Story Annotations

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz says of story pitches she accepts: "There has to be something surprising and narratively interesting there."

As we launch a series about the mystical art of pitching longform stories, the longtime freelancer does the coolest thing: He annotates one of his own

The New York Times foreign correspondent talks about her sensational last story from India, in which she uses first person to unparalleled effect

The Los Angeles Times writer, who watched a doctor operate on a teen gunshot victim, talks about his enduring passion for stories that depict “the split-second events that change the…

The writer talks about her hilariously awful trip with extreme birders for Audubon, and her bold choice of having a paragraph consisting of a single exclamation point

The writer talks about his Huffington Post Highline piece on ritualistic killings in Papua New Guinea -- and the differences between scapegoating in philosophy and in blood-curdling real life

The writer, who splits his time between tabloid reporting and deep dives, talks about how one prepares him for the other. (And kudos to Outside magazine, on a longform roll.)

For his piece in Outside magazine, the writer talks about the trickiness of reporting on climate change and the importance of pacing: "readers can feel when the story loses its…

The writer talks about his eerily prescient 1971 Esquire classic about "phone phreaks," and how it inspired Steve Jobs (who later said, “If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would…

The New Yorker writer talks about his story on the awakening of a daughter of the reviled Westboro Baptist Church, calling it "a culmination of things I was writing about…