The role of editor as story director
The director wasn’t satisfied. “Do it again,” she said, after we finished the scene. We did. “Do it again.” We did. “Do it again.” And so on, until we got it right. Or close enough. It was my first...
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Foreign reporting: Peter Hessler on seeing China through a personal lens
Peter Hessler’s books about China have resonated with both Western and Chinese audiences, an accomplishment that seems unlikely today, when the “China story” has become a political and diplomatic...
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How a writer’s kaleidoscopic mind learned to still the distractions with haiku
I learned much of what I value about writing from a man who lost his voice. A slender, black-eyed Panamanian, José Quintero was a legend in the American theater and a guest artist at Florida State...
View Article“…no one feels the entry wound …”
“The White Lotus” scorches like burning sand on bare feet. A satire about wealthy white tourists in Hawaii and a mysterious death that springs from their visit, the HBO series poses spiky challenges to...
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Tools from fiction build a sophisticated National Magazine Award feature...
Tamara Dean thinks a lot about the elements of story, whether she is writing for magazines such as The Progressive; essays for Orion or Creative Nonfiction; or a fictional short story for a literary...
View ArticleCollected reflections on John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”
Today is the 76th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. That’s not a notable number in the rather arbitrary realm of anniversary stories. But the event itself just seems to gain profundity as time...
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A conversation with Nathaniel Rich on “Losing Earth,” human inertia and...
EDITOR’S NOTE: The report released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not equivocate: Global warming is real, human-caused, catastrophic — and leaves a narrowing window to...
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What the “Insect Apocalypse” reveals about faulty human memory
EDITOR’S NOTE: The report released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not equivocate: Global warming is real, human-caused, catastrophic — and leaves a narrowing window to...
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Braving the Drake Passage, swimming with leopard seals, and interviewing a...
EDITOR’S NOTE: The report released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not equivocate: Global warming is real, human-caused, catastrophic — and leaves a narrowing window to...
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Pitching ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network: Focus on sources and impact
EDITOR’S NOTE: Tomorrow we feature an interview with Max Blau, a local reporter who made a successful pitch to ProPublica, and an annotation of the pitch. Blau is now a staff reporter for ProPublica...
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3 rejections before a successful pitch to ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read an interview with ProPublica’s editors about how to submit a successful pitch to the Local Reporting Network. When writing his style of investigative stories, Max Blau considers...
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A retired newspaper man finds a new writing voice in the solitude of wilderness
Every year, or as often as I can, I go into the northern Minnesota woods, usually alone now, seeking tranquility and time to brood and reflect. And I write while I’m there, among the pines, at a...
View Article“His name was Zaki Anwari …”
Writers usually stuff facts in dispatches from the front or the cop shop or the accident scene. All those W’s and H’s, jammed together. Generally, the formula works. But individual facts, as well as...
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How the loss of one Olympic story led to gold on another
Olympic athletes toil years to earn spots in competitions so dramatic some are judged by the snick of a shutter. The patience required for journalists is less heightened but very real. Writers at the...
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Jason Fagone follows the creation, life and death of a chatbot romance
Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence is a part of our daily lives. Based on the principle that machines can be made to simulate human intelligence, A.I. is at work every time we tell Siri...
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“The Simulation of Jessica:” Chapter 2 unfurls an intimate chatbot conversation
The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I. The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more? By JASON FAGONE | July...
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“The Simulation of Jessica:” Chapter 3 probes the ethics and power of A.I.
The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I. The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more? By JASON FAGONE | July...
View ArticleA panoramic approach to a book about the Sept. 11 boat lift
In “The Art of Description: World into Word,” Mark Doty writes that Proust endeavored to “dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blur of space and time that the unit of...
View ArticleFrom Sept. 11 to COVID: Using the personal to write the global
How do you write about a shared event that changes the world, but that we each experience personally? And how do you then share that personal experience back to the world in a meaningful way? I’ve been...
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A 9/11 survival story: Honoring accuracy and voice in eyewitness accounts
EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute. As the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 looms, I am reminded of one of my favorite anthologies of...
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