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William Langewiesche and “Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight”
William Langewiesche is known to readers of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair as a kind of Jack London figure, a writer of sturdy, authoritative tales of modern life at the moral, technological and...
View Article“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
Why is it so great? For Valentine’s Day, we had to go with One Great Sentence on love (even if the holiday makes you go harrumph). This one is a doozy. It’s uplifting — love makes you brave enough to...
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Finding the story in the parentheses and other adventures with Jeffrey Stern
It wasn’t the sensational headline — “The Real-Life Mad Max Who Battled ISIS in a Bulletproof BMW” — that grabbed my attention. It was the next bit. “Here is a person I came to really like and admire –...
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On bullets and planes that fall from the sky — and, somewhere in the middle,...
This could have been a week of love — at least of the commercialized Hallmark variety. But hearts and flowers didn’t prevail for even one day before yet another person with a gun ran amok at a school....
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The Pitch: How to break into The California Sunday Magazine
In just over three years of existence, The California Sunday Magazine has emerged as one of the best magazines in the country. The San Francisco-based publication has been a finalist for 10 National...
View Article“An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and...
Why is it great? This line is beautifully constructed, yes, but what stands out for me is the sentiment conveyed. It could be my journalism mantra. The sentence comes from Orlean’s introduction to her...
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Peter Stark and “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow – First – Chill –...
Peter Stark’s second-person rendering of a hypothermic near-death experience took its 1997 print headline from the closing quatrain of an Emily Dickinson poem that, depending who you ask, is either an...
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“An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite”
This week’s One Great Sentence by Susan Orlean, referenced in the headline above, could be my journalism mantra. Yes, we must know about the great events and people of our time. But to closely examine...
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The thing with feathers: Burkhard Bilger and his haute-couture “plumassier”
Is participatory journalism a good thing? Burkhard Bilger may have pondered that while clinging to the subject of his recent New Yorker profile as the twosome zoomed through Paris on a scooter....
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What Journalists Need to Know About Writing Screenplays
How many journalists regard the Watergate scandal as a love story? Peter Landesman does and that is, arguably, the key to his success as a screenwriter. Landesman was sitting in a Chicago bar when he...
View Article“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, not...
Why is it so great? The writing in this famous passage is so good that George Orwell wrote a parody of it designed to ridicule the bloated writing of his day: “Objective consideration of contemporary...
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Is literary journalism the peacock of the news world? So much useful beauty
It was John Steinbeck’s birthday this week, and I came across this quote by him: “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.” That made...
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The Pitch: Pacific Standard’s executive editor shares some do’s and don’ts
Jennifer Sahn, executive editor of Pacific Standard, understands why writers sometimes feel frustrated when editors take weeks to respond to their pitches or don’t write back at all. But she wants...
View Article“The American people want someone to articulate their rage for them.”
Why is it so great? I recently watched the movie “Network” again, and it could have been written in 2018 instead of more than 40 years earlier. This line almost sums up the last presidential election,...
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Syria’s “selfie teen” highlights the devastation of war — and the fog of war
The fog of war is especially thick in Syria, where access is nearly impossible for foreign journalists and accounts of the war often reach the outside world via social media. In the besieged Eastern...
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We’re as mad as hell and we’re going to go on Twitter and say so
I watched the movie “Network” again the other day and was unnerved by how accurately screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky predicted today’s media and political environment. The line between news and scripted...
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Writing through a whiteout: David Grann and “The White Darkness”
The lede came to David Grann a year before he would complete his epic story and a year after the events it describes: “The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned he...
View Article“If I were hauling 600 miles across the Arctic, I’d choose J. for stamina and...
I’ve held on to the entire March 20, 2016 “Voyages” issue of The New York Times Magazine because I can’t bear to part ways with Leanne Shapton’s story within, which includes this smart, hilarious...
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Eva Holland and “Get Schooled in the No-Nonsense Art of Survival”
Adventure narratives thrive on the nearness (or near miss) of doom’s heavy paw, but Eva Holland gives readers something other than a saga of suffering and survival in her recent account of her slog...
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Polar opposites: Exploring some very cool writing, the he said/she said version
As a near-spring Nor’easter hit New England this week, we showcased two recent stories about polar exploration. What intrigued me were the very different perspectives of the writers and subjects. In...
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