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
It was probably aimed more at the American public than its media, but one message embedded in former Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr.’s recent prepared remarks to a Congressional impeachment panel should have been unmistakable … Read more
It’s that date again. The one we might even not think about for awhile, or at least send to a distant corner, until it’s upon us with the force and dread of our continued disbelief and altered reality. Is … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Because the world can’t seem to get enough of “Game of Thrones,” we are co-publishing this essay with our friends at The Poynter Institute, with their permission. I have watched all 73 episodes … Read more
“The Loneliest Polar Bear” wasn’t just a heart-tugging news story. It was a suspenseful, multi-thousand word saga about an abandoned newborn polar bear. It was rationed into five chapters that were published in the print paper and online. It … Read more
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
