EDITOR’S NOTE: Writing about science and animals (creatures?) can be challenging. It is essential to get it right. It is also essential to make it accessible. In other words, to translate the hard-to-know world to a semblance of the known … Read more
The story started in one direction and ended up going in a jarringly different one. But when the time came to write a feature on the Auburn Tigers softball team, ESPN’s Tom Junod went back to where he’d … Read more
WHY IS THIS SO GREAT? Or … is it? This might cause eyerolls as a “great sentence” pick. It’s not what most would call high literature, and likely will be breezed by in a fast read. Some might even call … Read more
Editor’s note: The tragic news last week of suicides by creative celebrities Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain captured headlines and emotions. But despair does not discriminate. Storyboard contributor Julia Shipley offers this view into the tragedy that stalks an everyday … Read more
I’m writing this from a mash-up of a magazine newsroom in Bucharest. The walls are smelly and stained from a recent flood in the apartment above. Desks are cluttered with grungy coffee cups, cold pizza crusts, giveaway pens. Ghosts of … Read more
The third-grade students in Misterbianco, a small town at the foot of Mount Etna in eastern Sicily, watched, rapt, as the heavy puppets moved on a school auditorium stage. The kids laughed, open their mouths with astonishment, then clapped. When … Read more
The lede came to David Grann a year before he would complete his epic story and a year after the events it describes: “The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned he could see … 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
It wasn’t the sensational headline — “The Real-Life Mad Max Who Battled ISIS in a Bulletproof BMW” — that grabbed my attention. It was the next bit. “Here is a person I came to really … Read more
In her piece “The Living Disappeared” for The California Sunday magazine, reporter Bridget Huber turns the complicated, still-unfolding story of the missing children from Argentina’s military dictatorship into a relatable narrative about loss. “If you’re really gripped by … Read more