As far as I can tell, the New Yorker staff writer Ian Parker has no Twitter feed, no website, no LinkedIn page and no TED profile. Even for that magazine, he’s pretty anonymous. I think he may be the best semi-anonymous nonfiction writer … Read more
The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s – by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and others – made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. The best of it may endure, but, 50 or 100 years from now, will people still be enthralled by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of italics and exclamation marks? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the work of John McPhee. Read more
For the past few years, GQ correspondent Jeanne Marie Laskas has explored the myriad behind-the-scenes lives that help make our first-world reality what it is today. To borrow a couple of sentences from the current political discourse, “You didn’t build … Read more
Dan Barry peddles in the petits dramas and crossroads that ordinary people meet day to day. Some of his best “This Land” columns for the New York Times suggest items that Anton Chekov might have written – that is, if … Read more
A tattered, stapled-together copy of Scott Anderson’s “The Hunger Warriors” now qualifies as one of my oldest and most treasured possessions. I distinctly remember snipping it out of the New York Times magazine nearly 11 years ago, so I … Read more
In 1977, Joan Didion told The Paris Review that she always kept in mind one line of poetry, from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “at the still point of the turning world.” I don’t know if Didion … Read more
Nora Ephron was a writer of many gifts. She was fearless. She was blunt. She was dazzlingly perceptive. She was writing at the right time. Her connections were fascinating. She could turn coincidence and happenstance into substantial proof that … Read more
Around the turn of the millennium, big changes swept Hollywood. Suddenly and as never before, screens were clotted with the teen-fodder likes of Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Titanic and Dawson’s Creek. Where other journalists saw the business … Read more
Politics should, in theory, be the subject of some of the most compelling narrative journalism. There’s built-in drama! There are winners and losers! The stakes are high! That’s why it’s so depressing that most politics stories, even those of the … Read more
Phyllis Fletcher opens this wonderful piece of rescued history and solved mystery with a simple declaration: “Ina Ray Hutton was a stone cold fox.” The correct response to this kind of shared confidence – relayed by Fletcher … Read more