A top reporter and storyteller, Eli Saslow was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing two weeks ago for his story about a struggling swimming pool salesman.Today, in the latest installment of our Annotation … Read more
At some point, we’ll round up some of the better deadline storytelling from the past two weeks’ historic news out of Boston and Texas and Washington, D.C., and Mississippi and Cambridge and Watertown, but let’s end the … Read more
When the bombs went off, we were talking about Miranda. Specifically, we* were talking about David Simon’s treatment of the Miranda warning in his book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The passage opens … Read more
I still remember where I was—sitting in a dive bar in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., trying to tune out the noise from the beach bums and a jukebox blaring Madonna and the Bangles—when I read these words: Just before noon the … Read more
Sometimes short nonfiction pays. Today we’re going to talk about a (mostly) nonfiction narrative of 457 words that made it to No. 2 on the pop charts. In 1975, a freighter named the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a brutal storm … Read more
The New York Times’ Dan Barry wrote himself onto 1A the other day with a story about an 89-year-old woman who spent two days locked in the trunk of her own car and then crawled to safety after … Read more
My estimable friend and former colleague Paul Kix recently wrote a column in this space on John Jeremiah Sullivan. In it he cited an essay Sullivan wrote about the art of writing: A fundamental law of storytelling is: … Read more
Brendan Koerner’s recent Wired piece about Alfred Anaya, a “genius at installing secret compartments in cars,” was nothing short of delicious as a piece of storytelling and discovery. Sure, someone’s out there fabricating automotive hidey-holes for smuggled drugs and other … Read more
Awards season continues with the announcement of the American Society of Magazine Editors’ finalists for the National Magazine Award. The organization this week honored 62 publications in 23 categories, with winners to be revealed in New York on May … Read more
Pamela Colloff’s annotated “The Innocent Man” continues today, with the second and final part. (To read Part 1, go here.) The timing couldn’t be better. On Monday, the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) named Colloff’s finely reported Texas … Read more