Pat Beall’s distinguished career at The Palm Beach Post has been marked by exhaustive and meticulous investigations. “I knew I did not want to create a parade of horrors, and in so doing, not only contribute to the canon … Read more
Empathy is one of the greatest gifts a journalist can have. If you come by it naturally, you can actually feel what your subject is feeling, and that can be a painful burden sometimes. But even if you have to develop … Read more
A few days ago, I had the disturbing experience of stepping barefoot on the bloody, decapitated body of a mouse. My first reaction was of course a back-wheeling step away from the corpse. My second was to clean off my … Read more
Why is it great? First off, the rhythm of the sentence makes me swoon. I keep reading it aloud, to hear how it swirls and swirls like dancers on a ballroom floor before coming to a rest, softly, on the … Read more
Nearly two years ago, I was one of dozens of Los Angeles Times reporters who took a buyout and left the paper. I liked my job almost all the time. Sometimes I loved it. But I’d done it for 23 … Read more
The annual Maine Lobster Festival is underway, so it seemed like a good time to go big on lobsters. Of course, festival organizers might not have been huge fans of David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” piece for Gourmet magazine. And … Read more
The article “Who Killed Julian Pierce?” was unusual on at least three counts. It was the author’s first magazine story. It took nearly 30 years to write. And it came close to solving a murder. “I thought a … Read more
Why is it great? Nabokov is masterful here, not just stylistically but emotionally. He interrupts Humbert Humbert’s grotesque pursuit of Lolita by having him address the reader directly with an abject plea for understanding, a jarring moment that makes us … Read more
To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, … Read more