Clik here to view.
5(ish) Questions: Inara Verzemnieks and “Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone”
“Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone,” Inara Verzemnieks’ story about the health insurance coverage gap, came out in the New York Times Magazine a month after the presidential election, as the media buzzed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reporters who go deep — something we need more of in a time of national...
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Annotation Tuesday! Ron Rosenbaum and “The Secrets of the Little Blue Box”
Some writers work for decades before one of their pieces gets widespread attention. Ron Rosenbaum managed to pull it off with his second long-form magazine article. Rosenbaum’s 1971 Esquire piece,...
View Article“The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might...
Why it’s great: The sentence is a story in itself. It creates a texture landscape in the reader’s mind (taste that rare scotch, sharp and warm in your throat; then feel the ache in your lower spine,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Saudi feminist’s spoken-word performance finds its power in protest
Waad Janbi, a Saudi feminist and aspiring filmmaker, has long fought against misogyny using her hands–furiously typing on her smartphone or laptop. But last month, for the first time, she fought it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Meet the phone phreaks, the grandfathers of today’s hackers (Russian or...
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The art of the obituary: It’s a dying one
Forget making little dolls out of corn cobs or embroidering samplers with snippets of homey wisdom on them: If it’s a dying art you’re after, look to the news obituary. Obit writers don’t get to...
View Article“The only break from the darkness comes when the sub drops through clusters...
Why is it great? This piece about mining companies exploring the bottom of the ocean creates an upside-down outer space. The whole story is a kind of extended metaphor between the exploration of space...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Guy Larson and “Merv Curls Lead”— it’s kind of like “The Office” on ice
You know when you absentmindedly click on a product and an ad for the thing seems to stalk you online for the rest of your life? (I once thought the name “Mrs. Pasture’s Horse Cookies” charming. Now,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Some longform stories that will chill you in more ways than one
This week we’re getting a sneak preview of spring in Maine, and the two feet of snow is fast melting. But there’s still a bit of a chill in this week’s roundup, either the literal kind — a hilarious...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Annotation Tuesday! Christopher Solomon and “The Detective of Northern Oddities”
Profiles are hard. Too often they’re drenched in the writer’s attempts to make the subject seem larger than life. But good profiles have the opposite effect: Through their honesty and attention to...
View Article“He watched a mouse saunter up the electric cord leading to the...
This vivid, funny, terrific sentence could have been drawn from Lewis Carroll, but it’s from the middle of a deadline story on the frustrations of two “peace commissions” that were unable to keep the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
5(ish) Questions: Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop on the backstory of the...
To the FBI, he was one of the most dangerous revolutionaries in the United States. To his supporters in the Puerto Rican independence movement, he was a freedom fighter. An important part of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The politics of language, from terrorists vs. freedom fighters to “carnage”...
We seem to have two recurring motifs going on this week on Storyboard — animals and the politicization of language. On the animal front, we have Christopher Solomon’s “cute even when it’s dead” otter,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Notable Narrative: Bernt Jakob Oksnes and “The Baby in the Plastic Bag”
The words appear on a blank white screen, accompanied by an atonal, ominous peal of music. “One frosty October morning, a newborn baby boy is found inside a plastic bag inside an Oslo graveyard. The...
View Article“Hazel Morse was a large, fair woman of the type that incites some men when...
Why is it great? With this opening line to her famous short story, Parker does so many things: She gives us an image of Hazel that’s Kodachrome clear: I can almost hear the old-fashioned pop of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
5(ish) Questions: Jesse Lenz and The Collective Quarterly magazine
In today’s world of impossibly speeded-up journalism, with Twitter bursts its high-velocity symbol, a small group of renegades has resolutely slammed on the brakes to practice what it calls “slow...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Let’s hear it for women writers like Dorothy Parker and Zadie Smith the...
This week, International Women’s Day really grabbed the spotlight with the Day Without a Woman protests and homages to role models on social media (shout-out to Nieman Lab’s great Instagram posts on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
5(ish) Questions: Diarmid Mogg and the crazy-compelling “Small Town Noir”
Anna Mae McNeil stares past the camera, the smudge of an old bruise under her right eye. The words “New Castle, Pa., No. 220” are written in white ink below her face. It is Feb. 5, 1933, and Anna Mae...
View Article“This is a love story, and I apologize; it was inadvertent. But I want it...
Why is it great? Have you ever read a book and found it hard to get over a terrible first line? You want to move on, and the other 100,000 sentences in the book may be just fine, but that first line...
View Article