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5 Questions: Anne Helen Petersen and the white supremacists who came for...
Anne Helen Petersen has spent the last year covering Trump rallies and protests, the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline camp at Standing Rock, crowd-funded healthcare, survivalist “preppers” and what it means...
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America and race: a disturbing undercurrent that runs through our past and...
The theme of America and race — and, unfortunately, hatred and even murder — runs through this week’s posts. The Osage Indians who were systematically killed for their oil in David Grann’s book. The...
View ArticleThe Boston Globe’s Malcolm Gay and a story of love, and art, lost to the...
Last year, Malcolm Gay, an arts reporter at The Boston Globe, stumbled across the seemingly impossible: an untold story about the Holocaust. There’s an inheritance that was lost and can never be...
View Article“He sat in an old chair near a particle board pinned with the yellowed...
Why is it great? I promise this is the last you’ll see of Springsteen on this site for the foreseeable future. But I had somehow missed this story by one of my favorite writers (and former co-worker on...
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5(ish) Questions: Nathan Thornburgh talks mind-blowing drugs and Anthony...
Sitting across a dinner table in Mexico City back in 2009, Nathan Thornburgh and Matt Goulding hatched an idea. Thornburgh, a longtime foreign correspondent for Time magazine, and Goulding, a roving...
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C.S. Lewis and Tolkien go to see “Snow White,” and D.H. Lawrence goes pulp...
Unlikely pairings seem to be a theme this week. Reporting a story under the influence of mind-altering drugs. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien going to see “Snow White” together. D.H. Lawrence given the...
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How Michelle Garcia told the story of Juárez, a city lost to violence,...
Numbers can tell a story, but they can also be relentlessly abstract. That was certainly the case for Ciudád Juárez, which over the course of four years faced a relentless wave of cartel violence. From...
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5(ish) Questions: Legendary editor Gene Roberts reflects on a lifetime in...
Filmmaker David Layton isn’t a stranger to the newsroom. Before he produced and directed documentaries, he was a newspaper reporter, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his next project, “The...
View Article“She was beautiful but when she tasted the water from the glass on her...
Why is it great? When I moved back to New England last year after nearly a lifetime away, John Cheever’s debut novel about a quirky New England family was the first thing I read. This sentence, near...
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Let’s celebrate some newsroom heroes: from Gene Roberts to Latina journalists
This was a special week on Storyboard, because we shone a spotlight on some journalists who often don’t get the recognition they deserve. Latina journalists, a minority within a minority in the field,...
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5(ish) Questions: Josh O’Kane and “The Ballad of Fogarty’s Cove”
The word “lament” is a sadly beautiful thing, its layers and meanings distinct, yet entwined. In music, it is a song of loss, of missing someone or something that is no longer there. As a verb, it...
View Article“There’s no room for hate in ice cream,” Dennis liked to remind himself.
Why is it great? We annotated this wonderful story last year, and the focus of the annotation was the rarity of humor in longform. This line makes me laugh even without the context of the story, which...
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The roadblocks, and the dangers, for investigative journalists in the Arab world
As the Arab Spring began to topple a wave of repressive governments six years ago, many members of the fledgling group Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism thought things were finally going to...
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Literary journalism gets some love, from “Hiroshima” to Shane Bauer’s prison...
I’m in Nova Scotia for a literary journalism conference (more on that in the coming days), and it’s been incredibly heartening to see such passion for the genre. I’ve heard wonderful discussions on...
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Feeling the facts: making the case for the sensory connection in literary...
If you wanted to do a word cloud of the literary journalism conference I just attended in Nova Scotia, the word “feel” might be the largest image. Then imagination. And memory. And voice. And trust....
View Article“This will happen so fast that one night he will be in the backyard,...
This famous piece by Susan Orlean is one of those stories where it’s hard to pick just one great sentence. You find one, and then another, and then another — a rabbit hole of great sentences. But this...
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Fake news and true facts, and the licenses taken in pursuit of narrative
A decade or so ago, shortly after I became book editor of the Los Angeles Times, I wrote a piece defending the liberties of memoirists. This was in the wake of the scandal over James Frey and his...
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A celebration of narrative journalism’s differences, and its singular strengths
This week we’re celebrating the things that make literary journalism different from news writing. A focus on felt detail. An embrace of emotion. An acceptance that the decisions made in the writing...
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The truth must be told: a conversation with slain Mexican journalist Javier...
Earlier this month, Mexican President President Enrique Peña Nieto met with representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists and pledged to make the security and protection of journalists a...
View Article“Did he kill? If he did kill, I would swear that it is with this meticulous,...
Why is it so great? I came across this stunning line (yes, it’s more than one sentence) in a piece in a literary journalism journal about the novelist Colette’s outings as a journalist covering “crime...
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