Jon Franklin’s “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which in 1979 won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, ran 33 years ago but never loses its power to captivate or instruct. Franklin followed a brain surgeon through a tense operation … Read more
At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, … Read more
In “Grace in Broken Arrow,” our newest Notable Narrative, Brooklyn-based freelancer Kiera Feldman unfurls an investigative story about child sex abuse and institutional accountability at a private evangelical Christian school outside of Tulsa, Okla. The piece ran … Read more
Seeing the gaggle of outlets now dedicated to digital long-form (The Atavist, Kindle Singles and Byliner Originals, just for starters), I wanted to talk to a narrative journalist who had written for print outlets and … Read more
The New School and ProPublica co-hosted a panel on long-form journalism last night at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City. David Remnick of the The New Yorker, Ira Glass of “This American Life,” … Read more
We talked by phone this week with Evan Ratliff, one of the founders of The Atavist, a just-minted publishing house that makes original narrative nonfiction available on digital mobile reading devices. Last year, Ratliff made a splash with … Read more
I had a chance to sit down last week with Anna Badkhen in Washington, D.C., to talk about her two books out this year, “Peace Meals” and “Waiting for the Taliban” (an e-book), both narrative nonfiction treatments of the effects of war … Read more
We have to start with the monkeys. The infinite number of monkeys that, given their own personal typewriters and an infinite amount of time, would produce the works of William Shakespeare. But even thought-experiments involving infinity have their limits. Read more
Last month, we heard rumors from the West Coast of a new magazine devoted to long-form storytelling – a magazine that existed in print only and had no digital presence. The ghostly enigma turned out to be Slake, an upstart … Read more
Comic book writer and misfit Harvey Pekar spent his life bracing for the worst, and now, finally, he can relax. Pekar was a non-fiction storyteller who recorded his daily existence for others to draw. In the medium of … Read more