I sat on a bench with Wade Livingston the other day. We talked about an alligator attack, a woman who drowned, and the people who saw fit to condemn her for the audacity to up and die while walking her dog. It’s … Read more
The opening paragraph of Rebecca Solnit’s new LitHub essay, “Why the President Must Be Impeached,” is a single sentence, 88 words long. It is one of the shortest paragraphs in a 20-paragraph soliloquy about her take on the … Read more
The story started in one direction and ended up going in a jarringly different one. But when the time came to write a feature on the Auburn Tigers softball team, ESPN’s Tom Junod went back to where he’d … Read more
“We walk through life influenced by all sorts of weird stuff,” says “Letter of Recommendation” editor Willy Staley. His column in The New York Times Magazine offers a place to celebrate those obsessions, fascinations and private joys, in a tight … Read more
“Have you ever heard the absolute silence?” So asks a young lobsterman on Maine’s Matinicus Island, one of the handful of people who live year-round on the island, 22 miles out to sea and smaller than Central Park. The … Read more
Adventure narratives thrive on the nearness (or near miss) of doom’s heavy paw, but Eva Holland gives readers something other than a saga of suffering and survival in her recent account of her slog across the frozen sea near … Read more
Peter Stark’s second-person rendering of a hypothermic near-death experience took its 1997 print headline from the closing quatrain of an Emily Dickinson poem that, depending who you ask, is either an immortal bummer of a ballad to the totalizing … Read more
William Langewiesche is known to readers of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair as a kind of Jack London figure, a writer of sturdy, authoritative tales of modern life at the moral, technological and geographic margins. Among his subjects have been … Read more
I remember first hearing Francisco Cantú’s story sometime last year, spooling out from my car speakers as I wound through mountain curves many hundreds of miles from the border he writes about. He was telling a story of his … Read more
If Dan Barry has a beat, it is humanity — humanity as it reckons with its triumphs and travesties, and, sometimes, its profound secrets. Why does Barry begin a story about a long-hidden trove of bones with a girl … Read more
