I read poetry. Chalk it up to an English degree, perhaps too much Milton or Wordsworth as an undergrad, or a line or two that I once might have penned one dark and stormy night. But as a journalist, I find poetry something of a closeted pleasure, hard to explain or justify, espec … | Continue reading
This week on Storyboard we spotlighted two pieces of historical nonfiction, with one telling the story of America’s first detectives, back in the time of Charles Dickens, and the other reaching back just 40 years, to the brutal Argentine dictatorship that saw thousands of people … | Continue reading
In her piece “The Living Disappeared” for The California Sunday magazine, reporter Bridget Huber turns the complicated, still-unfolding story of the missing children from Argentina’s military dictatorship into a relatable narrative about loss. The heroine of the story, 91-year-ol … | Continue reading
Why is it great? I’ve never read Bierce’s satirical dictionary, but after coming across this sentence, it’s on the list. With just a few words, he conjures up the dreariness of the month (with something quintessentially dreary: fractions). It’s no longer the autumn of bright col … | Continue reading
Matthew Pearl is a sucker for underdog stories, origin stories and untold stories. Those all came together when the author of best-selling historical fiction thrillers such as “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow” asked: Who were America’s first detectives? And what did they do? … | Continue reading
We really looked under the hood of literary journalism this week, with wonderful tips on how to pitch and write your stories. In the second installment of our series “The Pitch,” a Smithsonian Magazine talks about her likes and pet peeves. In this week’s One Great Sentence, Poynt … | Continue reading
Note from Storyboard editor Kari Howard: Reporter Tom French recently spoke at the annual Power of Storytelling conference in Bucharest, Romania. His speech, a remarkable feat of storytelling about storytelling, is so powerful, we’re running the entire transcript verbatim. Trust … | Continue reading
Why is it great? I admire the way Dillard turns a piece of natural science into a narrative of anticipation during which no human being … | Continue reading
As a senior editor commissioning science features for Smithsonian Magazine, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz gets tons of freelance queries. Yet few cold pitches result in an article. Why not? “They’re often stories that should be told, but they’re not being framed as good stories, with g … | Continue reading
This week we spotlighted talented women on Storyboard — be they writers, performers or proto-feminists of the 18th century. I love this quote from Adrian LaBlanc, one of the women included in “The Stories We Tell” anthology below: “I won’t be here to witness it, but won’t it be a … | Continue reading
We all know music has the power to change us. I sometimes indulge in a “Sliding Doors” reverie, wondering what path my life might have taken if I hadn’t heard the song that set me irrevocably in the direction I ended up going back when I was 17. Holly Gleason, the editor of a new … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Take a look at the publication date: 1792. That’s more than two centuries ago, and two things are remarkable about this fact. 1) That Wollstonecraft, the mother of “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley, was such a terrific feminist back then. And 2) that in many res … | Continue reading
The 1967 edition of the annual “Best Magazine Articles” anthology has six names on the cover: Gay Talese, Gore Vidal, Stephen Becker, Conrad Aiken, Conrad Knickerbocker and Tom Wolfe. Underneath those names it says, “and others.” You open the book, and see that one of the “others … | Continue reading
For Halloween week, we did a few spooky-themed posts, including an interview with the creator of the scary true-stories podcast “Lore.” This week’s One Great Sentence is a haunting one (in both senses of the word) from Mark Twain, who is one of the all-time masters of the one-li … | Continue reading
Barely three years ago, Aaron Mahnke, a part-time horror-thriller writer, sat at his computer and started to drag a document to the trashcan. Just as he was about dispose of the sprawling essay he’d written with outtakes from his supernatural research, he paused, letting the docu … | Continue reading
Why is it great? For Halloween, I decided to use this wonderfully spooky line from Mark Twain (who in his writing and his speaking was a true master of the Great Sentence). Starting with the rhythm of “away out in the woods,” it has a ghost-story-around-the-campfire feel: Gather … | Continue reading
These words from journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones sum up this week’s posts on racism and white supremacism better than I ever could: “The truth is even though this is fundamental and foundational to living in the United States, this is a history and a truth that most Americans are … | Continue reading
New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones doesn’t pretend to be an objective observer of her subject: racial segregation. “I’m not, and none of us are,” she said of journalists during a speech at the annual Power of Storytelling conference in Bucharest, Romania, last wee … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Sadly, the Red Sox aren’t in the World Series, but this beautiful line from a classic Updike piece captures the crowd at Fenway like a camera. But it’s a camera that also has the ability to read emotions. The line about the Harvard freshmen is priceless. And can … | Continue reading
Vice News’ 22-minute documentary “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” provided a chilling look at the white supremacists behind the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August. It quickly went viral. But Elle Reeve, the Vice correspondent who took viewers beh … | Continue reading
Immersion journalism usually means the kind of reporting that Ted Genoways does: He and his photographer wife spent a year practically living with a soybean farmer and his family in Nebraska to give us a close-up look at the people who bring us our food. But some younger reporter … | Continue reading
For more than 15 years now, Ted Genoways has been exploring narratives of how America reaps its food. In 2001, Genoways, a contributing editor/editor at large at On Earth and Pacific Standard, published an award-winning sequence of poems about his grandfather’s work in the stocky … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Chabon has tapped into that greatest of sensory effects: the ability of smells to take you back to a place, a moment, a memory. The last one, in particular, works its magic on me. The mildewy smell of an old canvas tent may not be scientifically pleasant, but it’ … | Continue reading
For Dena Takruri, the power of journalism rests on its ability to give voice to the voiceless. As a Muslim and Arab American, Takruri grew up watching the news and saw how underrepresented, and often misrepresented, people of color and marginalized communities really were. “As a … | Continue reading
I’m so excited about this series we’ve just launched on Storyboard called “The Pitch,” in which we try to demystify the unicorn of longform: the story pitch. Contributor Katia Savchuk will talk to writers and editors about their tips and pet peeves, and even annotate some success … | Continue reading
One of my earliest childhood memories was having cash in my hand and roaming a baqala, or a corner store, in my Middle Eastern hometown. I remember the South Asian employee who patiently watched me decide which treat to buy and, once I tiptoed my selection to the counter, helped … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Great writers fear not the long sentence, and here is proof. If a short sentence speaks a gospel truth, then a … | Continue reading
Magazine pitches are an elusive species. You hear talk of them at journalism conferences and in freelancer forums. You see evidence of their existence in the stories they beget. But it’s rare to catch a glimpse of a specimen in the wild. This all manages to give the narrative pit … | Continue reading
Loss was too much with us this week, as we learned of yet another mass shooting that beggars the imagination. And it’s a theme of this week’s posts, too. In India, The New York Times’ Ellen Barry writes about a man who murders his wife and gets away with it (until her story was p … | Continue reading
The 14th Street subway station was hot and noisy with gossip and foot traffic, with a lingering scent of something musty I couldn’t immediately identify. I could hear mediocre performers play instruments in the distance, the subway’s automated announcements weaving into the sound … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This sentence is one of the most vivid metaphors I’ve ever read. It captures the helplessness of a life of desperation, where you can’t even jump from the window, just stare out of it, seeing the life you might have had while the flames and smoke come ever closer … | Continue reading
In March, The New York Times announced that its India-based South Asia bureau chief, Ellen Barry, would relocate to London to become chief international correspondent. Accordingly, Barry loaded everything she owned onto a container ship in Mumbai that was already rounding Cape Ho … | Continue reading
Two of the biggest stories in America today are the culture wars that seem to be deepening the divide in the country and the opioid crisis that is devastating a huge swath of rural and urban America. When it comes to the latter, The Cincinnati Enquirer did a standout job with a h … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Written long before every person carried a camera, before Facebook, back when “streaming” was just what water did as it coursed through its bed, Goyen, raised in a small town in East Texas, believed we could carry our stories and memories with us, wear them like … | Continue reading
If interviewing is an art, Krys Boyd has had plenty of practice with her paintbrush. For a remarkable five days a week for the past 11 years, the Texas journalist has been illustrating the depth and context of current events for the public radio show “Think.” Sometimes she prepar … | Continue reading
As far as Terry DeMio knows, she’s the only journalist in the country with the title “heroin reporter.” She’s been covering the opioid epidemic for The Cincinnati Enquirer for five years, including two on the beat full time. Yet DeMio and her editors felt they needed to do more t … | Continue reading
It was a lot of fun focusing on movies this week on Storyboard. Each day I tweeted out some of the best-written lines in filmdom — including the best one-word line ever: “Rosebud.” Here on the site, we explored the concept of documentary film as “home movie,” and talked to a phot … | Continue reading
The big screens on suburban, prairie and desert roadsides once beaconed families and lovers. Now they’re mostly tattered and forlorn, a reminder of America’s midcentury love affair with the open road, the automobile and the Hollywood dream factory. Three years ago, photographer … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Yes, it’s three sentences. But it’s one brilliant summation of journalists, from the best-written movie about journalists of all time. God, the banter in the screenplay! I love how this line has hilarious putdowns like “daffy buttinskis” but at the same time cont … | Continue reading
It shouldn’t be surprising that storytelling was the focus this week on Storyboard: That’s what we do. But I love the variety of the storytelling on offer. A narrative about a recanted abuse allegation. A book connecting the fate of mussels to the fate of all of us. A remarkable … | Continue reading
The photograph on the cover of Abbie Gascho Landis’ “Immersion” is the first hint that the book is going to be surprising. The image is at once coy and inviting, a puckered pout that is somehow so voluptuous that the unwitting passerby might be slightly scandalized to glimpse it … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Few authors have written as magnificently about nature as Rachel Carson, and this sentence is a good example. Its strength is not in form but content. It revealed to me something I did not know — that at one time in the history of Earth, the tides were much mor … | Continue reading
In the opening of Maurice Chammah’s story “The Accusation,” jointly published by Esquire and The Marshall Project, we meet Katie Spencer Tetz, a 25-year-old woman who learns that her father is getting out prison. He’s been locked up for nearly two decades for brutally molesting h … | Continue reading
I decided to try another “theme” week on Storyboard, after having such fun with the Southern focus last week. For this one, we took a look at controversial stories, books, writers and themes. From D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” to Alex Tizon’s last story, the incendiar … | Continue reading
Like most journalists today, Britni de la Cretaz is accustomed to being on the receiving end of comments from critical readers and opinionated trolls. As a freelance writer who frequently tackles important and uncomfortable subjects, both about herself and about U.S. society, she … | Continue reading
Why is it great? For “Controversy Week” on Storyboard, I chose a sentence from one of the most controversial books of the 20th century. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was shocking on so many levels when it was written: for a woman’s infidelity to her husband; for the pleasure she took … | Continue reading
The story of the woman called Lola begins and ends with ashes. Ashes that “filled a plastic box about the size of a toaster.” Ashes sheltered in a canvas tote bag from a suburb north of tech-hip Seattle to a rice-farming village deep in the poverty of the Philippines. Ashes final … | Continue reading
It was Southern Week here on Storyboard, spotlighting some wonderful regional journalism and writing. It’s been fun tweeting out great lines from famous Southern writers, including this one from William Faulkner: “I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one … | Continue reading