Digital longform, and the pitfalls of the “build it and they will come”...
“I don’t know what we were thinking.” “Well, what do you think?” “You tell me. I have no idea.” When Aleksandr Gorbachev decided to research the business models of digital longform publications for his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Digital longform as journalism jetpack, and “Walking While Black”
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kate Christensen: “It is crucial to avoid grinding axes, settling scores and...
Novelist and memoirist Kate Christensen is a bit of a pioneer for me, leading a Lewis and Clark expedition to a new life. Seven years ago, she moved to the White Mountains and then Maine after spending...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Notable Narrative: Shane Bauer and “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard”
Shane Bauer is no stranger to prisons. In 2009, when he was a freelance journalist living in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iranian border guards arrested him and two others when they accidentally crossed into the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Carrie at the prom and the Nora Charles of the Allagash
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Just in time for another convention, Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing...
I just got off the plane from the Republican National Convention with a bulletproof vest still packed in my suitcase, and I have to wonder if last week would have made Hunter S. Thompson lose his mind....
View ArticleAnnotation Tuesday! Rachel Aviv and “Your Son Is Deceased”
This New Yorker story about a fatal police shooting could have seemed like “same old, same old.” After all, I’ve consumed (and sometimes written) countless death-by-cop sagas during my 50 years as a...
View Article5(ish) Questions: Adam Hochschild and Texaco’s secret support for Franco in...
When Adam Hochschild started researching the Spanish Civil War a few years ago, he knew it was already the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Trying to find something new to say...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hunter S. Thompson, William Burroughs and Dorothy Parker — now that would be...
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Annotation Tuesday! Davy Rothbart and The California Sunday Magazine’s “Crowd...
Unlike most of us, Davy Rothbart enjoys being thrown off balance, even if it leaves him uncomfortable or embarrassed — or even humiliated. Davy Rothbart played Selfie Man for Crowds on Demand. Photos...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Pulitzer at 100: The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team and an epic series on...
In 1986, Patrick McSorley was a 12-year-old-boy living in a Boston housing project. His dad had just committed suicide, and his mom was schizophrenic. One day, a Catholic priest named John Geoghan...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Celebrating “Slow Journalism” and the Pulitzers’ 100th birthday (You look...
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Pulitzer at 100: Anthony Shadid, an expert of the human soul
It’s June 2003, and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has just been overthrown. “Everybody likes us,” Spec. Stephen Harris, a 20-year-old from Lafayette, Louisiana, tells a Washington Post correspondent...
View Article5(ish) Questions: Adam Hochschild and Texaco’s secret support for Franco in...
When Adam Hochschild started researching the Spanish Civil War a few years ago, he knew it was already the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Trying to find something new to say...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Pulitzer winner gone far too soon and the “other” Elizabeth Taylor
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Pulitzer at 100: Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman on “Tainted Justice”
Imagine, if you will, an investigative series in a metropolitan tabloid daily newspaper about renegade narcotics cops and a lying informant, a series that opens with a headline like this: Celebrating...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Saudi Millennials are using social media to revive an ancient literary...
History is happening in Saudi Arabia right now — but I’m not referring to the feminist presence at the Rio Olympics. I’m talking about an ancient cultural and literary festival called the Sooq Okaz,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Detective stories true and fictional, and loving the word “whacked”
Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Annotation Tuesday! Jon Mooallem’s “The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of)...
Every once in a while you read a story that feels so authentic and true, you wish you’d written it. That’s how I felt reading Jon Mooallem’s New York Times Magazine piece about a self-professed “idler”...
View ArticleThe Pulitzer at 100: Katherine Boo and “Invisible Lives” at group homes
“Elroy lives here. Tiny, half-blind, mentally retarded, 39-year-old Elroy. To find him, go past the counselor flirting on the phone.” If you had been in the Georgetown University cafeteria back in...
View Article