At the end of each semester, after all the discussions of craft, I remind my reporting students at the Missouri School of Journalism the why of it all: the larger purpose their journalism serves. By then they have become … Read more
I had an exchange the other night with my 4 ½-year-old daughter about what qualifies as a story. Who knew one of the joys of parenthood would be to see your child’s sense of narrative emerge? *** It starts … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read an annotation of the prologue and first act of This American Life’s “Anatomy of Doubt.” CAUTION: The stories linked to and discussed in this package describe details of sexual assault, which some readers might … Read more
Hemingway is having a moment. Again. The eponymous documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that has been airing and streaming on PBS — air streaming? — has exhumed the cultural conversation about the author. That … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts today analyzing the power of the presidential inaugural poem delivered Jan. 20, 2020, by Amanda Gorman, and reflecting on its place in history. The one below, by Roy Peter Clark, is cross-posted … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts today analyzing the power of the presidential inaugural poem delivered Jan. 20, 2020, by Amanda Gorman, and reflecting on its place in history. The other, by writing teacher Roy Peter Clark of … Read more
Seventy-five years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, a plane called the Enola Gay, manned by a crew from the U.S. Army Air Force, flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. The bomb … Read more
Early in my career, while working in Minnesota as a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the city’s most famous native writer. It may have had something to do … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute I was half-way through an essay on how the experience of news — especially in the midst of a pandemic — felt like a … Read more
“Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” So begins Nikole Hannah-Jones’s stunning and provocative essay that … Read more
