Articles

Dreaming Against the Odds

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:…

The Exorcist in Love

The subject of this profile is not like most of us. Is she crazy? A hustler? Or does she know things we can’t? We need the writer to make sense…

A Hidden Addiction Fuels a Life of Chaos

Gurnett’s attitude in this piece is curious, compassionate, never melodramatic. Gurnett achieves "narrative distance," a detachment from her subject, even as she seeks to understand him. Her writing has more…

At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die

LeDuff got a job on the cutting floor at a North Carolina slaughterhouse, where the work burns your muscles and dulls your mind. He hacked meat off of bone and…

Best of Friends, Worlds Apart

Ojito profiles two men, one black and one white, who have fled Cuba and live in Miami. In Cuba they were close friends; in America they have grown distant from…

Shared Prayers, Mixed Blessings

This is a fascinating account of an integrated Fundamentalist southern church and its courageous struggles with race. Through his focus on two church couples, one white and one black, Sack…

Reaping What Was Sown on the Old Plantation

This is the tale of a black park ranger and a white landowner, the descendant of slaveowners, in Louisiana. It’s a story about the unearthing of grievances, about perception, truth…

The French Fry Connection

This series has global reach, an international cast of characters—and shows that, to paraphrase Tip O’Neil, “all economics is local.” Read seeks to explain the wide repercussions of the Asian…

Against All Odds

Suskind won a 1995 Pulitzer for feature writing for this story and its sequel. He later published a book: “A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner…

Growing Up, Growing Apart

The eighth installment in The New York Times race series may be the least narrative, in the sense that it is more an organized, persuasive collection of reporting—quotes, background, information—than…