Articles

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…

We chose Erin Sullivan’s story about a 9/11 survivor as our latest Notable Narrative for the usual reasons − interesting characters; strong, memorable writing − but also because it contained the watermark of a takeaway…

We thought about rounding up some of the week’s better 9/11 anniversary coverage (including that viral thing about rescue dogs, because a great protagonist doesn’t have to be human), but…

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…

The first week of fall term ends today at Harvard, and the Nieman Foundation's newest class of fellows is settling in. The Nieman fellowship, which next year will celebrate its…

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…

In July 2011, Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) wrote a haunting story about the “disappearance” and death of a woman named Kathryn Norris. He did it…

The best stories – even the written ones – have audio. Maybe it’s a sensibility: voice or style, which Ben Yagoda explores in his craft book The Sound on the…

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…

Jon Franklin’s “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which in 1979 won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, ran 33 years ago but never loses its power to captivate or instruct. Franklin…