This piece mixes humor and gravity in telling the story of a man who narrowly escaped from the Marriott World Trade Center, a hotel that collapsed when the Twin Towers came down on 9/11. Its humor, we think, works only … Read more
Marilynn Rosenthal is on an obsessive quest for the truth. Trying to understand her son’s death, she even travels to the United Arab Emirates in search of the mother of one of her son’s murderers. We admired the evocative reconstructive … Read more
Trost’s own daughter is doing well, she reports, after years of innovative and experimental treatments for her combination of learning and behavioral problems. In this piece Trost returns to that world by following another little girl through a maze of … Read more
We found this story difficult to read, for good reason; we squirmed with sympathy for Elias Fishburne, a man who is swept into the criminal justice system in a case of mistaken identity. Jones masterfully builds tension and sorrow for … Read more
This fascinating piece is part historical narrative, part contemporary profile. From a craft point of view, we were interested in the challenge of portraying Margarete Barthel, the former SS guard, in ways that offer an authoritative "take" yet leave room … Read more
This piece goes to show that in skilled hands, a “how I got the story” narrative can beguile readers, making them willing to encounter difficult, and in this case obscure, material. A science narrative is almost always, as here, … Read more
This piece uses narrative to turn what could have been a distanced roster of wrongs into a more compelling, close story about individuals’ suffering. Vivid narrative makes good investigative work all the more compelling, the wrongs more outrageous, because the … Read more
Hull uses detail to full effect but also embeds comments in her narrative that advance her larger point. Notice this phrase in the lead paragraph of this third installment: Amy’s school supplies are “all the gear needed for a well-planned … Read more
In this final, sad chapter of the series, a West African immigrant, Adama Camara, scrubs toilets and wipes tables for 16 hours a day. The world is a grimy, dreary, bone-tired place. There’s too much work for too little gain, … Read more
In this second installment of Hull’s series, you’ll find this small example of how even a newspaper article (the voice of which is usually straight and communitarian) can include irony: “As Saul and Nallely talk about which Starbucks puts the … Read more
