I love the writing in this article. A sample:

"He wore delicate blue-and-white-striped slip-ons, his clothes unchanged across the three days I saw him: baggy black pants salted with cigarette ash and a deep blue shirt that, owing to its epaulets, lent him a vaguely military air. You would assume he chain-smokes, and you would be right, except the term doesn’t go quite far enough; so constant was the smoking that it seemed his cigarettes were little oxygen tanks he drew on to sustain life."