Why is it great? This line, from the poet Elizabeth Alexander’s beautiful memoir about the death of her husband, knocked me out on a couple levels. First, I had no idea that Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were best friends, … Read more
Why is it great? Have you ever read a book and found it hard to get over a terrible first line? You want to move on, and the other 100,000 sentences in the book may be just fine, but that … Read more
Why is it great? With this opening line to her famous short story, Parker does so many things: She gives us an image of Hazel that’s Kodachrome clear: I can almost hear the old-fashioned pop of the flash. She also establishes Hazel … Read more
This vivid, funny, terrific sentence could have been drawn from Lewis Carroll, but it’s from the middle of a deadline story on the frustrations of two “peace commissions” that were unable to keep the peace in Vietnam. The observer is a Polish Army … Read more
Why is it great? This piece about mining companies exploring the bottom of the ocean creates an upside-down outer space. The whole story is a kind of extended metaphor between the exploration of space and the exploration of the … Read more
Why it’s great: The sentence is a story in itself. It creates a texture landscape in the reader’s mind (taste that rare scotch, sharp and warm in your throat; then feel the ache in your lower spine, and your own … Read more
Why is it great? This is exciting — a guest submission from Pulitzer Prize winner Maria Henson, whose series of editorials on battered women in Kentucky was awarded the prize for Editorial Writing in 1992. (See her piece for Nieman … Read more
Why is it great? This essay has a more famous line, which is being quoted a lot these days: “Then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in … Read more
Why is it great? Even without context, this line is tremendous. Playfully riffing off Chekhov’s rule that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it absolutely must go off by the third, Solomon transforms a prosaic garden implement into something … Read more
Why is it great? Yes, we deliberately launched this cool new feature with the first sentence of one of the most famous magazine articles of all time. Go big or go home. Fifty years later, this lede is still … Read more