In today’s America, the word “masculinity” is almost a Rorschach test. When you look at it, do you see a patrimony that is raging, raging against the dying of the light? Or do you see an assault on the concept … Read more
It was a tragic wreck, and dramatic, in a rural Maine way. A Toyota Corolla collided with a milk truck. Milk spilled across the interstate. A man was dead. From this bit of news from January, Portland Press Herald journalist … Read more
Few journalists are more versed in guns and gun violence than Mark Follman. As national affairs editor for Mother Jones, Follman has led a series of landmark investigations into everything from mass shootings to child gun deaths. Even now, with … Read more
The 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics offered a host of memorable storylines: 28-time medal winner Michael Phelps’ final race, Ryan Lochte’s bizarre fabrication of a gunpoint robbery, and the “will they, won’t they” speculation as to … Read more
As a college sophomore in 2005, I read Dana Priest’s report about “black sites” –far-flung secret prisons overseas that the CIA used to house terrorist suspects captured from the battlefields. One in Afghanistan, known as the “Salt Pit,” was … Read more
On her first weekend at The Winston-Salem Journal in 1987, Phoebe Zerwick’s new coworkers took her to a famous crime scene: the place where a man named Darryl Hunt had allegedly raped and murdered a woman three years earlier. Read more
The word “lament” is a sadly beautiful thing, its layers and meanings distinct, yet entwined. In music, it is a song of loss, of missing someone or something that is no longer there. As a verb, it expresses grief, … Read more
Filmmaker David Layton isn’t a stranger to the newsroom. Before he produced and directed documentaries, he was a newspaper reporter, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his next project, “The Newspaperman,” is a film about one of the 20th century’s … Read more
Sitting across a dinner table in Mexico City back in 2009, Nathan Thornburgh and Matt Goulding hatched an idea. Thornburgh, a longtime foreign correspondent for Time magazine, and Goulding, a roving food writer and editor who pioneered the bestselling “Eat … Read more
Sometimes the idea for a book springs from what you don’t know. David Grann had never heard of the “Osage Murders” until a historian he was talking to mentioned the series of mysterious deaths among members of the wealthy Osage … Read more