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Annotation Tuesday: Elizabeth Weil and “The Curse of the Bahia Emerald”
Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Outside, says she doesn’t write about “super important” things. But her warm and captivating voice has animated every subject...
View Article“There is a time to write and a time to walk and a time to reflect and a time...
In August 1991, I read John Cheever’s journal excerpts published in The New Yorker. I was a 19-year-old college dropout, a waitress, and in the half hour before starting my shift, I sat outside my...
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“The Uncounted”: combining the power of narrative with an 18-month investigation
“The Uncounted,” Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal’s exhaustively reported investigation into the scale of civilian casualties in the U.S.-led coalition’s fight against ISIS, begins, like many disaster...
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“There is a time to write and a time to walk and a time to reflect and a time...
This week’s One Great Sentence, by the novelist John Cheever, has stayed with me all week. It’s an existential matter for writers and artists of all types, the battle between the introspective and...
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Why’s This So Good? (The wonderful) Dan Barry and “The Lost Children of Tuam”
If Dan Barry has a beat, it is humanity — humanity as it reckons with its triumphs and travesties, and, sometimes, its profound secrets. Why does Barry begin a story about a long-hidden trove of bones...
View Article‘Tis.
Why is it so great? This is not only one of the best one-word sentences in a memoir, it’s also possibly the only one-word chapter in a memoir. And the final chapter, to boot. So it also ranks up there...
View Article5 Tips for Journalists Covering Mental and Behavioral Health
Few topics are as misunderstood by the media as mental health. Despite advances in treatment paradigms, reporters too often fall back on dated stereotypes, distort the nature of illnesses and recovery...
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The sorrows of Ireland, from Dan Barry, Frank McCourt and Dolores O’Riordan
The words “lyricism” and “Ireland” seem entwined. One of my favorite poets is W.B. Yeats (oh, his “Stolen Child”). More recently, the playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, born in London of...
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As Saudi Arabia modernizes, an expat child of its “Little America” creates a...
It isn’t often that you open a book and leap into your childhood. A wave of nostalgia washed over me as I flipped through New York-based photographer Ayesha Malik’s book, Aramco: Above the Oil Fields....
View Article“He longed for a past as imagined as it was real.”
Why is it great? This story was part of the late writer’s Iraq coverage that won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. It captures Iraqis’ sense of loss in the war, and the loss that had...
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The evolution of wartime journalists in Syria: from activists to reporters
Six years ago, in the early days of the Syrian uprising, a group of anti-government activists in a Damascus suburb decided to start their own newspaper. “If I look back to myself reporting at that...
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A salute to storytelling in the Middle East: Syria, Saudi Arabia and Shadid
This week we spotlighted the storytelling of the Middle East on Storyboard. Too often the coverage is of the bird’s-eye-view variety, either because of dangerous conditions or cultural differences. But...
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5(ish) Questions: Richard Marosi and “Without a Country”
Stories about anti-immigrant raids and deportations can take on a sheen of the generic: a series of action-movie snapshots coupled with thousand-foot views of policy, statistics and ideology that...
View Article“For what are we without hope in our hearts / That someday we’ll drink from...
Why is it so great? Springsteen’s eternal theme of the runaway American dream runs through this song and the entire album it’s on, the Nebraska-esque “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” This song could be the...
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Francisco Cantú and “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border”
I remember first hearing Francisco Cantú’s story sometime last year, spooling out from my car speakers as I wound through mountain curves many hundreds of miles from the border he writes about. He was...
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Forget the politics of immigration — read about the real lives of immigration
This week on Storyboard we spotlighted some wonderful journalism (and songwriting) about immigration. I know I might be biased, because I spent the bulk of my career at the Los Angeles Times, but I...
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“The Watchdog” on the importance of storytelling in consumer reporting
You might not think of consumer columnists as narrative storytellers, or investigative reporters. But journalist Dave Lieber, “The Watchdog” for the Dallas Morning News, is a big fan of the...
View Article“No single gesture would do more to demonstrate continuity and stability — to...
Why is it great? The great presidential biographer Robert Caro has proved countless times that he understands the power of a short sentence. His description of the instant in Dallas that changed LBJ’s...
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5(ish) Questions: Radio storytelling pioneer Jay Allison and the bite-size...
Jay Allison is a pioneer in the world of radio storytelling. Nearly 25 years ago, he founded Atlantic Public Media, which in turn birthed WCAI, the public radio station for Cape Cod and its surrounding...
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A tribute to audio storytelling, and to the memory of bedtime stories
This is a very “audio” week on Storyboard, and I’d like to have more of them. Storytelling has so many forms, and sometimes we hear stories better than we read them. It’s almost like you’re a child and...
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