Why’s This So Good?

We’re coming upon our  65th installment of “Why’s this so good?” – in which notable journalists dissect their favorite pieces of narrative journalism. Our contributors have included Adam Hochschild, Jennifer B.…

There is a good reason tales of true crime make for great magazine writing. Or good procedural TV shows and movies. It's because the best stories of unsolved murders, missing…

After a 7.0 earthquake destroyed Haiti on Jan. 23, 2010, I spent weeks reading news reports about a tragedy so massive and devastating the numbers alone overwhelmed me: more than 316,000…

As far as I can tell, the New Yorker staff writer Ian Parker has no Twitter feed, no website, no LinkedIn page and no TED profile. Even for that magazine, he's pretty…

The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s – by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and others – made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our…

For the past few years, GQ correspondent Jeanne Marie Laskas has explored the myriad behind-the-scenes lives that help make our first-world reality what it is today. To borrow a couple…

Dan Barry peddles in the petits dramas and crossroads that ordinary people meet day to day. Some of his best "This Land" columns for the New York Times suggest items…

A tattered, stapled-together copy of Scott Anderson’s “The Hunger Warriors” now qualifies as one of my oldest and most treasured possessions. I distinctly remember snipping it out of the New…

In 1977, Joan Didion told The Paris Review that she always kept in mind one line of poetry, from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “at the still point of the turning world.” I don’t…

Nora Ephron was a writer of many gifts. She was fearless. She was blunt. She was dazzlingly perceptive. She was writing at the right time. Her connections were fascinating. She could…