Articles

Notable Narrative: Bernt Jakob Oksnes and "The Baby in the Plastic Bag"

Notable Narrative: Bernt Jakob Oksnes and “The Baby in the Plastic Bag”

The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet bucked the short-attention-span trend by committing to a nine-part serial -- and it paid off both in readers and a powerful narrative about an infant left…
March 7, 2017
Kari Howard
5(ish) Questions: Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop on the backstory of the NPR show’s most downloaded episode ever

5(ish) Questions: Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop on the backstory of the NPR show’s most downloaded episode ever

A show that was more than a year in the making about the controversial prisoner Oscar López Rivera scored journalism gold, coming out just days after the Puerto Rican was…
March 2, 2017
Julie Schwietert Collazo

“He watched a mouse saunter up the electric cord leading to the nonfunctioning clock over the hotel bar and asked the Chinese waitress in German whether it was a tiger.”

—Henry Kamm, The New York Times, Feb. 17, 1973: “Regional Truce Teams Unable to Act”
March 1, 2017
Steve Chawkins
Annotation Tuesday! Christopher Solomon and "The Detective of Northern Oddities"

Annotation Tuesday! Christopher Solomon and “The Detective of Northern Oddities”

For his piece in Outside magazine, the writer talks about the trickiness of reporting on climate change and the importance of pacing: "readers can feel when the story loses its…
February 28, 2017
Allison Eck
Guy Larson and "Merv Curls Lead" — it's kind of like "The Office" on ice

Guy Larson and “Merv Curls Lead” — it’s kind of like “The Office” on ice

In his 1999 piece on a would-be impresario of the quirky sport of curling, the Canadian writer creates a David Brent-like character: at times an insufferable blusterer, at others an…
February 23, 2017
Kari Howard

“The only break from the darkness comes when the sub drops through clusters of bioluminescence that look like stars in the Milky Way.”

—Brooke Jarvis, "The Deepest Dig." The California Sunday Magazine, November 2, 2014.
February 22, 2017
Kari Howard
The art of the obituary: It's a dying one

The art of the obituary: It’s a dying one

As newsrooms shrink, a former obit writer mourns the loss of bustling staffs that took deadline dives into fascinating lives, and looks fondly at the New York Times piece marking…
February 21, 2017
Steve Chawkins
Meet the phone phreaks, the grandfathers of today's hackers (Russian or otherwise)

Meet the phone phreaks, the grandfathers of today’s hackers (Russian or otherwise)

Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included,…
February 17, 2017
Kari Howard
A Saudi feminist's spoken-word performance finds its power in protest

A Saudi feminist’s spoken-word performance finds its power in protest

Waad Janbi, a Saudi feminist and aspiring filmmaker, has long fought against misogyny using her hands–furiously typing on her smartphone or laptop. But last month, for the first time, she…
February 16, 2017
Jasmine Bager

“The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.”

—Katherine Boo, “Opening Night,” The New Yorker, February 23, 2009.
February 15, 2017
Jeneen Interlandi