Why’s This So Good?

One honey-glazed autumn afternoon, I watched a tangle of fifth-graders playing Capture the Flag in a park in Boise, Idaho. Their favorite soundtrack blared in the background: Alexander Hamilton. My name…

The Facebook post was conversational and almost light-hearted:And on Day Two of Camp Fire coverage, I spilled water all over my notebook and laptop (tips?!). Seems fitting that the only…

Sometimes I push writing students to look for new ways to tell stories.Should you start with the “small” things? Is there a story in the way a character dresses? How…

 New York Times sportswriter John Branch is best known in the journalism world for  “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” His gripping long-form narrative, which reconstructed a fatal avalanche in…

 I sat on a bench with Wade Livingston the other day. We talked about an alligator attack, a woman who drowned, and the people who saw fit to condemn her for the audacity…

The opening paragraph of Rebecca Solnit’s new LitHub essay, “Why the President Must Be Impeached,” is a single sentence, 88 words long. It is one of the shortest paragraphs in…

The story started in one direction and ended up going in a jarringly different one. But when the time came to write a feature on the Auburn Tigers softball team,…

In The New York Times Magazine's quirky "Letter of Recommendation" column, Nicola Twilley examines the charms of a monstrous subterranean clot formed by the detritus of a genteel city

“Have you ever heard the absolute silence?”So asks a young lobsterman on Maine’s Matinicus Island, one of the handful of people who live year-round on the island, 22 miles out…

Adventure narratives thrive on the nearness (or near miss) of doom’s heavy paw, but Eva Holland gives readers something other than a saga of suffering and survival in her recent…