There is a good reason tales of true crime make for great magazine writing. Or good procedural TV shows and movies. It’s because the best stories of unsolved murders, missing persons, or outrageous heists have the ring of fiction. They … Read more
Our latest Notable Narrative is “Stowaway,” an interactive comic, published by The Atavist, that tells the story of a young Ethiopian boy, “Fanuel,” who made his way to the United States via human trafficking and perseverance. The writer … Read more
To hear the novelist Junot Díaz talk about writing is to have your mind augured open to new ways of processing the human experience and to feel swept up in the poetics of the … Read more
There’s a lot of great work out there right now, people! Here are some of the stories and storytellers who’ve caught our attention lately — and why. Highlights: a Mexican cemetery for drug lords, a near-death experience in a bullring, a … Read more
The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s – by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and others – made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. The best of it may endure, but, 50 or 100 years from now, will people still be enthralled by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of italics and exclamation marks? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the work of John McPhee. Read more
Guest-curating our latest Notable Narrative is Tom Levenson, professor of science writing at MIT and the author of four books, most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter. He chose Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Fear of a Black President,” from The … Read more
For the past few years, GQ correspondent Jeanne Marie Laskas has explored the myriad behind-the-scenes lives that help make our first-world reality what it is today. To borrow a couple of sentences from the current political discourse, “You didn’t build … Read more
Let’s talk about why we’re not talking, shall we? I’ve noticed a recent video journalism trend against treating the audience to a bit of narration. Yes, I said narration: the stuff so many video journalists shy from. Why the shyness? I’ve … Read more
The first week of fall term ends today at Harvard, and the Nieman Foundation’s newest class of fellows is settling in. The Nieman fellowship, which next … Read more
In July 2011, Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) wrote a haunting story about the “disappearance” and death of a woman named Kathryn Norris. He did it partly by dumpster-diving for personal details … Read more