The City & Regional Magazine Association announced its latest winners this week. The annual prizes are administered by the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. Five great … Read more
David Foster Wallace grew up in the Midwest but it was not really his home. Yet in September 2001, he was teaching at Illinois State University and living in Bloomington. He had attended college in Massachusetts and graduate school in … Read more
Two notable narratives for your consideration this week, both on the loss of a loved one, to cancer: In “The Day I Started Lying to Ruth,” a long reported essay in New York magazine, Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist Peter Bach captures … Read more
This year’s International Association for Literary Journalism Studies* started today in Paris, and you can follow along via #IALJS9 or watch the events live. The full conference program is here. Ten recommended panels or presentations: “Hearing Their Voices: How Multimedia Changes the … Read more
Tom Wolfe and I met twice, in his Upper East Side home, and to answer the inevitable question, no: He never wore a white suit. Dark blazer, dark pants, no hat. We talked for four hours over two days … Read more
Last week, a student asked for notable examples of the write-around, that subgenre in which the journalist had limited to no access with the story subject. The most famous examples are Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” … Read more
A few years ago an intern did a study of the writing that showed up in our newspaper. He ran our stories through a computer program that measured the reading level you would need to understand each piece. It turned … Read more
At the end of 2013, everyone I knew was talking about a single essay: Ariel Levy’s “Thanksgiving in Mongolia: Adventure and Heartbreak at the Edge of the Earth,” published in the New Yorker in November. Read more
Five stories that you must stop and read, right now: last night’s winners in the National Magazine Awards for feature writing, reporting, essays, multimedia and fiction (you don’t need us to remind you that there’s a lot to learn about … Read more
May is bittersweet for the Nieman Foundation, as we send one class of fellows back into the world and welcome another, for a year of study at Harvard. Here, courtesy of the mothership, is the Class of 2015, … Read more