Articles

Raise your glasses to four lessons all writers can learn by judging craft beer

Raise your glasses to four lessons all writers can learn by judging craft beer

Maybe not 99, but at least a few dozen bottles of beer are along the wall. We take one down, pass it around, make sure the barcode on the bottle…
July 15, 2022
Charles Scudder
A tribute to the consummate reporter/writer: Francis X. Clines

A tribute to the consummate reporter/writer: Francis X. Clines

EDITOR’S NOTE: This tribute is shared with permission from our friends at The Poynter Institute.Frank Clines arrived at The New York Times in 1958, one year before the death of…
July 14, 2022
Roy Peter Clark
So you want to write a book? Brace yourself for some serious self-promotion and, yes, TikTok

So you want to write a book? Brace yourself for some serious self-promotion and, yes, TikTok

It was the mid-1990s. I was sitting across a white damask table-clothed table at a midtown Manhattan steak house watching my editor, Bob Loomis, alternately cut into a ribeye and…
July 13, 2022
Lauren Kessler
When your saved story becomes one more overstuffed space

When your saved story becomes one more overstuffed space

One of the few things I appreciate about Facebook, besides tours of my friends’ faraway lives and photos of the babies being born to my former “Baby Js”, is the…
July 12, 2022
Jacqui Banaszynski
A meteorologist attracts an audience with casual writing and controversial views

A meteorologist attracts an audience with casual writing and controversial views

 If not for the astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan, University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass might be writing and teaching about Nor’easters, Mount Washington in New Hampshire and Boston’s…
July 8, 2022
Stuart Tomlinson
So you want to write a book? The risks and rewards of memoir

So you want to write a book? The risks and rewards of memoir

For well over a decade, my memoir was a perennial backburner project. I would vow to carve out time to write each week, but work or life always took precedence.…
July 6, 2022
Mallary Tenore Tarpley
Struggling to explain American democracy to a visitor

Struggling to explain American democracy to a visitor

With something of a literary apology to Garrison Keillor … It was anything but a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, aka These dis-United States, as we headed into the nation’s 246th…
July 5, 2022
Jacqui Banaszynski
A podcast focused on diversity practices what it preaches

A podcast focused on diversity practices what it preaches

When I asked Saadia Khan whether or not she identifies as a journalist, she said no. Her definition of a journalist: “someone with a degree in journalism or has worked…
July 1, 2022
Kristen Chin
"... the Jenga tower simply will not collapse."

“… the Jenga tower simply will not collapse.”

In the minority writing of last month’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, three justices delivered a dissent that was both lacerating rebuke and baleful elegy. Folded unexpectedy inside:…
June 30, 2022
Trevor Pyle
The vital scramble after news that will reverberate forward

The vital scramble after news that will reverberate forward

Just when I think the dominant news of the day is too big to be pushed aside, it is eclipsed by other news. I was working through an early draft…
June 28, 2022
Jacqui Banaszynski