Harried doctors and nurses, gowned in eerie layers, race to the call of codes. Hospital hallways overflow with the near-dead. Undertakers scramble to make space as body after body arrives, and refrigerated trucks are crammed with more, all waiting … Read more
Peter Stark’s second-person rendering of a hypothermic near-death experience took its 1997 print headline from the closing quatrain of an Emily Dickinson poem that, depending who you ask, is either an immortal bummer of a ballad to the totalizing … Read more
History is happening in Saudi Arabia right now — but I’m not referring to the feminist presence at the Rio Olympics. I’m talking about an ancient cultural and … Read more
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual … Read more
“I don’t know what we were thinking.” “Well, what do you think?” “You tell me. I have no idea.” When Aleksandr Gorbachev decided to research the business models of digital longform publications for his master’s thesis at the University of … Read more
Back in the distant 1990s, This American Life host Ira Glass described a recurring dream of NPR’s Scott Simon: Simon would shoot a basketball over and over, but then it would disappear. The ball never landed. That, … Read more
What we’re reading, in the world of narrative journalism, essays and academia: Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City’s Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice, by Scott Helman and Jenna Russell. Helman and Russell, Boston Globe reporters, … Read more
Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism hosted a daylong Future of Digital Longform conference recently, and it was full of good stuff. (They kindly invited Storyboard to appear on a panel, and although we couldn’t make it, … Read more
The day I left Bucharest, the International Herald-Tribune ran a front-page story about the shambles that is Romania. After three visits there in three years, I can tell you that it is, indeed, a mess. Communism is lifted and people … Read more
Five from the field: 1. Rachel McAthy’s recent roundup of eight long-form digital projects included sites you probably already know about, like The Atavist, Byliner and Longreads, but also Matter, which recently met its … Read more
