Over his career at the Los Angeles Times, Thomas Curwen has written and edited for the Outdoor section, the Book Review, the features desk and the Metro desk. Despite his wide-ranging interests, his enduring passion is for stories that, as he puts it, depict “the split-second events that change the predictable course of life.” That passion paid off in his Pulitzer-winning contribution as part of the team that reported on the San Bernardino terrorist attack, and his Pulitzer finalist work about a grizzly bear attack in Montana.

A story on gun violence, then, would fit nicely with Curwen’s interests. But when he set out to report a story on the ratcheting trend in 2013, on the heels the Sandy Hook massacre, Curwen noticed the market was saturated with pieces that focused on gunmen or the victims. So he found a different main subject: the trauma surgeon.

Five months after securing clearance to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Curwen and a photographer witnessed, from inside the operating room, as Dr. Brant Putnam raced to save the life of a teenage boy. The resulting story is a pulsating and spare tick-tock of an all-too-common phenomenon in American hospitals.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve worn a lot of hats at the Times over the years. When you reported this piece, were you on a specific beat? How did you find this story?

Gun violence in America had once again moved to the front page, and most stories, it seemed, focused on the shooters and the dead. I wanted to find a different angle. Two years earlier, I had written about the firefighters and paramedics who arrived on the scene of a similar tragedy at a hair salon in Seal Beach, and I knew that every time a bullet found its victim, it set off a ripple of effect, concentric rings running throughout our society, changing the lives of families, bystanders, medical professionals, even those reading the news.

I wanted to see how surgeons and emergency room personnel cope with these senseless, almost daily shootings, and I began calling local hospitals to see if I might be able to report this story from their perspective.

For you, is this a gun violence story or a trauma surgeon story? Or both? Or neither?

This is the story about a random act of violence that upended the life of the victim and his family, but by focusing on the surgeon who treats gunshot wounds almost every day, I wanted to see if the experience was somehow uneventful. This intrigued me: How can the world collapse at the point of a gun, bringing with it death and tragedy, and leave some unscathed, even undeterred by these events? How do they understand gun violence (and this country’s inability to stop the bloodshed)?

In terms of your final narrative product, it feels spare, or at least as though it could’ve been much longer, with far more context and backstory. Why did you choose to focus the aperture in this way?

After reporting the story, I realized I had a straightforward chronology. I just needed to get the clock running in the most efficient and economical way, introducing the reader to the emergency room and the two main characters: the surgeon and the boy. Beyond that, I wanted to get out of the way, laying out each detail in the most clear and economic manner, avoiding unnecessary detours and medical jargon. When writing action sequences, I find that short sentences are the most effective, staccato bursts of language, that convey speed, franticness and urgency. Longer sentences would have slowed the rhythm of the prose, and these are no moments to linger over. A life was at stake.

Similarly, I felt that too much backstory – those detours – would have distracted the reader. This account had to be as focused and as sharp as possible.

In many ways, this story reminded me of Jon Franklin’s famous piece “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which won the first Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Are you familiar with that story? Did you take inspiration from that or any other writing when putting this together?

I am flattered by the association, and yes, I am familiar with Franklin’s masterful story. It certainly has become the hallmark for medical narratives, to which I would add Tom Hallman’s “The Boy Behind the Mask.”

As much as I admire these stories, I don’t know if I can say if they influenced me. I read widely, drawing upon a lot of different narrative styles, and in this case, I credit my sources, namely Dr. Putnam. Once I had completed a draft of the story, I met with him, and we talked about our four hours in the operating room, a conversation that allowed me re-report the story and go deeper in the material.

“After reporting the story, I realized I had a straightforward chronology. I just needed to get the clock running in the most efficient and economical way, introducing the reader to the emergency room and the two main characters: the surgeon and the boy. Beyond that, I wanted to get out of the way.”

You mentioned to me that one of the most difficult aspects of reporting was getting access to the surgical operation. How did that process work? Did you feel that being in the room while it was happening was essential?

The challenge of reporting any story in a hospital setting is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which prohibits medical personnel from disclosing information about their patients.

In the past, I’ve secured permission from patients before I began reporting. They would sign a waiver allowing me access to their records and histories.

In this case, however, any individual coming into a hospital with a gunshot wound would not be in any position – physically or mentally – to sign any waiver, let alone understand who I was and what I was attempting to do.

As a result, the photographer on the story – Barbara Davidson – and I were able to work out an arrangement with the hospital and their attorneys to report the story under the condition that once the patient was in recovery, we would explain our intentions. If the patient agreed – and then signed the waiver – we could proceed. If the patient did not agree, we would destroy my notes and images.

It was a gamble, and we were fortunate that Harbor-UCLA Medical Center agreed to these terms. In the end, the hospital staff – and the patient and his family – understood the importance of our work.

The story reads quickly, at times during the surgery almost like an avalanche, an assault on the senses. Was it intentional to create a sweeping energy like that?

It’s a good observation, and yes, that was the intent: to capture the chaos, the uncertainty, the fear and terror of this moment, these seconds that passed as hours on the operating table.

Surgeon races to save a life during L.A.’s shooting season

By Thomas Curwen

Originally published August 18, 2013

From the entry wound — the size of a nickel — Dr. Brant Putnam guesses that the bullet is a .45, but it’s what he can’t see that worries him most. What went into your decision to start in the hospital, almost inside the head of the surgeon we haven’t met? I am great advocate for telling a story as close to the point of view of the protagonist as possible. This story is Dr. Putnam’s story, and I wanted to establish from the very beginning. All that we’re seeing and experiencing comes from his perspective. Technically, this makes attributions more invisible and creates a more immediate, less intrusive reading experience.

The boy, a teenager most likely, lies naked on Bed 2 in a trauma bay at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. His brown skin, slick with sweat, is ashen.

“What’s your name?” a resident asks as half a dozen doctors and nurses circle him.

The boy can’t answer.

“Ohhh,” he moans.

“How old are you, sir?”

“Awww.”

The boy’s hipbones delicately protrude from his narrow waist. He has a woman’s name tattooed down his right arm from elbow to wrist and the bullet hole is to the right of his navel. These details are incredibly intimate. What purpose was served by including them here? I wanted to capture the vulnerability of the human body, most obvious when it is stripped naked. The boy’s skinny frame and his tattoo were the canvas of his youth, possibly his innocence, and the bullet hole, the stunning interruption. I also believe that the more intimate the detail, the more universal the appreciation. I didn’t want the reader to be distracted by questions of race which often figure in stories about gun violence. I wanted these hipbones, that right arm, that naval help connect us immediately to this stranger, this boy, just like all of us.

Putnam, chief of trauma, stands back and watches and listens. He is puzzled that the wound is hardly bleeding.

“Sit up for me.”

“Ohhh.”

There is no sign of an exit wound.

“Hey. Wake up.”

A resident slaps the boy. They need him conscious.

Putnam knows the surge of adrenaline that brought the boy this far is nearly spent. If his blood pressure crashes, his heart will stop. Putnam wonders if it is too late.

“Let’s go to the OR,” he says, loud enough to get everyone’s attention.

The season of shootings has begun on time. Were you not worried that this “season of shootings” may need some explaining? It is always a challenge to weave statistics into a narrative, but in this case, they are critical. They explain the urgency of this story and lay out why we are here in the first place. So rather than present the numbers like a news story (107 GSWs in three months), I wanted to set them up with a quick lead-in – alliterative, perhaps disarmingly poetic – with the hope that any confusion would quickly be answered by the consecutive sentences.

Last year, from July through September, this Torrance hospital treated 107 gunshot victims, the highest number in the county.

This year, four GSWs — medical shorthand for gunshot wounds — arrived on the first day of summer. One was a suicide and three were assaults. Three died and one would probably be discharged in a few days.

Now, on June 23, two more have come in, both teenagers, both assaults. They walked through the front door at 2:25 a.m., no EMTs, no police. Were you spending the night in the hospital, waiting for a shooting victim to come in? What was it like when one did come in? Relief? Fear? Barbara and I had spent three previous Saturdays at the hospital from 3 p.m. until 1 a.m., just waiting. We picked Saturdays, we picked the summer, we picked late nights because these are prime-time for shootings. On each occasion, nothing happened, and yes, we were surprised. It was our fourth night, around 2:15 a.m., and we were just about to call it quits – resigned to another night coming up with nothing – when these two boys walked into the emergency room. The chaos of their sudden arrival caught us off-guard, and suddenly we were off and running. With no time for reflection, for relief or fear, we were running with Dr. Putnam from the ER to the OR, changing into gowns, masks and boots and trying to stay out of the way.

The hospital staff calls it the homeboy ambulance service: patients brought in with injuries often from gang shootings.

Putnam can see that one of the boys will be OK. He has a clean wound through the shoulder.

The boy with the nickel-sized bullet hole is far worse, and they know nothing about him. No name, no age, no family. For now, they call him Zinc, one of the pseudonyms the hospital uses for its John Does.

Emergency departments in hospitals throughout America have physicians like Putnam, doctors who specialize in saving the lives of shooting victims.

Other traumas, like concussions and automobile accidents, can be subtle and require imaging to see what’s hidden. Gun injuries don’t hide their tracks, but they are just as much a mystery, a puzzle put together by the surgeon as seconds race by.

No matter the clarity of the injury, the damage can extend like concentric rings beyond the trajectory of the bullet. There is the blast effect, the sometimes fatal bruising that can occur to organs in the vicinity of a wound. There is the so-called triad of death, the interplay between body temperature, blood acidity and coagulation.

There is ancillary debris — shards of glass, pieces of clothing, even upholstery if the bullet has passed through furniture — and there are always infections from bacteria carried into the wound. Did your original drafts include more detail about this process? I’m sure books have been written about what bullets do to bodies, but you managed to tease out the essentials. How difficult was that?   I wanted to keep it simple. I could have named the types of bacteria, even described various infections, but that would have cluttered, even interrupted the narrative. This boy was close to death, and I wanted to stay focused on this detail.

Putnam, 44, estimates that he has treated about 5,000 GSWs and consulted on nearly 2,000 more over the last 20 years, 10 of them at Harbor-UCLA. The victims he remembers the most are the children and women, the bystanders hit by stray fire, the wounded who spoke to him in the ER but died in the operating room.

Whenever he loses a patient, he hears his mother asking him what he could have done differently. And whenever he saves a life, he knows that success is often just a matter of luck.

Medicine and technology have come far in recent years in balancing the odds, but when it comes to gun violence, the numbers are overwhelming.

“Why guns?” Putnam asks. “Why so many guns? It once was fistfights. It once was stabbings. Now it’s a whole new world out there, and with guns, it’s just too much.” In today’s world where guns and gun violence are such a serious and debated issue, this quote feels almost of a different, simpler time, before every news network had dissected congressional gun laws. Why did you include it? I was grateful that Dr. Putnam was as insightful as he was, and I liked this quote because it accomplished exactly what you describe. It reminds us of Dr. Putnam’s long experience with GSWs, and it takes us back to a more simple time, conveying in brief measure how quickly gun violence in America has grown out of hand.

The emergency room team washes the boy with an antiseptic. He has been intubated and anesthetized. Blood transfusions have begun.

“Sticky blues,” Putnam calls out. No time to wait for the antiseptic to dry. Nurses drape blue cloths around the boy until he disappears, with only a torso remaining.

Putnam, dressed in surgical scrubs, gloves, cap and headlamp, makes the initial incision from sternum to pubic bone, bowing around the navel.

Chief resident Carrie Luu follows the scalpel with a “Bovie,” a pen-shaped tool that cauterizes the open blood vessels with electrical current. Were these specifics of the operation confirmed after, or are you familiar with surgery and the tools needed? The surgery was chaotic, bloody and disorienting. In taking my notes, I tried to capture as best as I could what I was seeing. But there was a lot that I didn’t know: the materials, the procedures, the anatomy. I was lucky, however, to be standing beside an intern who answered my questions. When I got home later that morning, I typed my notes, capturing the fresh impressions as imprecise as they were. Then when I had a draft, I met with Dr. Putnam, and he and I talked through the particular moments of the surgery, filling in the details, capturing his impressions and fact-checking everything that I saw.

The air smells of singed flesh; tendrils of smoke rise into the lights. This is such a sickening and yet somehow beautiful combination of the senses. Can you talk about how you come up with such language? There is no forgetting the smell of singed flesh; it’s a memory that goes back to the first time we had a mishap with a burner on the stove or barbecue. But here it was at such an industrial scale, given the amount of cutting and cauterizing. And the lighting in the operating room was so cinematic, almost too bright, that the smoke was brilliantly illuminated as it moved and curled upward. As for “tendril,” it’s comes from – of all places – an art history class in college where the professor was describing cigarette posters from the Art Nouveau era. The artists loved to represent those languid strings of smoke, the tendrils, that patterned the air.

Putnam sets a clock running in his mind. Two hours is optimum. Three is the limit. Anything longer compounds the trauma with a phenomena known as physiologic exhaustion, when the body has worn itself out trying to compensate for the injury.

Putnam and Luu begin by separating the small intestine and colon from their ligaments. They notice a few holes in the bowel, but those repairs can come later.

Lifting the intestine out of the torso, they find a pool of blood the size of a football flooding the back of the abdomen. This explains why the entry wound was dry. The boy is losing more blood than they can give him. Putnam wonders again if they are too late. I feel now we are almost inside the mind of Putnam, with this level of detail and intimacy. Was he wondering this aloud? Did he tell you this after? Yes, this was the advantage of working with Dr. Putnam after the first draft was written. I was able to ask him about his feelings and thoughts during the surgery.

He orders more transfusions. A resident begins suctioning the abdomen.

“Minus 8,” a nurse calls out. It’s a measure of the blood’s acidity, a reminder of the triad of death. A normal reading — zero — means blood clots can form naturally.

As patients lose blood, lactic acid accumulates in the cells, and the enzyme that helps coagulation doesn’t function. The more acid, the more bleeding, and patients’ temperatures drop until there’s no stopping the loss.

Trauma teams try to interrupt this cycle. Transfusions and warming blankets help. The OR’s thermostat is set as high as it will go: 85 degrees. The boy lies on a pad that’s heated to 100 degrees, but still his temperature has fallen to 93.

Unable to see beyond the blood collecting in the abdomen, Putnam reaches in, and his fingers find the inferior vena cava — a vein nearly an inch in diameter — that channels blood from the lower half of the body back into the heart.

He pushes down on it, and the bleeding slows. When he eases up, he can hear a whoosh. The vena cava has been punctured.

Fired from a handgun, a .45-caliber bullet averages 900 feet per second, and unless it hits a bone, it usually follows a straight line.

This bullet’s journey passed through the skin and the colon, the intestine and then the vena cava. It stopped just behind the pancreas, with its point boring nearly two inches into the spine at an angle, just missing the spinal cord.

Putnam probes the vertebra. He feels sharp fragments of bone and a hole in the L-3 vertebra no larger than his little finger. If the bullet posed a risk for pain or infection, he would remove it, but experience tells him it is safe to leave behind.

With the blood drained, he can see the damage to the vena cava: two holes in the vein, most of the tissue shredded. There will be no repairing it. Each end will have to be tied off permanently, and the other veins will have to adjust by carrying blood back to the heart.

But ligating the vena cava is tricky. Unlike arteries with their thick muscular walls, veins are as fragile as tissue paper.

Putnam puts a clamp with long pincers on the vein, which swells like a garden hose. In this graf and the one above, you’ve used everyday, relatable things to such great effect: tissue paper, a garden hose. Is that why you chose them, so people could really connect to what’s going on? That’s a nice observation, and yes, it’s true. When a story comes close to being technical (L-3 vertebra, vena cava, etc), I think it’s important for us to step away from the textbook and find an explanation, a picture, an analogy that renders the detail in the most ordinary terms possible. Not only does it make the reading experience effortless (critical for narratives, in my opinion), but it also represents my effort to help demystify the world, which – especially in the fields of science and medicine – has become so specialized as to be almost alienating. I think it’s incumbent on writers, narrative writers, to help break down those walls. Even in the best of circumstances, fewer than half of patients with similar injuries survive.

The boy jerks, a sudden reflex.

“Can you paralyze him so he’ll stop bucking?” Putnam asks. This quote seems removed, almost inhumane. Do you think Putnam still sees all of the people he operates on as people? I believe that all surgeons understand that our bodies have minds of their own, and in this instance, like a broken machine, are subject to involuntary reflexes that can interfere with the business of living. In moments of such profound trauma, the body and soul become strangers to one another, which is natural and does not take away from our humanity.

More paralytics are added to the cocktail of intravenous drugs.

Putnam guides Luu, the chief resident, as she starts to tie off the vein. The stitch reverses direction with each pass and looks like the threads on a baseball.

“Minus 11,” a nurse calls out. They have been working for almost 90 minutes.

“Come on,” Putnam says, encouraging Luu. “This is where all these things really matter.”

She is having trouble. Sideways torque in the needle tears out the suture. Luu is still learning — and Harbor-UCLA is a teaching hospital — but now Putnam has to take over.

“Big pledgets,” he calls out, asking for the felt-like material, nearly an inch in diameter, that will act like gaskets to support each suture against the tissue. “Hurry, please.”

His hands rise and fall quickly, deftly, with the grace of a pianist. His stitches, though, aren’t perfect. He learned long ago that there was no call for elegance in surgeries like this. A perfect stitch could mean a dead patient.

With a little more than 12 passes, the lower portion of the vein is closed. They are almost two hours in. Putnam is sweating and splattered with blood. The room is stifling.

“Watch your eyes,” Putnam announces as he removes the clamps and tests the sutures. Given the pressure in the vein, blood could spray across the room if the sutures don’t hold. I love the commonsense yet ghoulish instructions. You convey information here in a simple yet dramatic way. How do you choose these moments? With every narrative, there is an inherent – and critical – tension between the action sequences (“Watch your eyes…”) and the exposition that explains why and helps orient the reader. I love playing with this rhythm, pushing the story ahead and then backing off, trying to gauge the reader’s capacity for each. Generally speaking, the stronger the action sequences, the easier it is to interrupt the flow with some explanation, which in my mind should always be – whenever possible – as brief as a haiku.

They hold.

“Still very oozy,” he says. The body’s normal coagulants haven’t begun to stop the other sources of bleeding.

He and Luu staple the top portion of the vena cava and turn to the intestine. They draw the long, serpentine tube through their hands inch by inch, stapling and stitching any tear.

A cloth is tossed on the floor to mop the blood at Putnam’s feet. By now, almost 80% of the boy’s blood has been replaced.

Loosely positioning the intestine inside the abdomen, Putnam begins bandaging. He won’t close the incision because he plans to open the boy again in two days to reassess the work and to see how the body is healing.

“OK, we’re moving,” the scrub tech announces as soon as Putnam steps back and begins to strip out of his surgical gown.

Putnam remembers all the bad news he’s ever delivered. He won’t have to remember this one. It strikes me that, for anybody other than a shooting-trauma surgeon, experiencing any part of this would be an unforgettable experience. What does it say about Putnam that he only remembers the ones that go wrong? It is  common in emergency room setting that the doctors and nurses only remember the lives they were unable to save. These are the lives that are shrouded in the tears, in the wailing, the sudden outpouring of grief that comes when the family members learn the outcome in the waiting room. For Dr. Putnam, these memories are tied up with his own sorrow – and second-guessing – as he relives the surgeries that didn’t end favorably.

At 5:25 a.m., three hours after arrival, he pronounces the boy in critical condition, expected to live.

A little before 6 a.m., Putnam goes looking for the family. He still doesn’t have any information about the boy.

Sleeping families fill the waiting rooms, and in the ER, Putnam speaks with the other victim, who says he doesn’t know his friend’s name.

Then a call comes in. A woman is asking if the hospital has seen a young man with the name Connie tattooed on the underside of his right arm.

Within an hour, Connie Greene and her husband meet Putnam in the ICU. She is the boy’s mother, and his name is Leandrus Benton. He is 16.

“He’s OK,” Putnam tells the parents. “He lost a lot of blood, and we almost lost him.”

Connie starts to cry. In the last five years, two of her nephews have been killed in street shootings.

Leandrus — or Lee, as he’s known to his family and friends — had been walking home from a party in Wilmington that night. As he would later explain, he and his friend thought it would be safer to take the alley than the street. Lee had heard the gun but didn’t see the shooter. The bullet, he said, burned through his gut. Did you want to speak to Leandrus more, or his family? Or was the idea not to individualize the victim too much, since this is more a story about all shooting trauma victims and those who help them? That’s a good question, and you’re right. Of course I was tempted to tell more of Leandrus’ story, but when Barbara and I visited him at his home just a few days after he had been released from the hospital, he was weak and still in shock. And it didn’t feel right to do anything more than to introduce ourselves and explain what I wanted to do with this story. And, as I have noted, we have read about the gunshot victims before, and this is a story about Dr. Putnam, his skill, his training and his familiarity with the terrible things that guns can do. By association, I hope his story can help readers understand that gun violence isn’t just between the shooter and the shot, but that it touches dozens, if not hundreds, of other individuals who live in a world conscribed by reluctant politicians, the Second Amendment and the pain and suffering of neighborhoods where poverty and violence are so tragically interrelated.

Putnam walks the couple into the ICU, and as they wash their hands, he pulls out gowns, gloves and masks for them. He then takes them to Lee, waits a minute and draws the curtain around them so they can be alone with their son. The rhythm of the last words is lovely. I also like the image of the curtain, because the surgery was like theater, and the doctor is playing a role for a brief yet vital moment in the boy’s life, then steps away from it. Talk about choosing this ending. Writing is a collaborative art: Every writer needs an editor. I had two excellent editors on this piece, Drex Heikes, and Kari Howard, now editor of Storyboard, but both proposed a rewrite on my original. The first ending that I had written shifted the attention from the scene in the ICU to Putnam’s reflections on the night. I had wanted to use his words to channel my thoughts about the terrible relentlessness of these shootings. Clearly I was too close to the material. Drex and Kari felt that his quotes broke from the narrative and wanted me to try a subtler approach. So we decided instead to highlight this moment of tenderness and privacy, letting readers ask their own questions and walk away with their own sense of futility and perhaps sorrow.

Writer’s note: Here is the original ending:

Within an hour, Connie Green and her husband meet Putnam in the ICU. The boy is 16 and his name is Leandrus Benton.

“He’s OK,” Putnam tells the parents. “He lost a lot of blood, and we almost lost him.”

Connie starts to cry. Two of her nephews had been killed in shootings in Long Beach.

Putnam walks the couple into the ICU and to their son’s bed. He draws a curtain around them.

They will learn later that Leandrus had been walking home from a party in Wilmington. He and his friend decided they would be safer to take the alley than the street.  Leandrus heard a gun but didn’t see a shooter. A bullet suddenly burned like fire in his gut.

After being on duty nearly 24 hours, Putnam relaxes and reflects on the day.

“Traumas are random,” he says. “They leave you asking not just why did this happen, but – when things looked so bad – how did they turn around?

“It takes a lot of luck and the sense that someone is watching over us.”

Putnam is weary. “I just need to get through the shift,” he says.

But he knows that once he gets home, he will start wondering.

“Why guns? Why so many guns? Why do young people get status through guns? It once was fist fights. It once was stabbings. Now it’s a whole new world out there, and with guns, it’s just too much.”

Why is it great? This week we’re spotlighting stellar literary journalism about America’s gun violence epidemic, and this stunning story by Eli Saslow takes an intimate, often uncomfortably close look at the life of a shooting victim after all the headlines have faded and the country’s attention has moved on to the latest massacre. You could say that Saslow embeds himself in the life of 16-year-old Cheyeanne Fitzgerald. This sentence seems to encapsulate the entire piece: the realization that she has no control over her life, the anger over a life disrupted, the fear that threatens to subsume the life left in the ruins. (Read the Storyboard interview with Saslow about the story here.)

Few journalists are more versed in guns and gun violence than Mark Follman. As national affairs editor for Mother Jones, Follman has led a series of landmark investigations into everything from mass shootings to child gun deaths. Even now, with President Trump occupying much of the magazine’s time and resources, Follman still finds time to report on the gun epidemic.

Perhaps his most groundbreaking project came  in mid-2015, when Mother Jones published a package titled “The True Cost of Gun Violence in America.” It was the culmination of a year working with an economist to collect and analyze data, and to present, for possibly the first time, a highly scientific look at the financial costs of gun violence on society.

The numbers were eye-popping: $229 billion a year in direct costs (emergency services, police investigations, short- and long-term care) and indirect ones (lost income, impact on quality of life).

To construct a narrative around the data, Follman and his team of half a dozen reporters, research fellows and producers found innovative and affecting ways to present the data. I interviewed Follman by phone about tackling a project with no precedent, building a narrative around numbers and avoiding the pitfalls of politicization.

The interview has been slightly edited for length and flow.

“I wanted to find ways to tackle the subject that are really strongly data-driven and really show the scope of the problem without getting into the political debate.”

In the story, you mention that Mother Jones was interested in the cost of gun violence since the mass shooting in Aurora in 2012. Were you involved in that initial interest, and can you talk about it?

It’s not so specific to that shooting per se, but that was just the point in time where I became much more invested in the subject of mass shootings, really focusing on it and conducting data research on it. I wrote that into the context of the piece as kind of a benchmark of time, because I had covered gun violence prior to that, but 2012 was really a major pivot point for me with that attack in Aurora. That’s the point I really started to think about: What’s going on with these mass shootings? Why isn’t there more information about this problem? And we started developing bigger projects around gun violence, too. Mass shootings have been a big focus for me and at Mother Jones, but I’ve also done projects looking at child gun deaths, and a lot of data work back then around the ways laws were changing at the state level.

What triggered this particular package, on the financial costs of gun violence in America?

It was something I had been thinking about from that time and been talking about with others on my team and with our editors as an area that really seems to almost never be discussed with respect to gun violence. I was also thinking about it in the context of mass shootings in particular, because they tend to be inordinately impactful in all sorts of ways. Psychologically, with the emotional trauma they can have, the response to them, the ripple effects they had were really intense. So part of that equation in my mind had to be the financial impact as well. And we saw that there was really no data on it, because it’s been this kind of political suppression of research over the years, it’s a difficult thing to measure, and so on. But as I pointed out in the piece, there are some difficult societal questions that have been studied in this way, so the big question became, why not this one?

We realized it was an opportunity to set out and do that. Our first step was to find out what, if any, economists were out there that had studied this. There are few, if any, who have tackled it at all.

This was a major package, with the main analytical feature, video and a separate piece with a number of gunshot survivor stories. What kind of time investment was this for you, the other reporters, the magazine?

It was a deep investment. I think, and I’m a little hazy on the details, but I think we spent about a year in total working on this, and about the last three or four months of it were pretty full time. We had a team of three reporters, including myself acting in a dual role reporting and editing, and we had a producer doing video and some research help from our fellows. It was a team of about a half-dozen people working on it full time for three or four months, and that was a culmination of about a year-long project of digging into data. It took us a long time initially just to figure out how to do the data project, involving a lot of conversations with Ted Miller, who was the economist we worked with on the data, just figuring out how to parse that in a way that made sense and would give us a good, understandable estimate of the problem but would still be a conservative estimate. We wanted to be careful not to overstate it, because there are some less tangible things we included. And I think we ended up with a conservative estimate, and the costs are likely significantly higher.

For a piece that largely highlighted the financial costs through data collection and analysis, you started and ended the story with the story of one individual, Jennifer Longdon, who had experienced gun violence and its rippling costs. Why?

We really had two components we set out to do. One was to figure out the data equation, which was quite complex, to figure out the methodology and then gather that data and analyze it. Then the other component was that I knew from the outset that I wanted to have a narrative story to wrap around it so that people would be able to relate to it. Data work is often pretty thick, and you want to combine that with good storytelling, so I was on the lookout for a good personal story that could kind of be the centerpiece. I had gotten to know Jennifer Longdon at that point through some other reporting I had done on gun violence, maybe the prior year. I had a sense of how big her financial burden was, so I started talking to her about whether she’d be willing to share more of that with me. Soon we were off and running with that, and spent time reporting her story out, too. Those were the two kind of tracks we brought together for the package.

Then as we were building it, we also thought we wanted to show this in some different ways too with some other kind of mini-portraits, so we started gathering that other group of survivors we wanted to profile as well.

Were you hesitant or concerned that Longdon’s story, since it was anecdotal and isolated, would cost you some of the objectivity and validity of your data?

I wouldn’t say that I was concerned about it. I think it was necessary to really get people to engage with the difficult computations of what these numbers mean. Because ultimately, the cost to a gun violence victim, both personally and then locally, within the immediate orbit of that person, to translate that, you really need a story you can relate to. It’s really a classic convention of good data journalism at this point. But on the other hand, I also felt like her story was really good for distilling these concepts, because you could see some very big costs to her that were direct and specific, but I think her story also was a good way to show these ideas of, what are the more intangible costs that are long-lasting that affect a person’s life and the people around them?

And that’s also why we wanted to have the other survivor mini-profiles, too, because we wanted to suggest that, you know, this is just one version of this. But I thought her story was very powerful when I started digging into the details of what she experienced, because the physical and psychological trauma she experienced was so intense, and the costs were so big that I thought it was a good way to show — kind of in miniature — these much bigger numbers. Really, they’re hard to relate to. We say at the top that the big grand conclusion from this is that gun violence costs the country more than $229 billion a year. How do you relate to that? You can compare it to the revenue of Apple computers, but it’s not going to give you the same sense of understanding and scale that a personal story like Jennifer Longdon’s does. So instead of taking away from it, I think it really added to the thrust of the data quite dramatically, and quite profoundly.

I agree, but I feel that as affecting and profound as that story was, I could imagine strident gun rights advocates saying something like, “Her story is an anomaly. You’re pulling that one out to distort the real evidence.” We’re living in a moment where everything that can, will be politicized.

Well, people can take a story like that and politicize it in a number of ways. But, I think it’s important to point out that one of the driving reasons why we were interested in doing this story and why were so invested is because, for me personally, I wanted to find ways to tackle the subject that are really strongly data-driven and really show the scope of the problem without getting into the political debate. There’s so much of that political debate about gun control versus gun rights, and anyone who reads about that topic is familiar with those arguments, but our goal with a project like this is to really show the problem empirically, through the data, through the stories of people who have experienced it, and let readers decide for themselves. Sure, you could say most people don’t experience what Jennifer Longdon did, but I don’t know if that’s true. I think many people understand that many people who experience gun violence have debilitating injuries, lots of people end up in wheelchairs. We had another one in the smaller survivor profiles, a young man from Richmond, Calif., who had come out of that setting of urban gang violence. I think many people would come out of her story thinking that this in fact may be more common than I realized, not a total exception.

“We really had two components we set out to do. One was to figure out the data equation, which was quite complex, to figure out the methodology and then gather that data and analyze it. Then the other component was that I knew from the outset that I wanted to have a narrative story to wrap around it so that people would be able to relate to it.”

People can and will continue to have those debates ad nauseam, but that wasn’t the intention of this project at all. The intention was to show this problem in vivid detail with a particular focus on that question that I think is fundamental and in some ways very simple: What does this cost society? And it’s interesting to me that to this day, that question comes up very little in all the debates about gun policy. There’s enormous financial impact from this problem that people still don’t really talk about.

Since you had reported on gun violence prior, did you find anything over the course of reporting that really shocked you, whether about the numbers or the survivor stories or something else? Or was it just a matter of organizing and contextualizing these things for your audience?

I would say some of both. I had a sense of where this investigation was headed, but of course we didn’t know what the numbers were until we really dug into it. But I would say that the over-arching numbers we found were pretty eye-popping. That the cost was that significant on an annual basis, and the comparisons we ended up making to it, like the cost of Medicaid, or what we spend to fight obesity or Apple’s annual revenue, these are major societal problems that it’s on par with financially.

I think in particular I was surprised in regard to mass shootings, that was something that really stood out to me, too. Looking at the cost of it, which I got into a little bit with the example of the shooting at Clackamas Town Center, the mall in Portland. If you take a mass shooting and isolate it and try to apply this methodology to a mass shooting, the numbers there I thought were quite stark. And it makes sense, in the ways that mass shootings tend to have an inordinate impact in general, that it would also be true with the financial. I started measuring, looking at how many people responded to this, the shutdown of the mall for nearly a week during Christmas season and the lost revenue from that, things that a more conventional shooting wouldn’t see an impact on. But in a mass shooting you see these things that have a much more dramatic impact. There was something like 115 investigators involved in the aftermath, doing their work and developing a report. That’s a lot of paid hours of work. Things like that add up into the millions of dollars. Or in the case of the Colorado mass shooting, the cost to the justice system to carry out the trial of James Holmes, just what they had to do to seat a jury, the cost of the time and number of people involved.

You mention the “indirect costs” of gun violence, which come from lost wages and impact on victims’ quality of life. Were you interested at all in going beyond that, to the almost tertiary costs, like cooling effects on local economies in urban areas, or how entire at-risk communities can be devastated by frequent violence?

I think certainly in concept I was interested in that, and some of that is shaded into the piece. There’s some discussion there in terms of when you get these communities that are locked into this terrible cycle, gun violence can very much be a root of broader problems like that. That’s why I think one of the economists in the piece mentions that the first thing mayors of major cities talk about when they want to fix a blighted neighborhood is the gun problem. It keeps businesses away, and kids aren’t safe going to school, and so on and so forth. So you can extrapolate out even further into the socioeconomic issues that gun violence can create in a community. And then it gets even more difficult to quantify the cost. One of the techniques economists use for that is something they call quality-of-life measurements, and that is an interesting area that bears further exploration.

One thing I just remembered that stood out to me as really surprising was the shocking lack of data on the mental health costs of gun violence. There have been virtually no studies that have been done on that. The study we had to use to kind of extrapolate off of was one Ted Miller had done with a colleague back in the 1990s, I believe. And even that is a fairly small sample. There’s obviously a huge cost in terms of mental trauma and treatment people need, or aren’t getting, when they experience gun violence, and I think the numbers we ended up putting around that were very conservative. I think if you were able to get a real look at the data, it would be a much more significant cost, not just in terms of money but in terms of the quality of people’s lives, in post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that.

It’s pretty incredible that something so common, and so devastating to so many, could have so little funding for research from the government.

Oh yeah. That was a very strong theme I found among public health experts and researchers, that there was a real chill on studying this subject. Not only because there’s a lack of funds from the government, but there’s been a political chill. People know that if they get into these waters, they’re going to get attacked. I thought that was an important part of this piece, too, to convey that. We’re really leaving ourselves blind on a major societal problem because of the politics of this. People just don’t want to study it. They’d rather do other things. They don’t want to worry about the NRA coming after them. That would have real implications for people working in academia, or government. It’s not just a matter of being criticized; it’s a matter of potentially losing funding for something else if they were to kick this particular hornets’ nest.

This was a special week on Storyboard: We spotlighted stellar literary journalism about America’s gun violence epidemic from the Huffington Post’s Highline, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. It was a joint effort with sister site Nieman Reports, which posted this great story in Nieman Reports on how newsrooms are covering mass shootings. I’d love to hear your suggestions on other stunning stories about this plague. Oh, and I’d like to give a shout-out to contributor Davis Harper, who really hustled in landing three of these stories.

Jason Fagone and “What Bullets Do to Bodies.” By the time Jason Fagone started reporting his story for Huffington Post Highline, gun violence had become a genre in journalism, the subject (sadly) of thousands of articles. He wanted to tell it a different way, and chose Dr. Amy Goldberg as his lens. He said: “I thought it would be worth doing because trauma surgeons see a part of the epidemic that the rest of us don’t. They’re really the only ones that can’t look away from gun violence, because it’s their job to fix people who are hurt.”

The soundtrack: “Gunshot,” by Lykke Li. One of my best music friends loves Lykke Li. This song reminds me that I need to listen to her more. “And the shot goes through my head and back/Gunshot, I can’t take it back.”

Thomas Curwen and “Surgeon races to save a life during L.A.’s “shooting season.” This is a particularly fascinating Annotation Tuesday! for me to read, because I edited this story that gives you a front-row seat to a surgery. (Wear goggles for the possible arterial spurting of blood.) I see Tom’s great pacing and the real velocity of the piece. And here and there I found a few things I wished we’d tweaked a little. But isn’t it always thus? Tom is one of my favorite writers. I recommend looking up some of his stories (and even a previous annotation I did of one of them.)

The soundtrack: “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” by Elton John. I don’t think of myself as an Elton John fan, but when he played at Outside Lands in San Francisco a few years ago, I realized I loved quite a few of his songs. “Tiny Dancer” and “Rocket Man,” especially.

One Great Sentence:

“The fact was it felt good to be angry, to yell and curse, because if she wasn’t angry then she was mostly afraid: of nightmares, of being alone, of the shadows in the church parking lot across the street, of cars backfiring, of the sound of knocking coming now at the door.”

Eli Saslow, “A survivor’s life,” The Washington Post, December 5, 2015.

Read why we think it’s great here.

Mark Follman and “The true cost of gun violence in America.” Mother Jones reporter Mark Follman talked to Davis Harper about about his landmark investigation into the staggering price of the firearms epidemic: an estimated $229 billion a year. Follman said of the data-driven piece: “We really had two components we set out to do. One was to figure out the data equation, which was quite complex, to figure out the methodology and then gather that data and analyze it. Then the other component was that I knew from the outset that I wanted to have a narrative story to wrap around it so that people would be able to relate to it.”

The soundtrack: “The Cost of Living Is Killing Me,” by the Skints. First hint that this is a British band: the name, which is the word they use for broke (in the no-money sense). Second hint: the heavy dub/almost triphop vibe.

What I’m reading online: The Nieman Reports story I mentioned above is a treasure trove of literary journalism on the subject of gun violence. Here are a few:

Washington Post writer Terrence McCoy told the story of a 9-year-old girl who was accidentally shot to death by her 3-year-old brother. McCoy told Nieman Reports: “I had been thinking about how to write about gun violence, and it struck me that so much of the media narrative was focused on these horrific acts of terrorism or mass shootings. But when you look at the whole of gun violence in America, that’s just a drop in the bucket.” And you think of this family left forever scarred, and no longer whole, by the violence of their own gun.

But perhaps even more moving is the Precious Lives Project, a two-year, 100-part radio series about young people and gun violence in Milwaukee. “Because we were committed to revisiting it every week, we could revisit people,” Emily Forman, a former producer on Precious Lives, told Nieman Reports. “We could go from talking to a family to the beat cop to the faith leader. You could draw connections between people, even in completely different parts of the city, so you could see how people knew each other and that violence isn’t discrete. It radiates.”

What’s on my bedside table: “El Hombre Negro,” by Maurice Leblanc. Actually, I’m not going to read this — a French writer translated into Spanish, a language I barely know. But I thought the cover fit the theme of the week, with its pulp-fiction gunman. I love this bio of him on Goodreads: “Maurice Leblanc began as a journalist, until asked to write a short story filler, and gentleman thief (later detective) Arsène Lupin, more gallant and dashing than English counterpart Sherlock Holmes.”

What’s on my turntable: “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” by Burt Bacharach. I chose this soundtrack for the movie’s gun ethos, but especially for the last moments of the film. The frozen image of them running out to fusillade after fusillade of gunshots haunts me more than seeing them riddled a la “Bonnie and Clyde” ever would. And the soundtrack has lovely moments. (That does not include “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”)

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

Many journalists covered the battle for Mosul, the capital of the self-styled Caliphate of the Islamic extremist group ISIS. American author Luke Mogelson, on assignment for The New Yorker, viewed it from a unique angle: He embedded for two months with a SWAT team from the Iraqi city.

“I’ve always been struck by how little we talk about the trauma of people from Iraq and Afghanistan compared with how much we talk about the trauma of the Americans who have briefly visited those countries.”

The SWAT team was led by Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak. Jihadists had gunned down his brother, blown up his father’s house. He had been shot three times himself. But Mogelson deftly avoids reducing the war to an unending cycle of vengeance. He says of his experience there: “The war in Iraq is a civil war, and civil wars are personal—if my article had a theme, that might be it—but this doesn’t mean that the war in Iraq is only personal. Nor does personal always denote vengefulness.”

His story offers a bleak, disillusioned picture of Iraq: a shattered country no one seems to really belong to. Soldiers feel first and foremost “native sons of Mosul.” And you are reminded of the late Anthony Shadid’s dispatches: a country where the word “liberation” makes no sense anymore, because whoever wins, nothing is going to change: Extremists are on both sides of the front line.

And yet, despite it all, you would be wrong. Mogelson recalls that one of the sergeants on the SWAT team had “Iraq” tattooed across his forearm. “When I asked for the story behind the tattoo, he explained that ‘Iraq’ was the name of his first-born son. Now, I would defy anyone to question or trivialize this man’s love for, and devotion to, his country.”

I talked via email with Mogelson about his experience in Mosul, his thoughts about the last decade and a half of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and his ambivalence about being a journalist covering those wars.

You embedded with a SWAT unit made up of relatives of ISIS victims. It is a telling choice. It is somehow the symbol of a country nobody feels to really belong to. A country where the strongest motivating force for fighting is blood and revenge. What does Iraq look like today?

My knowledge of Iraq is honestly too limited for me to be able to characterize anyone I’ve written about as necessarily “symbolic” of broader, national traits or trends. It’s true that many of the members of the Mosul SWAT team desire revenge for crimes that were perpetrated against them by ISIS and its antecedents; I wouldn’t know, though, to what extent that applies to Iraqis generally. Perhaps more importantly, even among the SWAT team members, there are other, equally potent factors at play. It would be as disingenuous for me to claim that retribution is the sole driving force behind the Mosul SWAT team as it would be to suggest that a given terrorist group, or terrorist, is motivated entirely by religious zeal (or bloodlust, or sexual frustration or resentment of our way of life). I suppose that in the space of a magazine article—even a 20,000-word article—you are doomed to be reductive, both in your rendering of people’s lives and in your presentation of the political, social and historical contexts that circumscribe them. But in choosing to isolate and pursue a certain thread, you can’t lose sight of… Actually, I’ll skip the tapestry metaphor and offer an example. One of the sergeants in the SWAT team—who, unfortunately, didn’t make it into the piece—had “Iraq” tattooed across his forearm. When I asked for the story behind the tattoo, he explained that “Iraq” was the name of his first-born son. Now, I would defy anyone to question or trivialize this man’s love for, and devotion to, his country. Another day, however, this same man removed his right eyeball and held it out for me to touch. It was fake. He had lost the real one to a car bomb in 2007 and, like all of his compatriots in the unit, he believed that the insurgents responsible for the attacks in Mosul during those years were currently fighting for ISIS across the front line. In other words, the law of retaliation pertained rather literally to his situation. So, the war in Iraq is a civil war, and civil wars are personal—if my article had a theme, that might be it—but this doesn’t mean that the war in Iraq is only personal. Nor does personal always denote vengefulness. The one-eyed sergeant had been forced to flee Mosul, and leave his family behind, a month after his son Iraq was born. He was fighting to get back to him, to save him.

Usually we talk about the Sunni-Shia divide. But from your experience, there seems to be mutual distrust, and mutual fear, basically everywhere.

Religious, sectarian, ethnic, tribal, political and generational tensions are ubiquitous. But so are the enduring bonds that often supersede these tensions. Maybe that sounds naive. All I can say is that it is difficult to justify surrendering to cynicism after you have witnessed the sort of heroism and humanity that I have been privileged enough to witness in Iraq.

After so many wars, Iraq is somehow a society of veterans. A society where the majority of men are like the characters of your book: troubled men, struggling to fit in again. But we barely notice it. We talk of PTSD only for our soldiers. How much do traumas matter? 

I’ve always been struck by how little we talk about the trauma of people from Iraq and Afghanistan compared with how much we talk about the trauma of the Americans who have briefly visited those countries, particularly when you consider that the experiences of almost any Afghan or Iraqi will make most of ours look pretty quaint by contrast. Then again, psychic torment isn’t relative; you don’t suffer any less just because others elsewhere have, by objective metrics, been worse off than you. For the writer, especially, equating trauma like that is unproductive. Also, it’s to be expected that Americans will be more engaged by the trauma of other Americans than by the trauma of Afghans or Iraqis. I’m not so troubled by this, in and of itself, mainly because it seems unlikely that Americans talking more about the trauma of Afghans and Iraqis would practically benefit or even privately gratify many Afghans or Iraqis. I’d say the issue is not the lack of discussion about their trauma but what that lack of discussion points to. I’d say it points to a gap between the value we place on their lives and the value we place on our own. I’d say this gap defines much more than our discourse about trauma; it defines the politics, strategies and tactics that traumatize. I’d also say it is one of the major moral problems of our moment and, incidentally, one reason why terrorism works.

Jihadists are basically off-limits for journalists. We can’t report from ISIS-held areas. What is it like covering a war where you never meet the enemy? And also, an enemy that is somehow your enemy as well? Because we all come from countries at war with ISIS.

Yes, and no amount of social-media contacts or phone interviews or studying of propaganda materials will change the fact that, so long as you are affiliated, by virtue of your nationality, with one side of a conflict, you will always be working within the context of assumptions and biases that are so ingrained you don’t even think of them as such. I would guess that this presents less of a predicament for people who have decided the side with which they are affiliated is either categorically right or categorically wrong. Then your journalism functions as an expression of patriotism or an act of protest. Historically, there are great examples of both kinds of journalism, but personally I find reporting in either mode about the current conflicts in which America is involved unconvincing. So, for me, that’s the challenge: How do you write soberly from a place of uncertainty, of ambivalence, and also what is the objective of such writing — that is, war reporting that’s neither in support of nor in opposition to specific policies? To return to my comment above, I think a good starting point is resisting the impulse to value American lives, Western lives, over others. As soon as you do that, the world reconfigures — everything looks different, including our enemies — and your priorities as a journalist shift accordingly.

“The war in Iraq is a civil war, and civil wars are personal—if my article had a theme, that might be it—but this doesn’t mean that the war in Iraq is only personal. Nor does personal always denote vengefulness.”

You joined the National Guard as a medic. In an interview, you said that you enlisted because you believed Afghanistan to be a just war. You didn’t deploy, but when you were discharged you moved to Afghanistan as a journalist. What did you expect, and what did you actually experience once there? What made you change your mind?

During the three years that I lived in Afghanistan, my opinion about what the United States should and shouldn’t be doing there must have changed a dozen times. I’m no expert on the country, and certainly less of a military expert, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who has been on patrol with soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan genuinely believing that more soldiers and Marines are the answer to its problems. That said, I don’t know that I can point to a moment between 2001 and today when I would have argued, without reservation, for a complete withdrawal of foreign troops. So, there’s that ambivalence. More than any other place I’ve been to, Afghanistan defies bifurcation into good guys and bad guys, and that goes for the United States and the Afghan government and security forces as much as the Taliban. I’d advise extreme wariness of anyone who depicts the country in such binary terms (which, I suppose, would mean a fair share of the people who have occasion to publicly depict the country in the first place: generals, politicians, editorialists and the like).

One of your short stories, “Total Solar,” is about our work as foreign correspondents. And you say: Confusing folks in confusing wars. What are for you the hardest things to grasp?

I’m nagged by this anxiety that in the future, if anybody bothers to look at these articles, they will read the way colonial travelogues read to us now. If my country wasn’t at war in Afghanistan and the Middle East, I doubt that I would ever have attempted to write about them; it would never have occurred to me to attempt to. But, of course, my country is at war in those places. My country is killing people every day in those places. Moreover, as I said, I’ve never been able to repudiate this killing absolutely. I can’t tell you right now that I believe America needs to stay out of Syria, wash its hands of Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq. Given that I am therefore, in a sense, complicit in the violence, I, as a writer, feel compelled to document some of its effects and consequences. More often than not, this means writing about Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis. Is it outrageously presumptuous for someone like me to write about Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis? Perhaps. Am I especially qualified to write about Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis? Not at all. That’s something I struggle with constantly: the tension between a sense of obligation to cover these conflicts, on the one hand, and a sense that I have no right to speak with any authority about the people who are most impacted by them, on the other. I don’t know. What’s the alternative? Let these stories go untold? One way around the dilemma, maybe, is to remind yourself that writing about anyone, anywhere, always constitutes a kind of transgression: You’re never truly going to feel like you have the right, regardless of whether the person comes from Mosul, Aleppo or your hometown.

All the characters in your book lost something in war. What about you? What have you lost in these years?

I’ve been very lucky.

Why is it great? This is the first lyric to feature on “One Great Sentence,” and of course it had to be Springsteen. I chose this not because it’s my favorite lyric by him, but because this song is Springsteen at his storytelling best. It’s a screenplay in a five-minute song, a Rust Belt Cain and Abel story with a narrative arc to make longform writers jealous. Love, loyalty, loss, laughter — it’s all there. I always picture the scene from “The Deer Hunter” with DeNiro and Walken at the pool hall when Springsteen sings “Me and Frankie laughing and drinking/Nothing feels better than blood on blood/Taking turns dancing with Maria/As the band played ‘Night of the Johnstown Flood.'” (Oh, and if this whets your appetite, Springsteen gets the Storyboard treatment here.)

It was a tragic wreck, and dramatic, in a rural Maine way. A Toyota Corolla collided with a milk truck. Milk spilled across the interstate. A man was dead. From this bit of news from January, Portland Press Herald journalist Mary Pols developed a 3,200-word Father’s Day feature that pulls readers in from the lead paragraph:

“On a gloomy Saturday afternoon in early May, the Canaan Fire Department shut down Route 2 in Canaan for a steady procession of tractors, dump trucks and vintage farm equipment. Up front was Karen Clark in a 1979 R model Mack truck. The Mack had been sitting in a field awhile — seven years, she figures — but she made sure it would start and had given it a good wash because her dad loved the “iron.” This particular truck, one he’d used in the 1990s, had been his pride and joy because it never broke down.

Her father’s ashes were in a red urn on the front seat next to her.”

“I think that native Mainers often have incredibly beautiful language. And I think there’s a lyricism. It doesn’t get called that very often, but I feel it when I’m talking to people. And they have a real gift with language.”

Pols, who writes about sustainability and the food economy, had become intrigued by the truck driver, Richard “Butch” Clark, and dug into his story over several months. “Death of a Dairyman” is not only a moving tribute to Clark, it also introduces readers to a community of rural Mainers connecting by one thing, Clark’s milk route.

Pols grew up in Maine, and has been a staff writer for the Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times and Contra Costa Times. She was a movie critic for Time magazine before joining the Press Herald three and a half years ago. She is also the author of a memoir: “Accidentally on Purpose; The True Tale of a Happy Single Mother.”

She spoke with me about her story, and the opportunities and perils of reporting in rural Maine.

Did you first envision this story as a Father’s Day feature?

I did not, not at all.

Then how did you decide to do a story about Richards?

The accident was in January, and it happened on a stretch of highway that I am really familiar with. My son was playing hockey at North Yarmouth Academy, and all of the hockey parents were talking about this terrible accident that they had witnessed, that had virtually shut down I-295. It was notable. And the idea that it was a milk truck, I have a huge, huge soft spot for dairy stories. And I just felt like wanted to know more about that man who was driving that truck. And also about that side of the business. Just because we tend to write about the farmers, especially when they’re announcing that they’re selling off the cows.”

Throughout the story, you have woven in this theme that the milk keeps coming, and it has to go. That lends the story some narrative tension, and momentum. Did you plan it this way?

I originally had structured it with each section having a piece of Richards’ last day. My editor, Chelsea Conaboy, felt there was not enough narrative tension in the telling of the accident to spread it out throughout the story. So it was her idea to pull it together in one section. And that kind of went against my instinct. Because I had this last day in my mind the whole time, and I did want to spread it out. Ultimately I very much liked her idea. When I executed it, it felt like it worked.

It sounds like the editing process went as it often does—you had a brilliant idea, and your editor had a different one?

Yeah. So I took a crack at it, but I still had these little shreds of that day in the sections. And then she went through and basically peeled them all out, and I didn’t miss them. You know how that is, when you need someone else to peel things out for you, so that you can see that it’s not actually a terrible tragedy that the story is different from how you originally envisioned it? So that was a really good collaboration with her.

This story was such a nice portrait of the entire rural Maine community that Richards touched along his milk route. But it can be difficult to write about rural Maine without falling into stereotypes.

Yes, it is, definitely.

Is that something that you are aware of, that you have to fight against? Is it also something, for you, that rankles when you see it?

It absolutely rankles. When I was away from Maine for so many years, I always wanted to read the books set in Maine, and I often felt very disappointed with the sort of Cabot Cove-ization of my home state. It is something that I never, ever, ever want to do. But I don’t feel like I fight it, it’s not like it’s trying to seep in there. I think that native Mainers often have incredibly beautiful language. And I think there’s a lyricism. It doesn’t get called that very often, but I feel it when I’m talking to people. And they have a real gift with language. It’s so far beyond, “ayuh,” but that’s what people assume, I think.

It’s sort of the standard shorthand.

Yes, that’s the shorthand. And Karen used this phrase “the milk’s got to go.” And that stuck in my head, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it makes so much sense.”

Many of us like to think that we can sit down with anyone in their living room, with the scrapbooks and the photo albums, and bring back a decent story. But this story had something more, didn’t it?

“In terms of rhythm, I read everything that Liz Strout writes, fiction-wise, and I had just finished her latest.  She has a great way with plain-spoken people. Although she is definitely not a romanticizer. She is just one of our greatest writers.”

I think that everybody has a story, but they aren’t stories that everybody is going to be interested in. What made Butch so intriguing to me, was, in our first news stories about the accident, the mother of the young woman in the other car said she felt like he’d saved her daughter’s life…  That was really compelling to me. This idea that we’re all on the road with big, scary trucks, and very often you hear about bad accidents involving them. This seemed to be the case where he had tried to drive not so much defensively for himself, but for others. So there was that. And then there was this idea that he was 70, and he was still out there driving, and wanting to do it.

And getting up at 2:30 every morning.

And not ever complaining about it…. The integrity and dignity of someone like Butch, it spoke to me, at this particular point in our history. It would have at any time, but particularly right now, it felt good to take a deep dive into a really good person’s life.

When you were writing the story, did you have a template in mind, or a writer who inspired you?

I wish I had it together enough to have templates! I typically feel a horrible, hideous sense of panic, and procrastination, and then, you know, just having to write out of desperation. But one thing I did with that story, I was supposed to turn it in on a Friday, and I didn’t, and I was still thinking about it while I did other things. And then I sat down on a Saturday, when nobody was bothering me, and then it just flowed.

In terms of rhythm, I read everything that Liz [Elizabeth] Strout writes, fiction-wise, and I had just finished her latest.  She has a great way with plain-spoken people. Although she is definitely not a romanticizer. She is just one of our greatest writers.

One thing about this story is that you clearly had it cooking for quite some time. Is that atypical for you?

Yes, I tend to work a week ahead. And I always have these bigger plans for bigger stories that will unfold over months, but very often I don’t actually get to chip away at them. But this one I had a chance to chip away at over time, which was nice. On the day of his memorial service, I was working on the night shift. I was late to work, and a Navy SEAL from Falmouth had just died in Somalia. And I remember switching gears, thinking “OK, I’ve got to get up to speed on Somalia in an hour.” That was the story of the day, but I had Butch in my brain, and I was very protective of that.”

Well, I really enjoyed your story. Thanks for discussing it with me.

I hope you’re also interviewing that raccoon writer, jeezum!

I’m glad you brought that up. Alex Acquisto did a great job on the raccoon story for the Bangor Daily News, it’s really fantastic.

Yes, absolutely, I was very jealous!

I think everybody was. But it occurred to me that although these are both rural Maine stories, they are actually quite different. Hers was a naturally more dramatic story—Maine woman drowns rabid raccoon in mud puddle. That’s pretty good, right?

Yes, totally.

While yours was—Maine truck driver had a milk route for many years, got up every day and did his job, raised a family, had some good friends, and died in a truck crash at 70.

It’s a much quieter story, isn’t it? It was definitely one of those things where I had to sell it to my editors, and wondered, are they going to go for it? And there were a few days while I was waiting to hear back about whether there was interest. There was a moment last week when my editor said, “We thought maybe the story would hold, but they read it, and they liked it, and it’s going to run.” I was so glad. I wanted it to be the most understated of Father’s Day stories. And I wanted that family to look at a Father’s Day paper and see that story and see that even though he’s gone, he’s still being recognized in some way.

A feeling of loyalty and loss runs through this week’s posts. In Iraq, a local SWAT team tries to avenge their families — and save their city. In a Bruce Springsteen song, a highway patrolman with a brother on the other side of the law says, “Man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good.” In central Maine, a rural community turns out to say goodbye to a simple dairyman.

Luke Mogelson and “The Desperate Battle to Destroy ISIS.” This answer in a Q&A about Mogelson’s epic New Yorker article about the Mosul SWAT team has stayed with me: “I’ve always been struck by how little we talk about the trauma of people from Iraq and Afghanistan compared with how much we talk about the trauma of the Americans who have briefly visited those countries. … I’d say it points to a gap between the value we place on their lives and the value we place on our own. I’d say this gap defines much more than our discourse about trauma; it defines the politics, strategies and tactics that traumatize. I’d also say it is one of the major moral problems of our moment and, incidentally, one reason why terrorism works.”

The soundtrack: “Doomsday,” by Kasabian. This has a “brotherhood of death” feel to it that fits the SWAT team. It’s a song that demands to be played at full volume — I can imagine it being played that way before they go out to do battle.

One Great Sentence

“Well I chased him through them county roads / Till a sign said Canadian border five miles from here / I pulled over to the side of the highway and watched his taillights disappear.”

Bruce Springsteen, “Highway Patrolman,” from the (brilliant) 1982 album “Nebraska.” Read why we think it’s great.

Mary Pols and the rural lyricism of “Death of a Dairyman.” This story by Pols in the Portland Press Herald is absolutely lovely. It’s regional literary journalism at its best. Here’s what she has to say about Mainers, and writing about them: “When I was away from Maine for so many years, I always wanted to read the books set in Maine, and I often felt very disappointed with the sort of Cabot Cove-ization of my home state. It is something that I never, ever, ever want to do. But I don’t feel like I fight it, it’s not like it’s trying to seep in there. I think that native Mainers often have incredibly beautiful language. And I think there’s a lyricism. It doesn’t get called that very often, but I feel it when I’m talking to people. And they have a real gift with language. It’s so far beyond, “ayuh,” but that’s what people assume, I think.”

The soundtrack: “Seventy Odd Years,” by the Oshima Brothers. This is a local Maine band, two young brothers who play beyond their years. The song is about finding your home — in a place, or with a person. And it has added poignancy because the dairyman in the story was 70 when he died.

What I’m reading online: Even this week’s online reads are shot through with the theme of blood ties and loyalty. First off, there’s “Our Perfect Summer,” by David Sedaris in The New Yorker. He always manages to get the combination of funny and sweet just right. This may be my favorite line: “In the coming years, our father would continue to promise what he couldn’t deliver, and in time we grew to think of him as an actor auditioning for the role of a benevolent millionaire. He’d never get the part but liked the way that the words felt in his mouth.”

And I love “A Year of Gardening the Grave of a Stranger,” a story by Sydney Schaedel for the always reliable Atlas Obscura. In the program at an old Philadelphia cemetery, the story says, gardeners are assigned a “grave or two to tend as if it were a dear relative’s final resting place. It’s a creative outlet for city dwellers who may not have space for a garden at home, and it brightens up the cemetery.” One of the participants has a great line, saying that cemeteries are “parks with reading material.”

What’s on my bedside table: “The Drunken Forest,” by Gerald Durrell. I’m a huge fan of Durrell’s memoir about growing up in a quirky, nomadic family, “My Family and Other Animals.” So when I saw his name — and the adorable drawing — on the cover of this book, I had to get it. He might be the only writer who would get me to read a book about the fauna of South America. This line about a native bird is one reason why: “They surveyed me calmly with pale yellow eyes that had a glazed, dreamy expression in them, as though they were listening to distant and heavenly music too faint for mere mammals like myself to hear.”

What’s on my turntable: “Nebraska,” By Bruce Springsteen. When picking the lyric for the One Great Sentence above, I listened to this brilliant album by the light of a kerosene lamp as a firefly flashed nearby. The atmosphere seemed to amplify the album’s storylines of darkness and despair, but also flashes of hope and love.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

In today’s America, the word “masculinity” is almost a Rorschach test. When you look at it, do you see a patrimony that is raging, raging against the dying of the light? Or do you see an assault on the concept of traditional male roles?

“Maybe I read too much Ernest Hemingway in college, but regardless of all the societal transformations, I think men’s lives basically revolve around the concerns he examined in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ Life is hard. You do what you can. You pray for happiness. Then it’s over.”

The last election exposed the divisions in the country over the word and the existential things it signifies. So it’s either very provocative or very canny to come out with a book called “A Man’s World,” as the writer Steve Oney has just done.

The book is a collection of Oney’s articles over his 40-year career as a journalist and includes profiles of characters as diverse as Gregg Allman and Nick Nolte, Robert Penn Warren and an old-time cops reporter in L.A.

He divided the book into four sections: Fighters, Creators, Actors and Desperadoes, and the first of those themes is a leitmotif throughout the entire book.

“I’m interested in success, but I’m really interested in struggle,” he says. “I’m impressed by people who don’t quit. With me it’s a daily battle, and in my writing I’m drawn to people for whom it’s the same.”

I talked with Steve via email about how he chose the theme of the book, how ideas of masculinity have changed in his decades covering men, and how he predicted the rise of Breitbart America.

I thought I’d start with a bit of sweep: Why did you choose this theme, and what does it say about both your career and what you think it means to be a man?

A couple years ago, I had a conversation with Beth Vesel, my agent, about publishing a collection of my magazine stories. During my 40 years in the business, I’ve written some 150 full-length pieces. I’m talking about ones of at least 3,000 words. Many are about the South, where I was raised. Many are about California, where I moved pretty early in my career. I’ve dealt with all sorts of topics – the rituals of small-town life in Georgia, the impact of the Charles Manson murders on Los Angeles, the Hollywood left’s infatuation with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas – but I’ve specialized in profiles, and a majority of my subjects have been men. “There’s your collection,” Beth said, then asked me to pick my best and write an introduction that gave shape to the selections and laid out the recurring themes. As I looked at my work, I realized I’ve basically been interested in four kinds of guys – Fighters, Creators, Actors and Desperadoes – and I organized the book around 20 who fit more or less into these categories.

The stories range from the start of your career, in 1977, to 2011. Men’s roles have changed a lot in those years. Did you want to capture that, or instead show how in many ways the struggles – the fight, you call it – have remained the same?

Certainly, ideas of masculinity have changed since 1977. Gender itself has been reconsidered as something more fluid. But to borrow from the unforgettable theme of “Casablanca,” the fundamental things still apply. Men fight – sometimes in battle, more often in a figurative sense. They create, whether in the arts or while solving work problems. They act – that is they present themselves in public. And from time to time they discard the script to confront an inner demon or do something outrageous, which can lead to greatness or ruin. Maybe I read too much Ernest Hemingway in college, but regardless of all the societal transformations, I think men’s lives basically revolve around the concerns he examined in “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” Life is hard. You do what you can. You pray for happiness. Then it’s over.

The inscription reads: “To the memory of my father, Robert Oscar Oney,” and you close your introduction with memories of him and what he gave you. Does the father-son role play a big part in your life and in the broader theme of “a man’s world?” One of the pieces, “The Casualty of War,” explores that quite movingly.

My father was an extremely moral guy. He tried to leave people better than he found them. He spoke often of fair play, and he would not tolerate dishonesty. He was Old Testament. He imbued me with those traits, and I’m thankful he did. He was also, however, a child of the Depression, and he often seemed crippled by a resulting fatalism. To some extent I battled against that. I thought that if I fought hard enough, trusted my imagination and took some chances I could break free. That was the push-pull of our relationship, and that is certainly a central drama of “The Casualty of War,” which I wrote for Los Angeles magazine during the Iraq war. The piece is about rebellion, reconciliation and loss. I look at the father-son relationship in many of the other stories in the book as well.  Incidentally, my dad died five years ago of congestive heart disease. I kept his final voicemail message. He said he loved me. That’s a big deal for a son no matter his age.

Because I’m a music fan, I have to ask a question about the title. I’m guessing it’s from the James Brown hit, right? A great song that has nonetheless always made me a bit queasy, because it’s a very old-fashioned view of the world (never mind his use of the word “girl,” although that must have been for the rhyme). But the song also says that men would be lost without women. Can you talk about why you chose that title? And how does it resonate through the articles? I’m struck by how women are playing this role in many of them, especially the Herb Alpert, Jake Jacoby and Robert Penn Warren profiles: They’re strong, but at the same time, they’re playing supporting roles. The men have the main stage.

Yes, the song “It’s a Man’s World” suggested my title. I chose it because all of the book’s subjects are men – and it’s provocative. It’s plainly not a man’s world anymore, and it hasn’t been for a while. But I’m all for stirring things up. And yes, there are a lot of strong women in the book. Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren’s wife, was a superb writer who won the National Book Award in nonfiction for “The Oysters of Locmariaquer.” It’s about oyster harvesting in Brittany. Lani Hall, Herb Alpert’s wife, was the lead singer for Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. These two and several others pop up in my work. True enough, they’re secondary, yet not because they’re subservient. They aren’t the focus. I’ve written many profiles of women – among them Tracey Ullman for GQ and Arianna Huffington for Los Angeles – and in those, men assume the supporting positions. So it depends on the assignment.

So much of this collection revolves around identity. You say in your introduction, “When people tell you you’re not defined by what you do, they’re wrong. You are what you do – action is character.” Can you talk about this theme a bit more?

Now we’re back to Hemingway. Even as a kid I never subscribed to the notion that you can just be. The marching orders from my mom were: Make something of yourself. I figured that a good life, like good writing, is a product of active verbs. That said, I do think this is really a philosophical question. Maybe an examined life is more worthwhile than an active life. Maybe our strivings are futile exercises. But I don’t believe so. I’m interested in success, but I’m really interested in struggle. I’m impressed by people who don’t quit. With me it’s a daily battle, and in my writing I’m drawn to people for whom it’s the same. Get up off the mat and show me what you’re made of.

Another theme is the artifice of our lives, the faces we present to the world. “It may be said that our lives are our supreme fiction,” you quote Robert Penn Warren as saying. When you seek out profiles, is that a conscious thread you’re pursuing in all of them, or does the story develop and you find you’ve returned to it?

I’ve always been interested in creativity. Ever since the University of Georgia, where I went to undergraduate school, I’ve been mad for Robert Penn Warren. In 1973, I read “All the King’s Men,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, for an English class. In 1977, after a couple years working for small daily newspapers in South Carolina, I lucked into a job as a staff writer at The Atlanta Journal & Constitution Magazine. Warren, who would soon become America’s first poet laureate, was at that time publishing great new poems once or twice a month in The New Yorker – in fact, he won the 1979 Pulitzer for poetry. I wrote him proposing a story, and he invited me to spend a week with him in Vermont where he had a summer home. The Atlanta papers were in high cotton at the time – Jimmy Carter was president, and they were rolling in dough. So they flew me up and gave me a month to do the piece. I realized as I was working on it that Warren – Mr. Warren to me – was by example and in his observations advancing the idea that imagination provides the path through life. To put it in more simplistic terms: If we dream big, it might happen. Since then I’ve sought out people to write about who follow that credo. Of course, just because you conjure something in your mind doesn’t mean it will be good. It might be awful. You might be wildly untalented. Or you might be a sociopath and do harm. But I realized early on that unless you have a great notion, you’ll never achieve very much. That was Mr. Warren’s gift to me. I’ve tried to put it in practice in my own career, and I’m fascinated when I see it in others.

I really loved the Warren interview. (A mark of that is how many turned-down pages I had for it.) I could ask so many questions about it, but one thing I loved was him talking about tale-telling, and how Southern writers “have a goddamned honed tale sense.” And that he and his wife (the writer Eleanor Clark) don’t have a TV because they don’t want to lose their innate ability. Do you think it’s harder to be a storyteller in these days of endless distractions?

Like most everyone else, I’m addicted to social media. Unlike most everyone else, I hate it. Sure, I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to, and I appreciate the business uses. I’m a self-employed writer. Facebook is where I promote my work. In every other way, however, social media is a sewer choking with the flotsam and jetsam of ill-informed opinion – or pet videos. It’s CB radio for the digital age. But that’s our age. Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark were from a different age. For them, Herman Melville’s poetry and Theodore Dreiser’s novels delivered not just joy but the news. They were more attuned to the bards of oral tradition than they would be to Instagram. Nonetheless, I think there’s a deep craving for the kind of storytelling Warren and Clark championed and embodied. Great books – and the better podcasts – feed that hunger, and that’s why they keep getting published and made. I live and die for them. If I’m not in the middle of a novel – and I always try to be – I go a bit crazy. Fiction and longform nonfiction order my world and hone my mind. The rest – unless it’s the weather report – is usually just noise.

One of my favorite articles is the one on Jake Jacoby, the ultimate L.A. cop reporter. When you wrote it in 1986, he had been a cop reporter for 50 years and was still at it. It’s so lively, and the ending is the strongest in the collection, I think. What about Jake appealed to you?

Jake Jacoby was the last of the old-time police reporters. He was as much cop as journalist, and he believed that newspapers should help solve crimes. In 1985, while working for a feisty LA wire service, he broke parts of the infamous Night Stalker case that led to the arrest and conviction of Richard Ramirez. I wrote that piece for GQ. Eliot Kaplan, my editor there, mailed me a clip from the L.A. Times reporting that the LAPD was naming its press room for Jacoby. In an attached note, Eliot said, “This is a great story.” (That’s how editors used to do it.) What initially attracted me to Jake was that he was an anachronism – a guy from the age of Tommy Dorsey functioning in the age of Sid Vicious. But after spending time with him, I realized there was more – Jake was guided by a moral code. At the top of the piece, I quote him saying that his job is to “sweep back the waves” of criminal outrage. He was saying that he saw reporting as a kind of noble witness bearing. By writing the news, a journalist stems the tide of wrongdoing. Now, Jake was not all admirable. He’d spent a few years as a McCarthy-era propagandist. He was right of Attila the Hun. But he was ultimately on the side of the angels, and that’s what appealed to me. By getting up and doing his job each day, he cast light into the darkness. That was his fight. The story appears in the Fighters section of “A Man’s World.”

His advice to young journalists starting out on his path today: “Get a job at a medium-sized daily newspaper whose managing editor believes that the best way to win new subscribers is with great storytelling. Then let this editor work you like a dog. That may be easier said than done, but I read local papers when I’m traveling, and I’m impressed by many of them.”

It’s of course fascinating reading the Andrew Breitbart piece seven years after the fact, now that it’s such a part of the firmament in the Trump White House. You say in the piece, “Breitbart perceives himself as a new-media David out to slay old-media Goliaths.” And you have him saying, “I want it to be in the history books that I took down the institutional left, and I think that’s gonna happen.” Are you a bit spooked by how prescient you were in the piece?

Thanks – I think – for calling me prescient on this. I wrote that piece for Time in 2010 shortly after Breitbart posted the James O’Keefe Acorn/prostitution video that made all involved infamous. I’d known him casually for several years. He and I belonged to a group of writers and producers that met monthly at the lovely old Hollywood restaurant Yamashiro to discuss politics and current events. But until I started reporting the story, I didn’t have a bead on him. During our time together he indeed predicted the demise of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. He said there was a big group of Americans who felt that elites in the press and in Obama’s White House patronized them, and he said Breitbart.com would become their virtual salon in the same way that the Huffington Post – which he also helped to start; go figure – had become the left’s salon. I was incredulous, but I took it all down, and wrote it up and, as you say, almost everything he predicted came true. Andrew was raised in Brentwood, LA’s most progressive neighborhood, but he went to college at Tulane during the heyday of multiculturalism on campuses and deconstruction in liberal arts classrooms. He chafed against both. In the early days of the web, he fell under the spell of Matt Drudge and became a flame-thrower. It’s no accident that my story on him is in the Desperadoes section of my book.

A related question: The book seems to tap into the Trumpian wave of male discontent. Men angry that their roles have changed. Was that a conscious move?

Except for some proofreading and a few decisions about cover art, I was done with “A Man’s World” before the election. Like many, I was surprised by Donald Trump’s victory. So if the book taps into a Trumpian wave of male discontent, it will be by accident, although I’ll be happy if it happens. There haven’t been many books in recent years that look at manhood straight up. There are academic studies of masculinity and treatises on gender. But “A Man’s World” is 20 portraits of guys, love ‘em or hate ‘em. It’s not prescriptive. It’s not ideologically driven. By the way, my agent thinks more women will read the book than men. She thinks that it answers the question: What do men want? We shall see.

I haven’t asked much about the craft of your storytelling. Can you talk a little about how you approach the writing of the stories? What’s your process, if there’s a constant in how you write?

I typically let the story dictate my approach. Until I’ve done some reporting, I don’t know what I’m going to write or how I’m going to write it. By and large, I’m straightforward when it comes to structure. However, I am willing to take chances. In “The Casualty of War,” for instance, I reveal near the beginning that its subject, Chris Leon, is dead. The story still has more than 7,000 words to go. That was a risk. I banked on being in such command of the material that I could make you keep reading even though you know how the piece ends. In “That Championship Season,” a profile of Brandon Tartikoff, the legendary president of NBC television, I present Tartikoff’s bio as if it’s taken from a TV program guide. His childhood is a sitcom. A bout with cancer is a movie of the week. I think that was effective, and it enabled me to avoid what I call the tyranny of information. Reporters often think that if they accumulate a bunch of facts and hit you with them all at once they’ve made a character come alive. More often, they’ve written something that is dense and poorly organized. I always search for ways to make details serve the narrative. I also aim for comic relief. One of my favorite pieces in “A Man’s World” is a profile of the architect John Portman I wrote for Esquire. I start the piece with a lengthy description of Portman’s wild comb-over, which is both defensive and outrageous. I think this is funny. More crucial, I think it’s apt – his buildings are both defensive and outrageous.

If you had to pick one, which of these interviews left the most lasting impression on you? Either with the process itself, or what you learned, or what you ended up writing.

“Talese is a master of writing about defeat. This is the school of journalism that says that after the big game, you often get the best story if you go to the loser’s locker room. There’s truth to that, and I’m always surprised that more reporters don’t do it.”

They all had a big impact on me. I don’t undertake stories lightly. That’s a curse and a blessing. They get under my skin: none more so than one on the late baseball star Bo Belinsky.  Bo played for the Los Angeles Angels. Everyone thinks Sandy Koufax pitched the first Major League no-hitter in California. Not true. It was Bo. Bo had everything – talent, good looks and beautiful girlfriends. But he threw it all away. First there was alcoholism, then cocaine addiction. Finally he shot his wife. Bo ended up selling used cars in Las Vegas. Not long after his death, a friend of his gave me a bunch of cassette tapes Bo recorded at the end. In a sense I got an interview from beyond the grave. That story, which is called “Fallen Angel” and which I wrote for Los Angeles, addresses why Bo said no to life and how he lied to himself. Those were hard things to ponder, and it took a toll. Incidentally, that piece and several others in “A Man’s World” – a profile of Gregg Allman that I wrote for Esquire when Gregg was in trouble, a story about the crazed novelist Harry Crews I wrote early on for The Atlanta Journal & Constitution Magazine – owe a lot to Gay Talese. Talese is a master of writing about defeat. This is the school of journalism that says that after the big game, you often get the best story if you go to the loser’s locker room. There’s truth to that, and I’m always surprised that more reporters don’t do it.

And is there a profile I haven’t mentioned that you want to talk about, either the writing or the reporting? I’m guessing some were quite wild.

The most ambitious piece in “A Man’s World” is “The Talented Mr. Raywood.” It’s about a high-end conman who bilked wealthy people in New York and Los Angeles out of millions. An interior designer, Craig Raywood relied on finesse and charm to bamboozle his clients. I worked on the story for nine months – luckily, I was on staff at Los Angeles at the time – and almost no one involved wanted to talk with me. Raywood was on the run, and the victims were mortified. Moreover, the case was still under investigation. There had been no arrest. The reason crime stories are almost always written after the fact is that prior to conviction, a reporter has no legal cover. All facts are in dispute. I was ahead of the police on this piece, but happily I had two great editors – the magazine’s editor in chief, Kit Rachlis, and Richard E. Meyer, a legendary former editor at the Los Angeles Times who’d just come to Los Angeles to shepherd this kind of work. They kept me on point, and I think I ended up writing a strong story that says as much about status and money as it does about the actual cons. But it was a challenge.

Finally, what’s your advice to young writers starting out on this path today?

Get a job at a medium-sized daily newspaper whose managing editor believes that the best way to win new subscribers is with great storytelling. Then let this editor work you like a dog. That may be easier said than done, but I read local papers when I’m traveling, and I’m impressed by many of them. A lot of good writing still appears every day in America’s papers.

Why is it great? Yes, it’s more than one sentence. But in this one short stanza, Cramer has captured all the rage and sorrow and loneliness and drive of the legendary Red Sox hitter Ted Williams. This is one of the best profiles of all time. The use of ALL CAPS to capture the lash-out-before-they-lash-out-at-you belligerence of Williams! The long section consisting solely of dialogue that reads like a Shakespearean soliloquy! The rhythms that reach a mad, loving Kerouac level! I called the lines above a stanza, and that was deliberate: This profile is an epic poem, about a man and his helpless rage. I almost used another stanza, which I’m going to add here. “The Kid was back, and Fenway was with him. ‘Yeah, 98 percent were for me,’ Ted said later, as he scraped his bat. A writer said: ‘You mean 100 percent. I didn’t hear a boo.’ Ted said: ‘Yeah, they were for me, except a couple of kids in the left-field stand, and a guy out in right. I could hear them.'”

Marion Abrahams-Welsh grew up with four generations of her family on hilly Sheppard Street in the Cape Town neighborhood known as District Six. Fourteen of them shared a small home filled with love and possibility, even though they had little money.

In the new South African book “District Six Huis Kombuis: Food and Memory Cookbook,” a moving multimedia storytelling project that’s part cookbook, part collective memoir and part embroidery project, Abrahams-Welsh relives the shared meals and the family’s beloved rituals during her childhood in the 1930s and ’40s.

She’s 84 now, but she’s still trying to recapture her lost life in District Six, whose residents were forced out in 1966 when it was declared a White Group Area by the racist apartheid regime. Sixty thousand people were removed to the Cape Flats squatter camp, and all but religious buildings were demolished.

“I never lost the picture of what our home looked like and replicated all the dinnerware in my own home,” she says. “I’m trying to hold on to that memory.”

Huis-kombuis means “home kitchen” in the Afrikaans language, and the cookbook shares the memories and recipes of former District Six residents.

“This is not a conventional cookbook; rather, it is a story about food that is deeply rooted in the cultural heritage that exists in the memories of those who were forcibly displaced,” Tina Smith, head of exhibitions for the District Six Museum in Cape Town, writes in the book’s introduction.

This is true. It is also true that “Huis Kombuis” is a fun book, alive with voice, texture and color.

In its collective narrative, “Huis Kombuis” goes a step beyond a standard cookbook “this is how I did it” voice to a “this is how it was” in District Six, offering a week in the old community as the narrative structure. But the real bones of the book are less traditional.

My senses awoke at the realization the hand-stitched recipes in “Huis Kombuis” were not some extraordinary font trick or kitsch photos of someone’s granny’s embroidery (although some part of me felt instantly obligated to appreciate that). They were embroidered by some of the two dozen contributors to the book in honor of their loved ones and the collective memory of District Six. The book is like an Instagram account with the soul of context. (Read more on Instagramming with conscience.)

Revina Gwemi spent seven years embroidering the names of former District Six residents and their memories on a “memory cloth” at the District Six Museum, where the book was born. Gwemi’s contribution of the recipe for Isonka Samanzi, a Xhosa steam bread, rolls into her narrative well after the reader has become acquainted with the woman and her life.

“My work with the residents of District Six has given me a capacity for love, and I’ve learned about compassion and forgiveness,” she says in the book.

Recipes like Gwemi’s, woven orally and then transcribed later in “Huis Kombuis,” have a torch-passing quality lost in the formula of tested recipe. There’s a sidestep of authority that allows readers to pass through, giving them a silent place at the table as District Six neighbors share their memories.

The time it took for the contributors to embroider recipes to in turn be photographed for “Huis Kombuis” adds a temporal depth to the cookbook that ties our contemporary time to the time of District Six. A new-old media is captured in the hours spent pushing needle and thread through cloth, and the transcription of oral to written history.

In one section of the book, professor Shaun Viljoen writes, “Memories of food in the book are so much more than recipes passed on; they are assertions of an indomitable spirit of survival, stories of family and community, and claims to human dignity continually denied by successive colonial, segregationist and apartheid regimes.”

Yet Patience Watlington writes about her childhood in District Six: “I didn’t think that I was losing out on anything. I thought it was how life was.”

Like other contributors to “Huis Kombuis,” Watlington attended workshops at the museum where they stitched their cloth and made a new community.“I learned so much, and the fellowship of all the ladies was the beauty of the workshops,” she says. “We did not only share our workshop experiences; we shared personal things with each other and boosted each other’s morale.”

With its untraditional storytelling, “Huis Kombuis” creates an analog to a world we all already know; it takes us there even before we’ve lit the stove.

A narrative arc is traditionally used to tell a story: rising action, climax, falling action. But there’s a term I prefer, denouement, that comes from the French to “unknot” a thing. In reading “Huis Kombuis,” we unstitch a multitude of voices belonging to a complicated past, but a careful appreciation of the cookbook comes from understanding the present. One of the contributors, Annie Bamm, uses the term pasella to describe the treats she would get as a child for certain errands like running to the butcher. American Southerners have an analogous term, sirsee. Both words mean “an unexpected gift” — the childhoods, the workshops, the memory cloths and now the pages of “Huis Kombuis.”

This week, identity is the theme that courses through the posts. Writer Steve Oney talks about masculinity and the creation of identity as an act of will. In South Africa, the women of the District Six neighborhood try to recapture an identity lost to apartheid when they were uprooted and their homes were destroyed. And the writer Alexander Chee tries to escape his writer’s identity when he takes a “real” vacation.

Steve Oney and “A Man’s World” (both the song and his new book). This is one of my favorite Q&As in recent memory. In his 40-year career, Oney has seen men’s roles change, but at heart, the same things hold true. I love this quote from him: “Maybe I read too much Ernest Hemingway in college, but regardless of all the societal transformations, I think men’s lives basically revolve around the concerns he examined in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ Life is hard. You do what you can. You pray for happiness. Then it’s over.”

The soundtrack: “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World,” by James Brown. As I said to Steve, asking about the origin of his book’s title, this is a great song that has nonetheless always made me a bit queasy, because it’s a very old-fashioned view of the world. And then there’s his use of the word “girl,” although that must have been for the rhyme. But oh, his voice, especially when he screams, “nothing.”

One Great Sentence

“And one day he made an error, and then struck out, and it sounded like all of Fenway was booing, and he ran to the bench with his head down, the red rising in his face, the shame in his belly, and the rage. Ted thought: These are the ones who cheered, the fans I waved my cap to? Well, never again.”

Richard Ben Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” Esquire, June 1986. Read why we think it’s great.

In a South African cookbook-memory book, recapturing a life that was lost to apartheid. This South African book is so special, finding a very human way to explore the costs of apartheid and a life lost when a Cape Town neighborhood was uprooted. It’s called “District Six Huis Kombuis: Food and Memory Cookbook,” and it’s a moving multimedia storytelling project that’s part cookbook, part collective memoir and part embroidery project. The gorgeous photo at the top of this post shows Marion Abraham-Welsh, who says: “I never lost the picture of what our home looked like and replicated all the dinnerware in my own home. I’m trying to hold on to that memory.”

The soundtrack: “Vul’indela,” by Brenda Fassie. One of my favorite pop songs. The music is so joyous. I defy you not to dance to this one. The poppiness of the song, though, is in sharp contrast to the tragedy of Fassie’s short life, which somehow heightens the emotion of it.

What I’m reading online: “On a Remote Greek Island, Learning to Take a ‘Real’ Vacation,” by Alexander Chee. This New York Times piece by the writer was pure pleasure, just like Chee’s own vacation. There are so many things that are both useful and beautiful for writers and freelancers here. I love his explanation of why he was taking a real vacation from his freelance life: “But I had come to feel a little like an on-call doctor for patients who would never fully explain themselves to me.”

How about a theme in the online reads this week? Exploring a new world, and maybe exploring yourself. That fits “Terra Nova,” a beautiful essay in Granta by Robert Moor. In it, he hitchhiked across Newfoundland. He describes one of his trips, with “a tattooed, stubble-headed man named Paul” who would “drive with his knees while he rolled a joint; the car filled with a grey air of vague mutual distrust.” Paul tells him something truly lovely: “When he was building a cabinet, he liked to hide cryptic messages on the inside, where no one would ever find them, but he would know they were there. I would come to learn that many carpenters do this. I was pleasantly haunted by the thought that there might be a shadow library of messages hiding behind our walls and inside our furniture – wise and profane words scribbled on the dark, inner, unfinished surfaces of our world.”

What’s on my bedside table: “Mr. Hobbs’ Vacation,” by Edward Streeter. Let’s keep with the summer vacation-road trip vibe with this book, which some of you might know by the movie starring a grumpy, older Jimmy Stewart as the dad. Anyone who has taken a vacation and arrived at a disappointing rental will like this breezy read. It’s a library discard, and I like the “date due” card inside: Starting on May 9, 1958, there’s a flurry of borrowing until October 5, 1962. And then one tiny stamp, circled in red, for August 28, 1986. Poor little book, waiting 2 1/2 decades to be taken out again.

What’s on my turntable: “Nice ‘N’ Easy,” by Frank Sinatra. This seemed to fit both themes going on this week: It’s a perfect soundtrack to a languid summer vacation night, the title track drifting out into the air, almost muffled by the humidity. (And that wonderful rhyme: “The problem now of course is/To simply hold your horses.”) But I was thinking about the categories in Steve Oney’s book: Fighters, Creators, Actors and Desperadoes, and thinking that Sinatra is all of the above.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

When I first came across Katherine Boo’s work in journalism school, I was immediately taken with her ability to expose injustice while weaving gorgeous narratives. I carved up her stories in The Washington Post and The New Yorker with a black pen, hoping I could figure out their magic.

“I’ve come to believe quite strongly that the American reading public is more hungry and sophisticated than we give it credit for. What is this convention in journalism that every reader has to get every line? They don’t.” 

Next I devoured Boo’s book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” which extended her probing and compassionate portrayal of poverty to India. Before becoming a journalist, I had spent nearly two years working with grass-roots groups in Mumbai slums just like Annawadi, the one she spent three years chronicling for the book. I’d been so upset by journalistic portrayals of these neighborhoods that I wrote an entire master’s thesis about the subject. Now, finally, here was an account that took slum residents seriously as protagonists in their own lives, without dismissing the inequality and corruption that stymied them.

When I learned that Boo was speaking at the Mayborn Conference in Grapevine, Texas, this year, I secretly hoped she’d give a crash course in her craft. But I’ve heard enough journalism keynotes to know that speakers are more likely to rehash their career paths or pontificate on subjects they’ve written about. So I was pleasantly surprised on Friday when Boo announced that she planned to give us our money’s worth by sharing 15 rules that guide her during the reporting and writing process.

“At our worst, we can be cynical processing machines,” turning human suffering into entertainment, Boo said of narrative journalists. The antidote, she explained, is to not to fall in love with the craft too much, but rather to “view it with a gimlet eye.”

Here are her 15 rules for writing responsibly, with some slight paraphrasing:

1) It’s not enough to tell the stories of victims. I also need to investigate perps.

Boo doesn’t stop at spinning yarns about the triumphs and travails of the poor. It’s equally important for her to hold powerful people accountable for wrongdoing. “I need to name their names,” she said.

2) I let what I hate give me wing.

Boo has been dealing with a degenerative illness since childhood. “Getting mad gets me off my butt,” she said. A lot of her work has been motivated by her irritation at reading about “passive, monosyllabic poor people that kept getting rescued by selfless white heroes.” It doesn’t matter what pisses you off, she says, as long as you pay attention to that feeling. “Writing against” is a good compass “until you know what you’re writing for,” she said.

3) I’m not the sum of my best or most difficult circumstances, and neither are the people I report on.

“Just as important as conditions are the ideas in people’s heads. There’s a pernicious tendency to suppress this truth when it comes to documenting low-income people,” Boo said. She tries to show her subjects “as they think, decide and act,” rather than only depicting their body language or how they are acted upon. That helps the reader engage from a place of respect, not pity.

4) When I’m first settling into a place, I tell myself that strong presumptions will make me miss what’s happening.

“It’s OK to go into a place a little uncertain, a little clueless,” Boo said, as long as you’re less clueless when you come out.

“My presence isn’t doing them a favor,” she said of her subjects. “They’re doing me a favor. They’re enriching my life, and if I stop seeing that, it’s going to show in my work.”

5) Memory sucks.

Boo says she reports out everything she can, from the events of a crime to the contents of a suitcase. She’s found that people sometimes deny their own experiences during the fact-checking process, until she plays back video showing them their own words. After a day of reporting, she also immediately writes an email to her husband capturing the emotion of that time, even if it means staying up until 5 a.m. She knows that something will be lost if she sleeps on it.

6) I ask myself: “What would really get lost if this story never ran?”

Boo engages in an inner dialogue that keeps her going until she finds a bigger meaning for the story: “At least I’ll show the dysfunction of Oklahoma’s public transit system” or “At least I can finger the guy who stole money.”

7) Don’t be a whiner.

“Wean yourself off of the tit of your own ego,” Boo urged. She says nonfiction writers shouldn’t get wrapped up in how much sacrifice the work entails. “My presence isn’t doing them a favor,” she said of her subjects. “They’re doing me a favor. They’re enriching my life, and if I stop seeing that, it’s going to show in my work.”

8) I don’t try to find simple characters.

“If you’re searching for a super-virtuous character, you’re denying … the infinite variety of the human condition,” Boo said. “When I select people to write about, I’m looking for individuals who don’t necessarily fit existing blueprints and whose choices and actions reveal the most about the societies they inhabit.” Boo also doesn’t believe in making herself a character in the story so that readers will have someone to identify with, as many of her editors have encouraged. “If you have this image of me constantly present, that distracts you from what’s going on,” she said.

9) I try never to forget that my “subjects” are really my co-investigators.

“They are experiencing more viscerally than we ever will the barriers in their lives,” Boo said. When she was reporting in Annawadi, she let children there use her camera to record whatever they wanted. Many of them decided to film a lake of sewage that bordered the slum, which helped Boo realize that the lake itself could be a character that revealed the area’s public health dangers.

10) Though I seek out the public record maniacally, I don’t assume that it’s accurate.

Government documents and other public records often reflect the interests and perspectives of those in power, Boo noted. So she makes sure to supplement these sources with “hang-out journalism.”

“You know better than anyone where the essential courage of the enterprise resides—with the people who risk retaliation, share their stories and help journalists build piece by piece a crucial alternative public record of our time.”

11) To calibrate my compass as a writer, I share my work widely and not only with journalists.

Instead of just talking to other reporters, Boo recommends getting feedback from a variety of readers. Her 12-year-old nephew told her he couldn’t smell the slums when he read a draft of her book. Others reported when they started to get bored. Boo said that, when she was younger, her instinct when hearing criticism was to “self-justify.” But she realized, “I often can’t see the problems until I get off my high horse.”

12) I often tell myself that editors and publishers don’t know what’s going to sell.

Boo writes mainly about poverty and has frequently been told that readers aren’t interested. “I’ve come to believe quite strongly that the American reading public is more hungry and sophisticated than we give it credit for. What is this convention in journalism that every reader has to get every line? They don’t.” Instead of dumbing stories down, she says we should trust the momentum of the narrative to carry readers even through parts they don’t understand. (Besides winning the National Book Award, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” became a New York Times bestseller.) When you wonder whether anybody cares about the story you’re pursuing, Boo says to tell yourself. “‘They’ll listen if I find it,’ and make yourself go.”

13) Even if I’m telling urgent stories, I can still experiment with form and make it a creative process.

“If your subject, like mine, is one people don’t necessarily want to read about, you have to do that,” Boo said. She encourages journalists to “read above your station.” Her own work has been inspired by the novelists Roberto Bolaño and George Eliot, among others.

14) When after a lot of effort I can’t pin something down, I force myself to put that uncertainty on the page.

Boo says she fact-checks “like a madwoman,” because those who have less power already have to work harder than anyone else to be believed. If she gets a small detail wrong, she knows that will be used to discredit the story as a whole and harm her subjects. Boo has taken to videotaping many of her interviews to provide evidence in case the story comes under fire. When she can’t find confirmation for something, she makes that explicit. “Getting it right matters way more than whether you can make people care,” she said.

15) If my work is successful, I don’t go and get high on my own supply.

“You know better than anyone where the essential courage of the enterprise resides—with the people who risk retaliation, share their stories and help journalists build piece by piece a crucial alternative public record of our time,” Boo said.

Bonus rule: Mind the gap.

It wasn’t one of her official guidelines, but during Q&A, Boo gave advice on finding story ideas. She suggested journalists follow the London Tube’s injunction and “mind the gap”: What is the thing that everyone has the theory on, but no one has done the reporting? Additionally, rather than “follow the money” or “follow the lies,” she says “follow the policy.” Policies are changing rapidly, and the impacts on poor communities are often obscured. Instead of just gravitating to the aberrant, which is our journalistic instinct, Boo suggests also thinking about ways we are interconnected.

Why is it great? I love how Lee has written this line: It tumbles out of Scout’s head exactly like the thoughts of a 6-year-old child, all “this and this and this and especially this.” And it also captures the joys of summer, that season when a child in particular feels things most acutely, but so do the rest of us. Oh, and canny readers will notice that I left off the last phrase in the series: “but most of all, summer was Dill.” I thought that would require explanation (Dill being Scout’s summertime friend), and once you start having to explain a sentence, the beauty is lost. I think the rhythm is still wonderful without it.

Whoever said “It is better to travel than to arrive” wasn’t sitting next to Sarah Lyall aboard American Airlines Flight 1886 en route from Iowa to Arizona at the moment she tried to open her single serving of yogurt.

It’s at this juncture in her 5000 word+/- saga that I begin to wonder if Lyall is chronicling more than the airline industry and instead providing a high-altitude window-seat overview to our country’s fractured classes.

The New York Times reporter’s narrative for the Business section — an account of flying across the United States four times in eight days, on a series of 12 flights, “half of them delayed,” in order to better understand “the forces shaping airline travel today” — begins with the yogurt, which, having built up internal pressure during the flight, explodes, showering white glop upon the hair and shoulders of her seatmates.

In this half-ominous and wholly hilarious launch to “Paying a Price for 8 Days of Flying in America,” the yogurt’s explosion functions as a metaphor for how tensions inside the airline cabin, and the industry as a whole, have been coming to a head. As Lyall summarizes, “The unfriendliness of the skies seems to grow only more baroquely awful with each new incident.”

In her nut graf Lyall asks, “How did air travel, which once seemed so glamorous and exciting, turn into a sadomasochistic pas de deux between the industry and the passenger?”

Lyall brings both levity and journalistic legwork to investigate some of the issues complicating domestic air travel, finding humor in humiliation. As one flight attendant put it, “You’re crammed in like sardines, your independence is taken away from you, you’re paying for things that used to be free.”

On “Day Three,” when Lyall prints out and affixes her bag routing tag, chalking it up as, one more of the “Things Airline Employees Used To Do,” it’s evident she’s smuggled her trenchant sense of humor into a section of the Times that rarely serves as a forum for voicey longform.

As a precursor and perhaps template for this assignment, Lyall recalls how “some years ago, I wrote an article that followed a bag of garbage on a journey.” In that piece, she followed Long Island resident Ocke Ketelson’s trash as it entered the “waste stream” and traveled 800 miles from the end of Ketelson’s driveway to a landfill four states away. Her article, “From L.I. to Angry Illinois: A 5-Day Trash Odyssey,” was (as is this article) replete with time stamps, titled mini-chapters and amusing but informative reporting on an industry’s inherent foibles.

“The unfriendliness of the skies seems to grow only more baroquely awful with each new incident.”

In the introduction to her eight-day airline odyssey, Lyall notes, “The stories had a pleasing parallelism to them—the random travel from place to place, the studious tracking of the specimen. This time, perhaps, I was the specimen.”

By explaining “Day 1: The Caste System,” and “Day 2: Boarding Nightmare,” Lyall documents “what the airlines euphemistically call the ‘boarding process.’”

She observes how the airplane turns into  “a microcosm of the Hunger Games” and how “the Gate lice” — a term, she tells us, the Haves of preferential boarding status use to refer to the Have-nots — may as well have boarding passes that say Loser on them. And the process of reaching one’s seat, she tells us, is the equivalent of “starting at a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and traversing the city until you reach your own house, a tent shared by 20 people on the banks of the Gowanus Canal.”

Surely in this age of fake news and alternative facts, it’s a journalistic feat to brandish jaunty language and still earn the reader’s faith through the final sentence. As a former London correspondent for the Times, Lyall is no stranger to dodgy dispatches. In a chapter of her snortingtly funny memoir, “The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British,” she compares the two countries’ journalistic standards, writing, “The British papers are unquestioningly more playful, opinionated and funnier than ours. They’re often more stylish and sophisticated, and more interesting to read.” What they lack, she acknowledges, is reliability and accuracy. Lyall lays out the paradigms like a mathematical axiom: “Just as U.S. Congress is duller but somehow more respectable than the British Parliament, so American newspapers are generally less amusing and but more trustworthy than British ones.” But Lyall’s prose, thanks to sustained study on both sides of the pond, offers the best possible hybrid: credible research offset with interesting, often baldly humorous testimony.

What keeps Lyall out of the Op-ed is her due diligence. Interspersed amongst the personal account of eight days of near ceaseless air travel are relevant quotes from 11 human sources, ranging from experts such as Henry Harteveldt, an industry group analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, and Seth Kaplan, a managing partner of the online publication Airline Weekly, to bystanders (er, bysitters?) such as Lyall’s seatmate Bela Nabulsi, a United Airlines 1K member from Houston, and business-class passenger Albert Zahalka, who remembers the “soul-destroying experience” of flying in economy.

As well, Lyall’s copy fairly bristles with facts. She cites Bureau of Transportation statistics of on-time performance (just under 80%); she counts security workers (44,000) and confiscated firearms (3,391 in 2016); and percentage of mishandled bags (5.73 per thousand in 2016) — the lowest ever recorded, according to “technology company SITA.”

Nevertheless, Lyall incurs a lost bag, which she includes among her personal statistics of the trip, again, both silly and serious: “Twelve cups of tomato juice. Three trips through whole body scanners. One alarming use of the word ‘groin area.’ Eight testy conversations with authority figures…. Two broken entertainment systems. And a reporter who went a week without washing her hair.”

By Day 7 of her extended domestic airline excursion, Lyall is fully proficient in the agony of boarding Zone Three, aka Gate lice land. Down to her last clean clothes — the adult onesie she bought at the Sochi Olympics — she’s watched a distraught Platinum status member plead futilely with a clerk to reinstate his upgrade status from No. 6 to No. 2. “What’s the use of the grubbing and scratching your way up an airline loyalty ladder if it exposes you to this sort of status based distress?” she asks.

It’s at this juncture in her 5000 word+/- saga that I begin to wonder if Lyall is chronicling more than the airline industry and instead providing a high-altitude window-seat overview to our country’s fractured classes.

For a whole week she’s flown with the 99% (or perhaps the wealthiest 99% — those who can afford to fly versus taking a bus). However, for her article’s conclusion, she joins the airline traveler’s 1%, and in doing so also reveals the (dystopic?) business model that keeps seat-based inequities aloft (so to speak).

Her 12^th and final flight – a glimpse of heaven — begins on the ground with access to a special lounge where she sips cucumber water, and it climaxes in the sky in 6B, a seat so ample that it reclines into a full-length bed. Here Lyall’s Hunger Games analogy of the industry — “where the elite enjoy over-the-top frivolities distant from the tedium of normal life, while the masses scrap over scant resources” — culminates. Now Lyall reveals the economic engines propelling the industry: “Airline executives have come to realize that they can do almost whatever they like in economy class, offering…a seat basically,” whereas the industry’s profit comes from the lucrative customers. First-class passengers, she tells us, “are worth perhaps 10 times as much as economy passengers” — a statistic reminiscent of the Electoral College process, as opposed to the popular vote.

Lyall fulfills her assignment embedded in the front of the plane, basking in her “cocoon of privilege.” Having put her days of exploding yogurt behind her (literally), she awaits a flight attendant’s delivery of a custom hot-fudge sundae — proving that the skies are still very friendly to the upwardly mobile.

This week is women’s week on Storyboard. We spotlight wonderful writers like Katherine Boo, Sarah Lyall, Harper Lee and Elizabeth Bowen. But get this — all the writers of the posts are women too. Kind of cool, no? This theme grew organically, with no grand plan to raise a feminist flag, but that makes the result even more sweet. (Oh, and if guys are feeling a bit left out, don’t fret: Two of the soundtracks are by men.)

Katherine Boo’s 15 rules for narrative nonfiction — now this is a “must read.” These amazing “rules” from Pulitzer winner (and journalism rock star) Katherine Boo got a huge reaction on social media, and for good reason. The tips, which she delivered at the Mayborn Literary Journalism Conference last weekend, are wonderful. I think my favorite is this quote with No. 12: “I’ve come to believe quite strongly that the American reading public is more hungry and sophisticated than we give it credit for. What is this convention in journalism that every reader has to get every line? They don’t.” Thanks to our Mayborn correspondent, Katia Savchuk, for a great post.

The soundtrack: “The Right Stuff,” by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. Sure, this song doesn’t hit the highs of “Wonderwall” or a lot of other Oasis songs, but Gallagher has a freaky gift for songwriting. Here, he gets into a bit of a dancey groove that I’m liking.

One Great Sentence

“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.”

Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Read why we think it’s great.

Sarah Lyall and (the hilarious) “Paying a Price for 8 Days of Flying in America.”  Oh, how Sarah Lyall makes me laugh. And new contributor Julia Shipley not only feels the same, but also has a touch of the Lyall about her. Consider this lede: “Whoever said ‘It is better to travel than to arrive’ wasn’t sitting next to Sarah Lyall aboard American Airlines Flight 1886 en route from Iowa to Arizona at the moment she tried to open her single serving of yogurt.” It’s one of my missions at Storyboard to spotlight funny storytelling — or, as Julia writes, “voicey longform.” This reported essay about the Hunger Games-ish hell of traveling coach for eight days is a pitch-perfect example of it.

The soundtrack: “Waitress in the Sky,” by the Replacements. This should be the anthem of those in coach. “Paid my fare, don’t want to complain/You get to me, you’re always outta champagne/Treat me like a bum, don’t wear no tie/You ain’t nothin’ but a waitress in the sky.”

What I’m reading online: Let’s keep with the women theme, shall we? For starters: Where Are the Mothers? In this piece for sister site Nieman Reports, Katherine Goldstein writes, “In the conversation about how to create more diversity and gender balance in newsrooms, one group has been routinely ignored: mothers. What are newsrooms doing to retain women who have or plan to have children, to make sure more women stay in the talent pipeline?” The deck hed could be a manifesto: “If news organizations want to attract and retain millennial journalists, newsrooms must better meet the needs of parents with young children—and create better work-life balance for everyone.”

And Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings site is a near-daily read for me. (I recommend the newsletter.) In this post, she talks about the book by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.” It’s full of great advice, including this one: “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

What’s on my bedside table: “The Heat of the Day,” by Elizabeth Bowen. Or should I say by “the criminally underappreciated Elizabeth Bowen”? Because she should be famous for her powers of observation, both of the seen and the hidden. How about this line, about at an outdoor concert? “Married couples who had sat down in apathetic closeness to one another could be seen to begin to draw a little apart, each recapturing some virginal inner dream.” Or this one that quickly follows:  “To be sitting packed among other people was better than walking about alone. At the last moment, this crowned the day with meaning. For there had been moments, heightening towards the end, when the Sunday’s beauty — for those with no ambition to cherish, no friend to turn to, no love to contemplate — drove its lack of meaning into the heart.” Sunday afternoon coming down…

What’s on my turntable: “Right On,” by Maxine Weldon. I chose this for women’s week on Storyboard because of her joyous yet fierce face on the cover. Right on! And I love that she covers Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” turning it on its head, and that Leonard Feather wrote the liner notes, ending: “If Maxine Weldon is not hell-bent for the upper echelons of show business, all I can say is grits ain’t groceries, eggs and poultry and Mona Lisa was a man.”

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

On a Wednesday morning in late July 2003, David Foster Wallace made his way to the “the enormous, pungent, and extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival” held every year in the state’s midcoast region. Wallace, “your assigned correspondent…accompanied by one girlfriend and both his own parents,” had been sent there by Gourmet, “the Magazine of Good Living,” whose bon vivant of a readership no doubt anticipated a freewheeling, lighthearted tour of the festival’s gustatory pleasures of August in Maine, perhaps accompanied by a recipe or two.

Meanwhile, the narrative’s temperature steadily increases to a boil, and readers are unable to think or claw their way out.

And for a while, at least, Wallace — keeping true to his own words that a “good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel” — maintains an amiable demeanor with his readers, displaying mastery of his subject material with a tongue-in-cheek transparency to the research process itself: “All this is right there in the encyclopedia.” From historical insights (“some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats”) to taxonomy and etymology (“a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae….the name ‘lobster’ comes from the Old English loppestre, which is thought to be a corrupt form of the Latin word for locust combined with the Old English loppe, which meant spider”), Wallace peppers opening sections with his unique brand of witty self-consciousness in tandem with humorous sketches surrounding U.S. tourism at large (and public gorging festivals in particular):

I confess that I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud hot crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists …  watching people slap canal-zone mosquitoes as they eat deep-fried Twinkies and watch Professor Paddywhack, on six-foot stilts in a raincoat with plastic lobsters protruding from all directions on springs, terrify their children.

After building this rapport with readers of Gourmet, Wallace—just shy of the article’s halfway point—casually drops a line that, in retrospect, appears as a crustacean version of Chekhov’s edict about never placing a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off: “A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle.”

Shortly thereafter and seemingly without warning, readers are plunged into the coup de grace of rhetorical questions that will solicit a record-breaking number of responses from readers:

So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is it all just a matter of individual choice?

This is all to say that what makes “Consider the Lobster” so good is not merely Wallace’s detailing of the various ways in which lobsters are euphemistically “prepared” for cooking — e.g., “Some cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s eyestalks” — nor is it his erudite display of “comparative neuroanatomy” and “hard core philosophy” that is required to discuss behaviors associated with pain and suffering, but rather his propensity to lure readers of Gourmet into the depths of self-investigative moral inquiry with him. An undertaking many readers of Gourmet, as we shall soon see, would not have otherwise agreed to at the outset of reading. “What were you thinking when you published that lobster story?” writes in one distressed reader, continuing, “Do you think I read your magazine so you can make me feel uncomfortable about the food I eat? What are you going to scare me away from eating next? Is this your job and the purpose of your magazine?”[1]

Another alternative is to put the lobster in cold salt water and then very slowly bring it up to a full boil. Cooks who advocate this method are going mostly on the analogy to a frog, which can supposedly be kept from jumping out of a boiling pot by heating the water incrementally. In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that the analogy between frogs and lobsters turns out not to hold.

There’s nevertheless a useful correlation between the frog parable and thinking about the structure of Wallace’s career-long engagement within the literary journalistic tradition: He begins slowly, almost tepidly, with his readers, gracefully careening them through a seemingly innocuous narrative about “one of the best food-themed festivals in the world.” Meanwhile, unbeknownst to gourmands and frogs alike, the narrative’s temperature steadily increases to a boil, and readers are unable to think or claw their way out of questioning the varying gradations of consciousness and the responsibilities and subsequent difficulties of living a thoughtful, conscientious existence. As Karen Kaplan of Huntington, New York, writes:

I imagined feeling the way a lobster feels after being plunged into a pot of boiling water. I certainly felt like I was rattling and clanking on the lid of the pot trying to escape. But in reality, I was just trying to finish this painfully long and footnoted-ridden article.

Wallace hooks readers like Kaplan into taking the plunge with him, so to speak, with not only his deployment of humor and the above parable-ish type rhetorical device but does so in tandem with implying that the stakes and scope of the article’s thesis remain uniquely suited for the very readers of the very commissioning magazine itself: “After all,” Wallace writes, “isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?”

And many readers did love the piece. Eric Henderson of Morgantown, West Virginia, found it “the most entertaining, well-written, and honest articles I’ve encountered in a magazine in the past decade,” while Charles Warner of Memphis thought its description of the standard American tourist “should be emblazoned above the exit portal at every international airport.” But then there’s Eileen O’Farrell of Healdsburg, California: “Your author, whose writing I find tiresome and somewhat infantile with his footnotes or information he couldn’t figure out how to include otherwise, admits he lacks ‘culinary sophistication’ and ‘is confused.’ He has obviously been taken in by the protestors. Please find writers who enjoy their job, their travels, other travels, and food!”

O’Farrell’s opinion notwithstanding, “Consider the Lobster” was included in Robert Atwan’s 2005 “Best American Essays” series, guest-edited by Susan Orlean. In the collection’s introductory remarks, Orlean considers her own criteria for selecting essays: “Many of the essays that intrigued me this year were funny, or unusually structured, or tonally adventurous…. What mattered most,” Orlean writes, “was that they conveyed the writer’s journey, and did it intelligently, gracefully, honestly, and with whatever voice or shape fit best.” E.g.,

I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.

Wallace’s voice is, to use Orlean’s phrase, tonally adventurous throughout, a contagious bewilderment from Wallace in unceasing conversation with readers of Gourmet, never quite letting them forget that they’re part and parcel to his own thinking about the various “questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain”:

As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.

Wallace, self-admittingly lacking both culinary sophistication and comprehensive understanding in mass tourism’s supposed appeal, nevertheless remained earnest in his quest to explore and question “whether the reader can identify with any of [his own] reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts” surrounding “the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue.” I suppose it’s safe to say that Wallace, in the end, was correct after all: “There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.”

[1] All reader response quotes come from Gourmet’s October 2004 “Letters to the Editor” section.

Why is it great? Nabokov is masterful here, not just stylistically but emotionally. He interrupts Humbert Humbert’s grotesque pursuit of Lolita by having him address the reader directly with an abject plea for understanding, a jarring moment that makes us queasy and disgusted but also arouses a shiver of pity. In that one sentence, we’ve been co-opted. And it captures the character of Humbert Humbert perfectly: in denial, but always, always, hearing the distant bell of culpability.

The article “Who Killed Julian Pierce?” was unusual on at least three counts. It was the author’s first magazine story. It took nearly 30 years to write. And it came close to solving a murder.

“I thought a magazine piece would be the same as making a documentary. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Nicole Lucas Haimes spends most of her time making documentary films, including “Chicken People,” about competitive show chickens, and “Cracking the Code,” an Emmy-nominated PBS special about the human genome. But she’s never been able to let go of a story she learned about as a young producer at ABC News in 1988. In the magazine In These Times, she read a tiny article about Julian Pierce, a Native American activist in North Carolina who’d been murdered while investigating police participation in cocaine trafficking. He was months away from likely becoming the state’s first Native American Superior Court judge.

The county sheriff claimed that Pierce had been killed by a 24-year-old member of his tribe seeking revenge after being told to stay away from the teenage daughter of Pierce’s girlfriend. After speaking to 120 people over three decades, Haimes discovered there was good reason to doubt the official account.

After first trying to tell the story through a movie and then a book, Haimes finally shared it earlier this year in magazine form, with the online MEL Magazine, a publication aimed at men launched by Dollar Shave Club in 2015 that’s better known for articles like “Trying to Figure Out How Much I’ve Spent on Booze in My Life Is the Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Done.”

Our conversation is condensed and edited below.

What gripped you about Julian Pierce’s story when you first read about it?

The story fascinated me on a number of levels. I contacted the family right away and immediately sensed the level of fear around the case. I went down to Robeson County in North Carolina for the first time in August 1988. It was a nuanced and complex place, a tri-racial community of whites, blacks and Native Americans. It was the most welcoming place I’d ever been and also the most frightening: It had the highest murder rate in the state and an extremely high rate of unsolved murders. A nonprofit that monitored the county’s courts estimated that 1,000 innocent people were wrongfully convicted every year in the 1980s. The suspicion around the case was intriguing for a budding investigative journalist. I immediately thought, “I know what I’m going to be doing for the next five years — I want to turn this into a movie.”

Why did it take 30 years to finally tell the story, and what kept you pursuing it?

I was able to raise some money to start making a movie. My screenplay was optioned, but the film was never made. At some point, I realized it wasn’t going to get made, at least in the way I envisioned it. I wanted to do something responsible with the information, so in 1998, I campaigned to have the county’s first Native American sheriff reopen the case. He refused. At that point, I figured I’d write a book, but meanwhile I got married and moved to California. It was a major disappointment that I hadn’t done what I thought I would. At that point, I had talked to well over 100 people and had enough information to cast doubt on the official story, but not a working theory of what else might’ve happened.

“My role changed from filmmaker to activist to writer. Is that OK? I don’t know.”

I continued to visit the county and stay close to the Pierce family. Around 2008, I heard a rumor from a confidential source that Dexter Earl Locklear [a drug addict and friend of the county sheriff’s who sometimes volunteered on Pierce’s campaign] broke down while smoking crack and told someone he’d killed Julian Pierce. I went back through my files and realized that there some could be some merit to the rumor. It was like a curtain was lifted. I decided the right thing to do was to try to get the case reopened, but everyone brushed us off. That’s when I decided it was time to get an article written.

I think it became an obsession at some point. If it were true that Julian Pierce was killed because of an alleged conspiracy run out of the sheriff’s department, then it would be a really significant story. Political assassinations are rare. I thought it had the possibility of bringing attention to a person who was a true hero for racial change. I was also a young woman looking for glory.

You got to know Pierce’s family well and actively campaigned to get the case reopened. What are your thoughts about getting so deeply involved considering your role as a journalist and documentarian?

I started out trying to make a movie, but that morphed into an ongoing determination to help bring justice to the case because it was the right thing to do. My role changed from filmmaker to activist to writer. Is that OK? I don’t know. Documentaries are different: It’s such a long process that developing intimacy with your characters is natural. There are facts, but I don’t believe there’s such a thing as true objectivity. What you have to do is be honest about your filters and present the story with integrity. I don’t believe journalists should be propagandists, but you can tell within the first four paragraphs that there’s a point of view.

What did you learn from spending so many years reporting on a Native American community?

Not to have any assumptions and to really, really listen and to be very present. I realized it’s really important to let people tell their stories in as unfiltered a way as possible.

What was different about writing a longform narrative compared to making a documentary?

I thought a magazine piece would be the same as making a documentary. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I figured I could write the story and then pop in the quotes I wanted, which is how I approach film, but that didn’t work. I thought it would be simple to structure something I knew so intimately, but it was a nightmare. There’s a level of visual detail film encodes: You see the food on the table, the drawn curtains, the smoke in the air. There’s no room to describe all of that in writing. It wasn’t enough to follow a character’s arc; a longform story required following an intellectual line of reasoning. The advantage is that the storytelling is concise and rigorous. Every word had to have meaning, which forced me to more concentrated than a documentary, where there’s room for other kinds of exploration.

Why did you end up publishing this in MEL Magazine, a new online publication sponsored by a shaving products company? What it was like to write for them?

Full disclosure: Zak Stone, the magazine’s executive editor, is a cousin. I didn’t know him very well, but he knew about this project. I reconnected with him when I was trying to pitch the story and he suggested people to pitch, but it came to naught. Then he got hired at MEL. He has a vision of making it truly a classic men’s magazine in the mold of Playboy, a mix of racy and serious. The editors were very supportive as I was learning to work in print and brought all the journalistic rigor I would expect from any publication. There was extraordinarily thorough fact-checking and legal review.

What did it feel like to finally get the story out there?

It’s unbelievably satisfying and such a relief. Now other reporters in North Carolina are picking up the story, and I’m so happy about that. I’m still working on a book that’s partly a memoir about my obsession with this case and partly Julian’s story. The Pierce family and the Robeson-based Center for Community Action are starting a postcard and letter-writing campaign to keep up pressure on Governor Roy Cooper to reopen the case. I don’t think it’s done yet.

The annual Maine Lobster Festival is underway, so it seemed like a good time to go big on lobsters. Of course, festival organizers might not have been huge fans of David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” piece for Gourmet magazine. And they might not like the weird lobster centaur on the cover of “M*A*S*H Goes to Maine.” But the love for Maine in the M*A*S*H book might make it all easier to bear.

David Foster Wallace and the brilliant “Consider the Lobster.” Some stories are indelible. You can remember lines from them years, if not decades, later. This is one of those stories for me.  Contributor Ryan Marnane says it well:  “What makes ‘Consider the Lobster’ so good is not merely Wallace’s detailing of the various ways in which lobsters are euphemistically ‘prepared’ for cooking — e.g., ‘Some cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s eyestalks’ — nor is it his erudite display of ‘comparative neuroanatomy’ and ‘hard core philosophy’ that is required to discuss behaviors associated with pain and suffering, but rather his propensity to lure readers of Gourmet into the depths of self-investigative moral inquiry with him.” And my favorite thing about the piece? That Ryan includes a footnote, in homage to DFW.

The soundtrack: “Rock Lobster,” by the B-52’s. Well, what else could it be? I have vivid memories of dancing to this in college, and everyone curling themselves down, down, down when we got to those lyrics. I can actually picture the dancefloor, many years later. The power of music and memory.

One Great Sentence

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.”

Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita.” Read why we think it’s great.

Nicole Lucas Haimes and “Who Killed Julian Pierce?” Katia Savchuk really draws you into this post with her lede: “The article “Who Killed Julian Pierce?” was unusual on at least three counts. It was the author’s first magazine story. It took nearly 30 years to write. And it came close to solving a murder.” Haimes talks about the difference between filmmaking and writing: “I thought a magazine piece would be the same as making a documentary. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

The soundtrack: “The Murder Mystery,” by the Velvet Underground. I’m sure many people think these lyrics are poetry. I’m not one of them. But the creepy, sinister mood fits the story.

What I’m reading online: Lucas Reilly’s recent piece for Mental Floss, “How Eclipse Chasers Are Putting a Small Kentucky Town on the Map,” made me want to book a flight to a town in the path of this month’s eclipse. It’s amazingly well-researched, and at the same time a pretty galloping read. It gives you a sense that your life could be changed by witnessing it. Who’s up for a road trip?

I really like it when editors point out stories they’re proud of. Richard Halicks, an editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, did just that with this piece by Rosalind Bentley, “After Philando Castile, 2 churches in Roswell seek racial reconciliation.” He had nothing but praise for Bentley’s work on the story, part of the paper’s RE:Race project.

What’s on my bedside table: “M*A*S*H Goes to Maine,” by Richard Hooker. Isn’t this a great match to the David Foster Wallace piece? The writing isn’t quite up to his level, but the cover photo, half lobster, half nude girl, is suitably queasy-making. And I have to think DFW would like this tagline, also on the cover: “They don’t come much zanier than this one.”

What’s on my turntable: “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” by AC/DC. I don’t listen to metal much, but you can’t go wrong with AC/DC and Angus Young. I thought of the title song when reading the story about the murdered Native American activist above. “If you got a lady and you want her gone/But you ain’t got the guts/She keeps naggin’ at you night and day/Enough to drive you nuts.”

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.