Articles

For the second Roundtable of July, our editors looked at “Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man” by Barry Bearak of the New York Times. Bearak has spent the last…

On a rainy afternoon in 1949, W.C. Heinz watched a beautiful young horse break its leg and then get shot in the head. And then he sat down and wrote…

In our latest Notable Narrative, “Iraqis Pass the Safety Test,” The New Yorker's George Packer draws an arc through three apparently unrelated points by doing little more than setting up…

Any piece about New York City has a heavyweight champion to contend with – E.B. White’s “Here Is New York” – but André Aciman’s “Shadow Cities” comes out swinging. “On…

Narrative therapy uses a client’s life story to shine a spotlight on how he understands his experience. The concept of an “illness narrative” emerged not in a literary context but over…

When the Mississippi River recently surged down through the middle of the country, a lot of people I follow on Twitter took the opportunity to point to John McPhee's marvelous 1987…

Our first Editors’ Roundtable of the month looked at “Diving Headlong into a Sunny Paradise,” by Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times, in which a young couple arrives in Florida…

For the first Roundtable of July, our editors looked at “Diving headlong into a sunny paradise” by Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times. The story follows a young Wisconsin…

Adam Hochschild, a longtime supporter of the Nieman Foundation’s narrative program, published a new book last month, “To End All Wars.” A former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Hochschild lives…

In our latest Notable Narrative, “Did My Brother Invent E-Mail with Tom Van Vleck?,” Errol Morris rejects many of the standard rules of narrative writing.Best known for his films “The…