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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Newspaper folks talk a lot about getting people into stories. But all too often that means trotting out direct quotes from a variety of sources. True characterization taps an array of…

Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression.…