Anne Helen Petersen has spent the last year covering Trump rallies and protests, the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline camp at Standing Rock, crowd-funded healthcare, survivalist “preppers” and what it means when famous men take off their shirts — just to name a few slices of her expansive range of subjects as a senior culture writer at Buzzfeed.

I can get people to talk to me because I can say, “I understand what it’s like to be misrepresented on the national level, and I want to get this story right.”

She treats every one of them seriously, dissecting moments and movements into layers of meaning, history and context. This search for understanding, Petersen says, is more useful than the ubiquitous calls for empathy that have sprung up in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. She’s looking for clarity, not compassion.

In January, as white nationalists threatened to descend on the idyllic ski town of Whitefish, Montana, Petersen made her way out west to see what was happening for herself. In a deeply researched piece about the march that didn’t happen, she untangles the threads of what did play out in Whitefish — and how recent decades set the stage for it.

Her piece takes an unflinching look at the contradictions in Whitefish and in the West: the white supremacist publication the Daily Stormer and the local group Love Lives Here, and how the region gave rise and responded to both. She focused on this town of fewer than 7,000 people — but makes clear that the currents that collided in January are not unique to Whitefish.

Petersen and I spoke by Skype about her reporting process and philosophy, what a journalist’s responsibility is, and whether it’s possible to write about the rural West while living in an East Coast city. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation follows.

This piece offered a lot of context and voices on the ground, but it reads as pretty personal, too. How did you decide to work on this story?

I have been thinking about neo-Nazis in the Pacific Northwest for decades. Growing up in northern Idaho, the neo-Nazis and the Aryan Nation specifically were always something that was in my backyard — not literally, but within an hour. I was always frustrated, because in the Northwest, if you say “northern Idaho,” a lot of people still say, “Oh, neo-Nazis.” I didn’t realize that people outside of the Pacific Northwest didn’t have that sort of conflation! I was mad too — Hayden Lake, where they were in northern Idaho, is one of the most beautiful places in the Pacific Northwest, and they’d laid claim to this most exquisite place.

I think our responsibility as reporters is to continue to report on this stuff, but to also point out to readers the ways in which this speech is dangerous, this speech threatens the fundamentals of our democracy, but that at the same time, the freedom to make that speech is fundamental to our democracy.

When I saw that this was happening in Whitefish, a place where I had gone skiing many times growing up, I thought — there’s a long history of this, but at the same time, how do you stand up against this sort of bigotry and denounce it while a lot of people who live in the surrounding area also voted for Trump and can also can be discriminatory or racist in their dealings with Native Americans in particular?

I knew that I was uniquely equipped in some ways to do a national story on Whitefish. There has been a lot of really good reporting in the area, but of the reporting I’ve seen from The New York Times and other outlets, none of it was very knowledgeable of the context of the long history of hate groups in the Pacific Northwest and how Whitefish itself is this little liberal enclave in a county that does not necessarily believe the same things. I knew that I could — I call it sometimes playing my Idaho card. I can get people to talk to me because I can say, “I understand what it’s like to be misrepresented on the national level, and I want to get this story right.”

I did a lot of covering Trump rallies and that sort of thing, and I also recognize that my position as a white straight woman affords me a feeling of safety that a lot of my colleagues didn’t necessarily have. And so I felt like it was important for me, or someone like me, who could go to a Trump rally and not feel unsafe, to do that work.

You live in New York, where Buzzfeed is based. How much does your experience in and knowledge of the West come up in your reporting, especially in places that have recently been recognized as overlooked?

A lot it is just being familiar with and knowing how to talk to and not being personally offended by people believing something different than you do. I grew up surrounded by Republicans. I think there is sometimes a knee-jerk reaction of, “Oh God, I couldn’t go to a Trump rally, those people are crazy!” But for me, it was just like going to church. It was like going to hang out with the parents of the people I went to high school with. I know these people. I know how to talk to them, I know how to get them to talk to me, and I think there’s a posture that you can take that isn’t like, you’re a weird exotic animal — it’s just “you’re a person.”

There is a way that Montana lives in the popular imaginary. There is a way that West Virginia lives in the popular imaginary. So how as reporters can we add nuance to that understanding? That takes in-depth, lengthy reporting. That’s not just parachute reporting. That’s not just talking to a couple people on the phone. It’s being there. It’s also, I think, hiring people in your newsroom who can navigate those spaces. That’s part of the conversation moving forward: a lot of places have shut down their regional bureaus, so different leading publications are thinking of how to reinvigorate this close, rigorous, nuanced reporting in different areas. Can I be the rural Western reporter and still live in New York? Is that possible? That’s kind of my role right now. And even if I don’t live in New York — can I do it from Seattle? Is that still not actually doing it? But at the same time, what is lost when you’re not in the newsroom every day? There’s a real vitality to being in a national newsroom. The conversations that go on — what is lost when you move away from that too?

I’m curious about what kind of reporting you did from a distance before you got to Montana.

I read a lot on Southern Poverty Law Center’s homepage. They are such an amazing resource in terms of really detailed histories of various hate groups. They have collected passages from different sermons from these pastors. They monitor chatrooms to see the different topics of conversation. It’s a very reliably and accurately sourced compilation of why these groups are considered hate groups, or dangerous groups — they have different designations. I did a lot of reading on the history of different hate groups in the Pacific Northwest. There are a couple of different articles that are really smart about the reasons why both neo-Nazism and what’s called the liberty groups, which are more about back to the land, return-to-arms militarism, converged in the Northwest.

And then just trying to untangle the series of events that happened leading up to the threat from the Daily Stormer. That meant not just, ugh, reading the Daily Stormer, going through all the comments on that site, which is just a cesspool, but also reading all of these local articles. There really was this pretty tangled web.

There are a lot of big questions right now about freedom of speech for journalists and also the “alt-right.” What do you think is important, what do you think is threatened, and how does that all of that relate to people not believing anything anymore?

It’s hard. I was reading about everything that happened at Middlebury [where student protesters disrupted a speech by conservative writer Charles Murray] and what happened at Berkeley [where protesters led the school to cancel a speech by former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos], and I think there is a really fine line. I think the Daily Stormer should have been allowed to march — that is their freedom of assembly. There were undue restrictions. I don’t think that was happening with Milo at Berkeley, where his planned speech was going to cause harm. He was going to name names of people at Berkeley who could be deported under Trump; that’s not freedom of speech, that’s actually targeted hate speech. I think our responsibility as reporters is to continue to report on this stuff, but to also point out to readers the ways in which this speech is dangerous, this speech threatens the fundamentals of our democracy, but that at the same time, the freedom to make that speech is fundamental to our democracy.

What about the question of bias in journalism? Where’s the line between pointing out why a travel ban is illegal, for example, and losing an audience that way, losing readers you could otherwise educate or inform?

That’s really hard, and it’s especially hard when our president has said that entire swaths of media are fake news based on just the name of the publication — including Buzzfeed. I think that part of this discussion is not so much about ideological perspectives but regional perspectives and identity perspectives. Empathy has been thrown around way too much. It’s not that you’re trying to gain empathy for a person so much as tell their story in a way that feels real and legitimate and that will allow people to see them as people.

Should I have tried harder to talk with the various hate groups that were in Whitefish? Or is it more interesting to tell the story of the town that’s trying to resist these hate groups?

My inclination is to talk about the larger macro issues through looking at the stories of these individuals, but doing it not just as parachute journalism. Actually investing in trying to paint a realistic portrait of a community and the ideological viewpoints that exist in that community — that seems really important to me, and that seems like a way you cannot alienate potential swaths of your audience. But that’s the difficult work.

The theme of America and race — and, unfortunately, hatred and even murder — runs through this week’s posts. The Osage Indians who were systematically killed for their oil in David Grann’s book. The white supremacists who wanted to claim a Montana town as their own. And, in a much gentler way, the difficult dance of race relations in the 1970s Brooklyn of a Jonathan Lethem novel.

David Grann and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” This book by the New Yorker writer is already getting a lot of buzz in its first week of publication. Part of that is his reputation, but part of it is the “how could we not know about this?” effect. Grann admits in this Q&A with Frank Bures that even he was stunned that he had never heard of the systematic murder campaign against Osage Indians who had gotten fabulously wealthy from the oil beneath them in the early 20th century. Grann says, ” 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.”

The soundtrack: “Black Gold,” by Foals. “They buried the gold, your ancestry’s sold and left/Just the residue.” Recommended band.

One Great Sentence

“Barcantier, of Le Kremlin, who had jumped in the river, tried in vain to throttle, aided by his Great Dane, the meddler who was dragging him out.”

Félix Fénéon, Le Matin, 1906. Read why we think it’s great.

Anne Helen Petersen and the white supremacists who came for Whitefish. In the wake of the election of President Trump and all the hand-wringing over journalists being stuck in their coastal bubbles, contributor Olga Kreimer’s discussion with BuzzFeed writer Petersen seemed particularly relevant. Petersen talks about growing up in the West, and how that informs her reporting, even though she’s based in New York. She says, “I can get people to talk to me because I can say, “I understand what it’s like to be misrepresented on the national level, and I want to get this story right.'”

The soundtrack: “Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” by the Pretenders. The song (a cover of the Persuaders hit) is about relationships, but it could easily apply to the thin line running down Main Street in Whitefish between the white supremacists and those who defended their town against the hate.

What I’m reading online: I know it’s a bit of cliché, but I love vintage VW buses. Some friends and I even rented one for a camping trip. So of course I was going to read the Rachel Monroe piece in The New Yorker called #VanLife, the Bohemian Social Media Movement. It’s so much deeper than the name suggests, capturing the arc of (brief) idealism, selling out, rationalizations and cynicism in a telegenic couple’s Instagram journey.

Another image-based story grabbed me, not the least because I’ve seen the images in question in person. Belfast, Maine, painter Linden Frederick has created a stunning series of artworks, “Night Stories,” that are very Hopper-esque in their outside-looking-in voyeurism. Like with Hopper’s paintings, they invite the viewer to create a story from the things seen and unseen. What’s tremendous about this series is that he enlisted an impressive cadre of top fiction writers to do just that. I cannot wait to read the stories and see the paintings in a museum setting. This project is one of my favorites in recent memory.

And you know when you read one of those stories that you wish went on longer? That was the case with “I’m a goner: El Faro’s last hours,” by Associated Press writer Jason Dearen. In it, he pieces together the final hours of a freighter ship that sank in a hurricane two years ago, killing everyone aboard, a kind of “Perfect Storm” writ large.  I would have read something twice as long, weaving in more of the crew’s back stories.

What’s on my bedside table: I’m heading down to Brooklyn this weekend, so I’m finally reading a novel that people have recommended to me for years: “The Fortress of Solitude,” by Jonathan Lethem. It’s about a boy growing up in the Boerum Hill area of Brooklyn in the 1970s, long before the borough was hipster central. The novel is a thing of beauty, full of humor and sorrow and, most of all, heart. Here’s just one sample of the humor that also manages to capture the feeling of growing up white in the neighborhood: “You could practically feel Robert measuring Arthur’s neck for a yoke, like Wile E. Coyote replacing the Roadrunner with a roast chicken in his mind’s eye.”

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: “Loaded,” by The Velvet Underground.  Going for a New York theme this week. I’m one of the generation that got turned on to the Velvet Underground by R.E.M. (Same for the Byrds.) I just read that despite the pot smoke coming from the subway on the cover, the title allegedly comes from Atlantic Records honcho Ahmet Ertegun asking for “loads of hits.” I still find it hard to believe “Sweet Jane” wasn’t one.

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.

Last year, Malcolm Gay, an arts reporter at The Boston Globe, stumbled across the seemingly impossible: an untold story about the Holocaust.

There’s an inheritance that was lost and can never be recovered. That to me was one of the real tragedies this story highlights.

It started with a call from Robert Berkowitz, a psychiatrist and amateur pianist from outside Boston. Since childhood, Berkowitz had heard his mother, Pauline Herzek, talk about her romance with Lajos Delej, a promising young pianist and composer in her native Hungary. By his mother’s account, Delej had been killed after going to look for her in a Jewish ghetto in Budapest.

Berkowitz didn’t know how much credence to give the story. His searches online and in Holocaust museum records had yielded nothing, and he started to think the tale may have been a myth that comforted his mother through Auschwitz and immigration. Then in 2015, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., he tried a different spelling: Delej instead of Deley, as he had always misspelled it. Bingo. He traced relatives to the U.S. and reached out to the Globe.

As Gay reported the story out, he came across hundreds of letters between Delej and his family that had never been translated or archived. The relatives Gay talked to hadn’t even read them. Suddenly Gay was reporting history in real time.

I asked him about his experience telling this remarkable story and writing about art that would’ve been.

You had an active role in investigating the story’s central mystery: Who was this forgotten composer, and was his relationship with Berkowitz’s mother as profound as she recalled? What was it like to piece together a story from artifacts you were deciphering rather than reporting on something already established?

At first this seemed to be a story that would closely hew to Robert’s experience. But as I continued to report, I learned that Delej’s sister’s family had this cache of 100 letters that hadn’t been translated or seen. All of a sudden, the entire story broadened because we had a previously unknown family history. I worked with a scholar named Michael Miller based in Hungary to translate the letters. I asked him to send me anything that was germane to Delej’s music or love life, or to how the family was trying to traverse war-torn Europe. This historical record had been silent since 1945. It’s quite different than sitting down and interviewing someone, or even going through a historical record that’s already known. But I think I was able to get a fairly three-dimensional vision of Delej and his family through this pretty robust correspondence.

Her love affair with Delej was clearly the defining romantic relationship of her life, shaping not only her subsequent marriages, but also her son’s childhood. Robert wanted to validate it before she dies.

What was it like reporting the story for two audiences: the readers and Berkowitz himself?

This was one of the most emotionally draining stories I’ve ever had to report. Robert was very involved. Over the four months I spent reporting, he’d call me and say: “What’s the update? Any news?” I didn’t tell him everything, because I wanted to surprise him to a certain extent. It was a complicated reporting process, because Robert had a lot of trust in me and had a lot riding on the story — he wanted it to be a parting gift to his mother [who was in her mid-90s]. He was deeply emotionally invested, but my first allegiance was to the story itself and to the readers. That created complications, because I couldn’t show Robert the story, and there were things I was pretty certain he wasn’t going to be entirely pleased with. He had these expectations, and when the facts cast doubt on them or didn’t exactly bear them out, it was a sensitive moment.

After everything you learned, what did you make of Pauline’s memory of the love story?

Robert would always say he was trying to bring Delej back to his mother. Her love affair with Delej was clearly the defining romantic relationship of her life, shaping not only her subsequent marriages, but also her son’s childhood. Robert wanted to validate it before she dies. He wanted to discover that Delej really was the talent she described and that their love was so great Delej was willing to risk his life to save it.

Of course, that made for some complicated reporting. Pauline believes the story so strongly. It’s nourished her through the years. But as I began to report her story more deeply, inconsistencies began to arise. The dates don’t quite line up, and the Budapest ghetto, where Delej would have gone to rescue her, is more than four hours away from where Pauline was being held. The inconsistencies don’t necessarily disprove Pauline’s story, but they do cast a measure of doubt upon it.

Maybe it’s journalistic heresy, but I’m not sure how much these inconsistencies matter. Her love for Delej is foundational for Pauline. It’s carried her for the past 70 years, deeply influencing her life and those around her. That takes on a weight of its own, and I actually think the ambiguity is one of the story’s richer aspects. As one of my sources put it, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if this whole thing turns out to be Pauline’s story?”

How did Berkowitz and his mother respond when they read the story?

Robert told me he had the story framed, and it now sits above his mother’s bed in her assisted-living facility. She feels people give her special treatment because of her relationship with Delej.

How did you approach weaving the past and present together as you wrote?

Reading the letters was incredibly beneficial from a narrative perspective and in trying to put the story in a larger context. These people were reacting to big historical movements that were affecting them either directly or they were feeling reverberations. I found it vitally important to contrast their parochial family life with the backdrop of this broader historical moment. Weaving the historical account of the Delej family with Robert’s experience was interesting. At one point Robert said that when he played Delej’s music, he felt they were playing together. Yet conceivably if Delej had lived, Robert never would have. There are these two almost mutually exclusive storylines that take place in different time periods, but are also intimately bound by the music and musical inheritance. The technical aspect of putting those narratives together seemed to unfold naturally.

How did you approach writing this story in a way that gives due to its emotional weight without being overly sentimental?

I tried to get out of the way. I think the story speaks for itself. My own writerly embellishments wouldn’t add to the emotional weight and would actually detract from it. I tried to have the telling of the story be invisible.

What was it like to write about art that could have been rather than art that exists?

You can’t exactly talk about a piece of work that wasn’t created, but you can talk about the music that wasn’t there to inform the coming generation. Toward the end of the story, James Conlon, who’s the music director of the Los Angeles Opera says, “The history of 20th-century music is written with an enormous omission.” When you listen to Delej’s music, you can hear his influences but you can also hear the growth. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Each generation of artists responds to the previous generation. When you wipe out a generation or two of artists, there’s this disconnect. Artists that came directly after the war responded to the absence. There’s an inheritance that was lost and can never be recovered. That to me was one of the real tragedies this story highlights.

Has this been optioned for a film yet?

We’re working on it.

Why is it great? I promise this is the last you’ll see of Springsteen on this site for the foreseeable future. But I had somehow missed this story by one of my favorite writers (and former co-worker on the LA Times’ foreign desk), Jeff Fleishman,  who sent me the piece after reading the recent Storyboard post on the singer as storyteller. First off, I know it’s five sentences. But it reads like one beautiful thought, crystallizing the loss of hope in the heartland that Springsteen has long written about. As a matter of fact, it reads like one of his lyrics. Beautiful.

Sitting across a dinner table in Mexico City back in 2009, Nathan Thornburgh and Matt Goulding hatched an idea. Thornburgh, a longtime foreign correspondent for Time magazine, and Goulding, a roving food writer and editor who pioneered the bestselling “Eat This, Not That” series for Men’s Health, had an idea for a travel website that would publish stories that alchemized their two principal interests: food and politics.

I foresee it being a gloriously independent and somewhat futile business for the years to come.

The resulting site, Roads & Kingdoms, is a testament to both co-founders’ journalistic vision (and the digital design sense of the third co-founder, Doug Hughmanick), as well as their stubbornness to stick with longform for longform’s sake.

These are young guys but firmly old media, and that dissonance may be the secret to their success. There are no ads or sponsored posts. Roads & Kingdoms traffics in old-school authenticity, an increasingly rare commodity on today’s web. Any R&K story must have what Thornburgh calls an “intramural element,” meaning it is not a story only about food, or war, or demagoguery or sports, but some combination of these foundational themes. This gives the site the initial look and feel of a traditional travel magazine, until the shot of adrenaline kicks in, followed by a healthy dose of ground-level grittiness.

After five years in business — a lifetime in the online journalism world — Roads & Kingdoms has widened its scope, padded its profit margin, bolstered its staff and added Anthony Bourdain as a contributing editor. At last month’s South By Southwest, the R&K team announced a new collaboration with Bourdain and CNN. With the recently launched digital site Explore Parts Unknown, the R&K team will go deeper into each episode of Bourdain’s hit food-and-politics travel show to provide a 360-degree view of each location Bourdain visits.

They’ve experienced all this growth while maintaining, as Thornburgh puts it, the feeling that “this, what we do, is personal to us.”

I spoke to Thornburgh over a series of phone conversations on one of his stopovers back at his home base in Brooklyn. We talked about the site as a whole, as well as the story in which he traveled to Peru and drank the powerful hallucinogen ayahuasca, which has long drawn seekers like William S. Burroughs to South America to partake in what the writer called “a complete derangement of the senses.” Lately, it has become the alternative medicine du jour, attracting everyone from tech tycoons to soldiers suffering from PTSD.

Thornburgh’s piece, which took him years to finish and covers, among other personal anguish, his grueling cancer treatment, perfectly encapsulates R&K’s strange — and strangely stirring — brew of entertainment, vulnerability, authority and storytelling that have become the site’s editorial hallmarks.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

It’s funny how there’s a lot of high-level worry about this industry, but sometimes you can just answer it with the same kind of approach that every small or midsized business has to take: Don’t spend a dollar you don’t earn. That’s surprisingly effective as a way of staying in business.

It seems like you have adhered to a unique editorial philosophy for the lifespan of the site. Is that true?

Have we stuck with it? Yeah. The level of fidelity has been super-high. That’s one of the things you win with your independence, and our kind of financially independent state. If we had large amounts of Silicon Valley money, then the business would have a very different trajectory, but every business model warps content on some level. You’re either going to go super-broad and hot-takey if you need to reach scale, or if you’re trying to go Hollywood scale and get stuff greenlighted, you’re only going to go with massive, deeply investigated stories. There are compromises everywhere. But I don’t worry about the partnership with CNN warping what we’re doing. R&K.com and all the R&K-stamped media, whether it’s the events or the podcast or the content, that’s all well within our control. I foresee it being a gloriously independent and somewhat futile business (laughs) for the years to come.

Looking back on the past five years, how do you think you’ve not only survived, but built a loyal audience?

Our voice is different, and I think probably custom-made almost for the internet and really our demographic. The key difference from what we do and traditional magazine-ing is that we don’t mind privileging the first person on some level to make sure our readers know who our writers are. It’s about establishing authority for the author. Part of that course is that we want to use writers who are local to the region they’re writing about, to find someone from that culture that they’re writing about, and can use that perspective in the story. That’s an important thing for readers these days, because the definitions of trust are different now than they used to be. It’s not a single, monotone, organizational voice. It’s about who are you and why are you telling this story. The length, and the desire to have every story we do reported from that place, it’s expensive, and hard to pull off, and the opposite of low-hanging fruit. That’s a really interesting challenge.

On a practical level, the thing that’s allowed us to survive is our deep fiscal conservatism. As a company, we’ve been very cautious, pay ourselves dirt and have a lot of sweat equity. We’re cautious. We haven’t made big bets on building a community hub, or something like that that is expensive and still very unproven. It’s funny how there’s a lot of high-level worry about this industry, but sometimes you can just answer it with the same kind of approach that every small or midsized business has to take: Don’t spend a dollar you don’t earn. That’s surprisingly effective as a way of staying in business.

Many people may know R&K best as one of Anthony Bourdain’s many side projects, and the site and he seem to have similar guiding philosophies. How did the relationship with him start?

Matt and I had both met him in previous jobs. One of my editing jobs at Time was to run the 10 Questions page, and I had picked Bourdain out. I didn’t know that much about him, but had seen “No Reservations” a couple times and thought he’d be outspoken and ready to go to print. He came by, and he was great. Interviewing celebrities is like one long humiliation. Whether it’s them or their handlers, there’s someone there to remind you that you are an insignificant blot, a stain on this man’s calendar. Tony was totally the opposite. I think he took the subway, had no entourage, spent all the time we needed. The guy spits fire. He knows how to talk like nobody I’ve ever met, but was also really interested in the work we were doing and the journalism. So I had a good impression from that.

We asked when we started it, “Who would be an ally for us in this march?” We had a launch party at SXSW when we started the website in 2012, and we sent Tony an email to ask him to come out. It was no high-ticket event — it was at my brother’s house — and we got an email immediately that said, “No.” We were super-excited. He emailed us back! From there, though, we’ve gotten a few yeses from him, which, if nothing else, show us that we were creatively like-minded. And I’ll say this about Tony: He’s a guy who does what he says. He’s always very forthright, and he’s not going to tell you pretty little nothings he doesn’t mean. Everything he has said that we wanted to do with R&K, he has done. Particularly for a man with so many obligations and demands on his time, to put follow-through at the top of his list of values, I really appreciate that about him.

What’s the pitching process for R&K like? I’ve pitched before, and I assume any other writing-oriented traveler (and there are many of us) has considered it as well. Is there an archetypal R&K contributor?

We have a stable of writers we love and go back to often, and certainly our editors here, part of their job is to look at the world and say: “This is happening here. How do we make this an R&K story?” However, we do work a lot with people who approach us through the website and are interested in what we’re doing. A lot of them do come from folks who are not the usual British/American/Canadian/Australian suspects, and recognize we’re open to working with people from a lot of different places. A recent piece that’s made us really happy is the Azov Dolphins piece, about an American-style football team in Ukraine. This Ukrainian photographer got in touch and thought we would be interested, and that to me is a great example of a story where we didn’t go out and say, “We need to find an NFL team in a war zone,” but once we saw that story come in, it was the perfect story.

Is there something specific you’re looking for in a story? Perusing your site just now, I’m struck, as I usually am, by the variety of the articles. There’s a guide to getting drunk at Disney World just below a Q&A with an Iraqi fixer. Is there an editorial mindset that allows those to coexist?

I think that perfect story has to have some kind of intramural element. A perfect story for me would never be purely a food story, or purely a war story. It’s kind of got to combine elements, and that feeling of being a cross-section of elements, that to me is an R&K story. It’s really built into the name, two things connected with an ampersand. War and football? We’ll take it. Food and politics? That’s a typical piece for us. That’s how we look at it: Get a couple different surprising elements in the same room and kind of go from there.

You haven’t written a ton of articles lately. Why did the one on ayahuasca strike a particular chord for you?

In the first couple of years, Matt and I were traveling a lot as a kind of proof of concept, and our co-founder Doug was traveling with us as well. We picked countries that had a mix of politics and food culture that gave us kind of the meat we were looking for. For us that meant South Africa, Myanmar, Denmark and Peru. Peru was an interesting place because it has this super-interesting culinary scene that’s the South American answer to what’s happening in Northern Europe. Matt was really interested in that and covering that, and I wanted a feature story to kind of sink my teeth into, and one thing that was happening in travel and tourism in Peru was this travel for ayahuasca. There’s that curiosity of, “What the hell is that about? Is it what it seems in the news reports?” I did a quick Lexis-Nexis search, a lot of which were short-hit articles about a kid who almost died, or somebody got robbed, these little negatives of the experience. But I could tell there was no way for news articles like that to get into the why. Yes, there are negatives, but there has to be some value there, people traveling for it, wanting to bring it back to the States.

There’s no better way to understand something than to jump in it. Trying to describe what’s happening while you’re stone-cold sober, you’re not going to come out of that with anything more than when you started. So the freedom to go and take these drugs and take the ride, that’s what I’ve won for having this scrappy and, at times, struggling media company.

What was your reporting process like, once you were “pulled into the ether?” I imagine you weren’t taking notes, even really mental ones, due to the drug’s power, so how did you document it?

I had good fortune with the shaman. He was very accommodating, so I did a lot of interviews and I was recording through the ceremony. We’re going to use some of the audio from the story in a new podcast we’re starting. (The producer promised she wouldn’t use any of the vomiting audio.) Now, anyone who’s ever been high on anything and had a pretty deep thought, and tried to engage that thought the next morning, will recognize that I had a bunch of tape, a bunch of stuff, but listening back I couldn’t really figure out what I was finding so incredible about what was happening. But I think from my mind, that’s a pretty interesting part about it. You can write the words, but what’s actually happening behind them? How do you get real meaning from it? I’m not sure. Really, at least in part, as I mentioned in the article, there’s a huge lag between when I did the ayahuasca, did all my notes, starting the article, and then finishing and publishing it. A couple of years. It took me a long time to put it into context. I had cancer, and eventually had some incontrovertible, fact-based stuff about Western medicine to compare that experience with.

Were you at all reluctant to do the second ceremony, after having what seems to be the best possible experience during the first?

That is a great question. I think context matters, when it comes to hallucinogens, and I think if you’re really feeling in the right frame of mind, then you’ll metabolize those things. I saw a lot of gory things on my good trips, so I wouldn’t say it’s a sanitized experience even when it’s going well, and since you’re writing for a journalism publication, the main question I had for Mother Ayahuasca was about journalism. I was having a lot of personal conflict and doubt about the things I had done as a journalist. Which is not to say I had been unethical according to our standards, but the kind of journalism I was doing was going and prying into people’s lives that are in tremendous tumult, grieving, death and so on, and asking a ton of questions about it. That was my job and I got to do it for TIME and it was a dream job, but I wanted to know, morally, am I good person doing this? I wanted to hear from this diety, from this experience, that it was OK, that I was still a good person. Here’s where it gets pretty good. All of this stuff is happening in your own mind, so lo and behold, I came out with a clean slate of approval from Mother Ayahuasca, which is very convenient. So I may have just been reassuring myself, but either way I came out thinking, you know what? It’s OK.

I was leaving the most corporate news magazine there is and starting my own thing, and suddenly I’m dosing in the jungle. I had kids, I had a family, and I had a lot of questions. That’s one of the things I love about ayahuasca, if you have a big life question, or death question, it can be really good for taking another look at those.

My sister went through a nearly two-year slog with cancer — surgery, radiation, chemo, infections from the radiation — and I can’t help but think, after reading your article, that ayahuasca would have given her that existential reassurance you talk about. Do you think the concoction will continue to become more mainstream? Perhaps not a doctor-recommended treatment, but at least one without the requisite stigmas? 

The experience of going through and realizing I had cancer when I was down there, and Mother Ayahuasca had politely declined to mention that, had made me feel like it was medically less effective than they were claiming, but psychologically more valuable or important. There are many moments with cancer where you don’t know which way it’s going to go, what your particular prognosis is or whether this can be a much worse thing than they are saying. I always felt like in conversation with doctors, I felt like ‘Fuck it, if I get really bad news here, I’m going back down to the jungle, do ayahuasca and think about it.’ We’re all going to die, so if you’re looking at the road and it’s a crappy one, ayahuasca can help with that. I saw a lot of things without fear on ayahuasca, and that’s not my normal.

Unlikely pairings seem to be a theme this week. Reporting a story under the influence of mind-altering drugs. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien going to see “Snow White” together. D.H. Lawrence given the pulp fiction treatment. But like the title of this week’s vinyl, “Damage and Joy,” their incongruity gives way to an “of course!” moment. (Come to think of it, writers who go by their initials is a sub-theme of the week.)

The Boston Globe’s Malcolm Gay and a story of love, and art, lost to the Holocaust. I’m not sure what haunts me more about this story: that the Nazis killed an artist who might have become a great composer, or that the woman who survived has loved him for the rest of her life, even through her marriages to other men. The latter reminds me of the Susan Minot book “Evening,” whose ending will stay with me forever. (Don’t cheat and watch the movie. It doesn’t come close.) Malcolm Gay talks to our contributor Katia Savchuk about discovering this untold story.

The soundtrack: “The Last Beat of My Heart,” by DeVotchka. When they make a movie of this story, this has to be the song they play as the final credits unfurl. It captures the drama of the story, and the emotions that stay until the last beat of her heart.

One Great Sentence

“He sat in an old chair near a particle board pinned with the yellowed obituaries of steelworker friends who died too early, including Robert Plater. 60. Cancer. A paper target practice figure hung next to the obituaries. Its heart had been blown out.”

Jeffrey Fleishman, “Here’s why Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar heroes have made Donald Trump their rock star,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1016.

Read why we think it’s great.

Nathan Thornburgh talks mind-blowing drugs and Anthony Bourdain. I’ve long been a fan of the Roads & Kingdoms site, which offers an offbeat mix of travel-food-politics longform, with wonderful photography. In a “5(ish) Questions” with Davis Harper, co-founder Nathan Thornburgh offers this sage advice: “It’s funny how there’s a lot of high-level worry about this industry, but sometimes you can just answer it with the same kind of approach that every small or midsized business has to take: Don’t spend a dollar you don’t earn. That’s surprisingly effective as a way of staying in business.”

The soundtrack: “In the Kingdom,” by Mazzy Star. Sure, this isn’t “Fade Into You.” (But seriously, what is?) But these lyrics fit the site’s vibe: “I took that train into the city/You know the one that goes under the bridge/I thought I was listening/to this band play a song that changed me.”

What I’m reading online: Atlas Obscura (another favorite storytelling site) tells us about the time “frenemies”  C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien went to the movies together and saw the Disney telling of “Snow White.” This is so sweet and prickly at the same time: They both hated the dwarves, and liked to snipe at Disney. Lewis wrote: “Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music.”

The Quality of Life Report: 2017. This piece by Meghan Daum is almost all prickly and not particularly sweet, but it’s pretty brave, in a kind of self-centered bomb-throwing way. In this essay for literary journal VQR, she talks about how the world of political correctness has changed people since she wrote her 2003 novel that gives the essay its title. (Hint: She wasn’t crazy about PC then, and even less so now.) A fascinating, and no doubt divisive, read.

Also slightly prickly is the brilliant writer Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer for her novel “Olive Kitteridge.” (A must-read.) I was going to call her brilliant Maine writer Elizabeth Strout, but this profile in the New Yorker tells me she doesn’t like being called that. She has a … complicated relationship with her home state. As the story goes on to say, “And yet, when asked, ‘What’s your relationship with Maine?’ she replies, ‘That’s like asking me what’s my relationship with my own body. It’s just my DNA.’” A great profile, and not just for new arrivals in the state like me.

What’s on my bedside table: “Love Among the Haystacks,” by D.H. Lawrence. When I saw this paperback at the Brooklyn Flea last weekend, I was all set to buy it for the cover alone. But then I saw that D.H. Lawrence was the author. When I wrote my very earnest senior thesis on Lawrence back in college, who could have dreamed that one day I’d find a pulp paperback by him?

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: “Damage and Joy,” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. My kind sister gave me this album, the latest by the criminally underrated Scottish band. It’s one of those albums where you hear one song that should be a hit, then another, and another. The Reid brothers are pop geniuses. (Granted, sometimes the melodies are … familiar.)

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.

Numbers can tell a story, but they can also be relentlessly abstract.

That was certainly the case for Ciudád Juárez, which over the course of four years faced a relentless wave of cartel violence. From 2008 to 2011, the Mexican border city offered a continuous, morbid count.

It is a piece that I have returned to repeatedly over the years, haunted by its picture of a city so consumed by violence that the everyday human-animal ecosystem is thrown out of whack.

4: The number of people killed by armed men on a bus filled with assembly plant workers.

15: The teenagers — with no known drug ties — who were murdered by cartel assassins at a party.

2: The grieving mother who sought justice for a daughter who had been killed – – and was herself shot to death by masked men at a government hall.

There were other numbers, too — ones that could overwhelm to the point of numbness: 10,000 dead, 100,000 homes abandoned, 2,000 businesses closed or burned down.

These figures were often greeted with equal parts horror and resignation, then quickly forgotten as the next atrocity took over the day’s headlines.

Now imagine the story of Juárez told through its dogs.

In 2013, Texas-based journalist Michelle Garcia, in collaboration with Mexican investigative reporter Ignacio Alvarado Alvarez, wrote such a story for Al Jazeera America. (The pair reported the article together; she wrote it.)

It began:

“In better times — and there were better times in Ciudad Juárez — even the mangiest street dog could count on kindness for its survival. Unwashed and unkempt, the streets were his home, the neighborhood his master. Scraps, the stray bone, a bowl of water — he got by.”

“Imagine, then, the upheaval that upended this imperfect but functioning system when a manageable 20,000 street dogs morphed into a teeming population of 200,000 mutts, German Shepherds, Labs, and the favored dog of city dwellers for years — the Poodle.

“The bond between man and his best friend was corrupted. One man nailed a dog to his fence. A gang of 10 children lassoed a cat, hurling it up onto the street cables high above, leaving it to dangle there.

“On the surface, this breakdown in the relationship between man and beast could be attributed to the brutal violence that tore at the social fabric in Ciudad Juárez between 2008 and 2011.”

Countless stories have been written about the period of extreme violence in Juárez. Few, in my mind, have been as indelible as “Mexico’s city of dogs.”

It is a piece that I have returned to repeatedly over the years, haunted by its picture of a city so consumed by violence that the everyday human-animal ecosystem is thrown out of whack, a story that evokes, in stark, terms, what it means for the social order to fall apart: People flee, or are killed, and a city is left feral.

“Houses emptied out seemingly overnight; entire blocks lay quiet. Meanwhile, every six months, the dogs produced a new brood, a new gang.”

The article was written well after Juárez had emerged from the worst of the violence. And it tracks the ways in which the city’s dogs served as poignant reminders of what had been.

Dogs had been protectors and loyal friends. They had “symbolized home and humanity” in dreary subdivisions with fanciful names such as New Juárez or Riberas del Bravo, where families survived on $10 a day and lived in cookie-cutter homes so small, not even a sofa would fit in the living room.

“During the worst moments of the violence, when the desert was littered with dead and mutilated human bodies, parts of New Juárez and Riberas del Bravo were all but lost to the dogs.”

And even after the murder rate had abated, there they remained: loose, hungry, miserable, carrying the memory of everything the city had been through, witnesses to an unspeakable history.

“Only the mutts knew for sure what happened. They were often the first to arrive at the crime scene — slinking around the blood, slipping behind police tape. They watched from sidewalks as the caravans carrying armed men rumbled past. Rottweilers and poodles alike were found standing guard outside the carcasses of torched homes, defending the remains.”

Part of what has long intrigued me about this article is the way in which Garcia and Alvarado tell a story that is about one thing (dogs) while simultaneously telling us a story about another (violence in Juárez). It recalls the intricate writings of essayist Bruce Chatwin, who once chose to describe the immigrant legacy of Buenos Aires by writing about the phone book. (“The history of Buenos Aires is written in the telephone directory,” he wrote in his famous South American travelogue, “In Patagonia “Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild — five names taken at random from among the R’s — told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.”)

It’s a storytelling device that takes information we’ve all heard and presents it in a surprising way, a tepid old news item transformed into a bracing bucket of ice water.

In Garcia’s story, a dog isn’t simply a dog. It is a creature that a desperate family abandons in haste, a family plagued by poverty or visited by death. A family faced with terrible decisions in a fraught time. A family, perhaps, like yours or mine.

Filmmaker David Layton isn’t a stranger to the newsroom. Before he produced and directed documentaries, he was a newspaper reporter, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his next project, “The Newspaperman,” is a film about one of the 20th century’s most important, if often overlooked, editors: Gene Roberts of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“One of the things we said was that we were going to build the best newsroom we were capable of building, so we just set out from there. We set about doing the best we could and having our fun doing it.”

But it’s a much earlier memory of a newsroom that stuck with Layton for years and seeded the idea for “The Newspaperman.”

“My father worked for Gene at The Inquirer,” Layton wrote me via email, “so I knew about him when I was young. I could tell that my father loved his job and that something special was going on in that newsroom. Whenever I would visit him there, I would watch all these people talking animatedly about stories, taking phone calls, typing furiously, joking around together. It is still the most congenial workplace I have ever seen. Much later, I learned that it was Gene who had almost singlehandedly created the conditions under which that paper flourished.”

Roberts arrived at the Inquirer in 1972, at a time when the paper was, by all accounts, in a freefall toward failure. He wasn’t exactly hard up for work; he arrived in Philadelphia via The New York Times, where he had been the national editor. But the challenge of taking the faltering paper and turning it around was too good to pass up, and he did exactly that.

There were many measures of his success, including leading it to profitability and earning what appears to be universal admiration of his reporters and peers. (Everyone seems to speak about Roberts with reverence.) But one particularly impressive achievement for this former Nieman Fellow was the fact that the Inquirer, which had never been awarded any Pulitzers, won them almost yearly throughout his tenure – and in some years won two.

So how has Roberts managed to remain largely unknown outside journalism? Layton’s co-producer and co-director, Mike Nicholson, thinks he knows.

“Roberts is often compared to Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post and Abe Rosenthal at The New York Times, two editors who became pretty well known, especially Bradlee after the film ‘All the President’s Men’ came out. [But] Roberts wasn’t really the public face of the Inquirer,” Nicholson says. “He let the editor of the editorial page be the one to attend functions with city leaders and luminaries. Roberts stayed in the newsroom and plotted ways to make the paper better. He just preferred talking to reporters, photographers and editors to hobnobbing.”

Though he was profoundly respected by industry peers, Nicholson says, and is viewed by some of them as “the best editor this country has ever seen,” his preference for staying in the newsroom meant he wasn’t well-known even in Philadelphia.

Nicholson and Layton want to spread the gospel about Roberts by sharing the story of his life and work in “The Newspaperman.” The filmmakers, who have been raising funds for the film on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, believe Roberts’ story has more relevance and resonance now than ever, what with shrinking newsrooms and shouts of “fake news” coming from the White House.

“We also feel like if we don’t tell it now, it will probably never get told to a wide audience,” Nicholson says. At least two book projects about Roberts never came to fruition, he says. The time felt right for a documentary treatment.

Although the Kickstarter campaign was fully funded Tuesday, the fundraiser is still accepting donations  for the next few hours. Learn more or donate here.

I spoke by phone with Roberts, who is now 84, retired and lives in his home state, North Carolina. My own questions were supplemented by those from Storyboard editor Kari Howard, as well as the memories of Jeffrey Fleishman, who worked at the Inquirer under Roberts. What struck me most in the course of our hour-long conversation was the manner in which he spoke about his own work, never referring to “I,” but always to “we.”

My editor at Storyboard, Kari Howard, one of the biggest literary journalism fans around, has always said if there were a journalism time machine, she’d take it back to the Gene Roberts era at The Inquirer. She’s heard such great stories of the freedom you gave writers to find the story no one else was doing, or find a different way of telling a story we all know. Why do you think your newsroom was this Emerald City for storytelling journalists?

One of the theories I had was if you were gonna be an editor and run a newspaper, it was better to run one that had lots of problems and was broken rather than go to one that was successful where you had everyone afraid to make change because it might reduce the paper’s profitability or impair its success. When I got to the Inquirer it was unprofitable and had no way to go but up. One of the things we said was that we were going to build the best newsroom we were capable of building, so we just set out from there. We set about doing the best we could and having our fun doing it.

“He let the editor of the editorial page be the one to attend functions with city leaders and luminaries. Roberts stayed in the newsroom and plotted ways to make the paper better. He just preferred talking to reporters, photographers and editors to hobnobbing.”

One of the problems, which turned out to be a good thing, is that Philadelphia was not considered a place then that you went to looking for good journalism. Because the paper wasn’t making money when I first got there and for at least six or eight years thereafter — it was marginal — what we offered was a place to practice the best journalism you knew how to practice. Interestingly, that attracted a first-rate staff.

I think that strategy is so simple and smart and compelling, that idea that you can’t go anywhere but up. But there’s a lot more that goes into fostering that culture and reputation once it’s established, right? Once you had come into The Inquirer and established this vision for what it could become alongside your colleagues, how did you continue to grow in that way?   

One of the most important things, one of the key reasons why I took the job, is that the Knight management structure with its larger papers was that the editor reported directly to Miami and no businessman locally was over the editor. And when you reported to Miami, the businessman had his own avenue of reporting and the newsroom had its own avenue. When it came to budget matters, both the newsroom and the business side generally came to an understanding before you went to Miami to get final budget approval. You weren’t in complete control of the finances, but you had more leverage than you would normally have as an editor because the business side of the newspaper couldn’t simply hand you a number and make you live with it without discussion. That was very important in building the paper. While we had a very good chief of the business side of the paper who had once been a reporter, having complete freedom without having to report to anyone locally was an important thing to have in trying to build a newspaper. I’m not aware of any place that exists now. It should, but it doesn’t: having a newsroom in charge of its own destiny without having to automatically salute to someone whose only real goal is getting the profits up.

Did you feel by the end of your time at the Inquirer that that model was about to shift?

It had shifted. I was the last editor at Knight Ridder who did not have to report to a publisher. And the last three or four years, I had to report, but it was with a dotted line to Miami. The whole budget process disappeared. Previously, you had gone to Miami, you and the businessman, and laid out what you intended to do in the coming year and what kind of budget you would need to accomplish it. Two or three years before I left, we were assigned a budget rather than negotiating it, and that is an important distinction. Previously, if you had made a good case, you stood a chance of getting some financial understanding. But if you were just assigned some number on what your budget was going to be—which, by the way, was usually dollars below the previous year—there was no way you could outline a program for improving the paper, and that became a real problem. And when they assigned you that number, it was usually with fewer people than the year before, too.

A reporter who worked under you said this of your leadership: “I never was in newsroom before or since that was so dedicated to storytelling. To stripping it all down to the human. It was a place to take chances, to swing big, to succeed and, sometimes to fail, but to look at what we did through the lens of a novel. To bring it to life.” Do you see that happening in a newsroom again, given all the changed priorities and economic constraints?

The difference between today and when I was an editor is that today, newspapers have a scary fundamental financial problem. When we turned the Inquirer around, and for Knight Ridder in general, we were financially stable and the company was somewhere around the 20% profit range – of every dollar that came in, they were holding onto 20%. It wasn’t life or death, which in some cases it may be today. If you were being cut, you were being cut to make a short-term profit goal.

One of the reasons why newspapers are in the fix they’re in today is because they never really had a research-and-development budget in which they worried about the future. And if we had figured out – and the basic technology was there – how to deliver the paper in the home, we might be facing a totally different future. The newsrooms accounted for only about 5 to 10% of the total expenditures of a newspaper, and there weren’t that many that approached the 10% level, and some were like 4 or 5%. Basically, the industry has had a kind of collapse, and the collapse was due to most of the newspapers becoming publicly held and the owners and management of the newspapers feeling they had to make Wall Street’s short-term profit goals, forgetting about the future. Most successful businesses and industries invest in the future through research and product development.

What advice would you offer other editors who may not feel they can dream as large as you did? What advice would you offer reporters who want to take chances with their storytelling?

“I am, by nature, an optimist, but it’s hard to be optimistic about journalism right now. We have got to come up with some solutions that provide more bodies to cover the news.”

In the very first year of Nieman, there was a guy named Eddie Leahy who was a rough-and-tumble reporter from Chicago who had never finished high school, if I remember correctly, but became a very able reporter and, in a way, helped shape the future of the Nieman program. He said, later in life, that as long as there was one little hole in a newspaper that you could fill up with a good story, a story that needed to be told, that life was worth living as a newspaperperson. And I agree with that. And even though editors today are grappling with tough economic times, the best of them are managing to do some really good journalism—but not enough of it. The current tragedy of journalism is that we’re probably operating below a third of the journalistic staff and maybe even a quarter of what we were operating with 20 or 30 years ago. Even then, you didn’t feel like you were doing all you could do, so the problem today is more acute.

Electronic journalism has not filled the void as far as bodies are concerned. We have immensely fewer reporters out there trying to cover a society that keeps getting more complex, not simpler, to cover. If we don’t find some solution, you wonder whether our basic democratic values are going to be eroded because the public is not being properly informed.

I’m also worried by the fact that Fox Broadcasting has you focus on the top two news stories of the day and now other networks are following the same procedure. You just wonder how much we are not addressing because it’s not being brought to our attention. The Inquirer was one of the first papers to break the worldwide dimensions of AIDS. You wonder what would happen today. At the time, you could follow your nose and not worry about the big story of the day, but the big story two weeks from now or one month from now.

I’m told this is the language that was written on cards when you left The Inquirer. How does it make you feel now, several decades later? “The Eugene L. Roberts Prize is meant to encourage and is dedicated to the story of the untold event that oozes instead of breaks, to the story that reveals, not repeats, to the reporter who zigs instead of zags, to the truth, as opposed to the facts, to the forest, not just the trees, to the story they’ll be talking about in the coffee shop on Main Street, to the story that answers not just who, what, where, when, and why, but also, ‘So what?’; to efforts at portraying real life itself; to journalism that ‘wakes me up and makes me see’; to the revival of the disappearing storyteller.”

I would say that the Raleigh [North Carolina] paper, while not doing as much as they would want or I would want, considering how much their staff has been reduced—I hear from 250 to about 85—manages to do some of that, and they do an occasional ooze story. They do try to practice some storytelling, basically with two or three reporters. But people are still trying even with very serious odds against them, stretched painfully thin; somehow, someway, they manage to break through on a story that needs to be told. I just wish there were more of them.

I am, by nature, an optimist, but it’s hard to be optimistic about journalism right now. We have got to come up with some solutions that provide more bodies to cover the news. The scary thing is that society as a whole does not realize it has a problem. If you just interviewed the person in the street, that person would say he or she is being bombarded with news.

Why is it great? When I moved back to New England last year after nearly a lifetime away, John Cheever’s debut novel about a quirky New England family was the first thing I read. This sentence, near the beginning, captured the character of the mother but also the book itself, which is shot through with melancholy and a family’s sense of history — and the feeling of being trapped by the weight of that history. Perhaps the most lovely part is that beautifully evocative combination of orange rinds and wood smoke; I can taste it, and the sweet-bitter sorrow.

This was a special week on Storyboard, because we shone a spotlight on some journalists who often don’t get the recognition they deserve. Latina journalists, a minority within a minority in the field, are doing some standout work, among them Michelle Garcia and Carolina Miranda. And Gene Roberts is an inspiration to those who worked with him at The Philadelphia Inquirer, but he isn’t famous like his counterpart in the era Ben Bradlee. Why? “He let the editor of the editorial page be the one to attend functions with city leaders and luminaries. Roberts stayed in the newsroom and plotted ways to make the paper better. He just preferred talking to reporters, photographers and editors to hobnobbing.”

How Michelle Garcia told the story of Juárez, a city lost to violence, through its dogs. It’s gratifying to point out a gifted Latina journalist — in a post written by another gifted Latina journalist. (If you don’t already follow Carolina Miranda’s culture coverage for the Los Angeles Times, I highly recommend it. She’s @cmonstah on Twitter, as a starting point.) In this piece, Carolina writes about a story by Michelle Garcia that has haunted her since she read it four years ago. The body count in Ciudád Juárez had gotten so mind-boggling during the height of the drug war, it became easy to tune the violence out; so Garcia told its story through the dogs who paid the price when a city went feral. I’m haunted by it too.

The soundtrack: “Dogs of War,” by AC/DC. Not my usual listening vibe, although sometimes a little AC/DC hits the spot, doesn’t it? And the lyrics here, about mercenary men and a culture of violence, fit the story: “I’ll firefight in the night/Run away or die of fright.”

One Great Sentence

“She was beautiful but when she tasted the water from the glass on her lectern she smiled sadly as if it were bitter for, in spite of her civil zeal, she had a taste for the melancholy – for the smell of orange rinds and wood smoke – that was extraordinary.”

John Cheever, “The Wapshot Chronicle,” 1957. Read why we think it’s great.

Legendary editor Gene Roberts reflects on a lifetime in journalism. This post means a lot to me, because I’ve always said that if I had a journalism time machine, I’d take it to Gene Roberts’ newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer of the 1970s and ’80s. Friends have told me how wonderful it was, how he gave his writers and editors freedom to tell a story that no one else was telling, or to tell a familiar story in a way no one else had. It seems like my spiritual home. Now a couple of filmmakers are making a documentary to shine a spotlight on this legendary editor who never sought the spotlight. I’ll definitely line up for that one. Here, contributor Julie Schwietert Collazo interviews Roberts; it’s a must-read.

The soundtrack: “Heroes,” by David Bowie. One of my favorite Bowie songs. It’s shot through with love and defiance and the recognition that nothing lasts forever. It’s that bittersweet feeling that fits this story about a wonderful moment in journalism. It didn’t last, but while it did, Roberts was king and the newsroom was his queen — his partner, not his subject.

What I’m reading online: I’m two chapters into “My Aryan Princess” by the Dallas Morning News’ Scott Farwell, the latest entrant into the new golden age of serials. It tells the story of a woman who informs on the scary Aryan Brotherhood of Texas gang. The lede is striking, and effective, because it telegraphs that the informant is not your traditional “hero”: “Crystal meth glowed orange, an ember in an ink-black night.” (The Columbia Journalism Review did a good piece on why the Morning News decided to run all seven parts at once online, “Netflix-style.”)

On the shorter side, I enjoyed “(It’s Great to) Suck at Something,” an essay by Karen Rinaldi in The New York Times. She talks about her obsession with surfing, which she acknowledges she’s terrible at, even after 15 years. Why endure? She writes, “Some might think your persistence moronic. I like to think of it as meditative and full of promise. In the words of the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.’ When I surf, I live in the possibility. Or, as the great father of surfing, Duke Kahanamoku, wisely advised: ‘Be patient. Wave come. Wave always come.'”

What’s on my bedside table: Someone on Twitter recently pointed out an older piece on the literary site The Millions with these words: “In my experience, there are two types of Marilynne Robinson readers: ‘Housekeeping’ people and ‘Gilead’ people.” And I realized that I’m a “Housekeeping” person. But I wanted to break free from that, so I once again picked up my copy of “Gilead,” where the bookmark rested on page 27, from an abortive attempt years ago. And on the bottom of the page, if only I had gotten that far, was a beautiful description of a man grabbing a wet branch and showering him and his girlfriend with water, a joyful moment. I’ll keep reading now, and maybe I’ll end up being just a Marilynne Robinson person.

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: “The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads,” by Talking Heads. The death of the great director Jonathan Demme put me in a Talking Heads mood. I couldn’t find my copy of “Stop Making Sense,” the soundtrack to the concert film he directed, so I settled on another live album. Side 4 is my favorite: “The Great Curve,” “Crosseyed and Painless” and “Take Me to the River.”

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.

The word “lament” is a sadly beautiful thing, its layers and meanings distinct, yet entwined. In music, it is a song of loss, of missing someone or something that is no longer there. As a verb, it expresses grief, or regret. In both verb and song form, it has a keening feel to it.

Realizing a narrative structure over the course of months brings more of a simmering self-satisfaction, like you’ve learned a secret you get to use for the rest of your life.

I kept thinking of the word as I read “The Ballad of Fogarty’s Cove,” a story by Canadian writer Josh O’Kane about a cove made famous in a Nova Scotian folk song that has become a metaphor for the battle between jobs and preservation – of land, but also of memories.

All the layers of the word come together in the piece: the regret over leaving the land of your birth because you cannot make a living there; the sorrow over the loss of a childhood place of exploration and beauty; and, at its heart, the song itself, by a Canadian folk singer, Stan Rogers, who died too young.

I’ve been having a bit of a Nova Scotia moment recently. I’m totally smitten with  “Island,” the collected short stories of the wonderful Cape Breton writer Alistair MacLeod, whose themes of hardship and love and loss seem to thrum throughout O’Kane’s piece.

And I recently read “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: Life in the Back of Beyond,” the memoir of illustrator Tomi Ungerer, who moved from New York City to a Nova Scotian farm in the 1970s. (It’s not your typical starry-eyed story of a city type escaping to the country, not least because of the beautiful illustrations; I highly recommend it.)

And now I’m in Nova Scotia for the annual International Association for Literary Journalism Studies conference. I can’t wait for it to begin.

It seemed like a perfect time to chat with O’Kane, a business writer for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and spotlight some lovely writing about the Maritimes.

The conversation, conducted via email, has been edited for flow.

First of all, do you come from Nova Scotia? You seem very in tune with the place and its people. Do you feel the pull of the place while you’re away?

I’m from New Brunswick, just next door. Growing up on Canada’s east coast, you try to ascribe unique characteristics to each city or province, but since I moved to Toronto, I’ve come to understand the Maritime provinces more regionally, having fought against similar political climates and economic hardships for centuries.

For a long time, my closest circle of friends in Toronto were all Maritimers. We collectively realized that the pull of home is universal, and often talked about it, though less so now that we’ve made new friends and settled into careers here. Until I got a full-time gig at the Globe, my parents regularly asked if I’d consider coming back to try opening a digital news outlet.

Some friends did move back east. Those of us determined to stay found other ways to pay tribute, from journalism to tattoos to buying property out there. I haven’t bought property out there.

Can you talk a bit about storytelling as part of the culture of Nova Scotia, especially through its music? You cite this lyric by Rogers, which gives me chills: “We Finches have been in this part of the world for near 200 years/but I guess it’s seen the last of us.”

I think about the themes of exile and leaving in Maritime song pretty well constantly. The Fogarty’s Cove story is a spiritual spinoff of my first book, “Nowhere With You.” It’s about the music of Halifax songwriter Joel Plaskett through the lens of leaving Canada’s east coast – he stayed, but emerged from a 1990s alternative scene that saw bands constantly split up or split town. Leaving creeps up constantly in his music; given my weird guilt about having moved away, I thought it was worthy of study.

The book devotes most of a chapter to Atlantic Canada’s long, winding relationship with leaving home, especially through song. In the region’s original music, it’s shown up for at least a century and a half: from traditional folk like “Farewell to Nova Scotia,” to the country of Hank Snow, to the light pop of Anne Murray, to the new-generation-trad of Stan Rogers. While some writers douse their songs in metaphor, Stan wrote songs about what he literally saw in Canso, Nova Scotia – “Fogarty’s Cove” being one of the most prominent examples. He stuck with me.

This piece seems like an archetypical Nova Scotia story: It has the bonds to place; it has the push-pull of stunning natural beauty and a desperate lack of jobs; it has folk music, which seems part of their DNA, like setting their life stories to music. Is that what drew you to it?

I didn’t even know Fogarty’s Cove was an actual place, at first. While in Halifax to research the book, Stan Rogers was already on my mind, and a friend mentioned he’d heard it was real, and that it had been expropriated for a quarry. The local newspaper had done a story about it, but it was more of an “angry locals with their arms crossed” angle. I wondered if there was a bigger-picture piece there, zooming out at the broader contexts. The Globe loves stories about regional economies and cultural history; the quarry proposal at Fogarty’s Cove felt like an allegory for the Maritimes’ longstanding tension between both. Plus, I’m officially a business reporter at The Globe, and happen to love writing about music, which is not a common skill set. Being a Maritimer on top of that, knowing what it was like to live there, it felt like this story was… meant for me?

But I also had a book deadline to meet and rock stars to interview. It was 14 months later, after sending the final edits to my publisher, when I pitched it to the Globe’s arts editor – because I was headed to Halifax for a wedding anyway. The editor bit, and convinced my usual manager to give me a week to spend in Guysborough County digging around. I missed the wedding rehearsal driving back from my hike to the quarry site – sorry again, Danielle and Chris – but I came back with so much good material that I was fired up about journalism for weeks.

And was it daunting to try to write that kind of story, pulling in threads of history and lore with a current-day conflict?

As the central characters, Stan and the cove have something in common: Both are absent for tragic reasons. So I tried to write the story in a way that lets them haunt the narrative, like ghosts.

At first, I thought this could be a tight 900-word piece, but after meeting the Fogarty brothers and spending hours scouring their documents, I realized I was terribly wrong. The cove’s story was their story, their ancestors’ story, Stan’s story, Stan’s family’s story, Canso’s story, Guysborough’s story, the environment’s story, and a quarry company from Alabama’s story.

I got some latitude, first for about 4,000 words, anticipating a month-away publishing date. I wrote 5,000 and it felt incomplete. I wound up with much better context and detail so that I could tell the story in ways that felt more linear for the reader.

Talk about how you decided to structure the piece. You have two central characters: the folk singer, Stan Rogers, and the cove itself. Then you have the current-day conflict over the cove. Was it difficult finding the arc of the story?

I had the rare benefit, at least as a newspaper reporter, of writing in chunks/subsections. But also as a newspaper reporter, I was first inclined to reveal the exact tension of the quarry high up.

The earliest draft took too long to get to Stan because I rushed the Fogarty brothers’ struggle to the top. My very excellent editor – Jared Bland, who’s now publisher of McClelland & Stewart at Penguin Random House Canada – suggested I push it down, and a more natural arc emerged. The final version might be the lowest I’ve ever dropped a “news hook” in a story.

As the central characters, Stan and the cove have something in common: Both are absent for tragic reasons. So I tried to write the story in a way that lets them haunt the narrative, like ghosts. Each of the first few chunks introduce a character or place, then alternatingly reveal a sense of Stan’s importance to history or a tension with the cove: Stan the child; struggling Canso; Stan the adult; jobs-focused Guysborough municipality; and finally the Fogarty brothers, and how everything that came before coalesced into their losing a chunk of family history.

The Fogarty brothers are almost an avatar for the cove itself – possessed by its ghost, so to speak. They let the second-half narrative speed forward more naturally: How are they fighting the quarry, and is that even feasible? Help piles up: environmentalist groups, a big-city investor, a legal loophole, and even Guysborough’s own data. I knew I needed to close with June Jarvis. She’s the reason Stan and Fogarty’s Cove matter – Stan’s avatar.

I like that the narrative isn’t black and white, but gray. There’s a “villain” in the quarry company, but that villain also offers jobs for a region that needs them. How hard was it to balance that?

The first characters I met were the Fogarty brothers, whose passion in getting their family land back was infectious. Hours later, when I checked into my bed-and-breakfast in Guysborough, the host asked what brought me there – it was well past tourist season – and I explained the story, mentioning the tension between jobs and history. “Well, we already know what should win,” she told me. “The jobs.” Everyone’s stake is emotional.

As I report in the story, Guysborough has put a selective spin on its public opinion claims, and a few characters voice the very real perspective that maybe a nature-shredding megaproject isn’t the most effective way to bring home jobs and people. But that hunger for jobs there, and across the Maritimes, is real. It can be easy to get caught up in the emotion of losing family history, but the struggle to find work has an emotional toll, too. Stan captured the balance of these emotions in his work. He was a fine role model.

What role did photography play in the storytelling?

I got to work with Darren Calabrese, a Halifax photographer who’d shot another weekend Arts cover story I’d written, and who does an incredible job conveying mood. We first wondered if we’d depict the cove with aerial photography, but he wound up traveling to Fogarty’s Cove by boat – I had gotten as close as I could via land – and his photos worked like a companion journey to the cove and back.  The overcast shots of the cove captured the tone of the story so well; his photos of Canso show exactly what the village has been through; and his portraits do a great job establishing character.

You mentioned to me that this is the longest you’ve been able to spend on a story. How long did it take to report and write? And what do you think is the most valuable/rewarding aspect of being able to take more time than the fast-paced news cycle usually allows? I wouldn’t mind if you broke the last question into two parts: the reporting and the writing.

I pitched it in September 2015, visited Guysborough and Canso in October, and first planned to file by the start of November. That sounds rich, looking back. It was published in April, seven months after first picking up the phone.

Writing in October, I didn’t let myself worry about who hadn’t contacted me back, since I had so much material already. But once I slowed down, as I gradually rearranged the structure in between my daily stories, I made more phone calls. Characters like Garnet Rogers, Ariel Rogers, Glynn Williams and Steven Rhude came forward; Garnet alone helped me reframe the introduction around Stan, as opposed to quarry workers. I discovered more details in documents from Guysborough and environmental watchdogs. I even tracked down a petition from the early 2000s and tallied how many names were within a few dozen miles of Canso. Through all this, I was able to add detail and harden arguments, which made the writing come more naturally.

Taking as long as I did to report and write offered different kinds of excitement. Landing an unexpected interview or document is a fist-pumping kind of thrill, which you don’t always get if you jump on a new story every day or week. But realizing a narrative structure over the course of months brings more of a simmering self-satisfaction, like you’ve learned a secret you get to use for the rest of your life. Still, they fed into each other: by having more time to write, I was able to track down more information. By doing that reporting, I had a better story to write, and it became more complete and engaging.

Why is it great? We annotated this wonderful story last year, and the focus of the annotation was the rarity of humor in longform. This line makes me laugh even without the context of the story, which is about a war between rival ice-cream truck owners that gets pretty Gunfight at the Soft-Serve Corral (with popsicles instead guns). But at the same time I’m laughing, the line shows the inherent decency of the ice-cream truck operator. In the annotation, the writers put it best: “How do you showcase a person’s serious emotion toward something that others might find funny, yet do so without belittling or sounding snarky?” That’s what they accomplished in this great sentence, and in this great piece.

As the Arab Spring began to topple a wave of repressive governments six years ago, many members of the fledgling group Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism thought things were finally going to get a little easier in a region where reporters who tried to dig beneath the surface often faced professional and personal danger as well as legal and cultural roadblocks.

“When the Arab Spring happened, we all thought it was going to usher in a new period of openness, and the opposite happened.”

Instead, some of the countries where the organization works have descended into civil war. In others, media censorship laws have become increasingly draconian and access to information more difficult.

In Egypt, an increasing number of journalists have been jailed, including Al Jazeera reporters who were accused in 2013 of supporting the banned Muslim Brotherhood group. In Jordan, a reinterpretation of the country’s cyber-crimes law has been used to arrest journalists and social media activists on defamation charges.

“When the Arab Spring happened, we all thought it was going to usher in a new period of openness, and the opposite happened,” said Rana Sabbagh, a Jordanian journalist and the organization’s executive director.

The Jordan-based nonprofit, which was launched with funding from the Danish government in 2005, now trains, mentors and provides legal support to journalists in nine countries, including Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

It has worked with journalists on more than 400 investigations, often under extremely difficult circumstances.

Those have included a probe into abuses in homes for mentally disabled children in Jordan that prompted the country’s king to order an investigation of the allegations, a look at Salafist kindergartens in Tunisia and a dive into the financing of the Muslim Brotherhood. The nonprofit convened a team of journalists to mine the so-called “Panama Papers,” a trove of leaked documents with details on offshore bank accounts and companies, including some belonging to government officials and their families.

The organization also built a database of records from court cases, gazettes and other open-source records throughout the Arab world, and developed a training manual for investigative reporters that is now used widely both in the region and around the world.

Although the group aims to provide journalists with tools to make their work easier, the challenges reporters face in undertaking investigations in the region have, in many ways, multiplied in the Arab Spring backlash, Sabbagh said.

Egyptian video journalist Mostafa el-Marsafawy came face to face with that backlash when he produced a damning investigative report in collaboration with the group. The organization provided him with coaching and legal advice throughout the reporting process.

In early 2014, El-Marsafawy launched what would become a two-year investigation into the treatment of conscripts in the country’s Central Security Forces. More than a dozen young men had died in alleged suicides and accidents. But El-Marsafawy found evidence that suggested some of the men had died at the hands of officers.

One conscript died of an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot wound while in an officer’s room. With the officer present. With the officer’s pistol.

Another allegedly hanged himself in his cell in a military jail where he had been sent for coming back late to camp after attending his cousin’s wedding.  A fellow conscript who was on duty the night the young man died testified that he saw three officers holding him on the ground and beating him before he was placed in a solitary cell.

A third young man collapsed from apparent heat exhaustion during training. Another conscript testified that the officer in charge began kicking him and when he did not wake up, beat him to death with a stick.

When he launched the investigation, El-Marsafawy began by contacting family members of the dead conscripts.

“Some of the families refused to talk to me; some gave documents but were afraid to talk,” he said. “Some families took the risk, and they talked to me. They were trying to find out who killed their sons.”

After 10 months of investigation, he finished an initial version of the story. But his employer at the time, the newspaper Al Masry Al Yawm, was unwilling to publish it for fear of reprisals, he said. Other Egyptian outlets were also unwilling to take it.

Finally, he found a home for the piece with BBC and continued the reporting and fact-checking process for more than a year until the story was finished.

As soon as the Arabic version of the report aired, in March 2016, it came under “heavy attack” on social media and government-sponsored talk shows, the ARIJ’s Sabbagh said. “We were blasted as being part of a movement to destabilize Egypt.”

“In Egypt, there are a lot of stories we need to work on, but a lot of journalists, they are afraid.”

Within days, his newspaper fired El-Marsafawy. After looking unsuccessfully for work in Egypt, he relocated to Jordan, where he now works for ARIJ training journalists to do video investigations.

El-Marsafawy said he doesn’t regret the project.

“I knew that there would be some bad things that could happen after the broadcast, but ARIJ was with me, and I took the decision that I would do it,” he said.

The results make it worth it, he said.

Soon after the Arabic version of the story aired, the officer involved in the beating case was sentenced to three years in prison, after lengthy court delays. El-Marsafawy said he heard from some recruits that conditions had improved in the camps. And for the families of some of the dead soldiers, the investigation came as a form of vindication.

Suicide is forbidden in Islam, so many of the families had been dealing with shame along with the pain of losing a loved one. Now, El-Marsafawy said, families told him they were happy that “something official on the TV said their soldiers were not suicides.”

But it may be more difficult for reporters to look into similar abuses in the future. A change in the law means that now all cases involving conscript deaths will be heard in closed military courts.

And many reporters and editors are shying away from doing stories that could get them fired or jailed, El-Marsafawy said.

“In Egypt, there are a lot of stories we need to work on, but a lot of journalists, they are afraid,” he said.

ARIJ is also looked on with suspicion in the country now, Sabbagh said, making it difficult to find media partners or hold training sessions for Egyptian journalists. Sabbagh said some journalists take vacation time to attend the organization’s annual conference and training sessions in Jordan, without telling their bosses.

Since ARIJ was formed, a number of other investigative reporting organizations have sprung up in the region, and Sabbagh said her group is aiming to find ways to support them.

“If you were to look back 10 years from now and document the beginning of a real movement called Arab investigative journalism, I think ARIJ will get a lot of credit,” she said. “It’s a miracle that we are here and that we keep going.

“Really, there is so much to be happy about, but we have such a long way to go.”

I’m in Nova Scotia for a literary journalism conference (more on that in the coming days), and it’s been incredibly heartening to see such passion for the genre. I’ve heard wonderful discussions on everything from John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” written 70 years ago, to Shane Bauer’s “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” from last year. Beautiful storytelling is getting some love in Halifax. (Come on up! It lasts until Saturday.)

Josh O’Kane and “The Ballad of Fogarty’s Cove.” As I said in the post spotlighting this lovely story, the word “lament” is a sadly beautiful thing, its layers and meanings distinct, yet entwined. In music, it is a song of loss, of missing someone or something that is no longer there. As a verb, it expresses grief, or regret. In both verb and song form, it has a keening feel to it. This story, which explores the love of a place, and the sorrow over leaving when it cannot sustain you, is imbued with the word.

The soundtrack: There’s only one soundtrack for this song, isn’t there? “Fogarty’s Cove,” by Stan Rogers. As O’Kane’s story says: “Fogarty’s Cove, the song, was a metaphor for the tragedy of leaving home to get good work.”

One Great Sentence

“There’s no room for hate in ice cream,” Dennis liked to remind himself.

David Wolman and Julian Smith, “The Cold War,” Epic magazine, 2015. Read why we think it’s great.

The roadblocks, and the dangers, for investigative journalists in the Arab world. I’m filled with admiration for journalists in the Arab world who dare to pursue investigative journalism. In this post by Abby Sewell, she talks to the leader of a group that’s trying to make things easier for those involved in the fledgling movement of reporter-diggers in the region. But things have only gotten harder, says Rana Sabbagh, a Jordanian journalist and the organization’s executive director. “When the Arab Spring happened, we all thought it was going to usher in a new period of openness, and the opposite happened,” she says.

The soundtrack: “Dig a Little Deeper,” by Mahalia Jackson. “I want to dig a little deeper in the store-house of God’s love.” A voice that gives you goosebumps.

What I’m reading online: Soon after the presidential election last year, amid allegations that Russia had interfered with the vote, I “curated” a selection of great literary journalism about Vladimir Putin. With this week’s Yates testimony and the firing of FBI chief Comey, I thought you might like another chance to read them.

I thought I’d stay on an international vibe with this piece by Samira Shackle in the Guardian, “On the front lines with Karachi’s ambulance drivers.” It’s vivid and intensely readable, with passages like this one:

Safdar shouts through his loudspeaker for people to move. “Hey Muslim! Go quicker!” he calls to a man with a long beard wearing a prayer hat. “Rickshaw driver, get out of the way!” “Old lady, move it!” “Son of a bitch, are you drunk?” He screeches to a halt outside the flats where the explosion has taken place.

What’s on my bedside table: A friend who helps organize the literary journalism conference lent me “Eagle Pond,” by New Hampshire poet Donald Hall. He thought I’d like this collection of essays about the family farm and the life Hall has lived there, as a child visiting his grandfather, and as a husband and widower — and grandfather himself. As someone living in a 19th century New England farmhouse, I’m hooked. 

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: “How to Speak Hip,” by Del Close and John Brent. This comedy album is worth it for the cover (and handy instruction booklet) alone, but it’s also funny. “Welcome to the exciting world of hip,” it begins, in the overly enunciated cadence of a pedantic instructor. “This is a new departure in language instruction for English-speaking people who want to talk to, and be understood by, jazz musicians, hipsters, beatniks, juvenile delinquents and the criminal fringe.” It has the vibe of that famous New York Times tweet: “‘Word up!’ It is I, the Gray Lady, with a “shoutout” to all my hip young friends.”

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.

If you wanted to do a word cloud of the literary journalism conference I just attended in Nova Scotia, the word “feel” might be the largest image. Then imagination. And memory. And voice. And trust.

You’ll see above that I actually created something quite lovely with a word-cloud generator. Its pink glow fits the positive vibe of the conference, organized by the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, which brought together scholars of the genre from Portugal, Mexico, Australia and just about everywhere in between.

“Facts aren’t enough. We need to feel them.”

At first, it was a bit disorienting to be a “practitioner” of journalism in a crowd of brainy academics. But then I realized that what unites is more important than what separates us: the love of literary journalism.

The thread running through the panels I attended, at least, was the sensory nature of this type of journalism, and how it connects readers to the subject through emotions while not forgetting the intellect.

That was the topic of one of the most intriguing talks, by Lindsay Morton of Avondale College of Higher Education in Australia. In this era of a president who regularly tweets about “fake news” in caps-lock mode, it might feel a bit edgy to argue for the championing of imagination in journalism. Morton disagrees.

Yes, she acknowledged, “the term ‘imagination’ is problematic because of its close association with invention.” But she argued: “All stories are a product of imagination. Reason and imagination need each other.”

After all, she said, “we are discoverers rather than recorders.”

Interestingly, two of the strongest advocates for the effective use of emotions in literary journalism were speakers who focused on science reporting.

Ryan Marnane, of Salve Regina University in Rhode Island, thinks we’re in need of more engagement in climate change journalism. And for him, that means merging the rational with the emotional.

“Facts aren’t enough,” he said. “We need to feel them.”

He focused on “Ballad of the sad climatologists,” a 2015 Esquire piece by John Richardson. In the story, Richardson opens with the controversy over one climatologist’s impulsive tweet: “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.”

Cue tweetstorm. The scientist had dared to go to the darkest side of climate change in a politically fraught time. But Richardson adds, “Worse, he showed emotion, a subject ringed with taboos in all science but especially in climate science.”

Marnane – who offered the great line “climatologists have become the new existentialists” – said that science writing can overflow you with information. What it needs instead, he argued, is “a rendering of felt detail.”

In another talk, Kate McQueen, who just earned her master’s degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, talked about the power of empathy in science writing.

“The term ‘imagination’ is problematic because of its close association with invention.” But “all stories are a product of imagination. Reason and imagination need each other.”

Although she cited two great science-leaning literary journalists of the past and present – John McPhee and Jon Mooallem — she focused her talk on Peter Wohlleben’s surprise best-seller, “The Hidden Life of Trees.”

In it, he works to make the trees become more human.

“When you know that trees experience pain,” he writes, “and have memories and … live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.”

McQueen argued that such an approach can win over readers who might not be inclined to worry about the fate of trees.

“An empathic view towards nature is not one we necessarily expect out of science writing, which — like the practice of science itself — is taken most seriously when grounded in empirical research and value-neutral language,” she said. “But journalists and writers at large who cover the natural world do much more than just repackage the latest news and research. They work hard to encourage a sometimes reluctant audience to take an interest in the world around them.”

She made a point that ran through the conference: “More science writers are willing to address what scholars of literary journalism already acknowledge—that adherence to the purely objective is limiting.”

In the same session, two speakers turned the science-emotion idea on its head a bit by talking about the actual science that may be involved in reading literary journalism.

Isabel Nery, of the University of Lisbon in Portugal, talked about brain reactions to media and literature.

She said that it’s “easier to imagine the reader ‘falling in love’ with a piece of literary journalism than a traditional news story.” But what about the brain’s reaction to literary journalism? (I’m somehow picturing the old educational ad about “this is your brain on drugs.” For literary journalism, I’m picturing that egg being coddled instead of fried.)

She thinks it would be cool to observe MRI scans of people reading literary journalism and hard news to see how different the brain reaction is.

“That could help make future decisions on the business model of journalism,” she said.

Marie Vanoost, of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, opened with a quote from reporter Amy Harmon: “I think that you absorb something more viscerally when your emotions are involved than when you’re just told.”

Vanoost decided to try to test that theory. She commissioned a study in which participants were given two versions of a health story, one written in narrative form and the other in the traditional inverted pyramid. Her hypothesis? That readers will remember information better in the narrative format.

In the initial study, at least, it turned out that women remembered the information better when reading it narratively. For men, the style of story didn’t affect their recall.

I don’t know why, but another initial finding surprised me: It was the men, not the women, who liked the narrative style over the inverted pyramid. Am I alone in that surprise? I’d love to hear from people on that.

On my last day in Halifax, I could hear the sound of a distant bagpipe serenading the city. It added a sensory layer to my experience there — and it deepened my feeling for it. Kind of like literary journalism does.

This famous piece by Susan Orlean is one of those stories where it’s hard to pick just one great sentence. You find one, and then another, and then another — a rabbit hole of great sentences. But this one resonates because it captures something universal about our childhoods, and that moment when we start to leave it behind. We are so caught up in the rush to grow up, we don’t even notice that something is gone. It’s not until years later, when we revisit a childhood home and the yard is so much smaller than the wild place of adventure that our 10-year-old minds dreamed it to be, that we feel the pang of loss. (Oh, read the wonderful annotation of the story here.)

A decade or so ago, shortly after I became book editor of the Los Angeles Times, I wrote a piece defending the liberties of memoirists. This was in the wake of the scandal over James Frey and his memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” which was debunked after it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Frey lied about nearly everything, including a train accident and the amount of time he’d spent in jail. And yet, what of the readers who had been legitimately moved by his confession, false or otherwise? Conventional wisdom called them suckers, conned into believing something they shouldn’t have. I, however, thought — and still think — that the issue was more complex.

I am looking for authority, intelligence, information. The last thing I am after is someone to tell me what to think.

Imaginative reconstruction has long been a tool of narrative nonfiction: Look at Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which, she later admitted, opens with a recollection she had lifted from a graduate student, who had given her permission to write it as if it had happened to her.

We live now in a different era, in which our attitudes on truth and nonfiction have grown more atomized. In the aftermath of the 2016 election — during which propaganda sites by the thousands were deployed as political weapons — everyone keeps talking about fake news. The president uses the term to excoriate those who call him on his lies. Late last month, in a televised interview with CBS’ John Dickerson, he referred to “the fake media … which is what we call the mainstream media”; it’s become a standard insult of his administration.

The Fake Media is working overtime today!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

Faced with that, what do we do about the licenses taken in pursuit of narrative, or the divide between facts and truth?

I’m not trying to be glib, and I don’t think such distinctions are semantic, or (for that matter) easily resolved. Throughout my writing life, I’ve straddled the loose line between them, as a journalist on the one hand, and as an essayist on the other.

As a journalist, I learned to follow a story, to let one source or subject lead me to another, to allow my conclusions, such as they were, to emerge from the information I uncovered.

But as an essayist, I’ve come to recognize the subjectivity of everything, the fallacy of facts as consolation, or window on the truth. What is truth, anyway, and how do we perceive it? This question sits at the center of every essay I write. I think of David Byrne: “Facts don’t come with a point-of-view / facts don’t do what I want them to.” More glibness, perhaps, but is it really? I don’t believe in truth, let me come out and say it, but at the same time, I want to ask you, point me toward a journalist who does.

“All journalism,” Michael Rosenwald argued recently in the Columbia Journalism Review, “is a kind of fiction. The writer gets to choose what to put in and what to leave out, shaping the story in different ways than another writer would, even after witnessing the same events. The transaction between the writer and reader consists of an implicit trust that the writer will deliver a reasonable facsimile of people and events.”

Yes, yes, I want to cheer; this is what we do. Take that Rosenwald quote: It’s accurate, but I’ve also trimmed the last eight words of the passage — not for clarity so much as for style. The intercession of the writer again, which is what we’re always facing, no matter what we read. When I think of truth and fake news, and what a writer owes a reader, perhaps the only thing we have to offer is this level of honesty.

Why is fake news so successful? Not least because it supports the preconceptions of its audience. We don’t have to think or be confronted; all we have to do is be affirmed. This is true on both sides of the ideological divide, from PoliticusUSA and the Raw Story to Breitbart and the Daily Caller; there is no right-wing monopoly on willful ignorance. Still, what is journalism’s purpose if not to inform us, and in so doing stir us out of our complacency?

The same, I want to say, is the intention of the essayist, who asks questions that cannot be answered, who embraces complexity. This is a difficult world, and I don’t mean only in regard to policy, although many mornings, my news feed is too much to bear. It’s a difficult world in which to be human, in which to try to live with integrity. That’s what they’re counting on, the purveyors of fake news sites, the politicians pushing a health-care plan that will strip coverage from tens of millions of Americans. It’s not the facts that frighten them; facts, we all know, can be spun. It’s the inquiry. Part of the goal, then, is to shut down the discourse, to appeal to our emotions, rather than our minds. The more we feel, the less we think, the better. That’s not a conspiracy theory, but simply circumstance.

Earlier this year, I participated in a conference at UC Irvine called the Future of Truth that sought to untangle some of these conflicting threads. Part of the discussion revolved around Joseph Mitchell, that magnificent observer, who in the 1940s and 1950s wrote many pieces for The New Yorker that relied on composites. In his 2015 biography of Mitchell, “Man in Profile,” Thomas Kunkel catalogues these lapses, raising questions about his subject’s practices. Mitchell once seemed to walk the border between journalism and essays with fluid grace — except that now we’re questioning his legacy. For me, the resolution here is simple: Do we trust him or do we not?

“All journalism is a kind of fiction. The writer gets to choose what to put in and what to leave out, shaping the story in different ways than another writer would, even after witnessing the same events. The transaction between the writer and reader consists of an implicit trust that the writer will deliver a reasonable facsimile of people and events.”

This is what Rosenwald was writing about, the questions raised by Mitchell’s work. And yet, these are the same questions, I’d suggest, that all journalism must provoke. As a journalist, I don’t invent or conflate, although I shape or even draw conclusions, depending on the type of piece I’m working on. As an essayist, conflation, or reinvention, is unavoidable because often I’m writing about memory, or personal experience, which is an inherently subjective territory. It’s important to know the difference between these impulses, but also to recognize what happens when they collide. In either instance, I am looking for authority, intelligence, information. The last thing I am after is someone to tell me what to think.

“It has been demonstrated,” Walter Lippmann wrote in 1922, “that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.” He’s right, of course, especially when it comes to that third category; just look at any front page, real or virtual, to see where casual opinion has led. As for the rest of it, it’s an open question, and as such, difficult to pin down. Intuition leads us to ask unexpected questions, while conscience sits at the heart of the entire journalistic enterprise. Indeed, at this point, the two of them together seem to make for the most essential sort of common ground.

This week we’re celebrating the things that make literary journalism different from news writing. A focus on felt detail. An embrace of emotion. An acceptance that the decisions made in the writing process make “the truth” subjective. And, finally, a recognition that in both narrative and news, trust is the thing that matters most of all.

Feeling the facts: making the case for the sensory connection in literary journalism. You’ll see at right that I created a word cloud from the ones that repeated and resonated at a recent literary journalism conference I attended in Nova Scotia. Many of the speakers made the case for the use of sensory details, for emotion, in narrative stories. “Facts aren’t enough,” one speaker said. “We need to feel them.” Another said: “The term ‘imagination’ is problematic because of its close association with invention.” But “all stories are a product of imagination. Reason and imagination need each other.”

The soundtrack: “Feeling Good,” by Nina Simone. This is a song I can play on repeat. In fact, I’ve even created a Spotify playlist of the same song five times so I don’t have to hit repeat. The moment those horns come in!

One Great Sentence

“This will happen so fast that one night he will be in the backyard, believing it a perfect place, and by the next night he will have changed and the yard as he imagined it will be gone, and this era of his life will be behind him forever.”

Susan Orlean, “The American Man, Age 10,” Esquire, December 1992. Read why we think it’s great.

Fake news and true facts, and the licenses taken in pursuit of narrative. This is such a thoughtful piece by David Ulin about the impossibility of “just the facts” in journalism, even in the face of the “fake news” refrain. I love this quote: “All journalism,” Michael Rosenwald argued recently in the Columbia Journalism Review, “is a kind of fiction. The writer gets to choose what to put in and what to leave out, shaping the story in different ways than another writer would, even after witnessing the same events. The transaction between the writer and reader consists of an implicit trust that the writer will deliver a reasonable facsimile of people and events.”

The soundtrack: “Fake Empire,” by The National. Wonderful lyric: “Turn the light out, say goodnight/No thinking for a little while/Let’s not try to figure out everything at once/It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky/We’re half awake in a fake empire.”

What I’m reading online: I have to start with a story off the news, “The Trump presidency falls apart,” by David Graham in The Atlantic. Whatever your politics, it’s remarkable for its damning day-by-day recitation of the latest revelations involving the Trump administration.

I think Sarah Smersh is doing an incredible job covering class in America. In this piece for Aeon magazine, “Poor teeth,” she looks at the class divide through something very simple: teeth. She writes, “My family’s distress over our teeth – what food might hurt or save them, whether having them pulled was a mistake – reveals the psychological hell of having poor teeth in a rich, capitalist country: the underprivileged are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held responsible for their dental condition.”

In the same vein, there’s  Dear Grammar Police, Your Smug Corrections Aren’t Helping Anyone, by Sarah Bronson for Narratively. She’s definitely right in saying there’s a “language privilege” in this country (witness a president who appears to deliberately misspell things in tweets to appeal to a certain base).

In another vein altogether, The final days of the Ringling Bros. circus, by the Associated Press’ Michelle Smith, is lovely. It offers sweet and sorrowful snapshots of the carnies as they say goodbye to the only life that most of them have known. One of them is sixth-generation circus, and he likes to say his parents fell in love in the air. Sigh.

What’s on my bedside table: “Francophone Literary Journalism,” a special issue of the Literary Journalism Studies journal. I received this before I attended the literary journalism conference. I had no idea that Colette was a journalist in addition to being an author, never mind a journalist dispatched to murder trials. Amélie Chabrier of the Université de Nîmes in France writes,  “While the media machine dehumanized the accused and turned them into monsters, Colette applies herself to re-immersing them in a human, almost banal everydayness, pausing at one or other detail, perhaps in an attempt to grasp what led them to commit an extraordinary act.”

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: “Greatest Hits,” by Sly & the Family Stone. It feels like summer today in Maine, so I put on my official start of summer soundtrack. It’s hard to pick a favorite from these brilliant songs, but I think I’d pick “I Want to Take You Higher.”

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.

Earlier this month, Mexican President President Enrique Peña Nieto met with representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists and pledged to make the security and protection of journalists a priority.

“No, we will never be able to tell the full story of that abysmal violence.”

Eleven days later,  Javier Valdez Cárdenas became the sixth journalist killed in Mexico this year. Valdez, a veteran crusading reporter who had long written bravely about the cartels, was shot not far from the offices of Río Doce, the Sinaloa weekly newspaper he cofounded in 2003.

The dangers journalists face in Mexico cannot be overstated: At least 104 journalists have been killed in the country since 2000, and at least 25 remain unaccounted for, the press freedom organization Article 19 says.

Widely known for his weekly column, Malayerba, and books in which he covered the impact of drug trafficking on the Mexican government, media and society, Valdez was the recipient of the CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 2011. (Video of his acceptance speech here.) Only last year he received the Maria Moors Cabot International Journalism Prize on behalf of Río Doce.

Valdez’s work for Río Doce and the national daily La Jornada combined elements of investigative and narrative journalism, emphasizing the ethical dimension of journalism and what Valdez saw as the journalist’s responsibility to tell the truth. More important, in his latest book, “Narcoperiodismo,” Valdez wasn’t shy about exploring Mexican journalism’s “contamination” by the narcos.

His journalism told stories that, when put together, reconstructed the horrific jigsaw puzzle of Mexico’s national tragedy.

The following interview by Blanche Petrich with Valdez was published in La Jornada in October. As Mexico celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Juan Rulfo, one of the country’s most gifted storytellers, it has tragic echoes of Rulfo’s classic 1951 short story, “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”

I translated the interview into English because I think it offers insights into what motivated Valdez and that it’s important that English-speaking readers learn more about his life, work and commitment to journalism. I’ve added hyperlinks and supplementary information in brackets.

Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico

Journalist Javier Valdez’s proposition is that the truth must be told. “Journalists do not like to practice self-criticism, because it’s not easy.” And that is indeed the proposition that Valdez makes in his book “Narcoperiodismo, la prensa en medio del crimen y la denuncia” [“Narco-journalism: The Press in the Midst of Crime and Denouncement”].

Valdez argues that his most recent title, the latest in a list of books that includes “Huérfanos del narco” [“The Orphans of the Narco”], “Los morros del narco,” [“The Children of the Narco”], “Miss Narco” and “Con una granada en la boca” [“A Hand Grenade in the Mouth”], is about “that concern with looking at ourselves face to face, from within. It’s not just about drug trafficking, one of our most ferocious threats. It’s about how the government is harassing the press. [The book is about] how we live in newsrooms infiltrated by the narco, sitting next to a colleague you cannot trust because they may be the one who is leaking reports to the government or the criminals. I also identify the businessmen, media owners and CEOs prioritizing business over stories, who are more concerned with profits than with telling the story of what is happening in Mexico, or about the risks faced by their reporters, their employees.”

“We learned the hard way that it was not enough to merely count the dead. When the violence exploded, reality overwhelmed us. What we wrote, what we published, had no connection with what was happening, that psychosis, that terror.”

The name of the multi-award-winning newspaper Río Doce, which he founded along with fellow journalist Ismael Bojórquez and other professionals 13 years ago, owes its name to the 11 rivers in Sinaloa state. A born-and-bred culichi [native and resident of Culiacán, capital city of Sinaloa], Valdez continually crosses the border of that state with its 11 rivers to inquire into the status of the health of journalism in Northern Mexico, from coast to coast.

In his search Valdez discovers terminology used to describe a range of roles, like the panochón, which in underworld lingo means a reporter whom the criminals locate, threaten and then exploit:

“The panochón can become a whistleblower, a journalist who betrays other journalists; the panochón can receive direct phone calls from the boss, receive slaps on the face, back and buttocks; suffer ‘the scissors’ (cutting of limbs), ‘stoves’ (burns) or ‘floor’ (murder).”

Valdez warns us: “The story I tell here is real. It has happened in some places of Mexico, in several cities of different states, at different times.”

Javier Valdez, 49, grew up in the old neighborhood of Rosales, in Culiacán. There his family lived without mixing with “the others,” the still-small community of gomeros who were sulky folk from the Sierra who came down from the mountains carrying opium paste, and ended up settling in the capital of Sinaloa, never integrating with their neighbors. It was the 1970s.

Then other neighbors appeared. They were true villains. Each was a mixture of gunman, policeman and criminal. And some years later others came too: the narcos. That was when that invisible line that divided the common families and the criminals began to falter. “The flirtation began, the culichi society winked at the drug traffickers. The coexistence could no longer be separated; we were already with them. They were already part of our life.”

Petrich:  To the journalists of this generation in other states who had to cover the violence that was unleashed during President Felipe Calderón’s term, this took them by surprise. Nobody was prepared for this. Unlike you, the Sinaloans…

Valdez: Partly it’s true. Culiacán in the 1980s and 1990s was a city where a funeral procession was machine-gunned in the center of town; a city with vendettas between drug gangs. However, when Calderón started his absurd drug war we discovered that no one, not even us in Sinaloa, were prepared to tell the story of this evil. We learned the hard way that it was not enough to merely count the dead. When the violence exploded, reality overwhelmed us. What we wrote, what we published, had no connection with what was happening, that psychosis, that terror. Realizing that we could not cope hit us badly.

Moreover, with each article we published we had to assess the risk. Suddenly, when we were deep into an investigation, someone would come in and tell us to “cool it off.” Sometimes it was a threat; other times it was just people who were worried about us. Either way, we slowed down. In 2009 they threw a grenade at the newsroom; it only caused material damage. We kept asking ourselves: Who did it? Was it the narco, any of the cartels, the Army, the Navy, a hitman, a police chief, a public servant?

Petrich: It is not easy to know if in Sinaloa journalists are better or worse than in other states of the region…

Valdez: It works in our favor to have a single dominant cartel, the Cartel of Sinaloa. There is not much dispute. It is a single group that controls the Government, and gives the orders and also has a monopoly over crime. That leaves some spaces for local journalism, which has no representatives from Sonora, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas or Veracruz, because they are in the middle of a sporadic or constant war between two or three criminal organizations.

In spite of that, we know that we only have a little piece of the monster, a small plot in hell. We tell stories of love in the midst of corpses hanging from the bridges, stories that may even be humorous, like the story of the guy who calls for a dance competition offering millions of pesos and beer as prize to whoever can dance the longest, while at that very same moment in a nearby street, an ice-box appears with five severed heads in it. No, we will never be able to tell the full story of that abysmal violence.

Petrich: Tamaulipas…

Valdez: That was like descending from Culiacán 50 feet into hell. In my book I titled that chapter “Reporting the Silence.” How do you report that? How do these reporters live, what have they done, where did they go, how did they survive, what do they think of those who fled, of those who are no longer with us? What is it like to be trapped in the middle of two or three criminal organizations and end up reporting nothing, publishing photos and images that do not say anything? That is what is published in the Tamaulipas media: nothing. Nothing to do with the street, with how people are suffering.

Petrich: And Veracruz?

Valdez: Veracruz is the amalgamation of all evils. Veracruz is the branch that contains most of the hellish core, where so many journalists have been assassinated, where there have been so many attacks on reporters, who have been harassed by the criminal government of Javier Duarte, where there is so much narcopolitics. Veracruz is of crucial importance, mainly following the murder of [journalist] Rubén Espinosa: the horror, the mourning of journalist colleagues, the denigrating death, the corpses of reporters thrown at the doors of their newsrooms; I had to write about that.

Rubén’s story is representative of the violence nationally, because it demonstrates the level of impunity and its impact. No one thought that the arms of the Veracruz monster would reach Mexico City in order to kill a reporter who was alone, impoverished, exposed and vulnerable.”

Petrich: The risks of journalism are multiple and not all come from outside: sensationalism, excessive repetition, normalization of horror …

Valdez: We all know that. And we’ve been wrong sometimes. More than being a double-edged sword, journalism is a resource with many blades, many edges. It is necessary to make an effort when telling certain stories so that you do not drool over the material, so that sensationalism does not take over. In journalism you have to make self-criticism and self-review a constant.

Petrich: In “Narco-journalism” you move away from the local chronicle, the testimonial journalism that you have always worked on. In which direction did you take the leap?

Valdez: I want to believe that I was moving toward telling a more public story, seeking to tackle a subject that would allow us to understand ourselves as journalists, full of fear, surrounded by corruption, contaminated by the narcos within our newsrooms. I hope I was able to document  this reality, our illnesses, including our pride, dehumanization, impunity, even our poverty, our low wages and working conditions. That’s what I tried to do.

Why is it so great? I came across this stunning line (yes, it’s more than one sentence) in a piece in a literary journalism journal about the novelist Colette’s outings as a journalist covering “crime of the century”-type trials. Who knew? But she reveals the perception and imagination that fueled her fiction here, putting herself in the mind of an infamous sociopath. The sentence that follows is almost as chilling:  “We remain stunned in front of the tranquil and gentle murderer, who keeps a diary of his victims and rested, perhaps, while at work, with his elbow on the window and feeding the birds some bread.”