In this week’s Notable Narrative, we took a semi-quantitative look at how Dahlia Lithwick’s story on a wrongful conviction used one person’s experience as a narrative thread to present a bigger problem. The piece, which followed the exoneration … Read more
Susan Orlean’s “Orchid Fever” first ran in The New Yorker on January 23, 1995. It had a second life as a book, and a third as a movie, in which adapting the latter from … Read more
Our latest Notable Narrative, the story of a mother convicted of killing her adopted son with salt, comes from Pamela Colloff of Texas Monthly.A two-time National Magazine Award finalist, Colloff has been … Read more
A few days ago I stepped onto an elevator, heading out for an afternoon coffee. The repairman was there, his tools spread out on the floor. Come on in, he said, pressing the “door close” button and whistling a short … Read more
Continuing the Nieman Foundation narrative writing speaker series set up by Paige Williams, journalism legend Gay Talese appeared on campus two weeks ago in conversation with Esquire’s Chris Jones. The Harvard Writers at Work lecture series co-sponsored … Read more
It’s hard to think of a single magazine piece that exerts as world-historical an influence upon its genre as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” the 1966 Esquire profile that redefined the way that long-form journalists write … Read more
Dexter Filkins is hardly the first person to use a crime and its procedural aftermath to tell a story of corruption – such tales have dotted the landscapes of film and fiction for most of a century. But in our latest … Read more
Our latest Editors’ Roundtable looks at Cynthia Gorney’s story “Too Young To Wed,” from the June issue of National Geographic. In addition to her work for National Geographic, Gorney is a professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of … Read more
I only saw my great-aunt a few times – she lived far away – but in my family, she was kind of a legend. She wore purple every day, and kept a stash of matching purple toilet paper that she’d break out for company. She … Read more
I first read “Letter from Bogota” in a Latin American History class in college. About 50 kids were crammed into an old, long lecture hall, the kind you see in movies about blue bloods and their schools: the dark … Read more