In this story of a father who takes care of his autistic adult son, reporter Maureen O’Hagan adroitly sketches the dilemma caused by longer life expectancies for people with developmental disabilities. The father, Ron Johnson, must have emergency bypass surgery to … Read more
In “Climbing a Ladder Made of Lipstick,” Los Angeles Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske looks at the day-to-day life of immigrant entrepreneurs who are transforming that quintessential American business, Mary Kay cosmetics. She follows Altagracia Valdez as the 60 year-old abuela … Read more
In “Let’s Die Together,” which ran in The Atlantic in May 2007, strangers in Japan join online networks with the express purpose of meeting and killing themselves. David Samuels serves as our guide to an underworld “too familiar” to the … Read more
Larissa MacFarquhar’s “The Conciliator” rises above other narratives appearing this primary season, much as its subject later rose to surprise Hillary Clinton, among other seasoned politicos. Amid the breaking-news accounts of state contests and he-said, she-said debates, MacFarquhar’s deeply reported … Read more
The story we’ve chosen this month, “The Fight for Sugar Hill,” centers on an itinerant pastor’s efforts to help the residents of a dead-end housing project in Texas’ richest county. Dallas Morning News reporter Paul Meyer and photographer Melanie Burford … Read more
Coverage of the war in Iraq, now in its fifth year, always runs the risk of reader fatigue. Daily headlines swim in the wake of militaries and militias. But with “Anguish in the Ruins of Mutanabi Street,” Sudarsan Raghavan manages … Read more
Second-day disaster stories, or eighth-day disaster stories, often merely tote up possessions damaged and lives lost. Not so with “The Answers in the Wind,” in which Washington Post reporter Tamara Jones details the aftermath of the tornado that obliterated Greensburg, … Read more
Occasionally a story strikes our fancy because of the sheer surprise of the subject. And so we were smitten by “Grandmasters in Guayaberas,” Josh Schonwald’s piece in the Miami New Times, about four unlikely chess champs. Rodelay Medina, Renier Gonzalez, … Read more
There’s a subgenre in first-person works of journalism in which the “I” is the reporter on the trail of a story. This sort of story offers readers a look at the reporter’s process and is often about the narrator’s efforts … Read more
The scene-writing is compelling in this tick-tock reconstruction of the experiences of the Virginia Tech class that lost the greatest number of people in the shooting. We found keeping track of all the characters a bit challenging—but the characters are … Read more
