Story Annotations

The historical novelist talks about his Boston Globe Magazine yarn and how he answered the question, "Who were America's first detectives?"

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

Some people are made for what they do. Steph Curry was made to play basketball. Dave Chappelle to deliver jokes. You get that feeling with Kent Russell and his writing.…

Rich Schapiro is always searching. Whether he’s writing a quick-hit 800-word spot feature for the New York Daily News or a magazine feature that’s taken years to report, Schapiro is…

Profiles are hard. Too often they’re drenched in the writer’s attempts to make the subject seem larger than life. But good profiles have the opposite effect: Through their honesty and…

Some writers work for decades before one of their pieces gets widespread attention. Ron Rosenbaum managed to pull it off with his second long-form magazine article.Rosenbaum’s 1971 Esquire piece, “Secrets…