As a college sophomore in 2005, I read Dana Priest’s report about “black sites” –far-flung secret prisons overseas that the CIA used to house terrorist suspects captured from the battlefields. One in Afghanistan, known as the “Salt Pit,” was … Read more
On her first weekend at The Winston-Salem Journal in 1987, Phoebe Zerwick’s new coworkers took her to a famous crime scene: the place where a man named Darryl Hunt had allegedly raped and murdered a woman three years earlier. Read more
The word “lament” is a sadly beautiful thing, its layers and meanings distinct, yet entwined. In music, it is a song of loss, of missing someone or something that is no longer there. As a verb, it expresses grief, … Read more
Filmmaker David Layton isn’t a stranger to the newsroom. Before he produced and directed documentaries, he was a newspaper reporter, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his next project, “The Newspaperman,” is a film about one of the 20th century’s … Read more
Sitting across a dinner table in Mexico City back in 2009, Nathan Thornburgh and Matt Goulding hatched an idea. Thornburgh, a longtime foreign correspondent for Time magazine, and Goulding, a roving food writer and editor who pioneered the bestselling “Eat … Read more
Anne Helen Petersen has spent the last year covering Trump rallies and protests, the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline camp at Standing Rock, crowd-funded healthcare, survivalist “preppers” and what it means when famous men take off their shirts — just to name … Read more
Sometimes the idea for a book springs from what you don’t know. David Grann had never heard of the “Osage Murders” until a historian he was talking to mentioned the series of mysterious deaths among members of the wealthy Osage … Read more
Six years is a long time to be away from cyberspace—especially when you’re known as the Blogfather. At one point, 20,000 visitors came to Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan’s site every day. Words, it turns out, mattered – too much, … Read more
The first line of Rania Abouzeid’s story “The Jihad Next Door” could be the opener of a literary spy novel. “The eight men, beards trimmed, explosive belts fastened, pistols and grenades concealed in their clothing, waited until nightfall before … Read more
Anna Mae McNeil stares past the camera, the smudge of an old bruise under her right eye. The words “New Castle, Pa., No. 220” are written in white ink below her face. It is Feb. 5, 1933, and Anna … Read more
