Longform specialist Jeff Maysh has a penchant for telling genre-breaking stories about people with secret lives. There’s the mom who assumed her daughter’s identity to return to high school; the Michigan farmer who made millions smuggling rare Pez dispensers into … Read more
A week ago, the Nieman Foundation hosted a fabulous event celebrating the Pulitzer’s Centennial. The theater was gorgeous, the stars A-list (Robert Caro, Laura Poitras and Bob Woodward, to name a few), the production flawless. As someone who just moved … Read more
When you read a lot of longform stories, you can’t help noticing something: They tend to be very, very serious. Think fast: How many made you laugh? Epic magazine’s “The Cold War,” by David Wolman and Julian Smith, made … Read more
Taro Yamasaki quit journalism school in 1968 to go to New York and become a photojournalist; he thought he’d become successful very quickly. Although he did do some documentary photography, for the next nine years his resume also included working … Read more
Every once in a while you read a story that feels so authentic and true, you wish you’d written it. That’s how I felt reading Jon Mooallem’s New York Times Magazine piece about a self-professed “idler” named Gavin Pretor-Pinney … Read more
This New Yorker story about a fatal police shooting could have seemed like “same old, same old.” After all, I’ve consumed (and sometimes written) countless death-by-cop sagas during my 50 years as a journalist. But Rachel Aviv’s narrative stands out … Read more
My first memory of reading something by Tom Curwen is like one of those dreams where you wake up and you want to hold onto it, but it slips away and you’re left wondering if it ever happened. Read more
Ashley Powers spent the first decade of her career at the Los Angeles Times, working her way up from intern to breaking news reporter to national correspondent. When she left the Times in 2014 to move with her husband to … Read more
