With a cell phone, an eye for evocative detail and 50 pages of notes, Brittny Mejia of the Los Angeles Times turned a day at a grocery store into a portrait of a community challenged and changed by … Read more
Surprising stories spring from any number of places. Investigative or narrative or explanatory stories often start with curiosity sparked by a local news story or feature. That’s what happened when an editor at Slate read a story in a … Read more
By early August of this year, 253 American cities had been added to the map of mass shootings. For a day or two after yet another event, officials in these communities — police and politicians — rise to prominence … Read more
It’s difficult to find a writer who isn’t haunted by a story. It could have been the quest that couldn’t catch a glint in an editor’s eye. Maybe one that got away when sources, or record keepers, wouldn’t cooperate. Read more
Matthew Pearl is a sucker for underdog stories, origin stories and untold stories. Those all came together when the author of best-selling historical fiction thrillers such as “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow” asked: Who were America’s first detectives? And … Read more
Profiles are hard. Too often they’re drenched in the writer’s attempts to make the subject seem larger than life. But good profiles have the opposite effect: Through their honesty and attention to perhaps mundane detail — and, as Outside Magazine contributing editor … 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
My first memory of reading something by Tom Curwen is like one of those dreams where you wake up and you want to hold onto it, but it slips away and you’re left wondering if it ever happened. Read more
Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker has pulled off a rare double, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing after having earlier won the National Magazine Award in the same category. Her story on a likely and monumental earthquake, “ … Read more