The 2022 National Book Awards were announced this week. I expect I am not alone in adding the winners in fiction and nonfiction to my wish list and handing it, not very discreetly, to my gift-giver-in-residence. Read more
By Trevor Pyle To guide readers through a thicket of bureaucracy and a shocking policy that had been born there, Caitlin Dickerson first had to slash through it herself. Once she had, the reporter for The Atlantic had unwound … Read more
Physical descriptions are challenging to write. More accurately, they are challenging to write well. And yet they are standard fare in much of our journalism, especially if we’re writing profiles or intimate stories that take readers deeply into other … Read more
By Philip Kiefer In the last several weeks, Katherine J. Wu, a science writer at the Atlantic, has written a lot about cats. Her run started in late August with a profile of … Read more
By Katharine Gammon Small-moment stories. That’s what the writers were laboring over the day I stepped onto the rainbow rug in my son’s third-grade classroom. I was there to share some of my work as a writer and to … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: “A Place Called WriterL” is a new collection of some of the listserv discussions about narrative journalism held in the late 1990s through the early 2010s. In a previous post, nonfiction author John Clayton writes about the … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two essays about the new book “A Place Called Writer L,” a collection of listserv discussions from the 1990s and 2000s. Tomorrow, co-editor Stuart Warner writes of the origins and ending … Read more
Kindness isn’t a word often used to describe journalism or journalists. I get that. To those who don’t do this work, we can seem abrupt, aggressive, even cynical and certainly impolite. In the too-close village and crowded confines of … Read more
As the aerospace beat reporter for the Seattle Times, Dominic Gates is one of the world’s most knowledgeable journalists about the business of commercial aviation, and especially about the Boeing Company, long based in Seattle and long the premier … Read more
I’ve always questioned the old aphorism that misery loves company. When I let myself throw a Pity Party, it’s a pretty self-absorbed affair, with room for only one in the spotlight. But it is comforting to be reminded, now … Read more