This week, International Women’s Day really grabbed the spotlight with the Day Without a Woman protests and homages to role models on social media (shout-out to Nieman Lab’s great Instagram posts on inspirational women journalists). But the crowds weren’t as large as expected, an … | Continue reading
In today’s world of impossibly speeded-up journalism, with Twitter bursts its high-velocity symbol, a small group of renegades has resolutely slammed on the brakes to practice what it calls “slow journalism.” Jesse Lenz and Seth Putnam, who met on the not-exactly-slow site Instag … | Continue reading
Why is it great? With this opening line to her famous short story, Parker does so many things: She gives us an image of Hazel that’s Kodachrome clear: I can almost hear the old-fashioned pop of the flash. She also establishes Hazel in relation to men, who lust after her, but will … | Continue reading
The words appear on a blank white screen, accompanied by an atonal, ominous peal of music. “One frosty October morning, a newborn baby boy is found inside a plastic bag inside an Oslo graveyard. The baby is about to die.” The screen fills with an extreme close-up of a baby’s face … | Continue reading
We seem to have two recurring motifs going on this week on Storyboard — animals and the politicization of language. On the animal front, we have Christopher Solomon’s “cute even when it’s dead” otter, and a mouse climbing a wall in a “One Great Sentence” that’s Lewis Carroll meet … | Continue reading
To the FBI, he was one of the most dangerous revolutionaries in the United States. To his supporters in the Puerto Rican independence movement, he was a freedom fighter. Thirty-five years later, in an era when the politics – and the politicization – of language is a hot-button is … | Continue reading
This vivid, funny, terrific sentence could have been drawn from Lewis Carroll, but it’s from the middle of a deadline story on the frustrations of two “peace commissions” … | Continue reading
Profiles are hard. Too often they’re drenched in the writer’s attempts to make the subject seem larger than life. But good profiles have the opposite effect: Through their honesty and attention to perhaps mundane detail — and, as Outside Magazine contributing editor Chris Solomon … | Continue reading
This week we’re getting a sneak preview of spring in Maine, and the two feet of snow is fast melting. But there’s still a bit of a chill in this week’s roundup, either the literal kind — a hilarious story about the offbeat sport of curling — or the metaphorical kind, with a coupl … | Continue reading
You know when you absentmindedly click on a product and an ad for the thing seems to stalk you online for the rest of your life? (I once thought the name “Mrs. Pasture’s Horse Cookies” charming. Now, with eternal repetition, it’s twee-sinister.) We all know that our tastes are be … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This piece about mining companies exploring the bottom of the ocean creates an upside-down outer space. The whole story is a kind of extended metaphor between the exploration of space and the exploration of the depths of the sea, starting with the lede. It featur … | Continue reading
Forget making little dolls out of corn cobs or embroidering samplers with snippets of homey wisdom on them: If it’s a dying art you’re after, look to the news obituary. After writing them for a few years before my retirement at the Los Angeles Times, I shed a tear when I think of … | Continue reading
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 ink and paper. Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and … | Continue reading
Waad Janbi, a Saudi feminist and aspiring filmmaker, has long fought against misogyny using her hands–furiously typing on her smartphone or laptop. But last month, for the first time, she fought it using her feet. Coming from a conservative country where freedom is clearly uneven … | Continue reading
The sentence is a story in itself. It creates a texture landscape in the reader’s mind (taste that rare scotch, sharp and warm in your throat; then feel the ache in your lower spine, and your own gathering revulsion, as you hunch into your 14th hour of trash-picking). But more in … | Continue reading
Some writers work for decades before one of their pieces gets widespread attention. Ron Rosenbaum managed to pull it off with his second long-form magazine article. Rosenbaum’s 1971 Esquire piece, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” tells the story of an underground network of tele … | Continue reading
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 ink and paper. Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and … | Continue reading
“Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone,” Inara Verzemnieks’ story about the health insurance coverage gap, came out in the New York Times Magazine a month after the presidential election, as the media buzzed about inaccurate predictions, liberal bubbles and the mainstream media’s failure … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This is exciting — a guest submission from Pulitzer Prize winner Maria Henson, whose series of editorials on battered women in Kentucky was awarded the prize for Editorial Writing in 1992. (See her piece for Nieman Reports on the origins of the series here.) Of t … | Continue reading
The American Society of Magazine Editors held its annual Ellies awards gala today, and it was a big night for Mother Jones and The New York Times Magazine. Here’s a handy list of some of the winners: Magazine of the Year: Mother Jones. Reporting: Mother Jones for Shane Bauer’s “M … | Continue reading
One of the first works I read by Ted Conover, the country’s reigning master of immersion reporting, was “Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing,” his 2000 book chronicling 10 months he spent guarding a maximum-security prison. That’s probably why I had imagined him as steely and reserved. I … | Continue reading
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 ink and paper. Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and … | Continue reading
It all started with a dusty photo album and a torn children’s map of the world. After countless hours spent sitting cross-legged on the cold concrete floor of our unfinished basement, my 10-year-old self fell in love with the concept of travel. I would gently turn the yellowing p … | Continue reading
The focus of this week’s “The Future of News: Journalism in a Post-Truth Era” at Harvard was, understandably, the (pretty terrifying) landscape for journalists dealing with the new Trump administration and its fondness for “alternative facts.” A lot of journalism heavy hitters, i … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This essay has a more famous line, which is being quoted a lot these days: “Then is when we join … | Continue reading
So much of tech journalism today is antiseptic or fawning, with beat reporters chasing the latest product release or “exclusive” CEO interview. Adrian Chen, on the other hand, is a master at revealing the human side of technology, and often its sinister side. Before leaving to fr … | Continue reading
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 ink and paper. Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and … | Continue reading
When I sat down to write this, I was a millennial about to tackle one of many adulthood markers – college graduation – and I struggled with the feeling of bouncing back and forth from being an adult one second and a child the next. Legally, I was an adult and had been since I […] | Continue reading
Why is it great? Even without context, this line is tremendous. Playfully riffing off Chekhov’s rule that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it absolutely must go off by the third, Solomon transforms a prosaic garden implement into something ominous, sinister. But with cont … | Continue reading
Chris Hamby’s recent investigative series for BuzzFeed reads like dystopian fiction. He tells us of a powerful “global super court” that companies use to sue sovereign nations for cutting into their profits. Proceedings are usually secret, public oversight is virtually nonexisten … | Continue reading