Author

Nell Lake

Coping When All is Hopeless

We liked the focus in this piece on one patient, the very clear narrative and progression from scene to scene. We thought the use of the doctor’s internal soundtrack a…

Two Brothers Make a Family

Usually we want newspaper narratives with highly emotional content to connect with some larger public issue; otherwise they’re so often mawkish, sentimental. But there are also, of course, plenty of…

Drugnet

Shiffman and his editor, Avery Rome, made a very complicated story readable and highly engaging by sticking closely to narrative technique. Read “Drugnet,” by John Shiffman…

Quarantined

This is a great example of linking a deeply personal experience to a larger social issue, or in this case to social history. Latimer traces her mother’s fear of showing…

Katrina’s Nameless Dead

Bruce DeSilva wrote us this about the piece: “Rukmini Callimachi is an AP bureau writer with less than 5 years in the business. She set out to do a situationer…

Equal Treatment

This piece uses narrative elements in shedding light on an irony of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it gets worked out at one locus, one institution. The piece is narrative in…

Father, Son and Holy Rift

“One by one they fell away, the doctrinal pillars of the house his father built.” This is the story of Chuck Smith, Jr., and his movement away from the stern…

Tay Sachs: At What Cost?

This piece is in some ways “just” another story about tragically ill children. But it’s also a useful exploration of ethical issues around the lengths parents will go, understandably, to…

One Spoonful at a Time

This is a fascinating, moving piece of memoir. We admired the masterly sequencing of the reader’s experience, from evocative scene to background and back to scene. But the background is…

End of the Race for Family Farm

This piece tells the poignant story of one farm. It’s also, peripherally, a story about baseball. It’s not fully narrative in terms of structure; it uses more quotes than dialogue…