Archive

Grounding apocalyptic issues in reality without losing hope

By Rebecca Boyle• 5 Questions• March 21, 2019

Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now. History is happening. We are changing the world.   So sings Eliza Schuyler in “Hamilton,” a magical musical set in the late 1700s about the … Read more

“She stares at me, but it feels like she’s looking at who I used to be, her little girl with ponytails and a snaggletooth who swore she was a Powerpuff Girl.”

By Jill U. Adams• One Great Sentence• March 20, 2019

This sentence contains everything that good narrative writing should. There’s the specific detail of the narrator, and there’s universality — the wonder we humans experience when faced with a child growing up. It seems remarkable to me that we … Read more

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”

By Curt Brown• One Great Sentence• March 13, 2019

Why I like it: I imagine my high school grammar teacher, Ms. Weiner, trying to diagram this sentence. We all seek characters to drive our stories. Here, Kerouac lists requirements for the characters that attract him — … Read more

Shop Class: Learning to look up, down, sideways, backwards and beyond

By Jacqui Banaszynski and Ted Ringger• Annotation Tuesday!• March 12, 2019

Storytellers in any medium can learn from those in others. Writers must know how to paint mental images through the hieroglyphics of text, apply (and break) rules of grammar to ensure clarity, and translate specialty jargon into widely understood … Read more

Newsroom Ode #10: A loyalist’s last lament

By Don Nelson• Short Takes• March 11, 2019

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the tenth and last in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author,  … Read more

THE PITCH: Wired’s exec editor seeks stories that reveal all faces of technology

By Katia Savchuk• Annotation Tuesday!• March 5, 2019

Maria Streshinsky, executive editor of Wired, wouldn’t say the magazine has grown skeptical about the promise of technology. But compared to the optimism of past editorial regimes, she and editor-in-chief Nick Thompson, who took their posts in 2017, have … Read more

Newsroom Ode #9: Echoes from an empty desk

By Don Nelson• Short Takes• March 4, 2019

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth and penultimate in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The … Read more

Raw first stories from the Appalachian Trail

By Greg Bowers• Notable Narratives• February 28, 2019

When I first discovered that Earl Shaffer — the first man acknowledged to have hiked the entire 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine — lived nearby, I went through his brother John Shaffer with an interview request. It … Read more

Building a museum with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up

By Kim Cross• 5 Questions• February 26, 2019

  One day last October, Cara Solomon sat alone in an empty field in Alabama, the unmarked site of a lynching. She wasn’t carrying a reporter’s notebook or thinking yet about how she might write about this place. She … Read more

Newsroom Ode #8: Podium pontifications

By Don Nelson• Short Takes• February 25, 2019

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eighth in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author,  … Read more