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
A woman working at a Chinese restaurant refuses a man’s pennies when he tries to pay his bill. The man is indignant; a circus act of politicians and community leaders follows. All express outrage and call for change (so to … Read more
Like “Thembi’s Diary”, this story takes us into its characters’ world without the use of a narrator. It’s an approach that can provide exceptional immediacy. In this piece, a soldier and his wife struggle to build a life after … Read more
