By Chip Scanlan When Rick Rojas became a national correspondent for The New York Times, a colleague told him to focus on the second word of his new title. As correspondents, Rojas says, “We are, in a … Read more
By Trevor Pyle When Jose A. Del Real was on the lookout for people navigating the snarled thicket of American masculinity, he found an unexpected one: a 23-year-old waitress and single mom in northeast Wyoming. He was in the … Read more
A speechwriter, a couple of jazz geniuses and the 44th president of the United States. That would be an enticing dinner-party guest list. As it turns out, it’s also an intriguing source of writing insight published last month in … Read more
The headlines coming out of last week’s public hearing of the Congressional Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol focused on the unanimous vote to issue a subpoena to a former president requiring his … Read more
A group of journalists clustered along a table at a lovely restaurant in Bergen, Norway, late last month, chattering about our work and how good it was to be back in the wrap of the narrative tribe after our … Read more
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
Before she penned a nearly 9,000-word feature about the choices that parents navigate when leaving Orthodox Judaism behind, Larissa MacFarquhar hadn’t covered this particular community. A self-described generalist, The New Yorker writer has chased her curiosity across varied subject … Read more
In “The Art of Description: World into Word,” Mark Doty writes that Proust endeavored to “dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blur of space and time that the unit of syntax … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This week, in recognition of Pride Month, we feature three posts about coverage of transgender people or issues. See how Lane DeGregory of the Tampa Bay Times handled a profile in 2002, when there were … Read more