Constance Hale is a California journalist and the author of six books, including the writing primer Sin and Syntax. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Atlantic, Honolulu, Smithsonian, Wired, and many other newspapers and magazines. From 2007-2010 she taught writing at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and she directed three conferences during her tenure there.
Newspapers struggle with representing incendiary topics in a way that explains without exploiting. Last month, The Plain Dealer’s Joanna Connors addressed sexual assault, poverty, and race in a single project. “Beyond Rape,” a 16-page supplement to the Cleveland newspaper, recounts … Read more
An anti-profile, Jeffrey Fleishman’s “Viewing Life from the Roof,” is a series of snapshots from the life of Alia Qotb, who lives on an anonymous rooftop in Cairo. In language that floats between poetry and prose, Fleishman recounts vignettes from … Read more
In this story of a father who takes care of his autistic adult son, reporter Maureen O’Hagan adroitly sketches the dilemma caused by longer life expectancies for people with developmental disabilities. The father, Ron Johnson, must have emergency bypass surgery to … Read more
In “Let’s Die Together,” which ran in The Atlantic in May 2007, strangers in Japan join online networks with the express purpose of meeting and killing themselves. David Samuels serves as our guide to an underworld “too familiar” to the … Read more
In “Climbing a Ladder Made of Lipstick,” Los Angeles Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske looks at the day-to-day life of immigrant entrepreneurs who are transforming that quintessential American business, Mary Kay cosmetics. She follows Altagracia Valdez as the 60 year-old abuela … Read more
Larissa MacFarquhar’s “The Conciliator” rises above other narratives appearing this primary season, much as its subject later rose to surprise Hillary Clinton, among other seasoned politicos. Amid the breaking-news accounts of state contests and he-said, she-said debates, MacFarquhar’s deeply reported … Read more
The story we’ve chosen this month, “The Fight for Sugar Hill,” centers on an itinerant pastor’s efforts to help the residents of a dead-end housing project in Texas’ richest county. Dallas Morning News reporter Paul Meyer and photographer Melanie Burford … Read more
Coverage of the war in Iraq, now in its fifth year, always runs the risk of reader fatigue. Daily headlines swim in the wake of militaries and militias. But with “Anguish in the Ruins of Mutanabi Street,” Sudarsan Raghavan manages … Read more
Second-day disaster stories, or eighth-day disaster stories, often merely tote up possessions damaged and lives lost. Not so with “The Answers in the Wind,” in which Washington Post reporter Tamara Jones details the aftermath of the tornado that obliterated Greensburg, … Read more
Occasionally a story strikes our fancy because of the sheer surprise of the subject. And so we were smitten by “Grandmasters in Guayaberas,” Josh Schonwald’s piece in the Miami New Times, about four unlikely chess champs. Rodelay Medina, Renier Gonzalez, … Read more
