Two journalist heroes are featured in this week’s posts. One of them, literary sportswriter Frank Deford, died this week, and I’m not sure we’ll see his like again. Read the One Great Sentence below and see if you agree. And Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who has won two P … | Continue reading
As a college sophomore in 2005, I read Dana Priest’s report about “black sites” –far-flung secret prisons overseas that the CIA used to house terrorist suspects captured from the battlefields. One in Afghanistan, known as the “Salt Pit,” was a former brick factory. Others were fo … | Continue reading
Frank Deford died this week, and I’m not sure sportswriters will see his like again. The beautiful rhythm of his language was some kind of wonderful. I love this bit from The New York Times obit of him: Ross Greenburg, then the president of HBO Sports, told The Los Angeles Times … | Continue reading
On her first weekend at The Winston-Salem Journal in 1987, Phoebe Zerwick’s new coworkers took her to a famous crime scene: the place where a man named Darryl Hunt had allegedly raped and murdered a woman three years earlier. If that seems odd, it wasn’t for this North Carolina c … | Continue reading
A darkness runs through this week’s post. Most disturbing is the interview with yet another Mexican journalist who was later gunned down for being brave enough to write about the vicious cartels there. And then in the One Great Sentence, French novelist/true crime journalist Cole … | Continue reading
Ben Goldfarb has found a niche in fish. A freelancer based in New Haven, Conn., he regularly covers commercial fisheries and wildlife conservation for magazines such as Science and Boston Magazine. It’s a topic that can easily get too wonky for mainstream readers. So when he hear … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? I came across this stunning line (yes, it’s more than one sentence) in a piece in a literary journalism journal about the novelist Colette’s outings as a journalist covering “crime of the century”-type trials. Who knew? But she reveals the perception and imagi … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Mexican President President Enrique Peña Nieto met with representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists and pledged to make the security and protection of journalists a priority. Eleven days later, Javier Valdez Cárdenas became the sixth journalist … | Continue reading
This week we’re celebrating the things that make literary journalism different from news writing. A focus on felt detail. An embrace of emotion. An acceptance that the decisions made in the writing process make “the truth” subjective. And, finally, a recognition that in both narr … | Continue reading
A decade or so ago, shortly after I became book editor of the Los Angeles Times, I wrote a piece defending the liberties of memoirists. This was in the wake of the scandal over James Frey and his memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” which was debunked after it was selected for Oprah … | Continue reading
This famous piece by Susan Orlean is one of those stories where it’s hard to pick just one great sentence. You find one, and then another, and then another — a rabbit hole of great sentences. But this one resonates because it captures something universal about our childhoods, and … | Continue reading
If you wanted to do a word cloud of the literary journalism conference I just attended in Nova Scotia, the word “feel” might be the largest image. Then imagination. And memory. And voice. And trust. You’ll see above that I actually created something quite lovely with a word-cloud … | Continue reading
I’m in Nova Scotia for a literary journalism conference (more on that in the coming days), and it’s been incredibly heartening to see such passion for the genre. I’ve heard wonderful discussions on everything from John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” written 70 years ago, to Shane Bauer’s … | Continue reading
As the Arab Spring began to topple a wave of repressive governments six years ago, many members of the fledgling group Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism thought things were finally going to get a little easier in a region where reporters who tried to dig beneath the sur … | Continue reading
Why is it great? We annotated this wonderful story last year, and the focus of the annotation was the rarity of humor in longform. This line makes me laugh even without the context of the story, which is about a war between rival ice-cream truck owners that gets pretty Gunfight a … | Continue reading
The word “lament” is a sadly beautiful thing, its layers and meanings distinct, yet entwined. In music, it is a song of loss, of missing someone or something that is no longer there. As a verb, it expresses grief, or regret. In both verb and song form, it has a keening feel to it … | Continue reading
This was a special week on Storyboard, because we shone a spotlight on some journalists who often don’t get the recognition they deserve. Latina journalists, a minority within a minority in the field, are doing some standout work, among them Michelle Garcia and Carolina Miranda. … | Continue reading
Why is it great? When I moved back to New England last year after nearly a lifetime away, John Cheever’s debut novel about a quirky New England family was the first thing I read. This sentence, near the beginning, captured the character of the mother but also the book itself, whi … | Continue reading
Filmmaker David Layton isn’t a stranger to the newsroom. Before he produced and directed documentaries, he was a newspaper reporter, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his next project, “The Newspaperman,” is a film about one of the 20th century’s most important, if often overlo … | Continue reading
Numbers can tell a story, but they can also be relentlessly abstract. That was certainly the case for Ciudád Juárez, which over the course of four years faced a relentless wave of cartel violence. From 2008 to 2011, the Mexican border city offered a continuous, morbid count. 4: T … | Continue reading
Unlikely pairings seem to be a theme this week. Reporting a story under the influence of mind-altering drugs. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien going to see “Snow White” together. D.H. Lawrence given the pulp fiction treatment. But like the title of this week’s vinyl, “Damage and Joy … | Continue reading
Sitting across a dinner table in Mexico City back in 2012, Nathan Thornburgh and Matt Goulding hatched an idea. Thornburgh, a longtime foreign correspondent for Time magazine, and Goulding, a roving food freelancer who pioneered the bestselling “Eat This, Not That” series for The … | Continue reading
Why is it great? I promise this is the last you’ll see of Springsteen on this site for the foreseeable future. But I had somehow missed this story by one of my favorite writers (and former co-worker on the LA Times’ foreign desk), Jeff Fleishman, who sent me the piece after read … | Continue reading
Last year, Malcolm Gay, an arts reporter at The Boston Globe, stumbled across the seemingly impossible: an untold story about the Holocaust. It started with a call from Robert Berkowitz, a psychiatrist and amateur pianist from outside Boston. Since childhood, Berkowitz had heard … | Continue reading
The theme of America and race — and, unfortunately, hatred and even murder — runs through this week’s posts. The Osage Indians who were systematically killed for their oil in David Grann’s book. The white supremacists who wanted to claim a Montana town as their own. And, in a muc … | Continue reading
Anne Helen Petersen has spent the last year covering Trump rallies and protests, the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline camp at Standing Rock, crowd-funded healthcare, survivalist “preppers” and what it means when famous men take off their shirts — just to name a few slices of her expan … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) was a clerk in the French War Office during World War I, a literary editor, art dealer, anarchist and journalist. While working for Le Matin in 1906, he wrote what came to be known as “Novels in Three Lines”: brief notices of local news e … | Continue reading
Sometimes the idea for a book springs from what you don’t know. David Grann had never heard of the “Osage Murders” until a historian he was talking to mentioned the series of mysterious deaths among members of the wealthy Osage tribe in early 20th century Oklahoma. Grann, a staff … | Continue reading
This week, journalists had their version of the Oscars (minus the red carpet and catty remarks about who-wore-what). The Pulitzer announcements are always an electric moment in a newsroom. Back in the old days, we’d gather around one designated computer and wait for the AP bulle … | Continue reading
It’s hard, I know, to make a case for gonzo journalism in an age when reality is beset by exaggeration, even lies. And yet I’ve found myself drawn back to the work of Hunter S. Thompson, who had an uncanny ability to use hyperbole as journalistic strategy. “We were somewhere aro … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Chivers just won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his magazine profile of Sam Siatta, a Marine suffering from PTSD. How did he make a story that has been told many times before so compelling? One reason is the heartbreaking use of the young man’s journa … | Continue reading
Some people are made for what they do. Steph Curry was made to play basketball. Dave Chappelle to deliver jokes. You get that feeling with Kent Russell and his writing. He makes the difficult appear effortless. Don’t believe me? Why don’t you try making a 10,000-word story about … | Continue reading
This week has me thinking of the dynamics of power, racial and sexual, governmental and personal. An Iranian blogger who goes to prison for six years for his words. The wife of a famous (and famously philandering) writer who appears to subsume herself in that marriage while at th … | Continue reading
Six years is a long time to be away from cyberspace—especially when you’re known as the Blogfather. At one point, 20,000 visitors came to Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan’s site every day. Words, it turns out, mattered – too much, perhaps, for Iran’s repressive government. In 2 … | Continue reading
Why is it great? For the second week in a row, our One Great Sentence comes from a gifted journalist who has just left us. Last week, the writer was Jimmy Breslin, who died after a long and brilliant career; this week, it is Alex Tizon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning longform writer … | Continue reading
When Colin McNulty was developing a podcast about Oprah Winfrey, the producer for WBEZ Chicago found inspiration in an unlikely place: “House of Cards,” the Netflix series about a scheming Washington politician who eventually becomes president of the United States. It’s not that … | Continue reading
Journalism, poetry, fiction and music all came together on Storyboard this week, so yes, call it a dream week for me. I love seeing how the same skills apply whether you’re a poet like Verandah Porche, a fiction writer like James M. Cain, a songwriter like Bruce Springsteen or a … | Continue reading
Like a lot of people, last week I reread the story that made Jimmy Breslin famous. It has his greatest hallmark: writing about the little guy, in this case Clifton Pollard, who was paid $3.01 an hour to dig the grave of his assassinated president. But it is this line, about the p … | Continue reading
“In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.” — “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen, 1975. There’s trouble in the heartland these days over promises broken and hopes betrayed. Somewhere on that lonely stretch of highway between the boardwalk and the inters … | Continue reading
At last year’s Power of Narrative conference at Boston University, the poet Verandah Porche asked Gay Talese which women writers he admired. He couldn’t name one, and proceeded to make it worse by mansplaining about how women just “do not feel comfortable dealing with strangers.” … | Continue reading
This week I left the snows of New England for a visit to my old stomping grounds in California. It was a bit head-spinning for a couple of reasons: When I left last year, California was in drought. Now it’s lush and green. And that green was a shock after the snow-covered country … | Continue reading
The first line of Rania Abouzeid’s story “The Jihad Next Door” could be the opener of a literary spy novel. “The eight men, beards trimmed, explosive belts fastened, pistols and grenades concealed in their clothing, waited until nightfall before stealing across the flat, porous I … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This line, from the poet Elizabeth Alexander’s beautiful memoir about the death of her husband, knocked me out on a couple levels. First, I had no idea that Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were best friends, and there’s something wonderful about the mere fact of thi … | Continue reading
Rich Schapiro is always searching. Whether he’s writing a quick-hit 800-word spot feature for the New York Daily News or a magazine feature that’s taken years to report, Schapiro is on the hunt for deeper meaning — a “character conflict,” as he calls it — behind every narrative. … | Continue reading
A spring blizzard this week left me without power for 16 hours, and at first I felt unmoored because there was no heat, no light — and no Internet connection. It revealed how plugged in my life is. But can I recommend reading a book by candlelight in front of the glow of a wood … | Continue reading
Daniel Miller’s coverage of the film business for the Los Angeles Times typically involves tracking the latest moves of the industry’s glitzy corporate behemoths. For … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Have you ever read a book and found it hard to get over a terrible first line? You want to move on, and the other 100,000 sentences in the book may be just fine, but that first line just … keeps … stopping you. This is not one of those first […] | Continue reading
Anna Mae McNeil stares past the camera, the smudge of an old bruise under her right eye. The words “New Castle, Pa., No. 220” are written in white ink below her face. It is Feb. 5, 1933, and Anna Mae has just shot and killed her husband. The photo is one of the latest mug […] | Continue reading