One Great Moment

“He sat in an old chair near a particle board pinned with the yellowed obituaries of steelworker friends who died too early, including Robert Plater. 60. Cancer. A paper target practice figure hung next to the obituaries. Its heart had been blown out.”

Why is it great? I promise this is the last you’ll see of Springsteen on this site for the foreseeable future. But I had somehow missed this story by one…
April 26, 2017
Kari Howard

“Barcantier, of Le Kremlin, who had jumped in the river, tried in vain to throttle, aided by his Great Dane, the meddler who was dragging him out.”

Why is it great? Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) was a clerk in the French War Office during World War I, a literary editor, art dealer, anarchist and journalist. While working for…
April 19, 2017
James Geary

“I go to sleep every night knowing I have the blood of so many on my hands and no amount of soap could ever wash these stains away.”

Why is it great? Chivers just won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his magazine profile of Sam Siatta, a Marine suffering from PTSD. How did he make a…
April 12, 2017
Kari Howard

“But then the not-knowing returns, and it keeps him awake at night.”

Why is it great? For the second week in a row, our One Great Sentence comes from a gifted journalist who has just left us. Last week, the writer was…
April 5, 2017
Kari Howard

“She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly.”

Like a lot of people, last week I reread the story that made Jimmy Breslin famous. It has his greatest hallmark: writing about the little guy, in this case Clifton Pollard, who…
March 29, 2017
Kari Howard

“Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in the last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore.”

Why is it great? This line, from the poet Elizabeth Alexander’s beautiful memoir about the death of her husband, knocked me out on a couple levels. First, I had no…
March 22, 2017
Kari Howard

“This is a love story, and I apologize; it was inadvertent. But I want it clearly understood from the start that I don’t expect it to turn out well.”

Why is it great? Have you ever read a book and found it hard to get over a terrible first line? You want to move on, and the other 100,000…
March 15, 2017
Kari Howard

“Hazel Morse was a large, fair woman of the type that incites some men when they use the word ‘blonde’ to click their tongues and wag their heads roguishly.”

Why is it great? With this opening line to her famous short story, Parker does so many things: She gives us an image of Hazel that’s Kodachrome clear: I can…
March 8, 2017
Kari Howard

“He watched a mouse saunter up the electric cord leading to the nonfunctioning clock over the hotel bar and asked the Chinese waitress in German whether it was a tiger.”

This vivid, funny, terrific sentence could have been drawn from Lewis Carroll, but it’s from the middle of a deadline story on the frustrations of two “peace commissions” that were unable to keep…
March 1, 2017
Steve Chawkins

“The only break from the darkness comes when the sub drops through clusters of bioluminescence that look like stars in the Milky Way.”

Why is it great? This piece about mining companies exploring the bottom of the ocean creates an upside-down outer space. The whole story is a kind of extended metaphor between…
February 22, 2017
Kari Howard