Remembering William Langewiesche

Langewiesche had no taste for manufactured drama. Real drama, he believed, could be found almost anywhere, in any story, if you looked deeply and patiently enough. Similarly, there was nothing overwrought about his prose. His sentences relied on ordinary words, but for all that possessed a pure and crystalline character that turned reading into compulsion. He rarely injected the first person into what he wrote, but the reader was treated to a seemingly omniscient perspective from right behind his eyes. And that perspective was earned. To ask Langewiesche how he knew a particular fact or how he knew what someone thought—the kind of thing fact-checkers and editors ask all the time—was to embark on an explanatory excursion that underscored how hard he worked for every morsel of insight. 

William Langewiesche was funny. When people talk about him now … they will invariably mention the serious nature of his work. After all, this is a man who wrote 20,000-word articles about the Iraq War and a National Book Critics Circle–nominated book on the rubble cleanup from Ground Zero. Over his long career, he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award 10 years in a row. He won twice. It should go without saying that none of those nominations had anything to do with humor.

But if you had a keen eye, you couldn’t miss the delight William routinely took in poking fun at the absurdity of life. In his article about Red Bull–sponsored parachutist Felix Baumgartner, “The Man Who Pierced the Sky,” he took a shot at the entire country of Austria for reasons only he understood.

“Red Bull is an Austrian company,” he wrote, “and a big deal in that town.”

The aerial view is something entirely new. We need to admit that it flattens the world and mutes it in a rush of air and engines, and that it suppresses beauty.  But it also strips the facades from our constructions, and by raising us above the constraints of the treeline and the highway it imposes a brutal honesty on our perceptions. It lets us see ourselves in context, as creatures struggling through life on the face of a planet, not separate from nature, but its most expressive agents.

" [Director and writer Anthony Minghella said], ’On some level what you want to do with any story that's based on a true thing or a novel is to deeply consume it and have reverence for it, and then you have to put it aside and retell the emotional story as accurately as you can.’ Those aren't his exact words  — that was what I took from it  —  but that rang really true to me. And oftentimes that's hard for a journalist because you've been educated as journalists to report the facts. And that's not the job of a screenwriter. That's not the job of a television writer. The job of a film and television writer is to take the audience on an emotional journey."