I had come to see Lieutenant Commander Doug Hamilton, an old college friend, undergo two days of landing exercises, and although I'd been aboard the carrier for only a short time I'd begun to appreciate the odds in favor of a fatal accident.