Rachel Monroe has two journalistic obsessions: crime and utopia. She’s fascinated by how people deal with extreme situations, when the stakes are high and things fall apart. The two aren’t even so different, she observes: “Utopia always contains within it … Read more
Longform specialist Jeff Maysh has a penchant for telling genre-breaking stories about people with secret lives. There’s the mom who assumed her daughter’s identity to return to high school; the Michigan farmer who made millions smuggling rare Pez dispensers into … Read more
You don’t have to be a “Hamilton” groupie to love this wonderful interview that Nieman Foundation Curator Ann Marie Lipinski did recently with the blockbuster play’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Read more
I just got off the plane from the Republican National Convention with a bulletproof vest still packed in my suitcase, and I have to wonder if last week would have made Hunter S. Thompson lose his mind. Before the convention, … Read more
Elizabeth Weil had never written about criminal justice, but when asked to write about a controversial case of whether a baby was killed by his father, she produced the gripping “What Really Happened to Baby Johan?” Her … Read more
I’ve been thinking about Mike Sager’s story, “The Devil and John Holmes,” for a long time. I first read his chronicle of the famous porn star and the Wonderland murders when it came out in 1989; I was 10 … Read more
“That’s all fine,’’ the L.A. film executive said briskly, “but who’s the antagonist?’’ Cut to: Me, author of a soon-to-be published biography of the 1940s/’50s wrestler and pop culture figure who called himself Gorgeous George. I’m on the phone with … Read more
To be a journalist on Twitter in the past four days has meant taking part, one way or another, in one of the more heated story dissections in recent memory. Last Wednesday, Grantland published “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” … Read more
Tommy Tomlinson Nieman Class of 2009 Tomlinson spent 23 years as a local columnist at the Charlotte Observer, writing the kind of pieces that readers clipped for … Read more
