“I think I started every interview with: Tell me how you met Bill Cosby.” Noreen Malone, a senior editor at New York magazine, didn’t plan the question ahead of time. As she set out to interview the 35 women accusing … Read more
Before Rebecca Skloot published the bestselling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she wrote magazines stories about science and about animals. You may remember her New York Times magazine piece “Fixing Nemo,” about goldfish surgery, and her O, … Read more
Last week, a student asked for notable examples of the write-around, that subgenre in which the journalist had limited to no access with the story subject. The most famous examples are Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” … Read more
Five stories that you must stop and read, right now: last night’s winners in the National Magazine Awards for feature writing, reporting, essays, multimedia and fiction (you don’t need us to remind you that there’s a lot to learn about … Read more
A story without sound lies too dead on the page. Imagine “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, without the pop … pop … pop of the operating-room sensors. Or Tom Wolfe‘s “The Girl of … Read more
This year’s National Magazine Award nominations in the features, multimedia, reporting and essay/criticism categories cover conflict, immigration, violence, grief, the abortion wars and more, from a host of talented journalists representing a range of publications. The American Society … Read more
My estimable friend and former colleague Paul Kix recently wrote a column in this space on John Jeremiah Sullivan. In it he cited an essay Sullivan wrote about the art of writing: A fundamental law of storytelling is: … Read more
It was a sideshow story whose horror was so extravagant that it bordered on vulgarity: On Feb. 16, 2009, a 14-year-old male chimpanzee named Travis, who had been raised from infancy by Nancy Herold, attacked a friend who was visiting … Read more
Nora Ephron was a writer of many gifts. She was fearless. She was blunt. She was dazzlingly perceptive. She was writing at the right time. Her connections were fascinating. She could turn coincidence and happenstance into substantial proof that … Read more