Well, the polls are more or less closed (thank you, Gawker technology!), and last week's winner is Michelle O'Donnell, for her anthropomorphic Times piece. Michelle will receive a copy of The Gay Talese reader. Today's entry also comes from the Times, but it's a very special guest: David1 Foster2 Wallace3. See you after the jump!

Play, the NYT's occasional sports supplement, offers many opportunities for overheated prose, as does sports journalism in general. Combine that with one of the most pretentious novelists of his generation and you're guaranteed GMiJ gold. It's hard to single out a section from DFW's piece on Roger Federer, so we're just going to go with this one, which had the benefit of coming early enough in the article that we saw it before we stopped reading:

Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of "The Matrix." I don't know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs. Anyway, that's one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

We're gonna give everyone a break and forego the obvious footnote jokes. If you must, that's what the comments section is for. Enjoy.
Federer as Religious Experience [NYT]