The Great Zucchini has a secret. And in “The Peekaboo Paradox,” Gene Weingarten exhumes the history that haunts the most popular children’s entertainer in Washington, D.C. The story, which ran in January 2006, is the best thing ever … Read more
Our first Roundtable of September examines “A Chance in Hell,” by Corinne Reilly. Visiting a combat hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Reilly shows the endless challenges of trauma medicine just a helicopter flight away from the front lines. The project, … Read more
When I was living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and came back sometime later to see what was left, one of the things I found was the November 1998 issue of Esquire magazine. The cover with Mister Rogers on … Read more
What do Silly Putty, Superman and Marilyn Monroe have to do with architecture? Short answer: Nothing. Long answer: Herbert Muschamp. In 1997, New York Times architecture critic Muschamp traveled to a then little-known industrial city in northern Spain to see … Read more
I only saw my great-aunt a few times – she lived far away – but in my family, she was kind of a legend. She wore purple every day, and kept a stash of matching purple toilet paper that she’d break out for company. She … Read more
On a rainy afternoon in 1949, W.C. Heinz watched a beautiful young horse break its leg and then get shot in the head. And then he sat down and wrote about it for the readers of the New York Sun, … Read more
Any piece about New York City has a heavyweight champion to contend with – E.B. White’s “Here Is New York” – but André Aciman’s “Shadow Cities” comes out swinging. “On a late spring morning almost two years ago,” … Read more
In our latest Notable Narrative, “Did My Brother Invent E-Mail with Tom Van Vleck?,” Errol Morris rejects many of the standard rules of narrative writing. Best known for his films “The Fog of War” and “ … Read more
For the first Roundtable of the month, our editors looked at “Ala. tornado twists two families together” by Stephanie McCrummen from The Washington Post. The story, published early in May, covers an unusual connection between strangers after a … Read more
Stephen Colbert mocking the national Christmas tree’s Twitter account shows that the frivolousness of the plucky social media tool is still up for debate. No doubt Twitter’s popularity offsets some of the mockery, and it has contributed to … Read more