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Parachute reporting in a foreign land: Getting it fast and getting it right
On May 3, 2018, volcanic fissures opened in a residential neighborhood on the island of Hawai‘i, forcing more than 2,000 people to evacuate their homes. While the Kīlauea volcano has been erupting for...
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The Pitch (Take Two): Erika Hayasaki on the reality of landing a big...
Erika Hayasaki was an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times when she left the relative security of the newsroom for the feast-or-famine world of freelancing. She has since made her way into...
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“Do not despair of our present difficulties. We believe always in the promise...
This photo released by Hanoi's Vietnam News Agency shows Lt. Commander John S. McCain III as a prisoner of war in 1967. AP Photo Coming at the end of his elegant posthumous valedictory to the country,...
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Rebecca Solnit’s long and winding road through the tangled tale of politics
The opening paragraph of Rebecca Solnit’s new LitHub essay, “Why the President Must Be Impeached,” is a single sentence, 88 words long. It is one of the shortest paragraphs in a 20-paragraph soliloquy...
View Article“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
This passage – not quite a Haiku, but with that feeling – comes as part of Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes.” It is introduced in the poem as “Instructions for living a life.” I’m not good at poetry (a...
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Christopher Solomon on how he captured the controversial wolf man of Washington
Before Christopher Solomon took on the case of the wolf researcher who ignited a political firestorm, the situation had sparked plenty of regional coverage. In particular, The Seattle Times, where...
View Article“No matter how long we study them, the images are unfathomable. No matter how...
Why it’s good: There are endless memories and memorials marking yesterday, the 17th anniversary of 9/11. I find it impossible to post about something else, but impossible to choose the right thing to...
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An alligator attack sparks a Facebook attack – and an invitation to...
I sat on a bench with Wade Livingston the other day. We talked about an alligator attack, a woman who drowned, and the people who saw fit to condemn her for the audacity to up and die while walking...
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After the fires: A surprising story of a haunted hero and the ashes of regret
Who knew there was a beat called “fire coverage,” or it was a job they would learn to love? Certainly not Lizzie Johnson, who was covering city hall for The San Francisco Chronicle, and not yet sure...
View Article“To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted...
Standing in the lobby of the gloriously ornate Chicago Tribune Tower, gazing at this James Madison quote, I am filled with pride. And fear. The pride stems not only from being a long-time member of...
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A conversation with Nathaniel Rich on “Losing Earth,” human inertia and...
Before anyone could even unfold the tree pulp, The New York Times Magazine wanted readers to know the magnitude of the story it had taken on. Editor Jake Silverstein announced on Twitter that the...
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“Just be the kite.”
An award-winning author writes a break-out novel, and then another, and then… It has been 10 years since Minnesota novelist Leif Enger‘s last book, “So Brave, Young and Handsome,” was published. That...
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Q&A: A conversation with Alexandra Petri on conjugating gender and politics
I‘ve always thought writing should be learned by osmosis. Like if you read enough good books you shouldn’t need to know the exact rules about dangling participles. But I’m a journalist and maybe I...
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How a Rubik’s cube helped a father understand the puzzle of his son
New York Times sportswriter John Branch is best known in the journalism world for “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” His gripping long-form narrative, which reconstructed a fatal avalanche...
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Legendary writer John McPhee to a student: “I don’t create the writer. At all.”
John McPhee John McPhee, a master of nonfiction storytelling, became a teacher by accident. In 1974, when he was a fast-rising star at The New Yorker, his alma mater, Princeton University, needed a...
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“From the dancing came the dancing.”
Sentences can seem simple. Even the most tangled and complex are just a few words arranged between punctuation and white space. Ideally they make sense standing alone. But sentences never really...
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The craft (and art) of the interview, from thoughtful homework to whatever...
Notes on interviewing process Jacqui Banaszynski The panel was promoted as “The Art of the Interview.” And based on the range of advice from four Seattle-based journalists, effective interviewing –...
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A conversation with Tommy Tomlinson: Getting naked in print and public
The first time I met Tommy Tomlinson, he and his wife, Alix Felsing, took me to their favorite spot for breakfast in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they lived and where Tommy wrote a wildly popular...
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“The girl, Fernanda Jacqueline Davila, was 2 years old: brief life, long...
There is much to consider in that straightforward sentence. A small child, only 2. A girl-child, if that matters, but that conjurs the universal image of a child clutching a doll. A name that hints...
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Divining the true source of stories
The tap water in Flint, Michigan, went bad more than four years ago, when the budget-strapped city stopped drawing its water from Lake Huron and the Detroit River and switched to a cheaper source:...
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