Daniel Miller’s coverage of the film business for the Los Angeles Times typically involves tracking the latest moves of the industry’s glitzy corporate behemoths. For his five-part series “Selling Stardom,” he dug into Hollywood’s darker side.

People have a vision of Hollywood as this gleaming place, and we know that’s not always the case.

A finalist for the Loeb Awards last year, the series uncovered a slew of shady businesses that have sprung up to serve Hollywood hopefuls fresh off the latest Greyhound bus.  There are the talent agents who illegally pocket clients’ paychecks, the talent listing services sucking up cash from aspiring actors, the expensive packages promising to qualify filmmakers for the Oscars. Miller also infiltrates a Christian acting seminar, one of the ever-growing variety of niche courses and workshops promising a fast track to stardom. (“And then that’s when I heard God say, ‘You are to go be a light in the darkness of Hollywood.’”)

The tale of the ingénue who arrives in Hollywood only to be preyed upon by hucksters and vultures is as old as the industry. But Miller shows us that predatory agents and services are an industry of their own, systematically exploiting aspiring artists.

He also shows us that, for the most part, authorities haven’t taken the problem seriously. When Miller approached victims, some of them couldn’t believe that a reporter would be interested in their experience — they blamed themselves. The way Miller tells the story makes us take it seriously.

We also catch glimpses of what the suspect operators have to say for themselves. In one of the most telling and bizarre moments of the series, an agent accused of taking money owed to her clients jokes that she’d only discuss her clients in detail if Miller agreed to coauthor a book with her that she’d title “Bad Agent.” Then she starts crying.

“I know I’ve ended up hurting some people — I didn’t mean to,” she tells him. “It’s not who I am — I am not a bad person.”

The L.A. Times’ Jay Clendenin, a photographer better known for his portraits of Hollywood stars, pulls the series together with intimate images that put a human face on the performers who are paying the price.

I interviewed Miller about the series; his answers are below, edited for clarity and flow.

You have to love a business where there’s no shortage of outsiders who show up every year and say, “I can do this better than people who’ve been doing it forever.” Sooner or later, those people are usually walking away with their tail between their legs.

Your job is to cover the film business and corporate Hollywood. How did this series come about?

I’ve always been drawn to the periphery of the business. People have a vision of Hollywood as this gleaming place, and we know that’s not always the case. I’d been hearing some rumblings about an uptick in crime on the edges of the business, and my editor John Corrigan, who’s now at the Wall Street Journal, encouraged me to do “longline fishing” — to go out and work the beat. I had lunches with agents, sat in on acting classes at a local theater, attended a seminar for young actors. Slowly the story ideas started to come, and I developed a network of sources removed from mainstream Hollywood. It took a while for the actors to trust me. Some were worried about being blackballed. Eventually, I built up a group of sources that were willing to tell their stories.

Tell me a bit more about your reporting process.

I spent a couple of weeks really hitting the pavement and talking to agents and actors. Some names and companies started coming up in conversations, and I developed a shortlist of people and companies I might want to write about. From there it was traditional research: looking at court records, talking to others who have done business with them, even turning to resources like Yelp and the Better Business Bureau to see what people were saying publicly. From that I was able to winnow it down to a list of entities I wanted to look at for these stories. We hadn’t done a series on the underbelly of Hollywood in some time at the L.A. Times, so it was fertile territory for us to explore.

You had five stories come out on roughly a weekly basis in the paper. How did you and your editors decide this should be a series? What were the advantages and challenges that came with that?

To me the series format made sense because it became apparent, sadly, that there was a diversity of questionable activity on the fringes of Hollywood. Rather than lump all these storylines into one or two pieces, it made sense to break them up and give them room to breathe. It helped that “Selling Stardom” was a rubric that could apply to all sorts of activities.

The first three stories were the product of initial reporting I’d done and essentially written at the same time. Believe it or not, at one point they were grouped together into an exceedingly long and unreadable single story, but ultimately we pulled them apart. The other two stories developed later as a result of tips and leads. I had kind of planted a flag in this space of covering shady behavior on the fringes of Hollywood. It was certainly ambitious to try to connect the dots between these disparate storylines and keep the through-line in place. Editors with a lot of experience pulling stuff like this off were instrumental in making sure we did it the right way.

How did you negotiate trying to make the stories flow and be engaging, with the legalese and “declined to comments” you had to include?

I thought about that quite a bit. It was important that the stories be anchored by anecdotes from performers who were mistreated — without them, these stories wouldn’t exist. There are narrative details about their lives, situations and hopes in the industry. But a lot of the stories were rooted in lawsuits, and I had to include the perspective of business executives. Narrative was deployed judiciously and frankly sometimes had to be set aside in order to handle some of the technical aspects of the stories, like weaving in details of the case and making sure people had a chance to respond to allegations. That was a big balancing act.

Do you feel that the story had an impact?

I was really heartened by the responses from the acting community and some talent agents and managers. In particular, I heard from actors who said, “This happened to me, and I didn’t think anybody cared.”

In the wake of the stories coming out, there was a monetary settlement reached in one of the lawsuits against Lynn Venturella, the talent agent I wrote about. A class-action suit against a talent listing firm I wrote about was also settled. Whether that was a result of my stories, I certainly couldn’t say, but those were events that made a lot of people in this world happy to see. I still hear from actors occasionally who say, “I was thinking of signing up with this agent or company, and I saw your story and just want to thank you.” As a reporter, there’s nothing more gratifying than that.

What do you enjoy about covering entertainment?

I love writing about the business side of Hollywood because it’s endlessly fascinating. You have to love a business where there’s no shortage of outsiders who show up every year and say, “I can do this better than people who’ve been doing it forever.” Sooner or later, those people are usually walking away with their tail between their legs. But for every story like that, there’s a wild success story. It’s a world that clearly intoxicates people, and that’s what makes it so fun.

A spring blizzard this week left me without power for 16 hours, and at first I felt unmoored because there was no heat, no light — and no Internet connection. It revealed how plugged in my life is.  But can I recommend reading a book by candlelight in front of the glow of a wood stove? I might try to replicate that on a regular basis, even when the power is on.

Diarmid Mogg and the crazy-compelling Small Town Noir. I came across this blog a few years ago and was instantly hooked. I’m the type of person who loves to look at old photos at flea markets and imagine the lives of the people in them (and feel a bit mournful that they ended up in a cardboard box like a Tom Waits song). But Diarmid Mogg took it much further with his blog Small Town Noir, a collection of midcentury mug shots from one forgotten town in Pennsylvania. He started reporting the stories of the people who’ve been photographed at one of the worst moments in their lives. The writing is quite lovely — as are Mogg’s answers in this “5(ish) Questions.”

The soundtrack: For this story I chose a whole album: “September of My Years,” by Frank Sinatra. It’s one of his best, a late-career album full of regret and hard-won wisdom. I can imagine the people of New Castle listening to it when it came out in 1965, when the town had not yet begun its slide from boomtown to bust, but the mood of regret resonating still.

One Great Sentence

“This is a love story, and I apologize; it was inadvertent. But I want it clearly understood from the start that I don’t expect it to turn out well.”

— Eve Babitz: “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.” Read why we think it’s great.

Daniel Miller and the Los Angeles Times’ “Selling Stardom.” Some of the scenes from this series by Daniel Miller about those making a buck off starry-eyed Hollywood wannabes could be in a movie themselves. Maybe one directed by Robert Altman, or even David Lynch? (I recently saw “Mulholland Drive” for the first time and it’s one of those movies that stays with you, even if you don’t love it while you’re watching it.) The most Lynchian moment is when a talent agent, meeting Miller in a non-glitzy office surrounded by empty water bottles, first jokes about having him ghostwrite her “Bad Agent” life story and then breaks down in tears.

The soundtrack: “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” by Tony Bennett. You have to love any song that has the words “gigolo and gigolette” in it. Bonus: castenets.

What I’m reading online: Two stories of loss haunted me this week. The first, “You May Want to Marry My Husband,” was written by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who died just 10 days after the Modern Love essay ran in The New York Times. I started crying early in the piece, in which she plays matchmaker for the man she knows will be her widower, and the tears didn’t stop when I stopped reading.

The other story is about another husband left behind when the wife who meant everything to him dies. This Pitchfork profile of the singer Phil Elverum gets almost uncomfortably close to grief as he shows the reporter his dead wife’s art journals. The truest moment, one that is unspeakably sad yet veers close to queasy-funny, comes when he says he cannot bear to throw out the breast milk that the couple had been saving for their child.

And can I also recommend this short video on Open Culture in which George Saunders talks about the art of storytelling? It even fits the theme, because there’s a moment where he describes the evolution of a character from an asshole to a grieving widower in the space it took him to craft one sentence.

What’s on my bedside table: “The Poetry of the Blues,” by Samuel Charters. I’m a bit torn on this book. I know that Charters helped a lot of people discover forgotten blues musicians, and this book is taking a clear stand against racism in 1963 America. But the scholarly language — a bit of whitesplaining, if you will — juxtaposed with the loose lyrics sometimes made me wince a little. His comments on racism, though, are just as relevant today as they were half a century ago, and that’s fairly heartbreaking.

What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “California Here I Come,” by Mike Lipskin with Willie “The Lion” Smith. I thought I’d continue with the theme of young white guys and older black music greats. The liner notes by the late, great Nat Hentoff tell the story of the two pianists coming together to jam. I love the playful dialogue at the beginning of the album, with Smith telling his protégé he’s going gangbusters, and he’s going to let him “sign off like the Lone Ranger.”

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

Rich Schapiro is always searching. Whether he’s writing a quick-hit 800-word spot feature for the New York Daily News or a magazine feature that’s taken years to report, Schapiro is on the hunt for deeper meaning — a “character conflict,” as he calls it — behind every narrative.

I started out as a newspaper writer, and not just at a newspaper but at a tabloid where space is really at a premium, and you’re often forced to tell a fairly complicated story in 300 words. That’s a real challenge in and of itself, and in some ways more difficult than writing a longer piece.

Perhaps it is this instinct that turns up stories about collar bombings, or census-taker hangings, or, most recently, a sweeping profile in Outside magazine of one of the most outsized characters in recent nonfiction memory: Ray Stansel, alias Lee Lafferty, a Florida drug smuggler who faked his own death, fled to Australia and became an environmental activist.

Even when he was still a student at American University, Schapiro wasn’t writing the usual campus life story for the college newspaper. Instead, he spent his time on features built less around a news peg than his own interests. Schapiro sought out and wrote about D.C.’s homeless population, and eventually lived on the streets for 10 days.

Now he works as a kind of roving generalist with the Daily News, but he’s still committed to stories that go beyond the news cycle. (His magazine pursuits remain, in his professional scheme, a sleep-depriving side gig.)

So why did he get into longform, working, as he does, for an outlet where most of his stories run fewer than 800 words?

“The work I do at the Daily News, which is still highly compelling for the most part, it’s a certain kind of writing,” Schapiro said. “Doing longform pieces allows me to tell a story a different way, to think about storytelling in a different way, and I think to challenge myself, to take on a kind of writing that I still consider myself a kind of a novice in.”

Some novice. Schapiro’s aforementioned feature for Outside is an ambitious, pulsating odyssey in which the existential questions of morality compete for top billing with the facts of the extraordinary life of the man in question. It’s just the type of find that makes all that searching worthwhile.

This interview took place over a series of phone conversations. It has been condensed and edited.

At least in your longform, you deal with some pretty gruesome stuff — collar bombs and census-taker hangings, to name a couple. Is that what piques your interest, or?

There’s nothing in particular that I’m looking for. It’s not as if I go into the process of looking for my next story with something specific in mind or a specific genre. I find I am drawn to stories in which there is a mystery at the heart of it. That was certainly the case with the collar bomb, in searching for who was really behind this, and what were their motivations? Many start out as a kind of search for truth, which I guess you could argue is what all journalism is about. And a mystery that’s embedded in a story that has multiple layers, which is what kind of distinguishes a magazine piece from a thousand-word newspaper article. I’m typically looking for stories that have strong narratives, for sure, but also convey some kind of deeper truths, or say something about the human condition that I find interesting, or reveal some kind of conflict within a character I find compelling — and that was certainly part of the motivation for this story.

I’m curious about your writing style. You keep it simple and to the point, which is a skill that can go missing in long pieces like this. Was it intentional?

I generally try to let the story tell itself. I sometimes find myself drawn to a story based on a headline, for instance, and it will strike me as being overwritten to the point that I get frustrated in the telling. So I generally try to stay out of the way a little bit, and as you said keep it as simple as possible. I think part of that is that I started out as a newspaper writer, and not just at a newspaper but at a tabloid where space is really at a premium, and you’re often forced to tell a fairly complicated story in 300 words. That’s a real challenge in and of itself, and in some ways more difficult than writing a longer piece.

I think it can be helpful to think about how a filmmaker would tell your story. Movies are driven by scenes, and I tend to be drawn to those stories that present particularly vivid ones. I try to, whenever possible, knit together scenes that propel the narrative forward but also reveal a deeper meaning about a person or event or whatever the focus is.

Did you find Stansel/Lafferty through the Tampa Bay Times article that you mention in the story, which was published soon after his death? How much did you feel was left to report? Was there a moment during the research and reporting when you knew you had a longform article on your hands?

Yes, I found it through that piece. In reading that article, I can’t remember exactly where it was in the piece, but when it brought up the fact he had essentially left behind his first family, that’s what initially told me, “Wow, this is more than the story of a guy who lived an extraordinary life; there was a bigger internal conflict here.” I was interested in pursuing that and the story of his children from his first family, particularly the two that went onto become drug fugitives as well. I was interested in what they thought of the decisions their father made, and that led me to have a pretty long and detailed correspondence with each of them in prison.

With the breadth of this guy’s life, this story must have been a bear to structure, both to get the story across in a digestible way but also make it exciting for the reader. What was that process like?

There is no way to overstate the value of having a talented editor. In this case I had an extremely talented editor in Jonah Ogles at Outside. This was a challenging story, for all the reasons you mentioned. I should note that I was playing around with the structure right up until I filed my first draft, which is unusual for me. Usually I have a very clear sense, and I thought I did, and I gave it to a couple people to read, and based on their feedback it seemed I needed to simplify it a bit. I should also note my original draft was over 10,000 words and the story that appeared in the magazine was a bit over 6,000. I simplified right before filing, and then with Jonah guiding it, we simplified the narrative even further — in terms of the chronology, and when to reveal certain details. I should note he was also the one who encouraged me to insert myself in the story, which is something I frankly try to avoid. He felt it was important to have someone guiding along the reader, a reference point for the reader and also to make the story feel a bit more present and urgent. In hindsight, I think he was absolutely right. While it still felt strange, I think it was the right move.

The True Story of the Fugitive Drug Smuggler Who Became an Environmental Hero

By Rich Schapiro

Originally published on Outside Online on Jan. 16, 2017

When Raymond Stansel was busted in 1974, he was one of Florida’s biggest pot smugglers. Facing trial and years in prison, he jumped bail, changed his name, and holed up in a remote Australian outpost. Even more remarkable than that? His second life as an environmental hero.

Even before he arrived at the accident scene, sergeant Matt Smith knew it would be bad. Smith was in charge of the 12-person police department in Mossman, a speck of a town located along Australia’s remote northeastern edge. He knew from experience that there was a fundamental truth about car wrecks: drivers have a pretty good chance of surviving a crash that’s car versus car, but they rarely walk away from a vehicle that’s slammed into a tree. The call that came over the police radio on that May 26, 2015 afternoon said that a vehicle had struck a tree along a two-lane road hugging the coastline. Smith’s hunch proved true. When he arrived, he found a white Toyota Hilux pickup wrapped around a gum tree as thick as a sumo wrestler. By some miracle bystanders had found a dog, an aging bichon frise, inside the truck, dazed but alive. But the driver had no chance. How did you come to start the story at the end of his life? Was that always the plan? I think it was two-fold. One, as you said, there were a lot of twists and turns in the narrative, and kind of starting at the end and then ending the first section with a sense of what the reader was getting themselves into was a way to kind of set up the story nicely, in a way that would be compelling to the reader as well as make the narrative easy to digest. It was a way to leave the reader thinking, ‘Wow’ at the end of that first section, but also leading them into the story in a way that would make it easy for them to comprehend the twists and turns the story would ultimately take.

Officers traced the registration to Dennis “Lee” Lafferty, age 75. Everybody knew Lee. Or at least knew of him. He was an American but had spent decades in nearby Daintree, where he operated one of the area’s oldest and most respected tour companies, running boat trips along the crocodile-filled Daintree River.

The river cuts through an ancient tropical rainforest that hosts one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems: rare ribbonwood trees, musky rat-kangaroos, and six-foot-tall southern cassowary birds. Lee was perhaps its greatest champion. It seemed there was no plant or animal he couldn’t identify, and his efforts to protect their habitats had earned him the reputation as one of the region’s most passionate conservationists.

“He was a real gentleman, a lovely man,” said Julia Leu, the mayor of the area. “He had a huge scientific knowledge, and he was definitely one of the people who wanted to preserve what we had.”

Smith spent most of his time at the crash site consoling a small crowd of Lee’s devastated employees, who told him that Lee shouldn’t have been driving. He was on medication for his Parkinson’s disease and prone to nodding off at any moment.

In the coming days, newspapers ran stories about the “local tourism stalwart” who “did not have a bad bone in his body.” There was a packed memorial service. And then everyone but Lee’s family began to move on.

Nearly four weeks after the accident, Smith received a text message from one of his detectives saying that he needed to read an article from a Florida newspaper about Lee. Smith was intrigued. Why would an American publication run a story about a guy in Daintree? The article had appeared in the Tampa Bay Times just a few weeks after Lee’s death.

Sergeant Smith isn’t the sort of person who is easily surprised or impressed. He once walked into a house that a spurned husband had booby-trapped with a speargun and barely flinched. How did you come by this detail? The way you get those details is by earning a source’s trust, and spending a good amount of time with them. I first spoke to Sergeant Smith by phone before I traveled to Australia, and when I got there I met him once in person at the Mossman Police Station, and a few days later he actually drove me out to the accident site. It was actually during that drive where we talked a lot about his previous experiences and his background, and that’s when a lot of those details came out. That’s what you’re always hoping for, to have someone talk to you as if you’re a friend and not a journalist. And not to say he was saying anything compromising, but we knew each other and we felt comfortable around each other. I am always very quick to offer personal details about myself to people I’m interviewing. Part of that is I’m an open person, but part of it is that people are so much more likely to let down their guard if they can relate to you and they can feel like it’s not a one-way transaction. Following a 2008 cyclone, he chased after a seven­foot-long crocodile gliding up a Mossman road. He has responded to multiple helicopter crashes in the area. When he learned what the article revealed, however, Smith was so amazed that he could utter only one word: “Wow.”

The piece described the life of an American fugitive named Raymond Grady Stansel Jr. In the 1970s, Stansel was a master fisherman who became one of Florida’s biggest pot smugglers, hauling gargantuan 12-ton loads hidden under piles of freshly caught fish. And then he pulled off one of the most dramatic vanishing acts of any outlaw in American history when he skipped bail, faked his own death, and reinvented himself in Australia as Lee Lafferty, tour operator and conservationist.

Since the summer of 2015, I’ve been trying to discover who Stansel truly was. What I ultimately learned—by digging through thousands of pages of court documents and interviewing his closest friends and family on two continents—is that the man lived not one extraordinary life but two.

The west coast of Florida is an angler’s paradise. People come from all over to fish for trout in Tampa Bay, grouper near Madeira Beach, and 100-pound tarpon in Boca Grande. Back in the 1960s, elite fishermen were treated like rock stars. They were invited to cocktail parties, and their exploits were chronicled in the newspapers. Raymond Grady Stansel Jr. was among them. “He was one of my heroes,” Bill Caldwell, who worked as Stansel’s deckhand as a teenager, told me. “He could do anything.”

Stansel was said to be able to back a 46-foot sportfishing boat into a slip with the wind blowing 15 knots and the tide running against him. Legend has it he once single-handedly brought up a 90-foot barge that had sunk in 100-foot waters using only scuba gear and inflatable tubes. What kind of attempts did you make to confirm these stories? There are a lot of them, and a lot of them seem a little larger-than-life. I included these kinds of stories because, by all accounts, this was an extraordinary figure and an extraordinary fisherman. If that’s the case, you need to show some examples, so that was the point of including them. In terms of trying to verify, I spoke with numerous of his old friends and acquaintances, who all seem to have good stories about him. They’re good storytellers — and they’re also known for inflating stores. I typically only used things that had more than one person who was able to confirm them, in detail. That said, I think I did couch it in a way to suggest that I didn’t actually know it. “Legend has it,” “it was said,” things like that. And I was told a lot of things I didn’t include, that seemed like his legend grew in his absence. He once caught more than 2,000 pounds of grouper in a single weekend. All this despite the fact that he was blind in his left eye, a consequence of being struck in the face with a broom as he and a friend swept the cafeteria floor in middle school.

Stansel was six-foot-two, lean and strong, with wavy dirty blond hair. He’d been raised in a modest house in Saint Petersburg, the son of a commercial fisherman and a Sunday school teacher. His renegade spirit and affinity for the outdoors emerged early in life. By age six, he could use a cast net to catch bait. As a teenager, incensed over the degradation of Florida’s wetlands, he boasted of sinking a massive dredge operating out of Tampa Bay.

When he graduated from high school in 1954, Stansel enlisted in the Air Force, gaining entry by memorizing the eye chart seconds before the exam. He told his friends that he went on to perform one of the Air Force’s most difficult jobs, refueling jets in midair, before he left the military and took up fishing as a profession.

There are several ways to make a living while fishing, from commercial jobs to running a charter boat. Stansel worked his way up to the best gig of all: private captain. He was hired by Clint Murchison Jr., the founder of the Dallas Cowboys, to pilot Murchison’s shimmering 40-foot Miss Centex in 1965. Stansel moved to the Texas side of the Gulf at Murchison’s request, bringing along his wife, Midge, and four kids—Raymond, Ronald, Sabrina, and Terry. They spent their summers in Boca Grande, where Stansel taught his kids to dive, fish for tarpon, and catch stone crabs.

By the late 1960s, though, the Murchison gig had ended. Stansel moved his family back to Florida and ran a charter boat, but the vicissitudes of the weather made things difficult. He tried to compensate for lean times by running stone crab traps in winter. But Stansel struggled alongside the other fishermen, most of whom kept their chins up and pressed on.

“Fishermen are like farmers,” said Bobby Buswell, a longtime friend. “You work your fanny off. You pay your taxes. You make a living. And that’s it.”

Stansel wanted more. There’s some disagreement as to how and when he was first drawn into smuggling. By one account, some dealers with a Jamaican connection approached him in the late 1960s because he was known as an expert boat captain and a family man unlikely to draw the attention of law enforcement. Another version had Stansel pulling off his first run in 1971, after he was recruited by two young smugglers who needed a bigger boat and were intrigued by the 44-foot T-Craft that Stansel had built himself. Wherever the truth lies, Stansel’s pot-smuggling enterprise was booming by the early 1970s. Marijuana was harder to come by in the U.S. in those days, a consequence of President Richard Nixon’s effort to shut off the flow from Mexico. But in Jamaica, buying a few ounces was as easy as buying a piece of fruit. “People would come off the street and offer to sell you their ganja,” recalled Mike Hubbard, who helped orchestrate one of Stansel’s earliest runs.

The marijuana was grown deep in the hills by villagers, who sold their product in 50-pound burlap sacks. Making connections was easy; transporting it back to the States—where it could sell for $175 a pound, a profit of $165—posed a challenge. So dealers turned to guys like Stansel, who knew practically every sheltered cove on the coast.

Word of this new source of income would eventually spread among Florida fishermen, but at the time, Stansel was one of the few players in the game. He soon expanded his operations into Colombia, which produced the most prized pot on the planet, by forming a partnership with a major supplier named Raul “Black Tuna” Davila-Jimeno.

Stansel would pilot his loaded-down boat five days from Jamaica (or ten from Colombia) into Florida’s maze of inlets. Under cover of darkness, they’d transfer the bales of marijuana, which “looked like horse feed,” according to one Stansel associate, right onto the beach, where they were weighed on massive scales. It took years for law enforcement to realize how much was arriving via the Florida coast. (In just two operations in 1974, they reportedly seized more than 200,000 pounds.) Do you know why the War on Drugs crackdown seemed to miss the Florida coast? When I said the final draft being almost half of the first draft, it was sections like this that got a lot of stuff cut out. By the time I finished reporting, I was very steeped in the state of Florida’s battle against the drug trade in the 1960s and early 70s, which I found fascinating. I was fortunate that the prosecutor at the time was extremely generous with his time, and really described what things were like. I also spoke with numerous retired investigators, mostly at the state level, in addition to former smugglers. I also read a couple of books on the matter. I really had more information than I knew what to do with. Stansel’s arrest was an extremely big deal in that he was the first person arrested by this newly formed statewide grand jury, created by the then-governor because they just started getting wind of the amount of marijuana entering the U.S. via Florida. There were a couple massive seizures of boats just before Stansel was arrested — several tons of pot — that basically forced the authorities to take action, and to realize just how much marijuana was being smuggled. Up to that point, most of it was coming from Mexico, but these fishermen and other smugglers branched out into Jamaica after Nixon cracked down, and it turned out the weed coming out of Jamaica was far more potent and valuable than Mexico’s stuff, then Colombia became the place producing the finest pot.

To the guys on Stansel’s crew, smuggling came to feel like just another activity on the water. “We trusted each other. No contracts,” said Hans Geissler, a former French Foreign Legion soldier and elite sailor who Stansel recruited. “We were a pretty close-knit group. Sailing off the beach, jumping waves, surfing, Jimmy Buffett. It was a nice little crowd, and smuggling felt like part of it.”

Stansel soon had more money than he knew what to do with. For a while, he stacked $100 bills in orange crates in his parents’ attic. But when his father found them, Stansel looked for more sophisticated hiding places. He opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands, bought gold bars in Costa Rica, and set up seafood and boat-building companies in Panama and Honduras. He also bought something he’d need to expand his operation: more boats. Soon, workers at the pier noticed that Stansel routinely made trips to sea without any ice—a necessity for anyone planning to catch and sell seafood—and then returned with his vessel riding low in the water, nets bone dry.

On the morning of June 6, 1974, Stansel emerged from room 23 of the Sheraton Bel-Air, a luxury beachside resort in Saint Petersburg. Striding toward the parking lot with a brown briefcase in his hand, he blended in easily with the hotel’s well-heeled clientele. He folded his lanky frame into the driver’s seat of an Avis rental car, keyed the ignition, and turned north on Sunshine Skyway. Seconds later a group of unmarked police cars pulled out behind him. This graf is so cinematic. I can see the camera following him. Do you ever think like a screenwriter or a director,  like you’re creating a movie, as you write? And speaking of movies, is anyone trying to make one about him? This was actually how I opened the story in an early draft. I think it can be helpful to think about how a filmmaker would tell your story. Movies are driven by scenes, and I tend to be drawn to those stories that present particularly vivid ones. I try to, whenever possible, knit together scenes that propel the narrative forward but also reveal a deeper meaning about a person or event or whatever the focus is. When writing scenes, you want to provide as much detail as possible, to make the readers feel like they’re there. In essence, to make the stories feel cinematic. I don’t believe a movie about Stansel/Lafferty is currently in the works, but I do hope someone will make one.

Stansel had been under surveillance since he flew home from Central America a few days earlier. By now he was considered one of the state’s most prolific smugglers. Just after he turned off the highway, police radios crackled with news: a statewide grand jury had issued an indictment against him and three of his partners for conspiracy to possess marijuana. The officers flipped on their sirens and boxed Stansel in. They jumped out of their cars, ordered him to exit his vehicle, and cuffed him without incident. In his pockets he had $5,476 in cash.

At the station, officers cracked open his briefcase to reveal his other possessions: an additional $20,000 in cash stuffed inside a manila envelope; paper currency from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Kenya; photographs of what appeared to be marijuana; blank tourist visas that would allow him to enter Nicaragua whenever he pleased; unused checks from a Swiss bank account; paperwork from Germany showing that his new Mercedes was ready to be picked up; and, finally, his passport, which was so thick that it stretched out like an accordion and indicated that he had been to 12 countries in the past 30 days, including Jamaica, Colombia, Japan, Hong Kong, Panama, and the Cayman Islands. The case against him was already strong—the cops had flipped several of his associates. With the items from his briefcase, Stansel would almost certainly do time. How much digging did it take to get to the court documents with these details? It was a challenge to get the documents, but the difficulty wasn’t really on my end, it was on the end of the people who work at the courthouse where all the documents were located. They really had to dig deep in their archives, and it took quite a lot of time and effort, and I’m in deep gratitude. It took a period of weeks and I think months for them to pull up everything, and it started with some very detailed conversations between me and one of the clerks, going into what was available and the scope of the filings. One of the disappointments was that the marathon bond hearing that led to the judge to reducing his bond — there is a transcript of that entire hearing which was unfortunately discarded at some point. That was a low point, but in the end I had so much material, and I still have hundreds of pages of documents of people who are witnesses in Honduras after he disappears offering their account of what happened, which are fascinating. That’s always a good problem to have, when you have so much material.

He was booked on a $1 million bond. At a marathon three-day hearing, his lawyer, a federal prosecutor turned private attorney named Bernard Dempsey Jr., convinced a judge to lower it to $500,000. Three months later, Dempsey produced a cashier’s check in that amount, and Stansel was free. It was, at the time, the largest bond ever posted in Florida history.

The trial opened on a gloomy Monday in January 1975, and it promised to be a full-blown media spectacle. “For a Watergate-fed public still hungry for a big, juicy trial, today there is—Raymond Grady Stansel,” read an article that appeared that morning in the St. Petersburg Times. If convicted, Stansel could be sentenced to five years in prison (this was before the war on drugs), but he would likely face additional charges—and additional time behind bars.

Perhaps no one apart from Stansel had more riding on the trial’s outcome than Emiliano “E. J.” Salcines. The 36-year-old prosecutor had been handpicked by governor Reubin Askew to oversee the grand jury that indicted Stansel (and would later turn its attention to many other Florida drug-trafficking kingpins). Salcines was supremely confident. Even a lawyer as good as Dempsey would have little chance of freeing a guy caught with $25,000 in cash and photographs of marijuana.

Before the proceedings got under way, Stansel’s lawyer made a startling announcement: Raymond Grady Stansel had died on New Year’s Eve in a scuba-diving accident off the coast of Honduras. “He just went down and didn’t come up,” said Dempsey, who added that Stansel’s body had not yet been found.

Salcines seethed. He demanded proof of Stansel’s fate. “We insist not on any foreign documents,” Salcines shouted. “We want the body—dead or alive.”

The tips that came in over the subsequent weeks, months, and years were dizzying. Police departments across Florida were inundated with Stansel sightings reported by anonymous callers, confidential informants, and even jailed traffickers hoping to obtain early release. One week he’d be spotted at a brothel in Belize, the next drinking beer at a bar in St. Pete Beach, Florida. “It’s like chasing a phantom,” lieutenant Michael Hawkins, head of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office’s vice unit, told a reporter at the time. Was there an official record of these sightings, or are these second-hand accounts from sources? There were documents that listed these different sightings that were kept by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Unfortunately, those documents were destroyed, but there were news reports based off them I think from the 80s and early 90s. And then some of the old investigators were able to corroborate them.

“It was like Elvis,” recalled David McGee, who was a prosecutor assigned to a North Florida drug task force when the Stansel saga was playing out. “He became kind of a legend.”

The leads turned up only dead ends, but you couldn’t find a single cop in the state of Florida who actually believed Stansel was dead. “They’re saying he drowned in a scuba accident,” said one former agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “That man had been on the water his whole life. He was like a fish.”

FDLE agents thought they had him in December 1976, when Honduran officials reported that Stansel had been “detained” in the capital of Tegucigalpa. The agency released a bulletin announcing his capture, and the news spread rapidly through Florida. Agents were preparing to catch a flight to Latin America when the Hondurans inexplicably reported that Stansel had vanished.

Wherever he was, investigators were fairly certain he wasn’t alone. Around the same time that Stansel had disappeared, so had his lover. (He and Midge were estranged by then, and Stansel’s kids were used to seeing him with other women.)

Janet Wood was a free-spirited twentysomething, blond and slender. Stansel first laid eyes on her while visiting the famed Chart Room bar in Key West in 1973. “He was the most exciting, extraordinary, capable man I had ever met,” she told me.

I first reached out to Janet a few months after Lee Lafferty was unmasked as Ray Stansel. When I finally heard from her ten months later, she made it politely clear that she wasn’t interested in speaking to reporters. “I have been offered money and the proverbial 15 minutes of fame (infamy?) and I was and am not interested,” she wrote in an e-mail from her home in Australia. She added that she was wary of how the couple might be portrayed. “We are never so uncomplicated as presented by the media with their limited space and time.”

After a correspondence that stretched to several weeks, Janet changed her mind. How did you finally convince her to tell her story? Could you have told this story without her participation? Let me answer the second part first. I thought I could, but knowing what I know now, I don’t know how I could have possibly pulled off telling the second part of his life in a compelling way without Janet’s cooperation. I consider her agreeing to speak with me to be the one of the major reporting coups, and certainly something that made the story twice what it would’ve been. She was able to give me a sense of what was going on in his head, and to describe him in a way that nobody else could have since she lived so closely to him for so long — and so many little details. In terms of how it came about, there’s no secret. I did with her what I did with everybody. I’m extremely honest in what I am trying to do in telling this story, and why it’s important to have her input. And then just being really gentle with sources. With Janet, I completely understood her hesitation, and I could imagine what a disorienting experience she was undergoing. You’ve been keeping this secret for so long, suddenly it’s out, and you have all these journalists trying to speak with you and get you to tell them everything. She was going through her own issues. I tried to be very gentle and honest. We first started corresponding by email and it became very clear right away that she was an incredibly thoughtful person, extremely cerebral and very good at expressing herself. Some of her emails were just so well-written and so interesting. Initially we were conversing off the record, and those made it clear to me what an asset it would be to have her full participation. And there were still questions she politely declined to answer. She eventually became more open to the idea after communicating with people I had talked to in Australia. Those people had conveyed to her that I was a serious journalist and was looking to flesh out who he was as a person and kind of tell who he was as a person and not just focus on his life as a drug smuggler. Stansel had protected her for so long, and now she felt an obligation to protect his legacy. If the story was going to be told, she realized that it wouldn’t serve the man she had loved to stay silent. “They may not be perfect human beings their whole lives, but there are individuals that make quite an impression on the planet,” she said.

Though she wouldn’t give up every detail, Janet finally told me how Raymond Stansel managed to make one of the most impressive escapes in American history.

Once he was released, local police followed Stansel wherever he went. They knew he had connections all over the world, and they didn’t want him to flee the country. In September 1974, barely a week out of jail, Stansel was on his motorcycle, riding away from the Tampa home where he was staying. As he crossed a bridge, he lost his tail, “dodging here, dodging there,” according to Janet. Then he made a dash to a local airstrip, where a friend waited with a private plane. With the complicated, layered nature of this story, it makes sense to structure this chronologically, as you did. Was that always your plan? My first draft — the 10,000-plus draft — it had a couple of flashbacks, or a section or two that was outside the chronology that went back to, for instance, the last time his son saw him, or things in his first life that I went back to. I think I also went back to and fleshed out how his sons got into their own troubles, and it just felt like it was going to be hard for the reader to follow along with the narrative and not get confused. And again, this is why you need a good editor, to kind of see these things. But it was pretty much the skeleton to tell it chronologically, and Jonah, the editor, just kind of refined that.

From there, Stansel flew to Key West to see Janet and convince her to come with him. “He didn’t know what he was going to do,” she told me. “He didn’t have a plan A, plan B, plan C.”

But he did have powerful friends. He somehow made it to Honduras—after all, he’d been smuggling drugs through the Gulf of Mexico for years. Once there, Stansel walked into the American embassy in Tegucigalpa and told officials he had lost his passport and needed a new one. (In fact, the police had kept it after his arrest.) Janet wouldn’t talk about his travel documents or the origin of his new identity, though records show that a 33-year-old named Dennis Lafferty had died in Florida just one year before Stansel slipped out of the U.S.

New passport in hand, Stansel went to the island of Roatán, 45 miles off the northern coast of Honduras, where Janet later met him. During Christmas week, his four kids—all between the ages of 11 and 16—joined them there. They dived during the day and spent the nights eating fresh fish and listening to Janet strum her guitar. A week or so later, the kids went back to their mom in the U.S., where authorities questioned Midge about Stansel’s whereabouts.

Ray and Janet, meanwhile, split ways en route to a predetermined location in Guatemala City. The plan was to sail across the globe in their 40-foot boat. The goal: end up as close as possible to the Great Barrier Reef.

They sailed to Belize, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire. They went on motorcycle treks through Central American mountain ranges. They had a close call in Belize when Janet was mistaken for Patty Hearst and held for 24 hours.

It was an epic introduction to life on the run, and then Janet became ill. She suspected seasickness, but in Bonaire they learned that she was pregnant. Sailing around the world no longer seemed so appealing, so they decided to fly instead. First to Venezuela, then to Peru, Tahiti, and eventually the Pacific island of New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu), where they were married less than two weeks before Janet suffered a miscarriage.

Through it all, the couple were looking over their shoulders for whoever was surely hunting them, even as they boarded a plane for what they hoped would be their final destination: Australia.

“For the authorities searching here and there, on the island and God knows where else, it was a job,” Janet wrote in an e-mail. “I do not say this to dismiss a few hard-working professionals, but their devotion to duty can’t compare to devotion to a dream of life, love, and freedom.” What are your thoughts on this dichotomy — duty vs. love — especially with regard to this story? When I first undertook this story, I saw it, kind of at its heart, as a redemption story. This is a guy who had committed some what were seen at the time as serious crimes, and who could have very well disappeared and lived in a cabin in the woods for 40 years, living a lonely, solitary life. Were that the case, I would not have pursued that case. What made this story special, what made it unique, is that this guy devoted the second part of his life to protecting this very unique habitat and to basically teach other people about it, and to provide a way for other people to enjoy it. He did that at a pretty significant risk to himself.  To think that a fugitive has started a business that’s designed to bring as many people to him as possible is a pretty bold endeavor, so that was how I kind of saw this piece going into it, and that’s what drew me to it. After reporting it out, I have to say what I thought of him at the outset was confirmed through the reporting. I think whatever admiration I had for him based on that first article only grew as I did more reporting. Now, the one thing that is still difficult to reconcile is him leaving behind his first family. That is something that people who knew him in Australia were also really, really struggling with, because it didn’t fit the devoted family man they knew. That’s something that’s hard to reconcile with everything that I learned about him.

There’s a saying in Australia’s Far North Queensland region: Your history starts here. For decades this remote stretch of pristine beaches and lush rainforest along the continent’s northeastern edge has attracted an oddball mix of Australian hippies and starry-eyed foreigners seeking a fresh start. You could be a German count or a renegade chemist who supplied LSD to the Grateful Dead. “No one gives a stuff,” said Andrew Forsyth, himself a former pilot who ferried Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth around the world, and relocated to the area in 2002 after first visiting some 40 years prior. This is a great graf. You almost could have started the story here, if you didn’t have such other vivid material. Is this one of those stories where you were spoiled for choice on material? One hundred percent. He lived such a remarkable life, and the place he chose to settle in was so unique in terms of its biodiversity, history and the colorful characters it attracts. Probably the hardest part of writing this piece was choosing what to leave out, which in my experience is not all that unusual.

In the 1970s, there were no traffic lights and few paved roads. Despite its proximity to the Great Barrier Reef, only the most determined travelers ever reached the area. Those who did often stopped in Port Douglas, a sleepy fishing village with a crescent-moon-shaped slice of golden beach. The downtown had a general store, a post office, and a couple of pubs where barefooted locals with names like Pegleg Tommy spun tales of bull sharks seen and giant crocs narrowly avoided.

“You could fire a gun down the street and you wouldn’t hit anybody,” said Norm Clinch, a machinist from Brisbane who often fished out of Port Douglas. “The police? There was one station, and they’d all be in there drunk or asleep.”

It was here in Port Douglas that, one day in the fall of 1975, a beat-up faded green station wagon arrived carrying a sun-baked American couple looking for just such a place. The lanky man who stepped out of the car identified himself as Dennis “Lee” Lafferty. If anyone asked—and few ever did—he was a fisherman from Texas. His wife was Janet Lafferty. If anyone asked—and few ever did—she came from Michigan, and both her parents were dead.

It wasn’t just Australia’s far-off location and proximity to the reef that attracted the couple. Lafferty’s great-uncle had visited in the 1920s and described Far North Queensland as a real-life Shangri-La. It also offered an added benefit: the fishing was world-class.

“We started from the get-go,” recalled Janet, who acted as Lee’s second mate as he relaunched his career.

The waters off Port Douglas were so well stocked, fishermen needed nothing more than a rudimentary lure made out of a four-inch piece of curved metal with a hook attached to have success. It was almost comically primitive. “When was the last time a fish saw a school of spoons going by?” Lee would say.

Lee outfished the locals in part by using live bait—caught with the specially designed cast nets that he and Janet made and sold—and quickly established himself as one of the best Port Douglas had ever known. “I used to say, ‘I’ll back Lee against any of you cunts,’ ” said Clinch, the salty-tongued machinist, who became one of Lee’s first friends. “ ‘He’ll fish you out ten to one.’ ”

If Lee did have access to large sums of money (and Janet insists that he did not), he surely didn’t act like it. At one point, he was running so low on cash that he had to borrow $8,000 from a fellow American expat named Walter Starck to buy an engine for a new boat. “He never bought anything flashy,” Starck said. “They didn’t go out and entertain. They lived a very modest life.”

Five years passed, and no one came looking for them. By then the Laffertys had two daughters—Jessie, born in 1976, and Kianna, in 1980—and though they told the girls about their past, life seemed to settle down. “He was a gentleman’s gentleman,” said Edward Pitt, a local fisherman who lived a few doors down. “He never showed off. He struck me as just a normal worker.” When pressed, his fishing buddies said there was one thing about Lee that was a bit odd. Anytime one of them produced a camera, he would disappear. How excited were you to get this great little detail? That was something that came out late in the reporting, and late into my trip in Australia. The one thing that was working in my favor was that he chose to settle down in a very, very small town where everybody knew each other. Once I got there and people started feeling more comfortable with me, and directing me to different people who knew him well, I was able to uncover some of those little details that, like you said, helped the reader understand what it was like for him to be living as a fugitive. What was the journalism saturation like in Australia? Right after the Tampa Bay story, there was a lot of follow-up by the papers in Australia, but by the time I got there, there was nobody there, and I don’t think there were many journalists around Daintree, ever. It’s 90 minutes north of Cairns, and that’s the closest city. I find you’re always more successful, anyway, once the attention has subsided. And also when you show up at a place that’s so far away, people are often intrigued by your presence. They’re curious about you, and why you’ve come so far for the story. It was a very good reporting experience in Daintree. People wanted to talk about Lee. They loved him, they admired him, and there were very eager to tell stories about him. Everyone except for his family, who were very reluctant to talk. What was the family’s reaction to the story? You never know how sources are going to react. In this case, I received very positive feedback from the family. I’m still in close contact with Janet. I received tons of contact from his family, and even some from people I never spoke to, some people I tried to speak to but didn’t speak to me and even they enjoyed the piece. It’s been a very gratifying experience in that way. You’re thinking about the reader as you’re writing, but it’s also nice when the people who have put their trust in you come back to you and tell you how glad they are that they agreed to cooperate, and that they feel like you handled the story with care and in a professional manner.

In 1982, the Laffertys purchased an overgrown piece of property along the Daintree River’s southern bank. The 80-mile-long waterway snakes through dense rainforest, where you can walk for miles without ­encountering another human being. It’s the kind of place that would have obvious appeal to an international fugitive.

But rather than retreat from society, Lee started a tour venture. The area has always been an ecological wonder, boasting unique species of mangrove trees, bats, birds, frogs, and tree kangaroos. He founded a company focused on exposing people to the best of it. In a span of ten years, the Daintree River Cruise Centre became one of the area’s most vital businesses. “It was classic hiding in plain sight,” Janet told me. “It’s not hard to turn the conversation around and get someone talking about themselves. We both learned that very quickly.”

Lee devoured books on the region’s ecology. He talked to the indigenous population to learn how they used seeds and plants. It wasn’t long before people showed up carrying specimens they hoped Lee could identify.

“I’d say, ‘God, he’s an encyclopedia,’ ” recalled Betty Clinch, who was one of the Cruise Centre’s first employees. As Lee’s understanding of the region’s ecosystem deepened, he dedicated himself to protecting it. He urged farmers to plant vegetation along the river’s edge to stop erosion. He pushed boaters to reduce their speed on the water so that the wake wouldn’t undercut the banks and disturb the microbes that ­inhabit the shallow areas. People close to him estimate that he saved the lives of hundreds of fruit bats that got stuck in the barbed-wire fences used by farmers. How he could spot them with one eye while driving on curvy country roads no one could understand. “Everybody here hates fruit bats, because they eat crops and spread disease,” said Lydia Archer, a longtime family friend. “He’d say they’re the most essential part of the ecosystem, because they spread native seeds throughout the forest.”

Even Norman Duke, one of the world’s foremost authorities on mangrove forests, was impressed. He first met Lee in 2002, when Lee was hosting a research expedition. “He really knew his stuff, and that shined in a place where there are a lot of people who don’t know what they’re talking about and claim they do,” Duke told me. “He easily fit into the tradition of the classic outdoor woodsman, the guy who can make a fire out of nothing in a rainstorm.” How do you know when you’ve got a great quote like that? You hear it, and it’s almost like it jumps out at you in flashing lights. When I walk away from the interview, that’s what’s still echoing in my head. It’s rare that I’ll be going through my notes or going through a recording and I find something that’s a real gem that I hadn’t already recognized. It’s more that somebody says it and right away, I know I’m going to use that. In this story, that happened quite a bit. Having said that, there were quotes that were so good that had to get cut. But in my experience, it’s like an alarm goes off. There are quotes that I’ve gotten that are 10 years old but I still remember so clearly. That’s the fun of the job, engaging people and hearing them say things that are so remarkable and hearing them say things that are put in a way that you were never put them.

For more than 35 years, Lee and Janet lived peacefully on the river. Then, in June 2011, news broke in Far North Queensland that a fugitive American drug trafficker was living an hour from Daintree. Michael McGoldrick, real name Peyton Eidson, was the leader of a California smuggling ring and went on the run in the mid-1980s. Eidson and his wife and daughter had fled to Australia, where they operated a luxury mountain retreat. They were captured by Aussie police after American authorities discovered that the real McGoldricks were dead.

For weeks the story was the talk of the Cruise Centre. The workers would sit around after-hours talking about the latest developments. It seemed everyone had something to say—except Lee.

Privately, Lee and Janet were both rattled by Eidson’s unmasking. “It did cause some concern, and it did worry Dad,” his daughter Jessie told me. “He certainly did not want to be exposed.”

Lee and Janet had ferociously guarded his secret since arriving in Australia. They had few close friends; he rarely left town and never returned to the U.S. Even after the two separated, in 2011, Janet never said a word to anyone. As careful as they were, the secret still found its way outside the family. When Kianna and Jessie were teens, they took equestrian lessons from a future Olympian named Christine Doan. Years later, Jessie married Doan’s brother and told him about her father’s past. The relationship soured, and so did the Doan family’s feelings about the Laffertys. “It’s a psychological crime scene,” Christine told me.

Lee may have succeeded in hiding his worries about Eidson’s arrest from his employees. But the noose was beginning to tighten.

Three years after Eidson’s capture, in late 2014, a tipster contacted a semi­retired Florida newspaper reporter named Lucy Morgan and alleged that Ray Stansel had been living a second life as an environmentalist in Australia. Morgan was used to getting tips about Stansel; she was a 74-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner who had written numerous stories about him and other smugglers. The tip didn’t seem especially promising at first, but she wasn’t the type to let something go without a little investigation. Following the call, Morgan pulled out a set of dusty cardboard boxes that contained every available record on Raymond Grady Stansel Jr.

Lee Lafferty was by then a shell of his former self. Parkinson’s disease had sapped his strength and stiffened his body. His hands shook, making it difficult for him to hold a coffee cup. Walking became a chore.

Every so often he’d say something about his past that raised eyebrows—that he once slept with $2 million under his pillow, for instance—but his employees shrugged the comments off as the medication-induced musings of a sick man.

In early May 2015, a friend took him out in a wooden dory. For weeks, Lee had been begging his buddy to do so. Since he was a boy, there was nowhere Lee felt more capable, more alive, than on the water. But on the river that day, Lee could hardly move on his own; the friend had to lift him into the boat. After less than an hour, Lee said he’d had enough. A couple of weeks later, Lee Lafferty got into his pickup truck for the last time.

Back in Florida, the news of Ray Stansel’s death—and life—in Australia stunned the investigators and prosecutors who had spent years trying to bring him to justice. “He turned out to be a hell of a Houdini,” Salcines, the prosecutor, told me.

His family in Florida had more complicated feelings. “It really just broke my heart when he disappeared,” said his sister, Elaine Schweinsberg. “He never tried to contact us again. I felt so bad that his children had to grow up without him.”

In the years after Stansel vanished, two of his sons, Raymond and Ronald, became drug smugglers and then fugitives after they were indicted for trying to haul half a ton of cocaine into Florida in 1991. Both were eventually arrested—Ronald in Costa Rica in 1992, Raymond in Alaska in 2010—and handed long prison sentences.

Despite being abandoned by their father, both believe he made the right choice. “I think my father picked a good place to have a life and am glad that he won and got out of here when he did,” Raymond Stansel III wrote from the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex near Orlando. “I missed him but used what he taught me and lived without regrets for my life.”

“I don’t blame Dad for not showing up,” Ronald Stansel wrote from the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola. “I’m sure that he missed certain aspects of what was left behind. It’s like you cut a chunk of your heart out leaving. But things seldom end the way you visualize in life. You can only take your best shot and roll with the punches.” These seem like incredibly magnanimous responses from his two sons. How did you react to them? I wish I had been able to include more from the two of them. When you spend this amount of time reporting, you want to fill the story with as many good details as you can, but in every magazine (or newspaper, for that matter) piece I’ve done, I’ve made agonizing decisions over what to cut. You end up having to kill your kittens. And there was certainly that feeling here, with some of these details. That said, it’s nice when after you publish a story like this, you get people writing you saying they wanted more. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, especially if you’re considering the other ways this could be told. And, yes, to your other question, I agree with you 100%. That was one of the things I was most interested in when I started the story — what would be the reaction of his sons. I was in touch with them mainly through email — the federal prison system actually has an excellent email system. But that was one of the main surprises, how magnanimous they were, and how supportive they were of the decision their father had made, and the fact that they both told they would have done the same thing and that it was the right decision.  The things that got cut were some of the recollections of their experience on Roatan, the week they spent with their father before he disappeared. They told me they had no idea what he was planning to do. But their observations from that trip were pretty interesting.

In fact, it was hard to find a single friend or family member who was troubled by Lee Lafferty’s previous life as a pot smuggler; it even seemed to have made him a legend. “Some people were asking does it change my opinion of him,” Mick Casey, a river guide who worked for him, told me. “It makes me admire the bastard even more.”

People in Far North Queensland often talk about Lee as someone who found redemption: a man running away from a troubled past who transformed himself into a protector of one of the world’s most pristine natural habitats. “Reflecting on it now, it’s just what Australia’s all about,” said Norman Duke. “It’s all about redemption. All about finding a new life.”

Spend long enough in Daintree, and you might also hear another story. Sometime in the early 1980s, Lee and a doctor friend were driving along the road that links Daintree and Mossman. As they neared a small bridge, they spotted a car in the crocodile-infested creek below. A couple of guys were just standing around looking at it. Lee burst from his vehicle and quickly realized that someone was still in the floating car. He dove into the creek, pulled out the unconscious man, and dragged him onto the bank. By the time the police arrived, Lee was long gone. Considering the morally ambiguous nature of his life and times, this seems a perfect place to end, but I’m interested in why you chose this point to wrap up. I usually know exactly how I’m going to start and end a piece when I start writing. That’s usually how I know I’m ready to write. In this case, I thought I had it, and as I started writing I was still reporting, talking to Janet and some other people. This anecdote came out a little bit later, and it took a little while to get it confirmed by a couple people, and then when I had it and was thinking about where to put it, I actually remember the moment where it came to me that this has to be the end. It kind of illuminates both who he was as a person and what he was dealing with while he was living in Australia. Even when he was doing something brave and unquestionably noble, in the back of his mind he was always that close to being caught, to being found out. It just kind of captured that in a really vivid way. And also, that last line is pretty subtle. You can linger on it a little, and it takes a few seconds for it to really sink in, why he would have taken off. I love stories that make you feel like you’re hurtling toward an end that you don’t want to ever arrive, and yet, when it does, it takes your breath away a little. That’s what I was going for here.

Why is it great? This line, from the poet Elizabeth Alexander’s beautiful memoir about the death of her husband, knocked me out on a couple levels. First, I had no idea that Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were best friends, and there’s something wonderful about the mere fact of this. And second, it’s incredibly moving that Ford actually captured his friend’s last breath and put it in a test tube. It’s this beautiful combination of science and love. And finally, I love the rhythm of those last words, “kept it evermore.” Like a fairy tale about enduring friendship.

The first line of Rania Abouzeid’s story “The Jihad Next Door” could be the opener of a literary spy novel.

“The eight men, beards trimmed, explosive belts fastened, pistols and grenades concealed in their clothing, waited until nightfall before stealing across the flat, porous Iraqi border.”

We need to see what they want us to see, and what they don’t want us to see, and that’s why I think it’s imperative that we try to be there, so we can get the 360 view, not the 140-character view.

The opening scene in the 2014 Politico piece describes militants slipping across the border from Iraq to Syria in August 2011, having been dispatched to set up a Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The moment, as told by Abouzeid, marked a turning point in the political uprising in Syria, which morphed from largely peaceful protests into a brutal civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and redrawn the lines of global geopolitics.

In the lengthy and exhaustively reported piece, Abouzeid detailed the rise of the militant groups Jabat al Nusra and the Islamic State and the splits and eventual clashes among the jihadi groups as they jockeyed for position.

Abouzeid, who grew up in Australia and New Zealand as the child of Lebanese immigrants, maintained close ties to her roots in the Middle East. During Lebanon’s civil war, she visited on family vacations, an experience that informed her later reporting on conflicts in the region.

A Beirut-based freelance journalist and New America fellow, she is now working on a book covering five years of the conflict in Syria, told through the lens of a number of disparate characters on the ground.

I spoke with Abouzeid at a café in Beirut about her reporting process for “The Jihad Next Door” and the developments in Syria since. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation is below.

This was a very involved piece. It seemed like it involved quite a lengthy reporting process, and you had a lot of access to the fighters from Al Nusra and so forth. What was your reporting process for the piece, and how did you get to the point with these sources where you could have this kind of access?

The start point for this piece was an interview of an Al Nusra leader. Abu Mohammad al-Golani gave his first televised interview in late December (2013) to Al Jazeera Arabic, and in that interview he mentioned that he had traversed the Iraqi border, that there were about seven or eight men who had crossed the border in Ramadan 2011 to set up Al Nusra, and that was my starting point for this piece. I wanted to know who those men were, how, why and all of the questions that any journalist would ask.

I had been covering Syria since the start of the uprising, and it’s a country that I knew before then, covering it from inside Syria, so I had previously interviewed Jabat al Nusra. I was the first journalist to interview a fighter and then also to get an official, so I had that sort of relationship with certain members of the group. I started with people that I knew and followed the thread, as we do, until I got the people that I wanted, and fleshed it out from there.

This story was reported in three trips into Syria. Golani’s interview was in late December 2013, and I pitched the story in January. February, March and April I was in Syria on three extended trips, so one trip per month. It was a particularly dangerous period. Al Nusra and Islamic State were fighting each other at that point, and that was also the period when Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri disavowed the Islamic State, said that is not part of Al Qaeda, so it was a very, very tense time inside Syria. So, the length of every trip varied.

At the time when you were setting out to do this piece, did you think about trying to get into Islamic State territory, as well, or was that pretty much a no-go?

At the time, in early January (2014), most of the rebels who identified themselves as Free Syrian Army, as well as some non-Free Syrian Army groups, had taken on Islamic State across northern Syria. There were active clashes, and they very quickly sort of pushed the Islamic State group out of several key rebel-held provinces. Islamic State remained in pockets of Latakia, which is an area where I was, at one point in the reporting of this piece. There were Islamic State fighters present, and I sent word to them that I wanted to speak to them inside Syria, and they agreed, but on the condition that I go to their area, because they wouldn’t come to the Nusra area. The Nusra people I was with were like, we can’t guarantee – if they take you, they take you. We can’t get you back. So, the Islamic State guys wouldn’t come to the Nusra area, the Nusra guys were telling me, “If you go over there then you’re on your own,” so I opted not to interview them there. I interviewed Islamic State people in Turkey for this piece.

You wrote about, in the piece, one commander whose house you had stayed at, and then he ended up being killed a month or so later.

Yeah, I went to see him and to explain what I wanted from him, and by the time I had permission the next month, when I went in, he was killed the day I crossed. I happened to go to see another source instead of going straight to his home, and had I gone straight to his home – I mean, you know, who knows?

What was your reaction to that, when you heard about what had happened?

(Pause). You know, I mean, anyone who tells you that luck isn’t a huge part of what we do is kidding themselves.

Obviously, the situation on the ground has changed a lot since you were reporting this piece. How has it changed for you and for other journalists who are covering Syria? When was the last time that you were able to go in?

To the rebel-held areas in May, and the regime-held area was late last year. I went when I needed to go for something, and I haven’t tried since, because I haven’t had to. I went in for book research, primarily, but I haven’t tried to get back in lately, because I have no pressing need.

I use every tool that I can to try to untangle what is a very tangled story. So, if that means I tap into my cultural heritage, my language skills, my ability to physically blend, whatever it might be, then I’m going to do that.

It’s always been hard to cover it from both ends, actually – rebel and regime – for different reasons. The regime, obviously, because access is so restricted via visas, and from the rebel side because it’s simply so dangerous and because you have to illegally cross the Turkish border to get into rebel-held territory, and once in there, we’re walking ATMs for many groups. So, at every stage, it has become harder. Crossing the border has become harder – the Turks have erected a concrete barrier, they’re shooting people dead at the border, they’re restricting entry into and out of the country for Syrians, locking them inside their killing zones, basically, for extended periods. So, it’s just harder to get in, it’s harder to get out, it’s harder to stay safe when you’re inside, safe from the people on the ground, safe from the planes in the air, safe from the artillery. At every level, it has become harder.

Do you see an impact on the stories that are coming out of Syria from the difficulty that journalists have in accessing it?

I think that, for all of its pluses, social media is still not a substitute for journalists being on the ground. It can help us understand snippets of a story, but what we see is just a snippet. Generally, social media is something that somebody has uploaded or information that somebody has disseminated because that person wants us to see it. It only ever captures a moment in time, whether it’s a video or a tweet or something like that. With regard to tweets, we don’t know necessarily who is really behind the accounts. Many people who purport to be Islamic State fighters, for example, have been found out to be frauds. Islamic State generally has a rule that its men on the fronts aren’t even allowed their own personal communication devices, for security reasons. With regard to footage, it’s just a brief moment in time, and we don’t necessarily know what happened before or after that clip was captured, and our job as journalists isn’t to just sort of take something out of context and try to explain it. We need to be there and see everything. We need to see what they want us to see, and what they don’t want us to see, and that’s why I think it’s imperative that we try to be there, so we can get the 360 view, not the 140-character view.

How do you think your own background has influenced your ability to report in the region and in Syria in particular?

Well, I am of Lebanase heritage – proudly of Lebanese heritage – I speak Arabic, I can physically blend in. I use my cultural and linguistic fluency to help me move relatively undetected when I need to. I’m not blonde, blue-eyed and I’m not 6 foot tall. I’m not going to get that second look. If I’m in a car in Syria traveling with a commander, they’ll just assume I’m his wife or his sister or something. That has definitely helped me.

And also viewing something like Syria not just as a story that happened now or that started in 2011, but knowing and understanding the historical and the social and the religious context of what we’re seeing today, has helped me to place events in context and to understand things that I might not otherwise understand, for example, if I just fell into China to cover something about China. It’s an added hurdle that you have to sort of get past.

I use every tool that I can to try to untangle what is a very tangled story. So, if that means I tap into my cultural heritage, my language skills, my ability to physically blend, whatever it might be, then I’m going to do that.

This week I left the snows of New England for a visit to my old stomping grounds in California. It was a bit head-spinning for a couple of reasons: When I left last year, California was in drought. Now it’s lush and green. And that green was a shock after the snow-covered countryside of Maine. But oh, to eat oranges and lemons picked from friends’ backyard trees and to smell the grandmotherly scent of orange blossoms. It sent me running to John McPhee’s “Oranges.” (See below.)

Rich Schapiro and “The True Story of the Fugitive Drug Smuggler Who Became an Environmental Hero.” This is one of those stories that has “cinematic” written all over it, both in how it’s told and the subject matter. In the “Annotation Tuesday!” with contributor Davis Harper, Schapiro has a great tip about how to approach writing: “I think it can be helpful to think about how a filmmaker would tell your story. Movies are driven by scenes, and I tend to be drawn to those stories that present particularly vivid ones.”

The soundtrack: “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” by Merle Haggard. I’ve got a California theme going on: Merle is one of the best songwriters ever from the state. The lonely roaming fugitive in this song is the opposite of the rooted one in the story, but I couldn’t resist hearing that twang.

One Great Sentence

“Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in the last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore.”

— Elizabeth Alexander, “The Light of the World.” Read why we think it’s great.

Rania Abouzeid and “The Jihad Next Door.” Beirut-based freelancer Rania Abouzeid makes a powerful case for the necessity of reporting on the ground, even when it’s extraordinarily difficult and dangerous, as is the case with Syria. She says, “We need to see what they want us to see, and what they don’t want us to see, and that’s why I think it’s imperative that we try to be there, so we can get the 360 view, not the 140-character view.” She also talks about how her background as a woman of Lebanese heritage has influenced her ability to report in the region. Fascinating.

The soundtrack: “Neighborhood Threat,” by Iggy Pop. I love that he’s still going strong. How about this lyric? “Did you see his eyes? Did you see his crazy eyes?”

What I’m reading online: The death of journalism giant Jimmy Breslin sent me hunting for his work. This piece was just one of many stories that won the Daily News the 1997 Pulitzer for spot news reporting for its coverage of a plane crash. The rhythm of this is so, so lovely:

“Barbey Street runs through East New York to its end, where the streets plunge into weeds and marshes that end at Jamaica Bay and across from it, the ocean where off to the left, many miles off but not that many really, the bodies from the TWA plane floated through the night and into the first light of the morning and then the hot day on the calm surface, with shoes and seat cushions around them.

The mother thought that Alberto was in this ocean.

“Crying all night,” a woman on the front steps said.

“Crying all night,” another said.”

And I liked this New Yorker piece by Jonathan Alter about Breslin’s career, and how he would be covering Trump: “Were he writing now, he would be seeking out stories on the personal consequences of Trump’s health-care and budget plans. And he would tell those stories with a little more fun and a lot more rage.”

I’d also like to recommend Amy Wallace’s last story for Los Angeles Magazine, “The Hollywood Exec and the Hand Transplant That Changed His Life.” She’s a longform master, with a particular gift for profiles (an underappreciated art).

What’s on my bedside table: “Oranges,” by John McPhee. This seemed a perfect companion for my trip west. Yes, I know he focused on Florida oranges in his fascinating book on the history of the fruit, but California will always be citrus land in my heart. Speaking of hearts, here’s a lovely bit: “In the fifteenth century, the countess Mathilda of Wurttemberg received from her impassioned admirer, Dr. Heinrich Steinbowel, a declaration of love in the form of a gift of two dozen oranges. Before long, titled German girls were throwing oranges down from their balconies in the way that girls in Italy and Spain were dropping handkerchiefs.”

What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “Let It Be,” by the Replacements. I love how this (outstanding) album is like a musical mood ring. Sometimes I want to blast “We’re Coming Out,” sometimes I want to hear the jangly pop of “I Will Dare,” and sometimes the pain of “Unsatisfied” hits the spot. For those old enough to remember answering machines, three guesses which song snippet I used to have on mine.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

At last year’s Power of Narrative conference at Boston University, the poet Verandah Porche asked Gay Talese which women writers he admired.

“All of us seem to be on the beat of retrieving what’s missing, what’s unheard.”

He couldn’t name one, and proceeded to make it worse by mansplaining about how women just “do not feel comfortable dealing with strangers.”

Cue Twitter firestorm.

At this year’s (Talese-free) gathering, Porche may not have made news, but her session, “Turn Grim News into Daring Poetry: A workshop on the alchemy of transforming fact into imagery,” was one of my favorites.

A little back story: I long dreamed of having a “News Haiku” feature back when I was at the Los Angeles Times. No, it never happened. But I loved the idea of distilling a news event down to 17 syllables. The concept seemed to have both beauty and approachability to it.

So it was exciting to see that Porche, a poet who lives in on a farm in southern Vermont, had the same idea, but better. She told us how the tools of poetry can help journalists.

“Sort what haunts you,” she said.

And isn’t that what the best journalism is all about? Identifying the thing that moves you, that stays with you, and then figuring how best to write about that thing?

“All of us seem to be on the beat of retrieving what’s missing, what’s unheard,” she said in one of her more poetic lines. It’s such a lovely way of describing what we do.

In a power point presentation (during which she urged us not to take notes and stay in the moment – she’d email us the presentation later if we wanted it), she offered a poet’s tips to journalists:

Imagine/invent/address your perfect reader

Make thumbnail portraits of the characters

Distill little soliloquies

Smell the setting

Discover the lead

Sense the ending

Pare down the language

I think they’re all incredibly applicable to journalism, both short- and longform: distilling what we know into something readable and compelling.

Porche liberally cited poets from Walt Whitman, who spent time as a journalist, to Mahmoud Darwish to link the work of poets to that of journalists.

I’d like to list a few that have particular resonance in this time of conflict and “fake” news:

“It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.”

–William Carlos Williams

And this:

“It makes sense, in a time of war or siege, to speak in shards.”

– Mahmoud Darwish.

And finally, this from Maria Margaronis, a journalist and poet: “Poetry is essential to me in my journalism work, as a writing practice. That is, in the passage from observing and listening to making phrases and finding metaphors and rhythms, tones and resonances.”

Porche, who says she dreamed up her non de plume after reading a Doris Lessing work that featured the very evocative verandahs of South Africa, then had us all read a line that resonated with us at the conference. She said she was going to create a poem from them.

Porche may not have caused a Twitter stir at this year’s conference. But a quiet stirring of creativity is good for the soul.

“In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.”

— “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen, 1975.

There’s trouble in the heartland these days over promises broken and hopes betrayed. Somewhere on that lonely stretch of highway between the boardwalk and the interstate, the landscape turned dark, the American dream receded.

More than a few of the characters in Springsteen’s songs probably would have voted for Donald Trump.

That’s something Bruce Springsteen has been singing about for more than four decades. It’s also a message that has been almost willfully misinterpreted for nearly as long, the first stirrings of a now-familiar world in which reality is anything I say it is, and everything to the contrary is fake news.

The collapse of America’s industrial heartland and the human toll it continues to take is a theme that creeps like a ghost through many Springsteen songs. It’s a perspective that cuts across political lines – workers feel like they’re disposable. Millions of Americans have come around to Springsteen’s view of the country’s problems, even if there’s bitter disagreement over who’s to blame and what to do about it. More than a few of the characters in Springsteen’s songs probably would have voted for Donald Trump.

In Springsteen’s 1978 album, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” one Springsteen character finds himself “working all day in my daddy’s garage / Driving all night chasing some mirage” and fighting to maintain a belief in “the Promised Land.” On the album’s title track, the darkness on the edge of town seems to grow ever larger, creeping over more lives. The narrator of “Factory” sees the price his father has had to pay to put food on the family table:

Through the mansions of fear
Through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing
Factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life

On 1982’s “Atlantic City,” Springsteen paints a somber picture of a once great American vacation destination gone to seed. In Atlantic City, there’s trouble busing in from out of state, the D.A. can’t get no relief, and the Gambling Commission is hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Atlantic City is dying an ugly death, and the only question is whether there’s any hope of redemption:

Everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on
Fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

The same year that “Atlantic City” was recorded and released, Donald Trump broke ground on Trump Plaza, a glittering 614-room hotel and casino on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. In the end, not even Trump could turn Atlantic City’s sand into gold. After years of financial difficulties, Trump Plaza closed in September 2014, putting nearly 1,000 employees out of work. Trump would later say in an interview: “Atlantic City fueled a lot of growth for me. The money I took out of there was incredible.”

In 1984, Springsteen released “Born in the U.S.A.,” his most explicit statement about what it means to be an American. The song’s protagonist kicks around in a dead-end town until he gets drafted and shipped off to Vietnam “to go and kill the Yellow man.” After his tour of duty, he returns home to an indifferent America that offers no job, no dignity and no respect for his sacrifice. The song’s superficially patriotic chorus – Born in the U.S.A.! / I was born in the U.S.A.! – is a bitter comment on how the privileges of American citizenry are distributed unequally.

“Born in the U.S.A.” was widely misinterpreted as an irony-free celebration of all things America, mostly by those who wanted that to be Springsteen’s message. Conservative columnist George Will famously misread the song’s meaning in an embarrassing syndicated column in 1984, “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen.”

In Will’s column, the intrepid bow-tied commentator recounted his experiences at a recent Springsteen concert, revealing that he was at first unfamiliar with the odor of marijuana at the concert venue and that three beats into Springsteen’s first song, he stuffed cotton into his ears to protect his hearing.

Having firmly established his rock n’ roll credentials, Will pronounced Springsteen as a shining exemplar of American values. “He is no whiner,” Will wrote. “And the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’”

It was an epic misreading, but a harbinger of things to come. “Born in the U.S.A.” came to mean whatever the listener wanted it to mean, never mind the actual lyrics or the intent of the author.

Will’s misappropriation of Springsteen was soon taken up by others. At a September 1984 campaign stop in Hammonton, New Jersey, President Ronald Reagan declared: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

When Springsteen was asked what he thought of Reagan’s invocation, he said, “I think people have a need to feel good about the country they live in. But what’s happening, I think, is that that need — which is a good thing — is getting manipulated and exploited. You see it in the Reagan election ads on TV, you know, ‘It’s morning in America,’ and you say, ‘Well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh.’”

But why get hung up on things like “meaning” and “truth” when there’s that killer chorus to sing along with – Born in the U.S.A.! Born in the U.S.A.! In 1996, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole played “Born in the U.S.A.” at campaign rallies until Springsteen told him to knock it off. That didn’t stop from Pat Buchanan from expropriating the song four years later during his presidential campaign.

By the 2016 presidential campaign, all shame had been removed from celebrating Springsteen’s music while simultaneously holding views fundamentally opposed to the values championed by his songs.

New Jersey governor (and brief presidential candidate) Chris Christie made much of being Springsteen’s #1 fan, having attended, to his count, more than 140 Springsteen concerts. If nothing else, the fact that Christie can be an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump and still go to a Springsteen concert and pump his fist along to lines such as “Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / And a king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything” is proof that in the post-factual world, you get to write your own lyrics.

No wonder politicians these days love to quote Springsteen. His uncanny ability to give voice to working Americans is more resonant than ever.

In one of his best songs, “Youngstown,” Springsteen recounts the rise and fall of Youngstown, Ohio, over the course of multiple generations. In 1803, James and Danny Heaton built the Hopewell blast furnace near Youngstown, giving rise to a booming iron and steel industry that would make the cannonballs that helped the Union win the Civil War, and the tanks and bombs that drove the Allies to victory in World War II.

Springsteen’s protagonist in “Youngstown” works in the local steel mills just like his father did, until the invisible hand of global capitalism does “what Hitler couldn’t do” – shuts down the mills. Smokestacks that once reached into the sky “like the arms of God” are torn down. Lives that once depended on the mills become rusted scrap. The narrator of “Youngstown” speaks for millions of casually discarded American workers:

From the Monongahela Valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same

Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir, you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

Today, the runaway American dream seems further away than ever. Still, we press on in our tightly sealed cars, with the windows rolled up and the radio cranked to a station that espouses views completely in alignment with our own, headed straight for that darkness on the edge of town.

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 of his assassinated president. But it is this line, about the patrician first lady, that stays with me. Maybe it’s because Breslin, with his working-man’s soul, was feeling the same thing as everyone lining the cortege route: that their sad, lonely queen would show them the way out of the darkness.

Journalism, poetry, fiction and music all came together on Storyboard this week, so yes, call it a dream week for me. I love seeing how the same skills apply whether you’re a poet like Verandah Porche, a fiction writer like James M. Cain,  a songwriter like Bruce Springsteen or a journalist trying to make deadline. We are all trying to distill the story — and what moves us — to its essence. As Porche says, “Sort what haunts you.”

“The Power of Narrative conference: how the tools of poetry can help journalists.” Perhaps unsurprisingly for the editor of a literary journalism site, I’m a bit obsessed with the rhythm of language. So it’s no surprise that a session at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference last weekend called “Turn Grim News into Daring Poetry: A workshop on the alchemy of transforming fact into imagery” was one of my favorites. She offered a poet’s tips to journalists: Imagine/invent/address your perfect reader; Make thumbnail portraits of the characters; Distill little soliloquies; Smell the setting; Discover the lead; Sense the ending; Pare down the language.

The soundtrack: “Poet,” by Sly and the Family Stone. A great groove accompanies these lyrics: “I’m a songwriter/A poet/And the things I flash on everyday/They all reflect in what I say.” Such a wonderful band.

“In a divided land, Bruce Springsteen and the runaway American dream.” I think journalists love Bruce Springsteen in part because he’s their musical equivalent: He’s a storyteller, and he gives voice to the powerless. We just wish we could do it so beautifully, and in the bounds of a three-minute song, no less. That’s why I think he deserved a spotlight on Storyboard, and Tom McNichol did a wonderful job capturing the four-decade arc of his giving witness the faltering American dream in the heartland. It seemed particularly relevant today in a divided country where, he writes, “millions of Americans have come around to Springsteen’s view of the country’s problems, even if there’s bitter disagreement over who’s to blame and what to do about it. More than a few of the characters in Springsteen’s songs probably would have voted for Donald Trump.”

The soundtrack: “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” by Bruce Springsteen. The title track to my favorite Springsteen album is bleak. (The line about everyone having a secret that they  have to cut loose or let it drag them down gives me shivers.) If they ever give the Nobel Prize for literature to another singer, they could cite this line: “I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost/for wanting things that can only be found/ in the darkness on the edge of town.”

One Great Sentence

“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.”

Jimmy Breslin, “Digging JFK Grave Was His Honor,” the New York Herald Tribune, November 1963. Read why we think it’s great.

What I’m reading online: I’m impressed with The Big Roundtable project The Promise  (very Springsteen-sounding), what it calls “Letters From Flyover Country: Three Towns in the Age of Trump.” And this week’s installment is really up my alley: Michael Shapiro spends some time with the digital version of microfiche, looking up old editions of the newspapers of each of the small towns. He writes: “They are as much a part of the town as city hall, the library, the high school, and the access roads to the business loop. Much more, really, because without them there is no record of the past — and by record I refer not to stenography but to narrative.” It’s a fascinating read.

This obituary of “rock star” ornithologist Chandler S. Robbins by Darryl Fears in The Washington Post reminds me how the best obits are posthumous profiles. Robbins really comes alive here, if that isn’t too Lazarus of me to say. In the birding world, he was so revered, one birder says “she was surprised she didn’t faint when a kind stranger who complimented the way she led a field trip turned out to be her hero, Robbins.”

What’s on my bedside table: A recent Storyboard interview with the writer of a blog called Small Town Noir sent me to the bookshelves for an old favorite by the great noir writer James M. Cain: “Mildred Pierce.” I hadn’t realized that Cain was a journalist and didn’t publish his first novel until he was 42. The first page of the book gives his background, and makes this astute observation: “Of all that hard-boiled school, he is the toughest and most laconic: his novels are stripped of everything extraneous to plot and action; it is the flayed nerve-ends of sensation that he lays bare. Characteristically, his economy applies to his own background: the years he spent as a reporter tightened his prose and gave him an eye for the highlights of a story.”

What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen. Yes, it’s Springsteen-o-rama this week. I hadn’t listened to this album in years, probably because it’s far from my favorite Springsteen album. Why? The music is the E Street Band at its E Streetiest, compounded by the overproduction of ’80s pop. That may have abetted the willful misinterpretation of the lyrics, which are much darker than the relentless cheeriness of the music. Perhaps more than any of his other albums, I’d love Springsteen to do a slowed-down, unplugged version of this one. (Yes, I spend time thinking of such things.) I think the fineness of the words would shine through.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

When Colin McNulty was developing a podcast about Oprah Winfrey, the producer for WBEZ Chicago found inspiration in an unlikely place: “House of Cards,” the Netflix series about a scheming Washington politician who eventually becomes president of the United States.

It’s not that Winfrey, the billionaire high priestess of “living your best life,” reminded him of the fictional Frank Underwood, the Netflix series’ villainous main character. But the structure of the series’ first three seasons, replete with cliffhangers and plot twists as Underwood rises from congressman to vice president to president, seemed a good template for a three-episode podcast chronicling Winfrey’s journey to the pinnacle of success.

“Making Oprah” begins with a dramatic moment as prologue: the demolition of her Chicago Harpo Studios in July 2016, five years after her show ended, to make way for a new McDonald’s corporate headquarters. The first episode, “No Strategy, No Plan, No Formula,” then circles back to tell the story of her beginnings as an African-American woman in television news and how she managed to wrangle her way into her first talk show. The episode ends on a dubious 1988 turning point: Winfrey drags on stage a wagon filled with 67 pounds of animal fat, which represents the weight she has lost. She shows off a svelte new body that didn’t last—a move that ended up haunting her.

The second episode, “Skinheads and Scented Candles,” chronicles her soul-searching after she realizes that a show featuring white supremacists gave a powerful platform to people whose ideas she abhorred.  She decides she must take responsibility for the influence her show exerts and  determines to find a new, more inspirational identity.

America’s love of television binge-watching has reinvigorated a literary form, the serial narrative

The final episode, “YOU GET A CAR!”, explores the consequences of unbridled success as the whole enterprise becomes more outrageous—with stunts like giving out free cars to everyone in the audience. Finally, Winfrey and her staff decide they risk becoming a parody of themselves, so they make the difficult decision to  end the program.

Joel Meyer, WBEZ executive producer for talk programming, says “Making Oprah” has been the station’s most successful podcast launch. “The story of how she kept evolving her show and how she tried to turn it into more than a talk show was really appealing to a lot of people,” Meyer says.

The surprising success of “Making Oprah,” on the heels of “Serial,” the 2014 “This American Life” podcast phenomenon, shows how America’s love of television binge-watching has reinvigorated a literary form, the serial narrative, with a history that dates to Dickens and Homer. Nonfiction serials have animated screens, radios, and even daily newspapers.

Long-form serials run counter to the super-short tweeting and microblogging trend. But it’s not the length that makes a serial enticing, it’s what Indiana University journalism professor Thomas French calls “the enforced waiting.” This “to be continued” approach draws in readers using the classic tools of storytelling craft that focus more on creating narrative tension than on conveying information.

Episodes of the first two seasons of “Serial” have been downloaded more than 250 million times, and it became the first podcast to win a Peabody Award. The “Serial” team’s newest podcast debuted to generally glowing reviews on March 28. “S-Town” is a seven-episode series about a possible murder in rural Alabama hosted by “This American Life” producer Brian Reed. Unlike the original two seasons of “Serial,” which were released weekly, “S-Town” listeners could download all seven episodes at once. Although “S-Town” is not a straightforward “true crime” story like the original “Serial,” its psychologically complex story struck a chord with listeners. In the first four days of its release, “S-Town” had been downloaded more than 10 million times—a record for a podcast, according to Serial Productions.

Although serial podcasts are popular to produce because they are a relatively inexpensive way to attract advertising dollars, the timeless draw of serial narrative permeates print and film as well. The documentary “OJ: Made in America,” created as an approximately 7½-hour movie for theaters but presented on ESPN as a five-part television serial, was rebroadcast on ABC and ESPN2; 41 million viewers tuned in to one of the 40 telecasts of the documentary between the June 11 premiere and July. Viewership grew even higher after it won an Academy Award in February. (Read a Storyboard interview with director Ezra Edelman here.)

Newspapers in search of readers also seem occasionally willing to invest the time needed—often a year or more—to produce deeply reported series that deliver subscriptions and pageviews. The New York Times’ 2013 five-part serial “Invisible Child” took Andrea Elliott more than a year to report and write. The Los Angeles Times’ 2016 “A Mystery in Six Parts,” called “Framed,” attracted 3 million unique pageviews and 50,000 subscribers to its newsletter.

Even book publishers, looking to reach a wider audience, have turned historical nonfiction into unconventional serial narratives: “March,” Georgia Congressman John Lewis’ story of his journey through the civil rights movement, is a New York Times bestselling three-volume graphic novel that is now being read in schools.

“A serial is not a form of information delivery,” says Roy Peter Clark, the Poynter Institute’s senior scholar and one of the nation’s most ardent nurturers of narrative journalism. “It’s a form of experience delivery. Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, it’s the creation of a world.”

From Dickens to Netflix, a primary question drives good storytelling: What happens next? New York Times television critic James Poniewozik calls it “the suck, where you’re sucked into it, and you just want one more bite.” “Serial” captured this feeling in its first season when it sowed doubt about convicted murderer Adnan Syed with this question: Is he really guilty? The search for an answer, with reporter Sarah Koenig as a truth-seeking character in the narrative, unspooled over the course of 12 episodes and resulted in a new trial for Syed.

How does a journalist create a compelling world, and keep the reader asking for more? The tools are no different from nonfiction’s and fiction’s basics: inciting incident, narrative arc and scenes including dialogue that move the narrative forward. When translating journalism into serials, some subject matters seem a natural: true crime, life-and-death struggle, a compelling character triumphing over obstacles.

French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning practitioner of narrative storytelling, advocates finding an “engine” for a nonfiction narrative, “a question that drives the story that cannot be resolved in the cycle of one day and one night.” This question forms the story’s arc and can only be answered by continuing to read.

Of course, adding the constraints of journalism into the mix of creating a compelling story arc complicates the matter. For example, “Serial” may have been great storytelling, but it has been criticized for lax reporting and a tendency to sensationalize in service of the mystery narrative. Koenig fails to interview key players and inserts herself into scenes that seem to revolve around her own feelings and not reported facts.

“To do a serial well requires a tremendous amount of reporting,” says French, who is best known for the serial narratives he wrote for The St. Petersburg Times. “In a lot of journalism we are content to say, ‘Such and such happened, police said.’ When you do a serialized narrative, you have to actually find out what really happened.”

Both reported reconstruction—using documents, videos and other artifacts—and eyewitness observation can form the details of a narrative. But unlike fiction, where the writer is in complete control of the story, a journalist must come to terms with a story that may not be perfect. “Real life doesn’t unfold as seamlessly as fiction,” French says. “It’s a lot more complicated, and very often has no real ending. You have to make your peace with the unruliness of real life.”

“A serial is not a form of information delivery. It’s a form of experience delivery. Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, it’s the creation of a world.” —Roy Peter Clark

The story behind a serial narrative doesn’t have to be new, but it does need to be told in a fresh way. When Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard decided to follow the bizarre story of a Southern California PTA mom’s harrowing experience with a false accusation, he knew he was taking on a sensational case that had already had its share of media attention. Still, “Framed,” published in September 2016, managed to keep readers on edge. The subhead teased at what was to come: “She was the PTA Mom Everyone Knew. Who Would Want to Harm Her?” An astute use of online tools also added freshness and transparency. Web designer Lily Mihalik incorporated document excerpts, and short audio and video clips of the main characters.

Clark argues that sometimes hyperlinks and other temptations of online publishing can sabotage a narrative because they take people out of the story. “Digital and multimedia versions of journalism have deemphasized the linear aspect of the reading experience,” he says. “With the hyperlink alone, you’re inviting people to stop moving forward and asking them to start moving sideways.” But in “Framed” the immediacy of being able hear the main characters’ voices and see the court documents seemed to add excitement and keep readers engaged. In a description of the series in a Facebook event with Goffard, readers called the serial “bonkers,” “highly addictive” and “juicier than a Mexican novella.”

Goffard first covered the story when it broke years earlier: A power couple, both attorneys, was charged with an unlikely revenge crime that sounded like tabloid fare. They were accused of planting 17 grams of marijuana, 11 Percocet and 29 Vicodin pills in the car of a volunteer director of an after-school program in Irvine, California. The wife pleaded guilty to a felony count of false imprisonment by fraud or deceit. A jury found the husband guilty of one count of false imprisonment by fraud or deceit. Goffard dug back into the story in early 2016 when he encountered the husband, sitting alone and looking defeated, at a courthouse where he was defending himself against the civil lawsuit the PTA mom had filed.

From Dickens to Netflix, a primary question drives good storytelling: What happens next?

After discussing the encounter with his editors, Goffard decided it was a story worth telling again, this time in more depth: “Some people said, ‘That’s an old story. Hasn’t it been told?’ But it raised all kinds of interesting themes about the power dynamics of Southern California suburbia and the mysteries of self-destructive behavior and the nightmare of false accusation, and it really hadn’t been told.”

The story, 15,000 words long, was originally going to run into two parts, but Times editor-in-chief Davan Maharaj suggested breaking it up into smaller segments. Goffard found that it divided naturally into six chapters, with each one running from about 1,800 to 3,100 words. “What’s fun about six parts is the series builds momentum and word of mouth, especially on social media,” Goffard says.

He tried to end on cliffhangers, and the end of the first installment was a classic, a recreated conversation between the investigating police officer and the PTA Mom:

He had asked Kelli Peters:

If the drugs aren’t yours, how did they get in your car?

“I have an enemy,” she said.

Although it seems at first that the narrative tension will revolve around whether the PTA mom is guilty, it becomes clear very quickly that she’s not. “The question of whether she’s innocent is not the basis of the suspense here,” Goffard explains. “She’s obviously innocent. The question is, ‘Who set her up?’ When that gets answered, the question is, ‘Why?’ And then, ‘Will the law be able to do anything about it?’ And then, ‘Will the full truth ever come out?’”

Because this is real life and not fiction, the biggest questions of the series never really get answered: Why did a seemingly happy and well-to-do couple of lawyers target a do-gooder PTA mom in such a vicious way? Goffard admits he’s still baffled: “I don’t have any real answers to that one beyond what’s in the story.”

Serial narratives blossomed with the New Journalism of the 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese used literary techniques to tell nonfiction stories. In the 1990s, profitable newsrooms devoted money and time to reporters who produced what would come to be considered masterworks of the newspaper serial form. In 1991 at The St. Petersburg Times, French wrote a Livingston Award-winning serial,“South of Heaven,” using the chronological frame of one year in a south Florida high school to create narrative tension with this question: Who will drop out and who will graduate? He later was awarded the 1998 feature writing Pulitzer Prize for “Angels and Demons,” a St. Petersburg Times serial that chronicled the murder of an Ohio woman and her two teenage daughters as they vacationed in Tampa.

Mark Bowden also found inspiration in the New Journalism techniques, even though his editors were pleading with him to write so short that his stories wouldn’t jump to an inside page. Bowden, who began working at The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1979, discovered the power of “long” in the 1990s when he deconstructed a book he was working on and turned it into a 26-day newspaper serial about how a U.S. relief mission in Somalia ended in a firefight with high-tech helicopters.

Bowden had been working on the book on his own but couldn’t find a publisher. He negotiated a deal with his editors that he would chop it up into a newspaper serial. It took him about a year to get it into shape. He focused on the dramatic action of the events, and cut out most of the analysis, until it was about a third of the size of the original manuscript. Each day’s installment was about 25 newspaper inches, and he tried to write scenes because he knew scenes move a story forward. “If you can write a scene with character, that is the most fun to read,” says Bowden, who is now an author and a writer in residence at the University of Delaware.

This was the early days of newspaper’s online presence, and a visionary online editor, Jennifer Musser Metz, decided to present all of Bowden’s source material. He remembers bringing in shopping bags full of documents that were then posted online in a multimedia presentation. In an exhibit at the Newseum in Washington D.C., the online display is credited with being one of the earliest examples of its kind. 

It was a hit both in the paper and online. The series, called “Black Hawk Down,” became an Internet phenomenon. Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer turned it into a blockbuster film directed by Ridley Scott.

But most surprising, Bowden, recalls, the head of circulation ventured into the foreign territory of the newsroom to shake his hand. “Do another one like this,” he said.

A serial doesn’t only answer the question: What happened next? Sometimes, it also explores a second, deeper question : How did it happen?

When producer Caroline Waterlow got a call from director Ezra Edelman asking if she wanted to work on a documentary about O.J. Simpson, she recalls saying, “Really? Do we need more about O.J.?” And she remembers his response: “It’s not just about O.J. — it’s about everything!”

Waterlow says she was convinced to sign on when Edelman described his vision for a documentary that used the prism of race to intertwine O.J.’s history and the city of Los Angeles’ history and explore how they culminated in that moment when O.J. was acquitted. The finished product was what French would call a “multi-thread” narrative, with O.J. and L.A. as the two main characters. It spans half a century and is told mostly in straight chronological order that braids together O.J.’s rise from a San Francisco housing project to star athlete, pitchman, and actor with the history of the L.A. Police Department’s fraught relationship with the city’s African-American citizens.

Serials offer a break from 24/7 information overload by inviting an audience to slow down and savor a story

The team worked on the film for two years, conducted 72 interviews, shot 300 hours of original material and sifted through 500 hours of archival footage. The New York Times’ Poniewozik says one of the most memorable scenes is 1970s footage of a Hertz commercial in which O.J., the Heisman Trophy winner, is sprinting through an airport to get his rental car. In the background, “white validators” in the form of an elderly white woman and a group of young white Girls Scouts cheer him on. Poniewozik calls the film a “documentary essay” more than a classic “true crime” narrative.

“It’s telling this very familiar story and telling you, ‘This is why it mattered,’” he says. “Why did it matter that O.J. was a black celebrity, and why in the context of civil rights in America and popular culture?”

Waterlow says the film was not conceived as a serial and Edelman would have preferred that viewers only watch in a theater with an intermission or two. Its serialization resulted from the realities of television, but the chronological structure lent itself to natural chapter breaks, and producers didn’t have much trouble dividing it into five parts. Although each part didn’t end on a traditional cliffhanger, the questions asked were interesting enough to hook the audience. “The length was the whole point,” says Waterlow. “Ezra’s interest was in a large canvas. There was no point of doing another two-hour film because that had been done. We were told no one’s got time, but the reaction was really strong. People were hungry for this.”

The “Making Oprah” podcast capitalizes on Oprah’s fame and the genuine excitement of its host, WBEZ anchor Jenn White, an African-American woman who at one point in the podcast calls her mother just to tell her she is going to speak to Winfrey. Making the reporter part of the story works, McNulty says, because “it breaks up the authority, makes it a little more approachable, and makes the audience feel like they’re being let in on stuff.”

Roy Peter Clark calls this technique “broken narrative.” He likens it to one used by John McPhee’s classic “Coming Into the Country,” a nonfiction account of traveling through Alaska. In the book, the reader follows McPhee as he journeys down a river, until McPhee steps out of the flow to tell the reader how he got there. Podcasts like “Making Oprah” and “Serial” work despite the broken narrative, Clark says, because “the story is compelling enough that the audience wants to stick with it.”

In the current media environment, serials offer a break from 24/7 information overload by inviting an audience to slow down and savor a story. “That’s one thing that Netflix and podcasts have shown us,” says Poniewozik. “If people are enthusiastic about something, they will spend a lot of time with it.”

Why is it great? For the second week in a row, our One Great Sentence comes from a gifted journalist who has just left us. Last week, the writer was Jimmy Breslin, who died after a long and brilliant career; this week, it is Alex Tizon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning longform writer who died at 57, ending a standout career too soon. The sentence comes from this piece for The Atlantic last year about a terrible mix-up in the cases of two missing men in Alaska that left their parents in torment. (Read the Storyboard interview with Tizon about the article here.) In just 12 words, Tizon captures the agony of a father who can never be sure if his son is alive or dead. It is the created word “not-knowing” that haunts.

Six years is a long time to be away from cyberspace—especially when you’re known as the Blogfather.

At one point, 20,000 visitors came to Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan’s site every day. Words, it turns out, mattered – too much, perhaps, for Iran’s repressive government.

The rise of identity politics and intolerance for diversity is directly linked to the current form of the internet. This is the deepest shock of this transition to me since my release.

In 2008, after returning to Tehran after nearly a decade of living and studying abroad, Derakhshan was jailed for his blogging activities. He was initially sentenced to nearly 20 years in Evin Prison, and spent much of his first years in prison without charges. After being locked up for six years, he was pardoned by Iran’s supreme leader and released in 2014.

In the years after he lost his freedom, the Internet shifted priorities and platforms. Blogging was no longer king; social media was queen. Because of the brevity and speed of social media, he had to adjust his writing style to package truthful stories in an interesting way.

For the last few years, he has been advocating for telling accurate stories on the web without getting caught in, well, a web.

I discussed these online changes with Derakhshan, who is living in Tehran. Some of the answers have been slightly edited for length and flow.

You had to trade the web for a jail cell for six years—an eternity in internet speak. Given your experience, how can one balance freedom of speech while protecting privacy amid these challenges? How has your time away from the internet taught you about not getting tangled within the worldwide web?

The decline of the web in favor of social media entails grim consequences. Hyperlinks were the founding principle of the web; it secured a diversity, nonlinearity, decentralization and interactivity, which made the web so powerful. But social media’s very philosophy and monetization strategy, or the stream, cannot be friendly to hyperlinks, since they do not want their users to leave their space. This new environment, in addition to the currently dominant algorithms, which favors popularity and now-ness rather than diversity and quality, is worse than television in its potential damage to representative democratic societies, where majority is supposed to take informed decisions without jeopardizing minorities. The rise of identity politics and intolerance for diversity is directly linked to the current form of the internet. This is the deepest shock of this transition to me since my release. This shift from what I call books-internet to TV-internet.

You started a petition to request that places like Medium, which serve as today’s form of blogging, adopt right-to-left languages, such as Farsi and Arabic. Do you suppose that adding new languages into the web will enrich our experiences?

Definitely. Most of the current social media platforms are obsessed with videos and photography and therefore encourage and favor emotionally provocative content. Any typography-dominated platform which respects text is of great value these days, for it re-enables reason and thinking. Our world is in visible danger over this curious decline, or even undoing, of the ideals of the enlightenment at the center of which rationality sits.

I always find it funny when Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” They are being too modest, since with an analysis of your behavior, they pretty much know what is on your mind—and even what you might be thinking about next. This is Huxley’s “Brave New World,” because we give them all this willingly and happily.

All current social media platforms favor the flashy and viral (most frequently posted by celebs). Our feeds tend to look like a never-ending stream of carefully curated reality TV shows, happening simultaneously, broadcasting live, in many cases. How can one mindfully navigate this?

Thanks for bringing this up. I’ve been saying this for over two years that television has captured the Internet and all the dark features of television are now reincarnated in social platforms. Plus, some new negative ones. However, I cannot find an immediate solution. This shift is caused by larger sociopolitical structures. Welfare states are collapsing, and therefore people are growingly overworked. Manual jobs are disappearing and people’s brains are consumed at work. So during free time, people would obviously prefer to be entertained than to be intellectually provoked. On the other hand, neoliberal systems are increasingly dispensing public education and, as a result, they fail to equip children with critical thinking skills, which is the basis for a healthy democratic society. Sad thing is the re-emergence of pre-Enlightenment social formations, where a small elite had access to text and intellect. A huge majority were basically illiterate. Most people around the world are dangerously becoming incapable of accessing complex typographic content. They can still read, but when you can watch, why read?

It seems that the hyperlink was democracy to you. Has the hashtag sort of taken over? 

Hashtag is a curious concept. It does come across like a hyperlink, but it is not. Links usually establish a relation between two known objects. From A to B. They’re outward-looking and this is usually done by a human being, who consciously picks a specific target web page to be linked to. Hashtags are self-referential and their target is unspecified. They classify, rather than connect. They comfort rather than challenge or surprise. We have enough categories I think in this new world of identity politics. What we need is connection and challenge.

You wrote in your Guardian piece that when you were freed from prison in Tehran, an inmate said to you that the “bird of luck” had sat on your shoulder. Do you think that in some ways, that metaphor morphed into Twitter?

Ha-ha. That’s a humorous reading of this Persian allegory where luck is seen as a bird that sits on one’s shoulders. But yes, I guess apart from Medium, which is struggling as a widely popular platform, Twitter is the most typographic and hyperlink-friendly platform out there. Ironically, this explains why it is doing not so well as a public company.

For those of us who grew up in places where the freedom of movement may not be as prevalent (I’m Saudi), how did social media influence your recent interactions? Do you ever miss the days in which this did not exist?

No, it is fun. I’m not against social networks per se; I use many of them, especially those where you can communicate through text, like Twitter. What makes me worried is, first, their current type of algorithms, which only encourage “likes” rather than “agree/trust” or emotions vs. reason. And their growing monopoly in distribution and, gradually, publication and production of news and opinion. As a blogger, I never knew my readers. This is fantastic when I’m able to get to know who reads my stuff now. It is immediate gratification and it is addictive. But it also can make us like clowns. Our purpose is quickly becoming to please than to challenge. This is inevitably affecting public intellectuals and political leaders as well as ordinary people. Demagogy is when audience precedes thinking, and social media is turning us all into little and big demagogues around the world.

You were jailed just days after your first tweet in October 2008. It read: “I’m going to move back to Tehran after 8 years in the next few weeks.” Did you think that you’d be using the same platform all these years later under such different circumstances? 

Yes, but what surprised me was how a personal microblogging platform had grown to have such political impact, with so many journalists and politicians using it to bypass intermediaries. In fact, this was what I expected from blogs, and, ultimately, Twitter is still a blogging platform.

Do you suppose that the innocuous-sounding first tweet played a part in getting you arrested? Do you worry now that travelers from certain countries are required to sometimes disclose their social media accounts?

No, my charges were mostly related to my blog posts from 2001 to 2008. Twitter has so far never been a source of trouble for anyone in Iran, as far as I know. I don’t think checking people’s social media accounts by border officers in North America and Europe is limited to people from certain countries. Many rights activists and groups in the West are now advising people to deactivate their social media accounts when they travel. Sadly, I think security is becoming more and more an excuse to impose self-censorship on dissidents around the world. But what is worse than what you write is what you do on social media. Western states are pressing many private social media firms to share user data with them, and that is where you are less safe in the West than in countries like Iran. Because the FBI can force Facebook or Google to hand them your behavior (likes and shares) and search histories with them, which enables them to know you so that they can even predict what you’re going to do. But states like Iran, ironically, have no access to these firms. So I always find it funny when Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” They are being too modest, since with an analysis of your behavior, they pretty much know what is on your mind—and even what you might be thinking about next. This is Huxley’s “Brave New World,” because we give them all this willingly and happily.

How has prison changed the way you write?

Prison hasn’t changed me—but aging has. I’m now much more careful to explain myself clearly so as not to create more misunderstanding for anyone. But it has also inspired me to create art. Art is the most durable thing one can leave behind. The problem is if you haven’t been to art school, it is really difficult to get into the art scene. I came out of prison with dozens of ideas for performance, video and installation art projects. But without access to curators, galleries and art spaces, I’ve had a hard time making any of them happen.

You have Canadian citizenship, so what made you decide to stay in Tehran?

Iran is where I was born and where my family still lives. Canada is my other home, and I’m proud of its resistance to the creeping xenophobia and racism which is haunting many countries in the West now. Diversity is in decline, both online and offline. Being a dual citizen is like being bilingual. You can learn a lot and contribute a lot.

The more we tend to immerse ourselves and connect to the world, the more we seem to be trapped within a cycle that feeds into itself. Our images are filtered, our messages are condensed to 140 characters, and our movements within the web are tracked and translated into zeros and ones (binary numbers). Why is social media our new storytelling tool?

I don’t think this over-digitization of life will last. Soon, and it’s already started, boundaries between real and virtual will vanish. We’ll be using analog (or mostly analog-looking digital concepts) much more again. Analog will bring our diminishing senses, such as touch, smell and taste, back. We will also be leaving this over-visualization of our lives soon. Already the rise of podcasts and audiobooks, and developing of voice-recognition technologies such as in [Apple’s] Siri are great signs of a massive backlash to this excessive dependence on vision. Consumerism, demagogy, social inequality, identity politics, and many of our modern society’s ills are enormously driven by the tyranny of eyes, and thereby hearts. As the great Persian mystical poet, Baba Tahir Oryan, once said:

Beneath the tyranny of eyes and heart I cry,

For, all that the eyes see, the heart stores up,

I’ll fashion me a pointed sword of steel,

put out mine eyes, and so set free my heart.

When it comes to news, I think there is much more to imagine and develop. I’m personally working on a type of journalism that I call “performative journalism,” which explores the intersection of performance arts, journalism and technology, and would love to develop it into a feasible project, if I manage to get a research grant or opportunity somewhere.

This week has me thinking of the dynamics of power, racial and sexual, governmental and personal. An Iranian blogger who goes to prison for six years for his words. The wife of a famous (and famously philandering) writer who appears to subsume herself in that marriage while at the same time becoming one of the more powerful women in publishing. A politician who is arguably the most powerful woman in Europe, but still suffers the slight of a man during a visit to the White House. A young reporter who has covered the imbalance of power between African American communities and police. And, finally, a singer who dealt with all of these issues her entire career.

The making of binge-worthy serial narratives, from “S-Town” to “Framed.” Last month, Storyboard did a piece on an epic serial that the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet had done, a nine-part story run over five weeks. Now Nieman Reports contributor Ricki Morell has stepped back to look at the big picture of the rejuvenation of the ancient literary form. Podcasts, fueled by America’s love of binge-watching, have led the way, notably with the blockbuster “Serial” and the new “P-Town.” But print has taken chances and gone long (sometimes very long, as in the 15,000-word serial by the Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Goffard, “Framed”) with the form too. Although the serials use many of the same literary devices as fiction, one person notes: “Real life doesn’t unfold as seamlessly as fiction, It’s a lot more complicated, and very often has no real ending. You have to make your peace with the unruliness of real life.”

The soundtrack: “Don’t Leave Me Hanging,” by Great Lakes Swimmers. Sure, I could have gone with “You Keep Me Hanging On,” by the Supremes. But this song is lovely — lush folk, if that’s not a contradiction in terms.

One Great Sentence

“But then the not-knowing returns, and it keeps him awake at night.”

Alex Tizon, “In the Land of Missing Persons,” The Atlantic, April 2016. Read why we think it’s great.

Iran’s “Blogfather” talks algorithms, hyperlinks and the lost art of communication. This interview with Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger who spent six years in prison for his online efforts, is a cautionary tale. Not only for journalists and other writers who struggle against governments that would limit their free speech, but also for the direction the internet has taken in recent years. He points out that those in the West face at least some greater dangers than people in Iran: “I always find it funny when Facebook asks ‘What’s on your mind?’ They are being too modest, since with an analysis of your behavior, they pretty much know what is on your mind—and even what you might be thinking about next. This is Huxley’s ‘Brave New World,’ because we give them all this willingly and happily.”

The soundtrack: “The Brave New World,” by Richard Ashcroft. This is a solo effort by the frontman of the Verve, a singer with an old-soul voice. This song has the country-blues vibe of The Band. “Into the brave new world/I hope to see you on the other side/Of this changing world.”

What I’m reading online: This week’s reads focus on powerful women. In the first, writer Evgenia Peretz has a fascinating profile for Vanity Fair, “How Nan Talese Blazed Her Pioneering Path Through the Publishing Boys Club.” Talese, is of course, the wife of writer Gay Talese, and this piece is as much about the power dynamic of their marriage as it is about her brilliance as an editor of writers such as Ian McEwan. This anecdote is very telling: Nan has a small correction to make, but when she tries to interject, Gay’s not having it. “Either you’re telling the story or I’m telling the story,” he barks. “But if you keep doing this, I’m going to talk to her alone. You’ve had your chance . . . . You can correct it later. Write a letter of correction.” Nan responds with an eye roll.

And a friend pointed out this Washington Post piece on photographer Herlinde Koelbl, who has done portraits of German leader Angela Merkel through the decades of her rise to power. She looks so … unformed in the first portrait, a woman of ambition who has no idea where it will lead her yet. In the later photos, she looks very polished, and also a bit weary. The only thing doesn’t change is her eyes: knowing, and yet kind. And I think of that look in her eyes when President Trump didn’t respond to her offer to shake his hand.

What’s on my bedside table: One of the coolest things in the swag bag at the recent Power of Narrative conference at Boston University was a copy of speaker Wesley Lowery’s book, “They Can’t Kill Us All.” (Can I be partisan and say the coolest thing was the Storyboard bookmark, shown at the top of this post?) The Washington Post reporter (and Twitter star), who was part of the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer for national reporting for its “Fatal Force” project, uses his extensive reporting to go deep on police shootings of African Americans. As he says in the introduction to the book, “The story of Ferguson is the story of America.” An impressive book for a reporter still in his 20s.

What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “Billie Holiday: The Original Recordings.” This album seemed to pair well with Lowery’s book. The liner notes point out the disparity between these early recordings and those at the end of her career, saying: “It is a wonder that Billie even survived as long as that, and it is even more remarkable that she was able to continue performing after twenty-three years of bitterly disappointing, often brutal love relationships, almost daily confrontations with racial bigotry, nightmarish bouts with drugs, dehumanizing Governmental harassment, exploitation by promoters, and selfish demands of audiences who, in Billie’s own words, often came to her concerts in hopes of seeing her “fall into the damn orchestra pit.”

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

Some people are made for what they do. Steph Curry was made to play basketball. Dave Chappelle to deliver jokes. You get that feeling with Kent Russell and his writing. He makes the difficult appear effortless.  Don’t believe me? Why don’t you try making a 10,000-word story about the ritual burning of witches in Papua New Guinea both wryly funny and utterly gut-wrenching?

Really I was asking: How is this still happening? Why is it happening? Clearly, it wouldn’t be so widespread in this country if there wasn’t some imagined value to it. It didn’t just seem like it was random violence.

That is one of Russell’s many feats in his 2015 story for Huffington Post’s digital magazine, Highline, on the witch hunts — and ritual murders — that continue to plague aboriginal society in Papua New Guinea.

An autodidact in philosophy (he also has degrees in journalism, Russian and cultural reporting and criticism), Russell said that the theories of the Frenchman Rene Girard on the use of scapegoating in societies both advanced and primitive was a major influence on the story. That existential stream flows under the surface, as Russell takes the reader on a heart-pounding, mind-expanding ride through the time warp of Papua New Guinea’s highlands.

Russell’s greatest feat is a first-person narration that feels both unfussy and fundamental to the story. In fact, he’s so good at inserting himself into his stories in ways that drive the narrative and avoid the narcissism, he could teach a class on it. Somebody else must have thought so, too, because when he’s not writing essays exploring his own masculinity, or trekking 1,000 miles across Florida on foot for another story, Russell serves as an adjunct professor of gonzo journalism in the undergraduate writing program at Columbia University.

This interview took place over a series of phone conversations. It has been condensed and edited.

This seems like something of a departure from the norm, for you, from what I’ve been able to research of your work. Am I totally in the wrong there?

It doesn’t seem like a departure for me, necessarily, because of where the idea came from. Normally with other ideas that I’ve had — especially with the book I wrote — the seed of the idea was very often a simple question that I’d ask myself, and it would germinate. I had a graduate school professor, David Samuels, and his advice was if you can think of something kind of nuts and build a realistic idea of it in your mind, it probably exists in the world somewhere. I’ve often used that as a springing-off point. In the past, I’ve often been propelled by the Nietzschean aphorism of what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. And with some rudimentary research, I find people who try to make themselves immune to all the snake venoms in the world, or something like that. In this case, it was kind of similar, I just kind of asked myself, “Are there still witch hunts still being perpetrated in the world?” And a rudimentary Lexis-Nexis search brought up all these stories, not only in PNG but all over the world. For me, it all came out of that same wellspring. And also it’s not a departure because I’m typically drawn to pretty bleak shit.

This was your first piece for Huffington Post. How did that relationship start? Did you have any say in the way they produced the story, with the cascading, “Scary Stories”-esque art?

That vertical, Highline, was started by a buddy of mine that I’ve worked with on a bunch of stories, a guy by the name of Greg Veis. He was last at the New Republic before everybody kind of walked the fuck out. That happened the night before I was supposed to get on a plane to go to PNG for the story, that I was going to write for them. I had written three stories for them before, and was a contributing editor there at the time. So, everything went to shit and Vies was telling me maybe don’t go quite yet, we’ll see what happens here, and I just said fuck it, I had already bought the plane tickets. I prefer to do things less pitching and working hand-in-glove with an editor but going off, incurring incredible expense, writing a first draft, then pitching it. After I reported it, I told him all about it. I was still under contract with New Republic, which was under new editorship at the time, but they weren’t really interested in it. My friend and editor Veis joined up with another former TNR editor, and they created and continued to edit Huffington Post Highline. They got that thing off the ground, and like you said they are doing some great narrative work with great design and editing work. They just won a National Magazine Award [ed.: in the Multimedia category, for ‘The 21st Century Gold Rush’]. But I had nothing to do with the design and layout, and was just as blown away as anyone else when I saw it.

I’ve never written for the actual Huffington Post, but working with the Highline was a continuation of a previous relationship I had had. I’m always hankering to work with them again; they’re some of the best.

In the story, you say your motivation behind the trip was to figure out how these witch hunts could be possible in the modern era. Was the impetus really that simple?

I guess it was a little more complex than that, insofar as the kinds of questions I have about something that lead to ideas. I had been reading a lot of a philosopher named René Girard, a French literary theorist who created or discovered this categorical, all-encompassing theory for literature and also the way societies are maintained. He’s got a theory that explains scapegoating violence and says it’s the foundation of society, especially of primitive societies and religions. He believes a tight-knit community will come to a head, and everyone will have a bunch of internecine fights and eventually it comes to a head where they scapegoat, someone on which to blame all the bad shit that’s been going down. They either kill that person or force them out, and in doing that, it kind of reinforces the communal aspect. Anyway, I was doing a lot of reading from that guy’s stuff. I found it really interesting, if not totally believable, and was thinking a lot about the role of scapegoats and scapegoating somebody. The witch idea kind of came out of that, and like you were saying, I came across a fair number of stories chronicling the violence in PNG. There were a bunch of excellent pieces that tried to give some nuance and depth to it, and I kind of felt the things that most interested me, and what I kind of found wasn’t being addressed in these stories were the things I wanted to go investigate. It was both as simple as wanting to see if this was still going on, but it was also out of a desire to kind of see if the idea of scapegoating people, if that theory, holds any water.

That question seems kind of simple and facile, but really I was asking: How is this still happening? Why is it happening? Clearly, it wouldn’t be so widespread in this country if there wasn’t some imagined value to it. It didn’t just seem like it was random violence, you know. I just wanted to see if some sense could be made, or see the phenomenon from the point of view of the people who were there, and almost make sense of it from under the bubble of the culture in a society where this would happen — if it’s even possible for some white doofus to fly in for three weeks and try to diagnose this.

I had a graduate school professor, David Samuels, and his advice was if you can think of something kind of nuts and build a realistic idea of it in your mind, it probably exists in the world somewhere. I’ve often used that as a springing-off point.

In many ways this resembles a travel dispatch, except for the, you know, ritual burnings of other humans. It’s a really entertaining story, and the parts that make it bearable, in a way, are your often funny and always insightful travel notes. Did you intend to channel your inner Bill Bryson? Or is that your natural writing style?

I think it’s a combination. I didn’t want to add comic relief to this thing, necessarily, but I think in general I have a wryly ironic sensibility that comes through. To include myself, obviously, that was necessary to me because the idea of some relatively ignorant, youngish white dude parachuting in here and giving the narrative of this thing is not just kind of absurd but also really off-putting and offensive. For me it felt necessary to frame it through my experience. I often frame my narratives through a pretty heavy personal lens. I use myself as a prism, or a host organism, to look at such things. In this instance, I am an interloper, possibly an orientalist, all these things where I’m trying not to couch it too heavily in terms of me because people are being murdered, there’s horrific violence, and you’re trying to do justice to the other characters and their stories.

Your book of essays explored different types of masculinity. Was that a thought as you ventured into the PNG highlands, where there is an almost prehistoric masculine ideal?

To be honest, it really wasn’t. It wasn’t until I started doing research and reaching out to people that I realized there was this kind of preserved-in-amber patriarchal society that had only recently been exposed to the outside world. Which made me wonder if I would always subconsciously be drawn to this type of subject. It’s the same kind of thing where I have colleagues and friends of mine who are women who joke that I finally wrote about women, but of course I wrote about women getting murdered and burned at the stake and stuff like that, so I don’t know if it was anything consciously chosen on my behalf. But when I started reading about the culture and history of that place, it gave me a little bit of pause and also scared the shit out of me.

My questions are in red, his responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button.

They Burn Witches Here And then they upload the photos to social media. A journey to an island caught between the ancient world and 2015.

By Kent Russell

Originally published on Huffington Post Highline in October 2015.

The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone. Neighbors crowd into a circle around her, here on this hill of rubbish next to their settlement, Warakum. They watch as the men blindfold her before tying her arms, legs and stomach to a log. They watch as wood is stacked and gasoline poured. They watch as their witch is pushed facedown onto the pyre. Camera phones are held up and aimed. The match is struck and thrown.

This is the consequence of rending the social fabric, of exercising divisive power, the men say to the thing in their midst. This creature at the center of the settlement dwellers is not a friend or a relative, as the crowd might have once thought. It is a poisonous weed, a snek-no-gut underfoot. Adulterers, the AIDS-marked unclean and witches such as this one—these evils must be uprooted from the community. It has been so for as long as any can remember.

The crowd can feel the shush of the flames against the skin of their faces. Then—a low, wet, chewing sound, a sound like a hive of insects eating and eating, as the fire feeds on the pile of refuse. The men roll truck tires over the witch’s trussed, prone figure. The crowd says nothing. This is self-defense. This is a body doing what a body does when a harmful foreign object is located. It marshals its strength, it pushes the object out, it becomes whole and healthy once again. This is, quite simply, the most shocking lede to a piece of journalism I have ever read. Were you cautious to start here, and with such brutally honest language? Why did you choose to begin with this anecdote? Part of what kind of drew my interest here was that the stories I would read about the witch hunts were almost all based around the Leniata story. It made the news in the United States and all over the world. “Oh my god, look at this savagery, look at this weird anachronistic juxtaposition,” and then everyone just kind of drops the story. This story was never followed up, so one of the things I thought I’d do was the case, and what kind of astounded me in a lot of ways when I went around, was that I would go to a university in Goroka and talk to some experts on this stuff, and historians, and ask them about it, and their faces just went blank. Either they didn’t know what I was talking about or didn’t want to talk about her. I got the sense that the only thing special about the Leniata case is that the rest of the world heard about it. In fact, there had been x amount of murders at that same spot before her, and y amount after her, and realized there was almost like a ritual happening here. So how it became both the opening and kind of the throughline for this piece was that to me it seemed that this was a ritual, a performance, acting out something as almost a service to the community. To me it seemed like it was almost a special case, but in many ways it wasn’t special at all. You obviously weren’t there to see this incident. How did you create the atmosphere — “a hive of insects eating and eating” for this event? It was similar to overlaying the sacrificial victims on top of one another, because they’re so similar, it was a combination of going to the place, interviewing the people. In PNG, there were these fires burning all the time, for clearing area or cooking or whatever, so even when I was in the highlands and in that particular area, I was able to observe garbage fires. Thankfully I did not witness a witch burning, but it was a combination of interviews, research and first-hand experience.

The witch was a 20-year-old mother of two who had been blamed for the death of a 6-year-old neighbor boy in her Papua New Guinean shantytown in 2013. Based on his symptoms, the cause of the boy’s death was most likely rheumatic fever. But in PNG, any death that cannot be chalked up to simple old age is believed to have a malevolent agent behind it.

A group of 50 or so of the dead boy’s relatives apprehended the young mother, stripped her, tortured her and burned her alive in the settlement’s landfill, just outside the city of Mount Hagen. A number of bystanders were uniformed police officers who helped turn back a fire engine when it whined to the scene.

This particular witch killing splashed across the homepages of international tabloids because members of the crowd had snapped photos and shared them proudly on social media. Journalists descended, ascertaining a few grisly details as well as the woman’s identity (which cannot be said for many victims of sorcery-related violence in PNG): Her name was Kepari Leniata.

The context that their stories lacked, the thing these journalists neglected to mention, was this: In PNG (which was fully “opened” to the outside world only in the late 19th century), the tradition of witch hunting has not simply persisted in the face of Western intervention—it has become much worse. The ritual is warping, the violence is metastasizing.

Witch hunts, which had been a part of many if not all traditional Papua New Guinean cultures, are now commonplace throughout the villages, townships and small cities dotting the country. Mobs are publicly humiliating and brutally torturing neighbors, family members, friends—often but not always women—and then murdering them, or else forcing them out of their communities, which in a deeply tribal society like Papua New Guinea amounts to much the same thing.

No one is sure how many supposed witches have been killed—are being killed—in Papua New Guinea. The country’s Constitutional and Law Reform Commission recently estimated 150 killings per year throughout the developing island nation, which lies just off the northernmost cape of Australia. Religious organizations, the people most involved on the ground, dispute this number. The United Nations reported that more than 200 killings take place every year in just one of Papua New Guinea’s 20 provinces alone.

Kepari Leniata’s public execution was at least the third committed at the Warakum settlement’s trash dump between 2009 and 2013. Two more have occurred there since. A third was set to take place in December 2014, near the end of a trip I took to the area in hopes of understanding how and why. How anyone with a camera phone could still believe in witches, and why this violence was now going from endemic to epidemic.

But there, I happened across a most rare thing in Papua New Guinea: an intercession.

II.

I wasn’t prepared for the airport in Port Moresby, PNG’s capital. And I don’t mean that in a kind of Orientalist, “I couldn’t believe the strange wonders I encountered” type of way. I mean: There was hardly any information available. At the time of my visit, Jacksons International Airport was un-Google-able.

Connecting through Tokyo, my flight was listed on the departures board, but it didn’t have a check-in number, a gate number or any status updates. It was the only gap in the stories-high flipboard. When I asked young Japanese attendants for help, their eyes grew wide above their surgical masks. This is a great detail, and helps ground the setting — which is otherwise totally foreign to most readers — in something they are familiar with. Is that why you included it? When there’s travel involved, or a long journey, I’m constantly taking note of everything because you never know what’s going to be used in the narrative. There was a lot, a lot of travel involved here, and I had all these notes on what it’s like to go to a place like this. It doesn’t show up on the big board, you can’t really spot other people going to this place. I almost lost my bag, so trying to get that and get it checked in. There’s only one flight there, and I don’t want to miss it. There’s this strange experience where I’m trying to pay attention to everything that’s happening and experiencing consciousness, since I’m not yet sure what the story is going to be. The experience was everybody was saying: “What are you talking about? Where are you going?” And the people who did know about it did almost a Looney Tunes loosening of the collar. It was truly bizarre being in Tokyo in this modern, sprawling, incredibly efficient airport, and then the strange hiccup in this efficiency happened to be where I was going.

After an overnight flight, my plane dumped me on the tarmac. The humidity reminded me every step of the way that “the atmosphere” was not a thing that started at some point far above my head. This South Pacific atmosphere was everywhere around me, reaching under my shirt, into my ears, my nostrils, hugging my whole body until nodes of sweat pipped up between the hairs of my eyebrows and mustache. I was drenched in sweat by the time I found a taxi.

Cities were recent developments in PNG, I learned. Anything that we would consider a “development” was recent. As a result, Moresby—pronounced Mosbi in Tok Pisin, PNG’s creole mashup of English, Malay and a smattering of other languages—has neither the bustle of an Indian slum nor the resourcefulness of a Brazilian one. Only 345,000 people live here, and unemployment hovers between 60 and 90 percent. Ashy wood smoke hangs over everything. Each low, cement building is fenced or walled, and the fences and walls are topped with broken glass or razor wire. On one side of the city are bare, brown hills. On the other: a shallow tongue of bay, packed with natural-gas tanker ships.

Moresby proper is largely free from the sorcery-related violence that plagues the rural interior of the country, where there remain tribes of people—citizens—who are living much the same as they have for the last 10 millennia. Still, it is the third-least-livable city on Earth, according to researchers at The Economist, behind Damascus and Dhaka, the city in Bangladesh where a factory collapse killed a thousand people.

The scant number of expats living in Moresby are typically concerned with one of two things: saving souls, or siphoning money out of the ground. The latter, the oilmen, rarely leave the handful of supermax high-rises near the bay. The former, the missionaries, stay in small compounds studded throughout the city. Upon touchdown, I called one such compound named Mapang and booked a shared room.

On the short ride there, about a block and a half from the window I’d sleep under, my taxi was stopped at a checkpoint by policemen who wore short-sleeved blue shirts and the bemused expressions of men expectant of bribes. My driver asked them what the problem was. They explained that a few hours earlier, predawn, members of the police and members of the army had engaged in a gunfight right here. Did you have a translator/fixer with you? Related question: A practically unlivable city, a shootout between the army and police, witch hunts. Were you fearful of your safety? I definitely felt like I fucked up irrevocably by not having a fixer. I’m not doing this parachute journalism where you normally have a fixer and they’ve worked with your publication before — I’ve never done anything like that; I didn’t even know who I was writing this for at this point. It was kind of fly-by-night, but I did know Monica going in, and that I would meet her at some point, come what may. I had the idea that Monica would be my Virgil character here, but I spent about five days hanging out in Port Moresby by myself, which is inadvisable. I was staying at a Lutheran guest house — there aren’t many hotels, but there is a lot of missionary infrastructure. I was in this heavily barbed-wire compound with all these missionaries of various Protestant denominations. I just started reporting as much as I possibly could. It must have been bizarre to be in a place that seems almost fictional, with very few (if any) analogues in the developed world. Yeah, I’ve done quite a bit of traveling, and in most places, you can obviously kind of draw comparisons. In this instance, there was really nothing I could have compared it to. It was a big shock to the system, especially for some white American dude. I got the sense that there was no way I could prepare for it, but I definitely didn’t do enough to prepare for it. Those first couple days in Port Moresby, while not wanting to impose any judgment on a place I didn’t know, I kind of walked mute and wide-eyed everywhere I went.

The police officers leaned into the window and searched my driver’s face for any hint of gladness or anger. Any kind of reaction at all. Had we heard about it? they asked. The shooting? This was in Boroko, a relatively upscale suburb of Moresby. There had been many injuries, the police said, and a few unconfirmed fatalities.

Halted for now, my cabby and I got out of the car to take a look around. An informal market was assembling itself on the dried mud beneath a single, bare tree. The ground there was sprinkled with broken glass and the husks of betel nuts.

Practically every man, woman and child in PNG chews betel nut, a mild stimulant. Intense salivation, and therefore a constant need to spit, is its main side effect. Chewing betel nut is technically illegal, but betel nuts were being sold under umbrellas at every street corner. The police who’d stopped my taxi were chewing betel nut. It didn’t matter where I went in PNG—gashes of viscid red spit were everywhere, making the violence seem that much fresher and thicker. Did you try betel nut while you were there? Hell no! I liked the idea of it in principle, but I have a weird thing with people who dip and spit in a bottle or something, it drives me insane. No, I didn’t want to do any of that. But it was incredible how widespread betel nut is. If you want to add to the surreality of everything, it’s not just the landscape and the city and everything, it’s also the fact that everybody’s just a little bit amped on this mild stimulant, and their teeth just looked blood red, as if they had just bitten into someone’s neck. It was just another element to add to the sense that I had no reference point for this, and that it would behoove me not to even try to draw any analogy.

My taxi driver spat carefully but frequently as we walked around the marketplace. With his help, I learned that the gun battle between the army and police had lasted for some four hours. The vendors told us this while spreading blankets, arranging wares, beginning just another day. They explained that soldiers had emerged from a makeshift nightclub late last night and were drinking hard when a police patrol asked them to go back inside. A scuffle ensued, and after one soldier was locked up in the nearby station, the other soldiers returned with reinforcements and sprang their partner from jail, Wild West style. As all hell broke loose, some shops adjacent to the marketplace were looted, and now these looted goods were being put out alongside the vendors’ regular fare.

By the time we got to the missionary compound, my cabbie was demanding 100 kina, or about $40. When I refused and offered him half of his price, he laughed vigorously, as if proud of my aptitude. Then he demanded I high-five him.

♦ ♦ ♦

At Mapang, there were gates, guards and razor wire. Darting birds and bougainvillea. Tin roofs, slatted glass windows, listless ceiling fans running off solar power. The main room was hung with a portrait of the staff, as well as an admonition to ALERT US if anyone not in the picture was seen walking the grounds.

This was a waystation for missionaries on their way into or out of the bush. That first day, around the breakfast table, I fell in with two of them, John and Marciana. John was a Kentuckian; Marciana, a Floridian like me, albeit from the third and strangest Florida, the Panhandle. They were my age or younger, anywhere from 23 to 30, and they had three little children: two boys and a baby girl, each named something Levitical. John was making them jam sandwiches out of the free breakfast fixings, to save money.

About a year earlier, he’d started a mission deep in the jungle of Gulf Province. “New Guinea’s Louisiana,” John called it, hoping to sum up for me the dire poverty and feverish customs of his village congregants. He’d come with his family to Moresby in order to load up on dry goods. They said I could tag along on their shopping runs.

Marciana had a pinch of moles sprinkled about her mouth and more than a few misgivings about being in-country. “In America, I’m considered black,” she said as we headed for their vehicle, a Toyota SUV with “BAPTIST CHURCH” stenciled talismanically on all four sides. “And here,” she said, “in PNG, I’m considered white. I can’t catch a break.” She smiled, she was being ironic, and then she kept on speaking, branching off on tangents, rarely falling silent whenever I was around her and her family. She seemed genuinely pleased to avail herself of a new audience after months in the jungle. I was reminded then of a term that one of PNG’s great anthropologists, Bronislaw Malinowski, used to describe the effect the bush had on outsiders: tropenkoller, or “tropical frenzy.” Speaking of this, what was the preparation for PNG like? It seems like it would be a challenge to simply exist there, much less perform journalistic acts. Most of the time, I was just eating Luna bars that I brought with me. The coffee was excellent there, which is one of the big exports in the highlands. I did have some meals with Monica from time to time. It was a lot of pork — somebody had killed their pig and you’d get to eat it, which was very nice. I drank the water, it was fine. I was less concerned about that — I like to think I have a pretty hardy constitution. But I was more focused on being there and focused on reporting, noticing details and talking to as many people as I could, and figuring out to get around well enough to report on my own when Monica had to go to funerals, or spirit some woman away from a murderous domestic situation. It was just trying to maintain integrity long enough to get the story I was hoping to get while I was there.

“There were these other two missionaries, older friends of ours,” John said, pulling us into surprisingly thick traffic. “These two missionaries, they got into a bad accident here in Moresby. They rolled their car. And the people, they came running. I mean running.” John had a vacuum-sealed tautness about his body that called to mind fire-and-brimstone preaching; actually, though, he was more that type of chill-dude campus minister.

“The people stripped it of everything,” he went on. “Bags, electronics, seat covers. ‘Run,’ one of the looters told them. ‘Your life is more important than your stuff.’ Our missionary friends said they were more afraid after the crash.”

We drove past a field alive with fires that had been set to clear the brush and scrub around Moresby’s one mosque. The mosque had leopard spots of light shining through its rusty dome. I asked what had happened here. Marciana told me that Americans, unlike Australians, are still welcomed in PNG because Americans didn’t stay after World War II and occupy land. One story goes that, in a show of support post-9/11, the Moresby police surrounded the mosque and shot it up with machine guns.

John and Marciana understood of course that theirs were but the latest in a long line of Western designs on a country well known for rebuffing Western designs. Europeans first set foot here in 1526. But compared to the other New Worlds, this island was hellish: daunting countryside, no obvious wealth, man-eating natives. It remained a lazy and malicious host in the eyes of white men until the mid-19th century. And even then, the British, Dutch, French, Germans, Russians—a thousand Hungarians—continually gag-gifted PNG among themselves.

Most of the contact the white men made was with the tribes of the coasts. Further exploration was rendered impossible by the spine of steep mountains that runs east-west along the length of the island. What lay within these walls—thousands of feet high, with clouds balancing on their rims as if about to tumble inward—seemed dark and unknowable. Until the advent of the airplane.

In the 1930s, two Australian brothers flew into the mountains figuring there to be gold in the remote central Highlands. What they found instead were paleolithic farming villages that had existed, more or less untouched, for tens of thousands of years. There was no metalworking, no domesticated beasts of burden. The Highlanders hadn’t had reason to think up the wheel. To them, the two white brothers appeared to be the ghosts of their ancestors, come down from the mist.

In a gesture of peace, the brothers cranked out some Italian opera on a gramophone they’d brought with them. The Highlanders loved it. They clapped and stomped and laughed to the music. The brothers were thrilled. They believed they had transcended cultural gulfs via art. A little later, though, with the help of some pantomime translation, the Australian brothers learned that that was not at all what had happened. The Highlanders fancied the music not because it was beautiful. They liked it, they explained, because the trumpets sounded exactly like the brassy screams of captive women selected for feasting. Now this is the way to give some historical context – make it entertaining. Are you mindful of that, doing the spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down thing? For sure. That’s kind of funny, the spoonful of sugar thing, but yes, I am kind of mindful of that. I think just in general, I tend not to speak with any kind of authoritative, almost scholarly, dry, straightforward prose, even in a piece such as this one where it is a very serious and somewhat dark narrative. For better or worse, any kind of narrative I’m spinning will be drenched in my sensibility, worldview and my voice. It goes back to the idea of including myself in such a dark story. The gaze is outward — it’s very much not about MY journey to Papua New Guinea, but in terms of how I write and see the world through a subjective filter, to act as if that’s not there, I think it would ring false. I didn’t want to contort the narrative into something that wouldn’t feel true. My personal outlook is a little darkly comic, so if there was any kind of conscious move, it’s to be sure that when I am being a smart-ass or cracking wise, it’s not flying in the face of these dark events.

The question as to whether this wide gulf could ever have been slowly bridged is moot; this gulf is being forcibly, abruptly sutured shut. In the span of little more than a century, the people here have had to shift from stone to steel to silicon. In some spots, they have jumped directly from hunter-gatherer existence to devotional pictures of Jesus on their iPhones. And the recent discovery of natural gas reserves has only exacerbated change, turning the nation’s previously stagnant economy into one of the world’s fastest-growing.

John and Marciana drove me to Vision City, a three-story shopping mall built recently by Asian investors where, after we had been patted down and metal-detected by a few of the security guards on duty, we ordered dinner at an Australian-themed restaurant that nevertheless had American license plates stapled to the wall. Inside, the wives of oilmen and construction magnates were wearing yoga pants and brave faces. Chinese businessmen were getting absolutely hammered at the bar.

“There’s been a bit of culture clash here between the people and the Chinese who come to supervise investment,” John said, understating the case. He detailed a recent incident in which a Chinese engineer was hacked to death with a machete following an argument with his Papua New Guinean contractors. Next came the tale of the usurious Chinese vendor who was decapitated not far from Vision City.

This influx of foreign influence, money and durable goods has brought conspicuous consumption to PNG, complete with its attendant resentment and envy. Previously, there had been systems of prohibition integrated into many of PNG’s traditional societies that regulated public exhibitions of wealth or standing, such as pigs and shells. The preening of one’s status wasn’t just tabu; it was dangerous. The person who threw many large feasts or cultivated many fruitful gardens ran the risk of making his or her clanspeople jelas, a word that goes beyond mere “jealousy” to convey something akin to “a state of uncontrollable, angry covetousness.” Nowadays, a person can make others jelas by owning a car or running a successful highway-side concession stand. Making others jelas is to be avoided, especially since it is believed that witches are very jelas and vindictive creatures indeed.

“I try not to stop and stare at anything—a waterfall, a pretty tree, that—” John said, nodding at a balcony where the legs of empty chairs were casting lengthening shadows in the face of a limpid sunset. “Our tribe thinks white people have a supernatural power that lets us hear precious metals vibrating in the earth.”

That has been one of the constants, John told me, underlying so much piled-on change: the belief that witches are behind most of the negative transformations rocking PNG. “We call them ‘baby Christians,’” John said of the native population. “A lot of them convert because they want the prosperity they see in Christian nations and cultures. But they just slap it on top of their traditional beliefs.” This missionary family must really be true believers. It seems like their plight must be one of the most difficult for anybody doing that kind of work. This family, I spent the most time with them, and putting aside the historical question of Christian missionaries, they were as wonderful people as you could ask to be around, as wonderful and as giving as I could’ve asked for. You’re exactly right — what definitely struck me was not just how devoted they were to what they believed to be their own mission, but they seemed indefatigable. They were in the bush. They had a couple of solar panels, but they had to walk several days to reach an airstrip to be able to get anywhere. They had to learn the separate dialect of the people they were living with. They had three young children, and both of them were younger than I was, and the resolve and belief really boggled my mind. They relayed some anecdotes to me where I was just like, “Good god. What are you doing?” But from what I know, the only outside contact the people of PNG have are either with people there to extract resources, or people there to save their souls. I’m sure that kind of exacerbated the strangeness of the mixing of modern, technological, Western religious beliefs and the anachronisms found in the country.

In a nation with little to no infrastructure, missionaries remain a primary point of contact between rural PNGers and the West. Much of the medical care and humanitarian aid dispensed in the bush is still provided by the Catholic and Lutheran churches. As such, more than 96 percent of Papua New Guineans identify as Christian. Yet theirs is a fluid, syncretic Christianity, not unlike the Christianity of the Middle Ages, one that has been grafted onto a long-established cosmology rife with demons, witches and relics imbued with power.

John and Marciana themselves seemed rather gleeful about their congregants’ belief in sorcery. I got the sense that it strengthened their self-conception, their missionary bonafides, as if the continued practice of something as heathenistic as witch hunting made their experience that much more authentic.

“You can’t use logic with them,” Marciana said. “Everything needs to be ‘story.’ You only convince them through narrative. How do you think they passed the time out there all those centuries? They tell themselves stories that make sense of what’s happening to them, what’s going on in their lives. All through the night, until 1 or 2 am. Then the pigs get restless at four, and they do it all over again the next day.”

The first tribespeople John and Marciana encountered at their mission did not have a word for the concept of goodness. There was only not-evil. Likewise, there was no such thing as truth; there was only not-lying. When people died, they became spirits, and the world was thick with these ancestral spirits, who did harm if not appeased. These ancestral spirits were what the people worshipped.

“Papua New Guinea didn’t have a single god prior to the white man,” John said on the drive back to the missionary compound. The eldest of his children demanded that the soundtrack to Disney’s Frozen be played again and again as we sped through streets that had cleared out after nightfall. A few individuals could be seen moving between trees or through doorways under the sodium lamps that had not been shot out. “The people here lived—continue to live—in an enchanted world,” John added. “The line between personal agency and impersonal force is not clearly drawn.”

“Kind of like with Catholics,” Marciana joked from the back seat.

I announced that I was planning to meet up with an accused witch and maybe travel with her to the Highlands, where the sorcery-related murder is rampant. John briefly took his eyes off of the road to stare at me, aghast. “The violence up there spreads like fire,” he said. “If you pick a fight with a guy, you’re picking a fight with his cousins, his brothers’ cousins, everyone.” It would be bad enough if I were simply traveling to the Highlands alone, Marciana said. But that I might be traveling with a supposed witch made matters infinitely more dangerous.

“If anyone begins to give you or her trouble,” John said, “just get out. If you get in the middle, don’t watch. Just turn the other way. Run.” What were you thinking in this moment? Were you tempted to say, “Screw this, I don’t need this in my life”? It was never a question for me. I had come so far, I was definitely going to go up there. When I mentioned that walk across Florida that I undertook, I went with a friend of mine and we didn’t really prepare, we had these big packs. It was extremely dangerous, and somebody had recently gotten killed not far from where we were walking, another guy who was also doing something similar. After less than a week, me and my friend were talking and thinking we must be the dictionary definition of a certain kind of privilege, where those obvious and rational fears that any normal person would deem incredibly unsafe didn’t apply to us. That kind of speaks if not to a certain dumbness, at least to never having been confronted with instances where I was in a position where I actually don’t control what’s going to happen to me.

III.

The process begins as it has before and since, in a dirt-packed hut where a family is weeping over a corpse. Some relatives grab at the dead boy’s torso, his arms, his face. Others sit cross-legged, smearing black and white mud on their bodies. Most moan, and their moans swirl around the tight space, harmonizing intermittently. This is their haus krai, the traditional ceremony in which every member of an extended family clan comes and sees and grieves for one of their own.

Watch for fireflies, some men whisper. Watch how they move.

Someone should step on the boy’s lower leg, others say. Step on it and wait for a sign to appear.

These relatives believe the dead boy’s spirit has gone over to a large and borderless place. They are very afraid for him. They are very afraid of him. Most of all, they are vengeful. I’m interested by the level of fear and paranoia on display here. I have a personal philosophy that the modern, capitalist, avaricious system we live in has made us all fearful and paranoid, and life was simpler before. But this bucks that notion. Were you surprised by that? Again, any writer who’s going into these situations are going to have lenses through which they view this stuff. Beyond being a white guy from the first world, but more than that. I was raised Catholic, raised to disbelieve in the idea of the Rousseauian natural man, raised to believe that humanity is fundamentally flawed and anywhere you go you’re going to see endemic, shitty behavior or warps in the wood. I certainly didn’t expect to find this Edenic, noble savage idea. Even in the nature of the violence of the witch hunts, I hope I made clear in the story that the white man had a whole lot to do with that. I wasn’t expecting some pristine scene up there. I was obviously shocked at the horrific violence, but without sounding like a jaded asshole, I was like, all right, I can believe that, human beings can be pretty shitty to each other.

They reflect on anything he could have said or done to bring about his misfortune. Did anyone want him dead? Who could possibly want a boy dead? Who was his last contact with? Did anyone offer him food or drink?

Someone should hold a length of bamboo and call out names, one man offers. The bamboo will move when the witch is called.

An older relative speaks up. What about the neighboring wives? she asks. Other women nod enthusiastically. They speculate on the neighbors’ comings and goings in the days leading up to the boy’s death.

Whose behavior had been out of the ordinary? they wonder. Who had been wandering after sunset? Who had been staring?

Who had unsettled debts? Who was jelas?

Sitting or standing around the hut, the women wonder these things while keeping tight control over their bodies. They are being monitored closely by the men. None of the women dares to rest her head on her hand. Such an expression might be taken to mean that she is communicating with another witch. None of them dares to yawn. Covering her mouth might be taken to mean that she has a devil inside her, a devil she wishes to keep. The men watch for such signs, the small details out of place. The women know this, and so grieve theatrically.

One woman coughs. The chatter stops. This woman speaks softly, offering a medical explanation for the boy’s death. It was an ordinary death, she is saying. The boy caught an illness in his stomach. He simply died.

And what caused his illness? shoots back another.

There is only one explanation they can agree on: A witch had extracted the boy’s heart. She had stolen it, and she was eating it piece by piece, savoring it like a crocodile with its drowned prey. If the clanspeople did not hurry, if they did not find the witch and retrieve the boy’s heart, he would surely walk alone in the spirit world forever.

The younger relatives do not know much of their tradition. Their tradition is contained by no book or photograph; their tradition had been one unbroken story passed from lips to ears. Yet they know of this—witchcraft, sorcery, puri puri, mura mura dikana, kumo, sanguma. The young have been told that the witches are behind their people’s unraveling, and they have been taught to fear them very much, regardless of what the missionaries and the white men say. How can the missionaries and the white men say that sorcery isn’t real while also talking of a good God? If God is good, who is doing evil in His world? No, evil is real. Witches are real.

It is decided: The relatives will hire a glas meri, a witch who now uses her powers for good. For a large fee, the glas meri will divine for them the one responsible. And then they will capture this evil creature. They will retrieve the boy’s heart and destroy the witch before she can bring more chaos upon the people of the settlement.

——

The United Nations’ worldwide Human Rights Day coincided with my time in Moresby. Speeches and seminars were held in a hotel’s dusty conference room, where many women in long, flowing, floral-patterned gowns known as meri dresses explained how bad things were to a few white U.N. agents. Two male members of parliament were present, saying things like, “Gender-based violence is the most pressing human rights issue in our country.”

Whenever a speaker intimated anything relating to change or optimism, 60 people clapped politely, and one woman in a meri dress laughed hard. She was seated in the rear of the room, where she was free to throw back her head and flail her arms with each bright, three-note titter. This was Monica Paulus, the witch savior of Papua New Guinea. This is a great way to introduce her, in contrast to sanctimonious chatter. It comes fairly late in the story, for a central character. Did you consider having this higher? The story is centered around Monica; she’s definitely the main character. Without her, I don’t know what I would’ve done. But similar to the idea that I couldn’t write this from a righteous, third-person perspective, if we opened directly with Monica, it would not have rung true for me as I experienced it or as it does when I look back on it. So for me to start with her would have assumed a level of understanding or a comprehensive knowledge that I didn’t have. So for me to come as this person with this limited, slowly developing understanding of this place, it’s not until this person shows up that I can finally begin to really start traveling around, getting involved and coming to understand. My editor was also encouraging me to have Monica show up earlier, but the nature of the experience of the story felt like we’ve kind of got to slowly edge our way up to this point because there’s such necessary context and background that I had gotten — and I thought the reader needed. I wanted to show that it was really an act of faith for me to find her at all, then what a relief it was to find her but also show how much a realist she was about this whole situation.

About 15 years ago, Monica had been a typical PNG wife, caring for her children and her many subsistence gardens, until her father died suddenly from a heart attack. As the eldest child, she was entitled to inherit his house, but her younger brother wanted it badly and accused her of killing their father with witchcraft. Jelasy like his is very often a motivating factor in Highlands witchcraft accusations. The accuser knows that the supposed witch will be killed or forced to flee, leaving the object of his jelasy—the witch’s house, possessions or land—free for the taking.

“I walked away for some time, lived in another province for some time,” Monica told me, demurring when I asked how she had escaped torture. But she couldn’t ignore or rationalize the violence anymore, now that she had been in the witches’ position. “So I came back to [the Highlands] where it started.”

Monica now spends her days assisting supposed witches by hiding them in safe houses, relocating them to new provinces, providing them with food or medical care and presenting their cases to anyone who will listen. They are primarily women, and often they bring their children with them, because in many of PNG’s traditional systems of belief, evil spirits reside in the womb. In return for helping these women, Monica and a number of her female colleagues receive death threats every day.

Before leaving New York to come to PNG, I’d done a small bit of correspondence with Monica via email and patchy Skype. We were able to piece together an understanding: She would show me around the country, and I would bring outside attention to what I saw. Aside from that, she said, all she wanted in return were a few cans of duty-free beer.

After presentations on rape and spousal abuse—marital rape wasn’t criminalized in PNG until 2003, and spousal abuse not until 2013—Monica got up in front of the room and delivered a presentation of her own. Her head barely peeked over the lectern. She had a tight perm, black as a burnt match, and the stout physique that is most prevalent among PNG’s Highlanders. It’s a build and bone structure that screams pugnacious.

“I felt like, ‘If I don’t do it, who else is going to do this work?’” Monica said over the clatter of porcelain, as servers set down coffee and sandwiches in the rear of the room. Someone asked how many lives she’s saved. Monica said that she wasn’t sure. At least 20 in the Highlands. She couldn’t think of anyone who was doing this work before her.

Which was not to say that there’s no such thing as practitioners of the occult arts, Monica clarified. There were—and are—people who engage in witchcraft, sorcery, sanguma. The rites are passed down, the spells fiercely guarded. “It is not just that it’s practiced,” Monica said. “It is that everybody believes in it. The prime minister believes in it. The police chief in the city of Kundiawa believes in it. They had a national sorcery conference last year, an academic conference, and more than half of the scholars in attendance said they believed in witchcraft.

“I believed in it, before I was accused,” Monica admitted. When she was younger, she was sure that witches were behind the unseen, unencumbered forces pulling her land apart. She believed that their terrible crimes must be met with an equally terrible punishment. She threw her head back and laughed.

Until 2013, the right to kill a witch in self-defense had been codified in PNG’s constitution, under a provision known as the Sorcery Act. Faced with international pressure post-Kepari Leniata, the government repealed the act and reinstated the death penalty for cases in which an accused witch is murdered. But Monica believed that the death penalty made things more dangerous for her, as those complicit in the murder of a witch—in many cases, whole villages—would sooner kill a compliant witness than face prosecution.

“Talking to people outside of my country, I will tell them I was accused as a witch,” Monica said. “But within my own country, I don’t say that a lot. There are people who will say, ‘OK, because she’s doing this work, she’s supporting her kind. She’s helping witches like herself.’”

Monica gestured with a notebook in hand. In it were the phone numbers and addresses of practically every suspected witch in PNG. Its cardboard cover had gone limp and cottony from handling. “You can do something,” she said, scanning for the white faces in the audience. “Are you interested in saving lives? You’ve got the money, you’ve got the resources there.” She outlined her ideal set-up: rapid-response teams situated throughout the country with access to vehicles, gasoline—and sums of cash to pay off mobs of would-be killers. “If you want us to do it … give us the necessary things we will use to do it, and just get out of our way.”

The white U.N. agents as well as the women in meri dresses applauded her. They applauded everybody. Today was a day for acknowledging that PNG was in the depths of a crisis. Tomorrow, and each day after that, was for combatting the paradox at its center: How does a nation outlaw its ontology, its belief?

Once Monica came down from the dais, I introduced myself. She hugged me and told me to gird myself for the Highlands, where the culture remains overwhelmingly, defensively masculine. We would attract a lot of attention, she said, because associating with a woman in public is considered something of a sign of weakness. In the Highlands, you suffered offenses according to your ability—or lack thereof—to protect yourself.

IV.

The glas meri divined three suspects for the dead boy’s relatives. Two were elderly women who had come to Warakum from the province of Chimbu, which was notorious for its witches; the third was a 20-year-old mother from the grieving family’s own ancestral province, Enga. It was one of these three that stole your son’s heart in the night, the glas meri explained.

And so, the men of the dead boy’s family tracked down the two crones who were hiding in the bush. When the men apprehended them, they wondered of them, If you are innocent, why did you flee?

The men struck a fire. They thrust iron rods into the flames, and they turned them until their upper lengths glowed orange to white. If you are innocent, they wondered of the women, why do you fear?

The men tore away the women’s clothes. They struck the crones, who cried out. The men knew that their blows would simply bounce off of them if they were witches. Witches have skin like rubber. Not only this: If they were witches, their treachery would include crying out that these blows were harming them, even when the blows were not. The amount of circuitous logic reminds me of pledging a fraternity, or basic training for the military, when someone is forced to act, but anything they do will be met with suspicion. How did you judge the morality of the witch-hunters? Well, again, I do believe in the idea of a universal human nature, so even when you speak of something like a vicious circle, or the circuitous nature of violence, I try to be as empathic as I could. I tried to kind of understand it from the point of view of something as simple as a gang or a blood feud or something like that. Where, like, especially if you believe there’s a direct agent behind every misfortune, or a boon behind the opposite, especially if you’re from behind a clan-based society where blood is very important, I tried to understand as best I could through the lens of the developing world, and the circuitous violence that can happen there. Obviously it’s an abhorrent and monstrous cycle of violence. One way I thought about ending the story was kind of an appeal in that regard, saying that in fact these aren’t some backward people who will be met by progress at some point and all of this will eventually be gone. The line of good and evil runs through everyone’s heart, and the judgment there — speaking of judgment — is always kind of a he-who-throws-the-first-stone thing.

How can you defend your actions? the men asked. How can accused such as you be defended? By witnesses? Witchcraft is, by its evil nature, an invisible crime. Who may possibly be witness to it? The witch and the victim, they said. None other.

We can’t expect you to accuse yourselves, can we? they asked. We must rely upon your victims. And they do testify. The body of the child you killed did testify. The good sorcery of the glas meri saw to that.

The men removed the rods from the fire and applied them to the skin of the witches, which closed over the wounds even as the hot irons were being applied. The men were deaf to their cries. Tell us where you put it, they demanded. Tell us where you put the young boy’s heart. Give it back to us so that we can make him whole again. Tell us where you put the heart so we can bring him back.

It wasn’t us! the crones said, sounding exactly like begging women. Please! they screamed.

Give us the name of the real witch, the men demanded. They rolled the irons through the coals.

Yes! Yes! the pair said. We admit to practicing sorcery! But we did not practice it on that boy. We had nothing to do with that boy.

Kolim nem, the gang demanded. Call the name.

Spare us, and we can tell you who did it.

Kolim nem.

The girl, they said. The third one. Kepari Leniata. They said the name over and over. A timeless wail: Not I, sirs, but her. This is very effective, an aria of blame and self-salvation. Did you see it as being almost operatic, this scene but also the story as a whole? There was a conscious decision there to demonstrate this kind of ritual nature of the witch hunts. They were honestly undertaken, but as a ritual it was kind of performative. There were people who were playing their roles and enact this kind of opera, or play, or liturgy — any kind of narrative where people have a prescribed role in carrying this thing out. In playing this thing out, we’re getting rid of the evil, coming closer together, pushing the spirit out of our community and becoming whole again. There was a kind of conscious choice to couch it in this Arthur Millerian, “Crucible” nature of a stage play, where it’s all action verbs and stage direction. There’s not a lot of introspection going on, but people are playing a part in this kind of ancient thing that has become warped with the modernity and encroaching outside influences. I definitely wanted to play up that ritual nature of this.

—-

Monica and I dropped out of dense, milky clouds as our propeller plane neared the small city of Goroka. Below us, swaths of algal-green jungle retreated from the spine of PNG’s central mountains. Gullies were veined with thatched and smoking villages.

The Highlands are a kind of agricultural island within an island. The nation’s only arable land allowed complex societies to entrench themselves. More than 800 languages, or about one eighth of the world’s linguistic total, are spoken here. Yet so many distinct languages developed across this craggy terrain because Highlanders tended not to venture more than 10 miles from their familial village over the course of their lives. Of the three options available to anyone making contact with another—confrontation, retreat or dialogue—history seems to indicate that the Highlanders most often opted for confrontation or retreat.

But in the past decade or so, Monica told me, scores of these villager-farmers have been trickling down from the mountains. They’re looking for work in Mount Hagen and Moresby, where Exxon expects its newly switched-on pipeline to more than double GDP. That, or they are themselves refugees from sorcery-related violence. These migrants live in crowded shantytowns on the cities’ outskirts, surrounded by strangers from far-flung clans. Men grow frustrated, and turn to powerful home-brew alcohol known as stim. Sometimes, they join up with bands of criminals known as raskols. Theft, rape and murder abound in the settlements.

At the same time, the migrants are bombarded with images of Western culture and status. They have satellite televisions and smartphones. They watch expats speed through their settlements in bulletproof Range Rovers. And their capacity for jelasy—as well as their keenness to detect potential sorcery—increases proportionally. These migrants, vulnerable people cut off from their support systems, see in the ruthless methods of Highland witch hunters—methods perhaps discussed with a new neighbor or an acquaintance on social media—a form of collective action that might be powerful enough to check the forces of entropy.

And, should some of these migrants return home, they bring with them this new, more virulent strain of the ritual. Traditional communities no longer decide upon their witch, enter her hut under cover of darkness, stitch her into a bag and toss her in the river or off a cliff. Now, suspected witches are tried publicly before they are roasted over open flames, crucified, dragged behind vehicles, strung up and beaten to death, buried alive, beheaded, forced to drink gasoline or stoned.

“It is the blowing of the wind,” Monica said. “It moves everything now.”

A few hours before we left for the Highlands, Monica had received a frantic 4 am text message from the executive director of an Australian NGO. A suspected witch was being tortured and interrogated in the Mount Hagen settlement of Warakum. If Monica couldn’t organize a rescue operation in time, another execution would take place at the Kerebug dump, the site of Kepari Leniata’s death in 2013.

Off the plane, the thin, gray air of Goroka felt like a physical relief following Moresby’s stifling closeness. Monica led me toward the Lutheran Guest House, pushing our way across a trampled field where some men were doing a brisk business selling actual snake oil from the bed of a Toyota Hi-Lux. “Now we will see what good the U.N. delegation was, in how the Hagen human rights defenders respond,” Monica said.

Monica has lived in Goroka since May 2014, splitting time between the houses of several friends. It’s not exactly safe for her here, but she continues to work out of this small valley city because it is accessible to PNG’s one highway through the mountains, meaning she can get to the sites of potential witch killings relatively quickly. The village where she grew up is in the adjoining province of Chimbu, yet Monica rarely returns for fear of reprisal; according to the twisted logic of the witch hunt, the fact that she was able to flee confirmed Monica’s guilt in the eyes of her community. Her clanspeople ended up setting fire to her house.

This was perhaps the most important thing to understand about the brutal nature of PNG, Monica said—no one owns the violence in this country. There is no monopoly on it, state-held or otherwise. PNG counts about 4,800 police officers, total, for a far-flung nation of seven million. And this constabulary lacks everything from uniforms, to pay, to fuel for their vehicles. To file an assault report with the police, one must first obtain a medical statement, which costs more than most Papua New Guineans can afford. Also, a victim has to provide investigators with gasoline. All of which keeps the likelihood of a criminal’s being caught and prosecuted in PNG hovering around 3 percent.

At the Lutheran Guest House, Monica made a command center out of the upstairs common room. She got on the horn—in her case, an Android handset with a wonky battery—and called Cathy Wali, one of the defenders from Mount Hagen. “Cathy,” she said, “go to the police station. Collect information from locals, but be careful! You don’t know who’s a perpetrator. … No, no, just tok tok with some of them around this place. See if the woman is still alive, or if they are already gathering the tires.”

Purple clouds time-lapsed across the open windows before a lightning bolt spiked a nearby radio tower, causing us both to shrink into a cringe. From the couch, Monica sent a text to the NGO director who first alerted her to the new Warakum witch trial. The director texted back, saying that he was in communication with the Mount Hagen Family and Sexual Violence unit. He was on the case, he reassured her. The lights in the Guest House flickered, and then they went dark.

Monica tried to make a few more calls, but her phone ran out of prepaid minutes, so we walked to a liquor-store hut down the path from the Guest House. There, I bought her a few phone cards; she scratched off their access codes while “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” played on a boom box behind the chicken-wired countertop. On the way back, we saw that the Mount Hagen Family and Sexual Violence unit’s truck was nowhere near the Kerebug dump, but here, in Goroka, parked in front of the one Western-style restaurant in town.

Monica’s reactivated phone buzzed with backed-up texts and status updates. She tried the Australian NGO several times; her calls went straight to voicemail. She tried the director’s secretary. “Me, ah, Monica here,” she said, sliding from Tok Pisin into English. “A woman has been held hostage, and they are preparing to burn her maybe tomorrow or tonight. … The police and the team in Hagen are not responding. … I just want you to help me to get other people at the national level so we could all work together to save this woman, before these things happen? Pleeeease? Yes, now! Because they will kill her.” Monica hung up. This builds the tension really well. Do you like using pure scene as dramatic device? Absolutely. Like I was saying before, I don’t consider myself particularly smart or comprehensive about this situations I might find myself, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable having a more kind of New Yorker, at a remove kind of storytelling. Not to reduce it to a dichotomy of show v. tell, but I just don’t think I have the wherewithal to be able to explain it at all, so it’s both a crutch and I also kind of enjoy it more when a piece has that kind of forward momentum. When you pull that double duty, where you’re both moving the narrative forward and revealing character in turn.

As rain fell, thickening from light to torrential in a matter of minutes, the common area grew very dim. Monica gripped her phone and whispered, Come on.

“It is the same people as were involved with the Kepari Leniata case,” she said. “I am absolutely sure of this.”

A few hours later, a new message announced itself. It was from the NGO director, a Facebook post that read: “Hi Monica—People are watching an helpless lady. Please can you please intervene before she is tortured to death. God please help save this young girl dying in the hands of those heartless animals.” The comments laddered underneath the post said things like, “Monica, please!” “Come on, Monica!” “Do something!” Monica wondered aloud if these people weren’t themselves in the crowd, doing nothing.

“I’m trying to do something on the ground, and you’re posting on Facebook?” she asked the absent director. “What is it? Am I God? Do I make miracles? I am sorry for this woman, but what else can I do?”

The common area was almost completely dark, and rain drummed steadily on the tin roof. Curtains were billowing with gusts of wind before collapsing against the open windows. Finally a call came in from Father Phil Gibbs, a missionary from New Zealand and 40-year veteran of the Highlands. Monica gave him the rundown. Father Gibbs jumped into his car and drove post-haste to Mount Hagen from Enga Province, where he’d been helping four unrelated women go into hiding following their own witchcraft accusations.

Throughout the night, Monica continued to act as a kind of conduit, an emergency switchboard operator receiving warnings, relaying messages and scrambling first responders. At 4 a.m., she finally tracked down someone willing to rent us a vehicle—the provincial police commander, who wanted $400 for the single-day use of his newish van, and who also wanted nothing to do with the rescue operation we were undertaking.

Twenty-four hours after we had been alerted to it, Monica, myself and an imposing driver named John sped toward the torture at the Kerebug dump. We were going to save a life, I kept telling myself, even as my breathing grew shallower. Monica and John carried no weapons, but I made note of the heavy wooden truncheon that was rolling along the betel-stained floor of our van as it climbed the Highlands Highway. I was struck by the lightheadedness that comes with the sense of having lost control of events. We were going to disrupt the ritual. That, or discover another unidentifiably carbonized body in the community’s ash heap. I can’t help but ask what the comedown was like, on your return to the U.S.? You must’ve been completely frayed, like after a long drug trip where everything is completely surreal. It was very unsettling to be there, and talk about this stuff, and hear the stories of these people along the highlands highway. I was able to talk to a lot of these women, and a lot of their stories didn’t end up in the finished narrative. But a lot of them, saying their mothers had been killed, the families dispersed, and so on. I was worried that would make me a little numb, or reduced to steeling myself against humanity and this human horror. When I got back, a friend of mine who was a Marine veteran and had been in Fallujah, had been living with me and it was really awesome to come back and slide back into the roommate slash brother situation, where we could crack a beer and put on an infinite loop of YouTube videos of dads getting blasted in the nards. I live alone now, and I would not have wanted to return home and process that stuff emotionally and psychologically by myself.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was 110 miles from Goroka to Mount Hagen, but the trip took more than half a day, as the highway’s asphalt had been chewed to gravel by processions of heavy-duty energy-extraction machinery. The jouncing was physically exhausting; at particularly steep junctions, it was terrifying. Monica pointed out the new liquid natural gas pipeline that ran through the Highlands to Moresby and explained that the distribution of its royalties would be yet another point of contention for clans who already fought frequently and viciously over subsistence farmland. We passed many unpaved turnoffs that led to webs of these clans’ villages branching up- and down-mountain.

Each of these villages held at least one story of sorcery-related violence. While in the Highlands, I heard some of them. I heard the story of a parliament member who tortured his wife for his typhoid. After accusing her of hexing his water, the MP invited the police to come by and watch his wife’s ordeal, so they could ensure that everything was proceeding accordingly. I heard the story of a girl who was forced out of PNG altogether because she shared betel nut with a warrior who later died a coward’s death in a tribal fight. The rest of the girl’s family still lived among her accusers, in fear, because they didn’t want to lose their land. “Every week, they pull a woman out of the river without a head,” the young girl’s mother told me when I spoke with her. “It’s happening. Tru tru. Like pulling fish.”

I also visited a village not far from Monica’s in Chimbu, a part of the country where an estimated 20 sorcery-related murders were committed every month. There, I was granted an audience with its young, progressive, college-educated chief-in-waiting. He was named Anton, and he referred to witchcraft and sorcery-related violence as “a challenge to development.” He took me up a low bluff and swept a hand over the land that would become his. I noticed a couple of charred gaps between huts and asked what they were. “We had to kick out two families, for witchcraft,” he said. “A young man died. A young man my age, college-educated. Over there. You can see his grave. After much internal debate, we decided just to force them out and take their lands. Not kill them.”

Anton emphasized that it was natural—it made sense—for the average Papua New Guinean to believe in witchcraft. It is the belief that undergirds society; it’s what has upheld order in the absence of strong, centralized government. The great danger in a place like PNG, where there is no real judiciary, where allegiance is tied to blood, is that reprisal will come back around, again and again as in the “vicious circles” of family vendettas and gang wars, force fueling force like a fire fed on the very things thrown over it, the attempts to snuff it out. As such, violence and death must be contained, regulated and explained through the framework of something like witchcraft.

“You visitors,” he told me before sending me off for the day, “you don’t understand—you don’t well understand—that we want to keep this tradition. This is our tradition. This is where the strength of our communities has traditionally come from. Our social harmony was going along until the white man arrived. There wasn’t torture until now. You intrude, and suddenly the things that used to go smoothly no longer do.” This man has quite a Hobbesian view of man in nature. What was your sense of him, as an educated person living within this context? Like we were talking about before, I thought it was important to not just impose my own conclusions on this place, but also know what others thought. And not just the young dudes who got drunk on homemade liquor and hacked at a lady who were “carried along by the wind,” as Monica would call it, but I wanted to talk to somebody who was going to be in a position of power going forward, especially a guy in this patriarchal society. I was excited to be able to hear if this guy thought this was useful. You want to know if somebody believes in the sanctity, or if not that, the autonomy of their culture. It was interesting that any woman could see, from the moment they were accused, what bullshit this was, but I wanted to talk to someone who would be running stuff in a couple of years.

The sun was high by the time Monica and I reached the wide, unpaved roads of Hagen’s outskirts. Discarded playing cards were sprinkled every couple of steps; gambling was considered such a problem here that police liked to go around forcing poker players to chew and swallow their hands. Monica laughed as she recounted the two times she’d been robbed in Hagen. “They didn’t stab me, at least,” she said. She told me about an Australian photojournalist she took to the Warakum settlement. He had been assaulted and relieved of his equipment. “I don’t like to get out of the car,” she said. “Except in Father Gibbs’ mission.”

When we reached the mission, a sprawling compound of low buildings painted a Marian combination of sky blue and white, we drove the length of its muddy byways several times over, searching for Father Gibbs. Monica grew frenzied. She pushed herself halfway out the van’s open window, screaming at gardeners and nuns, “Where is Father Gibbs? Please!”

Finally we found him walking to his shack at the rear of the compound, a thin older man belted tightly into too-big secondhand clothes. When he saw us, he nodded and held up his palms at chest-level, to calm us. “It’s OK!” Father Gibbs shouted, smiling. The eyes set into his washed-out face glowed glacially blue. Monica and I jogged to him, our jabbered questions wrestling for primacy. He invited us into his shack for tea. “She’s fine,” he said. “Margaret is fine.”

Father Gibbs told us that, apparently, the information Monica received from the Australian NGO was secondhand, and about 12 hours old. “We can thank Facebook for the confusion,” he added. Then he played Margaret’s video testimony, which he had just returned from recording.

Her split and swollen face appeared onscreen, where she said: The dead boy had been very close with her. She had often fed him in her shack, the same Warakum shack she has lived in for 16, 17 years. Margaret fought with this boy’s mother sometimes, but that was natural, who doesn’t argue? “We share betel nut, smoke, money and food with each other,” she said. Yet her sister-in-law’s son died, and two days later at the haus krai, one of the boy’s relatives fell into a trance. She began to wail and speak in tongues, she touched the dead boy’s chest, she claimed that two women—one black, and the other a lighter shade—had stolen the boy’s heart. “Two women were involved, but after further discussions and gossips about my past arguments with my in-law, they included me also,” Margaret said. “You know how women talk when they are together.”

The dead boy’s father got drunk, took a long iron rod and beat Margaret with it. Then, the male neighbors up and down her street joined in. “They attacked me until I thought I was going to die,” Margaret told the camera. “I am a sinner, but that moment I prayed to the Lord and said, ‘Lord, the ordinary people cannot see the inside of me. They cannot operate my skin or body to see my inside. Only you know my inside and my thoughts. I am dying, so I give myself to your hands.’ … They told me to sit on a chair beside four tires they lined up. They told me, ‘You will sit on the tires and we will burn you.’”

“By the time I got to the settlement,” Father Gibbs said, “she’d been freed by her husband and the police. I went to the hospital, but she’d already been sent home.” Both he and Monica were shocked that the police intervened. They thought it might have had something to do with a very recent civil disturbance in Hagen, one in which some clanspeople beat a police officer to death after a traffic accident. Tensions were high, and the police were more likely to flex their muscle.

“The problem,” Father Gibbs continued, “was that she had named two more people under torture. She named two more women who were known to have 100-kina debts with the deceased boy’s family.” This case wasn’t resolved, they knew. They had not escaped its gravity. Within days or weeks or months, they’d likely have to scramble to save a life related to this boy’s death.

We got up to go. Monica told Father Gibbs that she’d see him sometime soon. I was relieved. Relieved that this woman, Margaret, had not been killed. But there was a truer, more selfish relief effervescing under that one: I was relieved that I did not have to stand up to unanimous violence and act as intercessor. I did not have to do what Monica does every day.

After that, I asked to be taken to Warakum and the Kerebug dump. Monica refused to leave the van. Our driver John did likewise. Warakum was dirt trails, corrugated shacks, scaly dogs and nothing green. I sensed that I was being watched by many eyes. I walked over to Kerebug. There, swineherds tended to their pigs as they rooted through the plastic bags, sodden cartons and discarded tires. Clouds seemed to be wrapping themselves around the mountainside like bandages around a head.

The graveyard where Kepari Leniata’s body lay in an unmarked grave was across the street from Kerebug. Most plots had small cement structures built over them, to deter theft and evil spirits. Some young men with machetes and homemade guns were settling down for the night; they were paid to guard the corpses left out in the open.

It was something of a miracle that Kepari Leniata was buried at all. Her body had decayed in the Mount Hagen morgue for nine months before one private citizen finally took the initiative to have her interred. The government had yet to even issue a certificate of death. At the time of this writing, they are still holding inquiries into her murder. The Western Highlands Police and the offices of the State Solicitor, Public Prosecutor, Solicitor General, Court Clerk and Coroner, as well as the Mount Hagen General Hospital morgue’s officer-in-charge have been summoned to provide evidence. They’ve attested that they have none. No family members or community leaders have come forward on behalf of the deceased.

The people I stopped in Warakum told me that they didn’t know anything about Kepari Leniata’s murder or the murders that came before and after hers. They stared at me, or they laughed, or they answered derisively in creole. To them, I was an interloper, someone outside the circular, self-perpetuating system of their belief. It was pointless to talk to me.

I was reminded of something Father Gibbs, Monica, John and Marciana—practically everyone else I met in PNG—had told me: Sorcery works. Sorcery works in that it will harm you if you believe it can harm you. In much the same way, a witch hunt works, insofar as its perpetrators believe in what they are doing. So long as the perpetrators believe in their scapegoat’s guilt, they aren’t killing one among them—they are coming together to solve a problem, experiencing the closeness born of complicity. This may be the most important graf in the story. Does it go back to your French philosopher? I didn’t want to come with this framework or mode of understanding and try to shoehorn PNG into it, but what astounded me was both the fact of how widespread the belief was, the totality of it (even the Prime Minister believed in witchcraft, Papua New Guinean scholars were looking into it as a cultural artifact), and also within that, it’s very difficult to conceive of that thing not being true. Certainly when you’ve been accused of witchcraft, and you’re in the middle, that’s when the epiphany hits you that this is all bullshit, a way of maintaining a social order and a coherent moral universe. So I expected that to be true, but that wasn’t really even the case. When I was hanging out at the U.N. beachside resort, I was hanging out with all the native Papua New Guineans who were working to combat gender-related violence, I remember there was one young woman. She had studied abroad in New York City and was as normal as could be, and I remember her being like, ‘Yeah, the first time I saw a man stoned to death for being a witch, he was a guy who owned a coffee farm and was very rich. There was a lot of resentment in the community for him and what were thought to be ill-gotten gains.” In my mind, I was thinking, sure, this makes sense, it’s going to be the false accusation and the redistribution of wealth will come about. It’s this quasi-Rene Girardian thing playing out. Then she was like, “Yeah, so he was a witch, so we killed him.” So I felt like there were a lot of congruences, but if I had tried to apply that theory of mimetic violence to PNG, it would have been forcing it into a framework that didn’t exactly fit. So it didn’t exactly conform to those expectations.

Was Kepari Leniata a witch? She clearly cast some kind of spell over her community.

Quickly, I got back into the police van. A misty rain began to swirl. People were streaming around the highway, hurrying for shelter ahead of night. A little ways outside of Hagen, a group of villagers had strung a downed power line across the highway. They were massed around it, blocking the road, demanding a toll. Monica told me to lie on the floor underneath the bench seat. I stayed that way for a while, smelling the smoky, loamy, strangely Scotch-like aroma of damp fires smoldering amid the mountains.

V.

During one of our last evenings together, Monica and I shared many cans of SP beer while sitting on the waterfront porch of a hotel south of Moresby. The tide was lurching onto the plastic-littered beach, where small skiffs—used for dynamite fishing, Monica told me—rested on their sides. I asked if she’d ever considered leaving PNG. She said she has thought about moving in with a sister in Australia, but ultimately she couldn’t see herself abandoning her homeland. Monica then asked me about America. Specifically, about the Salem witch trials.

I told her that, no, I didn’t think witch hunts were necessarily some barbarous relic of an ignorant past. I considered them a perennial, recurrent phenomenon. In the West, witch hunts have coincided with periods of change and instability. They can occur when one sociological, economic, religious or political framework displaces another. The decline of feudalism, the waning of the Roman Catholic Church, the decimation of Europe’s population by the plague, the threat to the American way of life posed by independent women on the frontier, the threat to the American way of life posed by Communism—all of these things precipitated witch hunts. I would like to hear more about this. Do you also not think that the developed world has evolved, but not exterminated, witch hunting? Is scapegoating in general not a less violent, but still destructive, form of this? That’s a funny way of putting it, kind of like when people are the victims of institutional racism, having been so beaten down by institutional racism, will just say, like, “It’s actually refreshing when someone says the slur right to my face.” Like I was talking about before, there were several drafts of this, maybe a dozen in all, but in earlier ones I had this grand idea of quoting Solzhenitsyn and all the rest of the stuff. Obviously, I do believe there are certain ineradicable human behaviors, and that this is one of them that humans have. I’m sure I will find a convenient locus of blame for things or people messing up my life, rather than blaming myself, as everyone does all the time. When I was writing this, I didn’t want to come into the story with any preconceived notion of what I thought the second level of this story would be, but as I was writing I thought to myself, “Oh yeah, it’s kind of interesting to write about something so bald-faced, something that’s such a fundamental part of every society that it’s really hard to talk about write about.” It seems so obvious and yet so not.

Witch hunts, I said, were like earthquakes and mountain ranges. They popped up in times of seismic change.

What I wanted to know was: What had happened in that moment when she was accused?

Monica looked down and kicked off her sandals, wiping her small, bare feet over the few grains of sand that lay scattered across the cracked cement. “It changed my mindset completely,” she said. It had been her honest-to-God conversion moment. When she found herself at the center of her village, in the middle of her family and neighbors, her most loved ones, with all of them pointing their fingers at her—only then could she see with absolute clarity that the whole mechanism was a sham. The violence being done to her in the name of justice, or the greater good, or the cosmic order was not at all distinct from the violence and suffering it hoped to suppress.

She finally understood that misfortune was oftentimes random, with no one agent behind it, and that this was perhaps more frightening than the prospect of witches. She also understood that she would most likely spend the rest of her life alone, physically and spiritually. Over the course of three decades, Monica had amassed property, family and friends—only to have those same family and friends suddenly cast her out, confiscate her property and invalidate her past life. Her three children still loved her, but her other relatives considered her subhuman. “When my husband dies,” she said, “I know they will come for me.”

The two of us watched as the sun halved itself on the horizon line. “We have to do a lot of work in this country,” she said. “There has to be a lot of educational programs to change the mindset of the upcoming youth.”

PNG’s young people needed to learn that diseases are caused by germs, she said, and that tragedy cannot always be explained. Such knowledge—part and parcel of the Westernization occurring so rapidly throughout the country—would certainly go a long way toward ending the scapegoating of witches. Yet that education will take many years to achieve. Fewer than 60 percent of the PNG children who start primary school finish it, and only about 10 percent enroll in high school. PNG has some universities—but their graduates tend to leave the country for better-paying work overseas.

“Do you think you’ll live to see the change?” I asked Monica.

“It will take generations for it to change,” she said solemnly. She told me that right now, maybe five out of every 100 PNGers had come to disbelieve witchcraft. That meant the next generation might have 10 disbelievers for every 90 witch hunters, and 20 in the generation after that and so on.

I told her that I, personally, believed witch hunting might come to an end much sooner than that. I had a pessimistic kind of optimism about PNG, I said.

In the span of a century, the West has introduced more change than PNG’s traditional system can handle. Globalization, democracy, internal displacement, the jelasy inherent to consumer capitalism—these have inundated the scapegoating mechanism, which is now working more ferociously than it ever has. But the perverse silver lining about this is the ritual of killing witches no longer effects the cohesion and coherence that it once did. The collateral damage—the death, dislocation and scorched earth that used to impact only the witch—is spilling outwards, finally outweighing the ritual’s social utility.

Monica chortled at my explanation. “I don’t know,” she said. The theorizing didn’t seem to interest her. She had her mission. She was going to disregard her own suffering and alleviate others’, one witch at a time, because this was all she could do. Alone, she couldn’t make her kinsmen see themselves as she saw them; she couldn’t make them understand that it is they who stand accused.

As the wavering sun sank completely below the waves, a streak of neon light flared across the water—an atmospheric phenomenon known as the “green flash.” “Look at that!” Monica exclaimed. “Look! It’s really beautiful!”

We watched in silence as the green dissipated. Then she said, “If a stranger saw this, he’d say, ‘Oh, this is where the witches are going.’”

Darkness fell like a curtain. Monica laughed herself hoarse. You started with such a shock of violence, then end on this funny, almost tender moment. Was there any symmetry — or anti-symmetry — to that? Or had the story, for you, simply finished? Oh, it was totally my editor, stopping me from being either really fucking sentimental or really stupidly philosophical, just trying to tie my hands behind my back as much as possible. I thought that in all of this, one of the things that struck me the most was Monica’s indefatigability, her true sainthood. Long after I left, Monica is still at work on these issues. I can parachute in and spend three weeks and try to make a narrative, but whatever work my narrative is doing for her, she’s still there in PNG doing this work. I wanted to highlight that fact. And also, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, I have come to see this with rose-colored glasses, but part of me likes the idea of ending with an accused witch, cackling as the sun goes down. Everything sans broomstick. The inversion of what people believe her to be, this rogue element of pure goodness, still cackling as if she was this Halloween witch. But mostly it was leaving with the idea that this would be a long, long process. Shamefully I haven’t kept up with PNG as I should have, but it was always my belief that things would get much worse before they got better, and I kept trying to steer or question Monica on that, that they would have to get really bad for people to finally see that all these killings don’t change anything. She wasn’t hearing any of that. She was like an NFL player in the locker room saying she’s going to take it one day at a time, go out every day and give it my all. So I also wanted to end on that kind of idea.

Why is it great? Chivers just won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his magazine profile of Sam Siatta, a Marine suffering from PTSD. How did he make a story that has been told many times before so compelling? One reason is the heartbreaking use of the young man’s journal. Sometimes tough-guy but much more often seeming like the diary of a little boy who has been taught to do something unspeakable, Siatta’s own words form the spine of the piece. In the sentence above, he is Shakespearean in his pain, a Lady Macbeth of the Afghan war.

It’s hard, I know, to make a case for gonzo journalism in an age when reality is beset by exaggeration, even lies. And yet I’ve found myself drawn back to the work of Hunter S. Thompson, who  had an uncanny ability to use hyperbole as journalistic strategy.

Thompson’s adventures in Las Vegas are chaotic not because of him but because of us, because this is the monument we have built to our prurience and half-articulated desires. In such a landscape, Thompson comes across as the most honest person around.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” he opens “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which remains, 45 years after it was published in book form, perhaps his signature work. “I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …’ And then suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.”

The bats, of course, are a hallucination — but they are also terrifyingly, fundamentally real, and their presence feels like a necessity, rendering the account more pointed (and, in a way, more accurate) than a traditional report. How, Thompson is asking, do we evoke the feeling of a situation? How do we recreate not only the raw facts of a moment or an incident, but also its sensibility?

“Fear and Loathing” is on my mind because I am living this winter and spring in Las Vegas, which he skewered, memorably, in the piece. Assigned to cover an off-road motorcycle race by Sports Illustrated, Thompson instead produced something weirder, what he called “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.” As with so many of his pronouncements, this one is rife with overstatement. It also happens to be true.

“Just one hour ago,” his alter ego Raoul Duke reminds his Samoan attorney (a character based on lawyer and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta), “we were sitting over there in that stinking baiginio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned — and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all. … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

If “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is recalled at all these days, it’s mostly for its excess, which is prodigious, to say the least. “We had two bags of grass,” Thompson admits at the outset, “seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.” When I encountered the book in the late 1970s, as a teenager infatuated with the counterculture, I couldn’t see past those details. Later, I couldn’t see past them in a different way, dismissing Thompson’s work as self-indulgent, a portrait of the artist as disordered soul.

And yet, to reread “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” at a distance of 40 years is to see anew the metaphor Thompson is creating, the echo between his inner disorientation and that of the nation through which he moves. Partly, this has to do with the promise of the 1960s, which lingers beneath the surface like a psychic archetype.

“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning,” the author writes of San Francisco in that decade. “… Our energy would simply prevail.” Still, from the perspective of the Nixon years, he understands this was an illusion — or even worse, a lie. “So now,” he concludes, in one of the book’s most  devastating passages, “less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

For Thompson, Las Vegas is an ideal place to see that water mark because it is the end of the road, the terminus point, the place the American Dream has come to die. Glitz and graft and cheap thrills, institutionalized corruption in the service of greed and easy decadence. “A little bit of this town goes a very long way,” he insists. “After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years. Some people say they like it — but then some people like Nixon, too. He would have made a perfect Mayor for this town; with John Mitchell as Sheriff and Agnew as Master of Sewers.”  What’s left unstated, although vividly clear, is that he is writing as a true believer, an American patriot, whose rage is fueled not by anarchy but disappointment.

Thompson’s adventures in Las Vegas, then, are chaotic not because of him but because of us, because this is the monument we have built to our prurience and half-articulated desires. In such a landscape, Thompson comes across as the most honest person around. He may be out of control, but at least he knows it; in a country going off the rails, there is no other response. If that were true in 1971, just think how true it must be now. “What is sane?’ Thompson wonders. “Especially here in ‘our own country’ — in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now.” Later, he describes an unnamed astronaut, upset at a Canadian musician for singing un-American songs, “muttering darkly about using his influence to ‘get something done, damn quick,’ about the Immigration Statutes.” The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Again, what makes this work is context, the sense that hyperbole is the only reasonable reaction to a hyperbolic age. Thompson grounds even his most scabrous fantasies in recognizable reality. Late in the book, as his paranoia mounts and he is sure he’s about to be arrested, he turns “into the early morning traffic on Paradise Road.” Then, he takes “a fast right on Russell, then a left onto Maryland Parkway … and suddenly I was cruising in warm anonymity past the campus of the University of Las Vegas.” This is my neighborhood, and to see it emerge in the midst of the madness is like stumbling upon a master clue. It’s not the tumult, in other words, that is most trenchant about “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas;” it’s that no account could possibly be tumultuous enough. Partly, this has to do with the city, but more with the culture that has built it as a shrine. In the face of such excess, what else can he offer but more excess. This is the new American Dream. “I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger,” Thompson tells us, “… a man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”

This week, journalists had their version of the Oscars (minus the red carpet and catty remarks about who-wore-what). The Pulitzer announcements are always an electric moment in a newsroom.  Back in the old days, we’d gather around one designated computer and wait for the AP bulletins; now, the Pulitzer gang live-streams, and live-tweets, the winners. But one thing hasn’t changed: It’s wonderful when the winner in even the Breaking News category has stories that take their cues from literary journalism. I highlight some of the winners below, but first, some cool things on Storyboard this week:

Kent Russell and “They Burn Witches Here.” Contributor Davis Harper thinks the lede to this piece about real-life witch hunts is the most shocking one he’s ever read. Yeah, it’s pretty blood-curdling. Russell wrote the story for The Huffington Post’s digital magazine, Highline (hurrah — more of these, please). He says, “I had a graduate school professor, David Samuels, and his advice was if you can think of something kind of nuts and build a realistic idea of it in your mind, it probably exists in the world somewhere. I’ve often used that as a springing-off point.”

The soundtrack: “Burn the Witch,” by Radiohead. I’m not sure a song has ever fit a story better. “Stay in the shadows/Cheer at the gallows/This is a roundup.”

One Great Sentence

“I go to sleep every night knowing I have the blood of so many on my hands and no amount of soap could ever wash these stains away.”

C.J. Chivers, “The Fighter,” The New York Times Magazine, December 28, 2016. Read why we think it’s great.

Hunter S. Thompson and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” I found it hard to believe we’d never done a “Why’s This So Good?” piece on this ur-Thompson story when David Ulin pitched doing an essay against the backdrop of our current unreality reality. (Prescient? “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”) Ulin writes, “To reread ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ at a distance of 40 years is to see anew the metaphor Thompson is creating, the echo between his inner disorientation and that of the nation through which he moves.”

The soundtrack: “Viva Las Vegas,” by Elvis Presley. I don’t remember this song being such a fever dream. You get the discombobulating feeling that the backing music has been speeded up to play at .45 speed while Elvis’ vocals are at .33 (until the end, when he gets pretty helium-powered himself).

What I’m reading online: As I said in the intro, I’d like to spotlight some of the best storytelling found in this week’s Pulitzer winners.

• Oakland’s East Bay Times won the Breaking News category for its coverage of the “Ghost Ship” fire.  The winning package has this well-told reconstruction of the deadly inferno, including a final text (will those ever fail to haunt?) from a daughter to her mother: “I love you. I’m going to die, Mom.”
• In case you didn’t click on the One Great Sentence above, it’s from The New York Times Magazine piece that won C.J. Chivers the Pulitzer for Feature Writing. The subject, PTSD, has sadly become a stock feature topic; Chivers fills the story with so much detail and pathos, it seems like we’ve never read one before.
• The Salt Lake Tribune won the Local Reporting Pulitzer for its series of stories about the horrible treatment of sexual abuse victims at Brigham Young University, whose Honor Code Office sounds a little like Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. This piece by Erin Alberty is eye-opening.
• The New York Times won the International Reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and the sinister apparatus that has built up around him. The most chilling story is this one by Andrew Kramer about the growing body count of those who dare defy the Kremlin.

What’s on my bedside table: “South and West,” by Joan Didion. This book proves that I will read anything by Didion. It’s a slim volume of notes that Didion wrote (no doubt on the typewriter she traveled with) on trips across the South and in California. They feel a bit scant, even stillborn. But she still amazes with her observational skills. Has there ever been a better eavesdropper in journalism? And this line, about a Gulf coast resort laid bare by a hurricane, is wonderful: “But even in the good years there must have been an uneasiness there. They sat on those porches and waited for something to happen.”

What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “Dusty in Memphis,” by Dusty Springfield. I thought this might make a nice companion for the Didion book. Of course, it outshines the book by a long shot. It’s in my Top 20 albums (and her beehive is in my Top 20 pop-star hairstyles). Feeling down? Put on “Son of a Preacher Man.”

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

Sometimes the idea for a book springs from what you don’t know.

David Grann had never heard of the “Osage Murders” until a historian he was talking to mentioned the series of mysterious deaths among members of the wealthy Osage tribe in early 20th century Oklahoma.

When I learned about these crimes several years ago, I was shocked that, like so many Americans, I had never learned about them in school or read about them in books.

Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker and something of a history writer himself, couldn’t believe that the sinister campaign targeting the oil beneath the Osage reservation land was so little known.  So he started looking into the killings.

There wasn’t much online. No one seemed to have told the victims’ story in a comprehensive way, even though, as Grann puts it, the campaign was “one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.”

He started sending off requests to places where documents about the murders might be stored. Slowly they arrived and began to pile up in the corner of his office. When he finally looked through them, he could see they told an epic story of racial injustice and greed, in which white settlers positioned themselves to inherit mineral rights from tribe members, whom they then killed.

Grann got on a plane to Tulsa and drove out to Pawhuska, where he found the Osage Nation Museum. There he stood in front of a 1924 photo of the entire tribe gathered with white settlers. But oddly, a piece of the photo that had been cut out. When he asked the museum director about it, she pointed to the blank space and said, “The devil was standing right there.”

Grann knew then he had to write the book that became “Killers of the Flower Moon,” published this month.

I asked him a few questions about the process.

Both “Killers of the Flower Moon” and your previous book, “The Lost City of Z,” [about the explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925] are historical narratives mixed with some first person, but they’re also different kinds of stories. Do you see them as having anything in common?

Both books have some element of intrigue. “The Lost City of Z” probes a great exploration mystery of the 20th century, and in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I try to peel back the layers of a murder mystery. But, in most respects, they are very different—in subject matter, worlds and narrative structure. Every time I start a new project, I want to be investigating something new, with its own set of challenges and rewards.

You’ve said there are three things you need to write a book. What are those things? 

I haven’t done enough books to have any fixed rules. But at least with “The Lost City of Z” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” I looked for at least three crucial elements before beginning. The first is the most obvious but also the hardest to find—and that is a story worth telling. Is the subject matter gripping? Are the people involved interesting? Are there things to discover along the way? I also want to make sure the story is about something larger than just the particulars. “The Lost City of Z” is a tale of adventure, but it is also fundamentally about whether an ancient civilization could exist in the Amazon and how such a discovery would transform our understanding of what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a crime story with many twists and turns, but ultimately it’s about a grave racial injustice and about the formation of the United States as a country.

The second critical element I look for is whether there is enough source material. As a nonfiction writer, there are lots of stories I would love to tell, but I often can’t because there’s simply not enough living sources or historical records. In the case of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I spent months trying to assess what source material existed. I sent letters to courthouses and police departments. Using the Freedom of Information Act, I filed requests for documents with the FBI and other government agencies.  While I was waiting for a response, I worked on other stories at The New Yorker. As materials began to trickle in, I would put them in the corner of my office and not even glance at them. Finally, after nearly a year, I began to comb through these materials. They were only a fraction of what I would need to write the book, but they gave me the confidence to commit to the project, which would take me nearly another four years to complete.

The final element that went into my decision to do a book is less rational. It’s whether, at some emotional level, I feel compelled to tell this story. I know how long books take, and if I don’t feel that need—indeed, even a compulsion—I’ll lose my mind and undoubtedly write a terrible book.

One of the challenges of writing historical (or any) nonfiction is finding a solid narrative thread. For this book, you had almost endless characters and murders to choose from. How did you know when you’d found the right ones for the book?

You asked me about the three things I generally need to do a book. In the case of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” there was a fourth element that was essential, which was coming up with a structure. Early on, I had no idea how to tell the story; it spanned so many years and there were so many characters and investigations, I was overwhelmed. And what I didn’t want to do is just write a book cataloguing the dead. I wanted to make sure that there was a deep sense of who these people were, how they lived, how they felt. And it was only when I resolved the structure—telling the story in three separate chronicles, each largely from a different individual’s perspective—that I felt that I could concentrate on the material and write the book.

The first chronicle is told largely from the perspective of an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart, whose family had become a prime target of the murder conspiracy. The second chronicle is told from the perspective of one of the investigators. And the third chronicle is told from my perspective in the present. This structure also allowed me to deepen one of the themes of the book, which is that each of us are often only able to glimpse part of history as it is unfolding; only with time does a fuller portrait emerge, and even then, there are parts that elude us.

Some of the most valuable material for this book you found by going to archives yourself, and by being in Osage County talking to people—good old-fashioned reporting. Do you have any thoughts on the value of real-world reporting, versus online reporting, for writers these days?

Research online can help you identify possible archives or people involved in a story. But then I always try to meet with people involved and visit the archives that might contain documents. I find you get so much more information that way. When I was researching “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I spent weeks visiting a branch of the National Archives, in Texas. Each day, I would pull boxes that I thought might contain materials related to the case. Much of the time I turned up nothing of interest and was miserably bored, and then suddenly I would open a box and discover something revelatory. One time I found the secret grand jury testimony from many of the murder cases, which was not identified in a catalogue and I didn’t even know existed. During the research for the book, I also tried to find descendants of both the victims and the murderers. These sources were critical in allowing me not only to learn more about what happened in the past, but also to understand how this history still played out in the present.

The final element that went into my decision to do a book is less rational. It’s whether, at some emotional level, I feel compelled to tell this story. I know how long books take, and if I don’t feel that need—indeed, even a compulsion—I’ll lose my mind and undoubtedly write a terrible book.

You say there was “a culture of systematic murder” in Osage County during what the Osage call the “Reign of Terror.” When did that become apparent?

Before long, I got some hints of it from the Osage I spoke to. I also read Dennis McAuliffe’s excellent memoir, “The Deaths of Sybil Bolton,” which was published in 1994 and detailed his investigation into the mysterious death of his Osage grandmother. He documents how she, too, was murdered for her oil money during the Reign of Terror. Yet her case had never been probed by the FBI or been included in the official tally of murders. So early on I knew there were additional leads I needed to pursue. But it was only over many years, as I spoke to descendants of previously unknown victims and pored over archival materials, that I had sense of the breadth of this systematic campaign of murder.

Do you have any thoughts on why this dark chapter in American history was forgotten in the larger (non-Native) American culture?

When I learned about these crimes several years ago, I was shocked that, like so many Americans, I had never learned about them in school or read about them in books. After the FBI’s investigation, in the 1920s, the crimes—or at least some of them—were well known. But over time they faded from the headlines. And I think that, just as many of the crimes were covered up because of racial prejudice, this chapter of history was neglected because of prejudice.

How do things stand today in Osage County, with regard to the Reign of Terror?  

The Osage I spoke to still remember the victims and decorate their graves. Some of them still try to investigate unsolved cases to try identify the perpetrators. Unlike so many Americans, they cannot forget what transpired.

Why is it great? Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) was a clerk in the French War Office during World War I, a literary editor, art dealer, anarchist and journalist. While working for Le Matin in 1906, he wrote what came to be known as “Novels in Three Lines”: brief notices of local news events—usually brawls, accidents, murders or suicides—that took up no more than three lines of newspaper print. A fairly typical example is: “On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.” Fénéon’s three-liners are so great because they compress so much story into so little space. In relating Barcantier’s foiled suicide attempt, Fénéon depicts a vivid, detailed incident with just a few deft strokes and some artful syntax, suggesting a rich back story. Fénéon is Edward Gorey in prose: macabre, economical, darkly funny. His sentences are remarkable for at once being so workmanlike (they were written as filler to make the columns fit) and so accomplished at evoking haunting, unforgettable scenes.