By Line Vaaben To tell this story of craft, I must share something which might ruin your first-time viewing of the short documentary film “Victoria,” by Eloisa Diez. So if you haven’t already watched it and … Read more
A few years ago, Line Vaaben was eating a traditional Christmas dinner at her home in Copenhagen. Vaaben, a 2014 European Press Prize finalist, remembered a story that followed a potato from the field … Read more
In the 100-plus days since Vladimir Putin ordered his Russian army into Ukraine, I have done something I rarely do on social media: Forwarded shares, many days a week, of art from and about Ukraine. I’ve wondered, of course, … Read more
For all my life, I’ve been a baseball agnostic. The thing I like most about baseball is that, by and large, it is played outside in the summertime, generally in the cool of the evening. Johnny … Read more
When I began reading Evan Allen’s powerful, critically acclaimed Boston Globe story about Anthony Pledger, all I could think about was Jimmie. Jimmie is a violent offender — a sanitized way of saying he is a murderer and a … Read more
More decades ago than I care to count, I was assigned to read “The Canterbury Tales” for a high school English class. That was before email and texting reduced the English language to rubble, and yet I still found … Read more
How’s this for a story? At the start of a bloody war that shocked the world, a ship braved Antarctic ice and sailors risked their lives, returning with a tale for the ages. That’s the story of Ernest Shackleton … Read more
A while ago, preparing to teach a literary nonfiction class, I reread Nellie Bly’s “Ten Days in a Mad House,” her account of going undercover in 1887 into Blackwell’s Insane Asylum for Women. Bly is known for her bravery … Read more
Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, and by Christmas internet searches were returning page after page of obituaries that described her as a “peerless prose stylist.” She has long been celebrated as a journalist, essayist, novelist and memoirist, … Read more
In 1990, Joan Didion received an assignment from Bob Silvers, editor at the New York Review of Books, to write about a highly publicized, emotionally fraught crime almost nobody wanted to read about after it was, in theory, solved. Read more
