This piece was part of a package that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting. Cook uses narrative in this piece to show the “real people” who could be helped by advances in stem cell technology. It’s a sad … Read more
This is an excerpt from “The Guinea Pig Doctors,” a book by Jon Franklin and John Sutherland about eight doctors who experimented on themselves in pursuit of knowledge. In this chapter John Paul Stapp gets strapped into a rocket sled … Read more
A model of clear explication of complex ideas, this piece shows how a sense of arc and suspense can be achieved in the form of amiable-narrator-in-pursuit-of-ideas. Swidey begins the piece with a scene in which identical twins show marked differences. Read more
In this dense but accessible piece, Cook creates suspense by pursuing an intellectual mystery, a compelling question. He follows a group of scholars in their effort to figure out whether collections of knots made by the Incan civilization were the … Read more
In this piece, we liked Aschwanden’s mix of folksy language and humor with serious explication of scientific debate. She very clearly gets at what’s at stake in the story; we were primarily engaged by this, by the question of how … Read more
This piece is typical of a certain type of piece in women’s magazines: the first-person science story. In a companionable and accessible voice, Skloot links complicated science to her own life and thus provides useful information about a question that … Read more
We thought this story notable in part because it’s unusual to read an adventure story that is neither heroic nor triumphant. This is a more character-focused story, a tale of one man who’s struggling with his failed dream. Therolf wrote … Read more
We liked the ways that Goelman used the first person in this piece. The self-referencing advances the story; it’s not overdone. We liked the elegant descriptions of the olive harvest, its good verbs. The mention of one harvester’s injury by … Read more
This lovely, short narrative essay provides small and interesting details about a region we’re more likely to read about in news articles. The piece is also about how death creeped up on one man, in a land of religious stories. Read more
The writing is snappy and the voice human in this slice-of-life piece about a couple and their fateful courtship. We liked the efficient movement from event to event, the sparing but effective use of concrete detail, the folksy language. The … Read more
