Story Annotations

The writer, who won the 1980 feature writing award, talks about trying make her literary stories both beautiful and powerful

When you read a lot of longform stories, you can’t help noticing something: They tend to be very, very serious.Think fast: How many made you laugh?Epic magazine’s “The Cold War,”…

The photojournalist talks about how he got unprecedented access — and images — inside the world's largest walled prison

The writer talks about creating moments of beauty, and the one thing you want to tell people about the story even if it has nothing to do with everything else.

The writer leaps into the abyss of pay-for-protest audiences, faux cheerleaders and pretend paparazzi -- and embraces the chaos

The New Yorker writer talks about a police department awash in machismo and parents who are told their home is in a "kill zone"

"My best stories attempt to answer an almost psychoanalytic need to address the larger, more philosophic questions about life"

The writer talks about the challenge of re-creating someone who is dead -- and who even in life was unknowable

Elliot Rodger, 22, who went on a deadly rampage near a California university, was an “involuntary celibate.” Most in the “incel” culture disavowed his actions. Writer Peter C. Baker’s recent…

For many of his 30-plus years in the journalism business, Jesse Katz has been covering crime. Back in the early 1990s, his former employer The Los Angeles Times assigned him…