Notable Narratives

This is travel writing brought to science. Nijhuis joins a group of scientists and students at a camp on a glacier. She’s a seasoned writer on the environment; her pieces…

This is another narative-as-scientific-mystery by Tennant, in which she creates suspense by drawing us into the lives of early settlers, raising a question and proceeding—with strong voice and narrative structure—to…

This piece was part of a package that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting. Cook uses narrative in this piece to show the “real people” who could be…

This is an excerpt from “The Guinea Pig Doctors,” a book by Jon Franklin and John Sutherland about eight doctors who experimented on themselves in pursuit of knowledge. In this…

A model of clear explication of complex ideas, this piece shows how a sense of arc and suspense can be achieved in the form of amiable-narrator-in-pursuit-of-ideas. Swidey begins the piece…

In this dense but accessible piece, Cook creates suspense by pursuing an intellectual mystery, a compelling question. He follows a group of scholars in their effort to figure out whether…

In this piece, we liked Aschwanden’s mix of folksy language and humor with serious explication of scientific debate. She very clearly gets at what’s at stake in the story; we…

This piece is typical of a certain type of piece in women’s magazines: the first-person science story. In a companionable and accessible voice, Skloot links complicated science to her own…

We thought this story notable in part because it’s unusual to read an adventure story that is neither heroic nor triumphant. This is a more character-focused story, a tale of…

We liked the ways that Goelman used the first person in this piece. The self-referencing advances the story; it’s not overdone. We liked the elegant descriptions of the olive harvest,…