Tributes this past week to basketball great Bill Russell were as many as they were deserved. I couldn’t follow them all, which is a pity. Sportswriting and obituaries often display some of the best writing in journalism. Wedding the … Read more
It’s been just over two years since we wrote about Tyrone Beason, then a Seattle Times columnist who had fallen out of love with the city as its tech-fueled growth seemed to discard funk and character and anyone without … Read more
Four centuries ago this year, a privateer named the White Lion anchored off Point Comfort, an English colony in what is now Hampton, Virginia. In its cramped hold, it carried 20 or so human beings kidnapped from an ancient … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, now in its 15th year, has grown into one of the the premier journalistic gatherings in the United States. This year’s conference centered around the theme of justice: … Read more
One day last October, Cara Solomon sat alone in an empty field in Alabama, the unmarked site of a lynching. She wasn’t carrying a reporter’s notebook or thinking yet about how she might write about this place. She was … Read more
Point of view is a powerful narrative tool. Take, for example, the Newest Americans project that we spotlighted this week. For some politicians and hate-mongerers, immigrants are a scourge. But in this project, immigrants get to tell their own stories … Read more
You could say there’s a certain symmetry to the fact William Melvin Kelley, the black “lost giant of American literature,” as The New Yorker called him earlier this year, was “rediscovered” by a white writer. One question could … Read more
Why is it so great? I found this quote from the absolutely amazing Ida B. Wells after The New York Times righted an old wrong by publishing her obit — almost exactly 87 years after her death. She was so … Read more
When Amy Padnani moved from The New York Times’ news desk to its obits department last year, she was charged with the task of “exploring different ways of storytelling with obituaries.” “It’s a forum for people to talk to … Read more
If interviewing is an art, Krys Boyd has had plenty of practice with her paintbrush. For a remarkable five days a week for the past 11 years, the Texas journalist has been illustrating the depth and context of current events … Read more