In “Ramadi Nights,” author Neil Shea offers up nocturnal desert patrols, pre-dawn home raids, and the dislocated daydreams of servicemen he meets while embedded in the Iraqi province of Al Anbar. Shea’s Virginia Quarterly Review account details his time with … Read more
Magic requires both deceiver and deceived to make the impossible seem real. In “The Peekaboo Paradox,” author Gene Weingarten sneaks into the private life of a gifted children’s performer to deconstruct his appeal. “The central fact of [the preschooler’s] world—and … Read more
Our second notable narrative for this month, “The Real Work,” delves into the legacy of magic and magicians, moving from its youngest apprentices to its veterans and the debate over its future. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik avoids the temptation … Read more
Newspapers struggle with representing incendiary topics in a way that explains without exploiting. Last month, The Plain Dealer’s Joanna Connors addressed sexual assault, poverty, and race in a single project. “Beyond Rape,” a 16-page supplement to the Cleveland newspaper, recounts … Read more
An anti-profile, Jeffrey Fleishman’s “Viewing Life from the Roof,” is a series of snapshots from the life of Alia Qotb, who lives on an anonymous rooftop in Cairo. In language that floats between poetry and prose, Fleishman recounts vignettes from … Read more
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
