In the winter of 2012, a pair of lovers set dozens of fires over a span of 20 weeks in remote Accomack County, Virginia—once the richest rural county in America, and now one of the poorest. As one or two or four of the county’s seemingly endless supply of abandoned houses went up … | Continue reading
In addition to the music of Blythe’s lush language, I love how he captures this brash paradox–that a chorus can make us feel so lonely. Furthermore I love how, like a quintessential writer, he stations himself on an edge between two groups–one, his own species, pent up in their c … | Continue reading
The crime was brutal – two guards shot to death with their own .40-caliber Glocks inside a Georgia Department of Corrections bus packed with prisoners. The setting was primal – a lonely stretch of state highway in rural Putnam County 40 miles north of Macon. The suspects, both ha … | Continue reading
Sometimes, when the world is too much with us, we just need a love story or a laugh. This week, Storyboard obliged with lots of both. We talked to the writer of a viral Modern Love column in The New York Times about love. We also talked to a producer of the C.O.O.L. podcast about … | Continue reading
She has a Groucho Marx tattoo on her left wrist, and a biblically tinged Sufjan Stevens lyric inked on her right arm. So maybe it makes sense that radio producer Lily Percy has been exploring how people use humor to cope with the punches thrown by life. The result is a 15-episode … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Yesterday was Dorothy Parker’s birthday. (She would have been 124, reminding me of her classic line, “Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.”) The line above is one of my favorites, because it has both her famous, often-racy wit and also her und … | Continue reading
Perhaps you’ve read that Modern Love essay in The New York Times, the one that zipped around the country along internet tethers and social media synapses in 2015 like contagious hope, bearing an irresistible headline – “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” – and instructions on … | Continue reading
This has been an unsettling week. Who will forget the look on that one Charlottesville marcher’s face, a terrible echo of the hate seen on other faces as Hitler rose to power in Germany and blacks began to win their basic civil rights in America? One of this week’s posts on Story … | Continue reading
With fewer staff writers at newspapers and magazines, freelance journalists have more opportunities to take on longform features – both on and offline. But the payoff is slow, and many freelancers (myself included) can’t seem to make the commitment. As an independent journalist, … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Here in E.B. White’s Maine, August is bittersweet, bringing whispers of summer’s end even at the height of its ripeness. Apples, the fruit of fall, begin to color on gnarled trees. Bright yellow goldenrod sprouts around blueberry barrens that are turning red long … | Continue reading
Empathy is one of the greatest gifts a journalist can have. If you come by it naturally, you can actually feel what your subject is feeling, and that can be a painful burden sometimes. But even if you have to develop the empathetic wavelength, it not only makes the person you’re … | Continue reading
A few days ago, I had the disturbing experience of stepping barefoot on the bloody, decapitated body of a mouse. My first reaction was of course a back-wheeling step away from the corpse. My second was to clean off my foot and dispose of the mouse. But my third was to think of th … | Continue reading
Why is it great? First off, the rhythm of the sentence makes me swoon. I keep reading it aloud, to hear how it swirls and swirls like dancers on a ballroom floor before coming to a rest, softly, on the words champagne and stars. But it also captures Gatsby’s world: People are dra … | Continue reading
Nearly two years ago, I was one of dozens of Los Angeles Times reporters who took a buyout and left the paper. I liked my job almost all the time. Sometimes I loved it. But I’d done it for 23 years. I was ready to grow. For decades, I’d made visual art on the side […] | Continue reading
The annual Maine Lobster Festival is underway, so it seemed like a good time to go big on lobsters. Of course, festival organizers might not have been huge fans of David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” piece for Gourmet magazine. And they might not like the weird lobster … | Continue reading
The article “Who Killed Julian Pierce?” was unusual on at least three counts. It was the author’s first magazine story. It took nearly 30 years to write. And it came close to solving a murder. Nicole Lucas Haimes spends most of her time making documentary films, including “Chicke … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Nabokov is masterful here, not just stylistically but emotionally. He interrupts Humbert Humbert’s grotesque pursuit of Lolita by having him address the reader directly with an abject plea for understanding, a jarring moment that makes us queasy and disgusted but … | Continue reading
To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impo … | Continue reading
This week is women’s week on Storyboard. We spotlight wonderful writers like Katherine Boo, Sarah Lyall, Harper Lee and Elizabeth Bowen. But get this — all the writers of the posts are women too. Kind of cool, no? This theme grew organically, with no grand plan to raise a feminis … | Continue reading
Whoever said “It is better to travel than to arrive” wasn’t sitting next to Sarah Lyall aboard American Airlines Flight 1886 en route from Iowa to Arizona at the moment she tried to open her single serving of yogurt. The New York Times reporter’s narrative for the Business sectio … | Continue reading
Why is it great? I love how Lee has written this line: It tumbles out of Scout’s head exactly like the thoughts of a 6-year-old child, all “this and this and this and especially this.” And it also captures the joys of summer, that season when a child in particular feels things mo … | Continue reading
When I first came across Katherine Boo’s work in journalism school, I was immediately taken with her ability to expose injustice while weaving gorgeous narratives. I carved up her stories in The Washington Post and The New Yorker with a black pen, hoping I could figure out their … | Continue reading
This week, identity is the theme that courses through the posts. Writer Steve Oney talks about masculinity and the creation of identity as an act of will. In South Africa, the women of the District Six neighborhood try to recapture an identity lost to apartheid when they were upr … | Continue reading
Marion Abrahams-Welsh grew up with four generations of her family on hilly Sheppard Street in the Cape Town neighborhood known as District Six. Fourteen of them shared a small home filled with love and possibility, even though they had little money. In the new South African book … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Yes, it’s more than one sentence. But in this one short stanza, Cramer has captured all the rage and sorrow and loneliness and drive of the legendary Red Sox hitter Ted Williams. This is one of the best profiles of all time. The use of ALL CAPS to capture the las … | Continue reading
In today’s America, the word “masculinity” is almost a Rorschach test. When you look at it, do you see a patrimony that is raging, raging against the dying of the light? Or do you see an assault on the concept of traditional male roles? The last election exposed the divisions in … | Continue reading
A feeling of loyalty and loss runs through this week’s posts. In Iraq, a local SWAT team tries to avenge their families — and save their city. In a Bruce Springsteen song, a highway patrolman with a brother on the other side of the law says, “Man turns his back on his family, wel … | Continue reading
It was a tragic wreck, and dramatic, in a rural Maine way. A Toyota Corolla collided with a milk truck. Milk spilled across the interstate. A man was dead. From this bit of news from January, Portland Press Herald journalist Mary Pols developed a 3,200-word Father’s Day feature t … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This is the first lyric to feature on “One Great Sentence,” and of course it had to be Springsteen. I chose this not because it’s my favorite lyric by him, but because this song is Springsteen at his storytelling best. It’s a screenplay in a five-minute song, a R … | Continue reading
Many journalists covered the battle for Mosul, the capital of the self-styled Caliphate of the Islamic extremist group ISIS. American author Luke Mogelson, on assignment for The New Yorker, viewed it from a unique angle: He embedded for two months with a SWAT team from the Iraqi … | Continue reading
This was a special week on Storyboard: We spotlighted stellar literary journalism about America’s gun violence epidemic from the Huffington Post’s Highline, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. It was a joint effort with sister site Nieman Reports, which p … | Continue reading
Few journalists are more versed in guns and gun violence than Mark Follman. As national affairs editor for Mother Jones, Follman has led a series of landmark investigations into everything from mass shootings to child gun deaths. Even now, with President Trump occupying much of t … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This week we’re spotlighting stellar literary journalism about America’s gun violence epidemic, and this stunning story by Eli Saslow takes an intimate, often uncomfortably close look at the life of a shooting victim after all the headlines have faded and the cou … | Continue reading
Over his career at the Los Angeles Times, Thomas Curwen has written and edited for the Outdoor section, the Book Review, the features desk and the Metro desk. Despite his wide-ranging interests, his enduring passion is for stories that, as he puts it, depict “the split-second eve … | Continue reading
Gun violence is one of America’s most pervasive, polarizing issues, and journalism has responded with thousands of articles tackling the subject, including a raft of forgettable think pieces, trend pieces, explainers and data-driven dross. And then there’s Jason Fagone’s recent, … | Continue reading
This week I celebrated the summer solstice watching a fiddle band atop a hill with sweeping views of the Maine coast and hillsides as the sun slowly lowered into a purple sunset. What did you do to mark the beginning of summer? One of our posts this week fits the summer theme: We … | Continue reading
The 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics offered a host of memorable storylines: 28-time medal winner Michael Phelps’ final race, Ryan Lochte’s bizarre fabrication of a gunpoint robbery, and the “will they, won’t they” speculation as to which athletes might skip the Games to avoid … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Tom Stoppard is one of our greatest wordsmiths, wildly intelligent and witty, while still revealing the pathos of his characters. This line is a perfect example of his genius. It uses a metaphor, a bit of wordplay, to capture something deep about human existence. … | Continue reading
When Susan Dominus set out to write a story about relationships and romance for The New York Times Magazine, her initial assignment had her talking to couples who have experienced, and recovered from, infidelity. The relationship therapists she spoke with pointed her in a differe … | Continue reading
This week’s posts captured the lunacy and sorrow of life. In the former, writer Mac McClelland talks about her hilariously awful expedition with extreme birders (yes, there is such a thing) for Audubon magazine. In the latter, journalists the world over joined together to honor M … | Continue reading
Today, journalists around the world came together to honor slain Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas on the one-month anniversary of his assassination. The global campaign, known as “Our voice is our strength” or, in Spanish, “Nuestra voz es nuestra fuerza,” saw journalists … | Continue reading
One month ago today, an assassin fired 12 bullets at Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas as he drove away from the office of Ríodoce, where he had long filed some of the most searing journalism on that country’s drug war. The bullets pierced Valdez’s forehead and hands, sym … | Continue reading
Tomorrow, Storyboard and its sister Nieman Foundation outlets, Nieman Lab and Nieman Reports, will join journalists and writers the world over to honor the incredibly brave Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas on the one-month anniversary of his killing. It seemed the right … | Continue reading
Mac McClelland is no stranger to risk and discomfort: This is a woman who has reported on rape in Haiti’s tent cities and genocide in … | Continue reading
A quote in one of this week’s posts has stuck in my mind. It’s by a former journalist who started a live-storytelling group in Beirut. What she says applies to that form of oral storytelling, but also to literary journalism in general: “The most compelling things I know and learn … | Continue reading
BuzzFeed News reporter Talal Ansari was interested in lists—not listicles. We see them all the time now when it comes to immigration policy. In January, President Trump listed seven Muslim-majority countries whose citizens were barred from entering the United States. Later, in th … | Continue reading
Why is it great? It’s graduation season, so it seemed like a perfect time to revisit this beautiful commencement speech that the writer George Saunders gave at Syracuse University four years ago. It may have been the most unlikely thing ever to go viral, because it focuses on a m … | Continue reading
Thirteen-year-old Simav Wooleh took the stage with a disarming smile in front of the audience gathered in a Beirut café. If she was nervous, the only thing that betrayed her was a tendency to fidget with her hands. “Good evening,” Simav began in English, then switched to Arabic. … | Continue reading