Notable Narratives

When I began reading Evan Allen’s powerful, critically acclaimed Boston Globe story about Anthony Pledger, all I could think about was Jimmie. Jimmie is a violent offender — a sanitized…

A journalist's mother tuned her, and then her daughter, into the sound of written language by reading Chaucer aloud in Middle English

A biographer of Arctic explorers writes about the discovery of Shackleton's Endurance and why adventure narratives hold our attention through time

A while ago, preparing to teach a literary nonfiction class, I reread Nellie Bly’s “Ten Days in a Mad House,” her account of going undercover in 1887 into Blackwell’s Insane…

Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, and by Christmas internet searches were returning page after page of obituaries that described her as a “peerless prose stylist.” She has long…

A charter member of IRE carried lessons from Didion's probe of the 1989 Central Park jogger case throughout his career

At the end of each semester, after all the discussions of craft, I remind my reporting students at the Missouri School of Journalism the why of it all: the larger…

I had an exchange the other night with my 4 ½-year-old daughter about what qualifies as a story. Who knew one of the joys of parenthood would be to see…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Read an annotation of the prologue and first act of This American Life’s “Anatomy of Doubt.”CAUTION: The stories linked to and discussed in this package describe details of…

A new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick explores the complexity of the man, and the legacy of his work