Articles

By Trevor PyleTo guide readers through a thicket of bureaucracy and a shocking policy that had been born there, Caitlin Dickerson first had to slash through it herself. Once she…

Physical descriptions are challenging to write. More accurately, they are challenging to write well. And yet they are standard fare in much of our journalism, especially if we’re writing profiles…

By Philip KieferIn the last several weeks, Katherine J. Wu, a science writer at the Atlantic, has written a lot about cats. Her run started in late August with a…

A journalist and mom goes to her son's third-grade class to teach writing ~ and instead becomes the grateful student

EDITOR’S NOTE: “A Place Called WriterL” is a new collection of some of the listserv discussions about narrative journalism held in the late 1990s through the early 2010s. In a…

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two essays about the new book “A Place Called Writer L,” a collection of listserv discussions from the 1990s and 2000s. Tomorrow, co-editor Stuart…

Kindness isn’t a word often used to describe journalism or journalists. I get that. To those who don’t do this work, we can seem abrupt, aggressive, even cynical and certainly…

As the aerospace beat reporter for the Seattle Times, Dominic Gates is one of the world’s most knowledgeable journalists about the business of commercial aviation, and especially about the Boeing…

I’ve always questioned the old aphorism that misery loves company. When I let myself throw a Pity Party, it’s a pretty self-absorbed affair, with room for only one in the…

A standard — some would say ideal — approach to effective narrative nonfiction is to follow a single, primary character through an intimate journey that illuminates a larger social situation.…