One Great Moment

Quick insights inspired by small moments across story formats.

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“She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly.”

By One Great Moment March 29, 2017

Like a lot of people, last week I reread the story that made Jimmy Breslin famous. It has his greatest hallmark: writing about the little guy, in this case Clifton Pollard, who was paid $3.01 an hour to dig the grave … Read more

“He watched a mouse saunter up the electric cord leading to the nonfunctioning clock over the hotel bar and asked the Chinese waitress in German whether it was a tiger.”

By One Great Moment March 1, 2017

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

“The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.”

By One Great Moment February 15, 2017

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