The story, which ran in the January 16 issue of Sports Illustrated, breaks down the legend of Herring eliminating Jordan from the team during his sophomore year. It turns out that events may not have unfolded in quite the way that Jordan came to recount them in the decades that followed.

The most surprising thing about Lake’s narrative is not that Jordan has misremembered or exploited a minor high school trauma, but what has happened in his life – and Herring’s life – since. Lake uses counterpoint beautifully, and the degree of Herring’s suffering and decline seems to parallel the degree to which Jordan’s star rises.

As he is inaugurated into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Jordan surrounds himself with coaching legends, friends and associates, whom Lake contrasts with the homeless derelicts who make up Herring’s social set these days.

We pull up at the ramshackle house and step into a blinding afternoon, 97º, vibrating with the song of cicadas. Pop carries the pizza box in one hand and the bag of King Cobra and cigarettes in the other. We walk toward the picnic table under the spreading oak, where several ragged men cool their heels in the fine gray sand. Collectively they are known as the Oak Tree Boys. They are here morning and night. Some are homeless. One has a wild shock of white hair and another is missing his middle lower teeth, so he seems to have fangs. They have nowhere else to go. Pop lets them stay here. He still gives what he can.

Pop opens the pizza box. The fanged man takes two pieces. The third goes to the wild-haired man, who gobbles most of it and flings the crust in the street. Two seagulls swoop in and finish it off. Pop opens the King Cobra and takes a long pull. He hands the sweating bottle to his adopted brother and roommate, Bob Wells, who takes his own gulp.

We get Pop Herring as a schizophrenic post-millennial Jesus, still out there feeding the multitude, even if it’s just with leftover pizza and malt liquor from a shared bottle. Lake’s layered scenes are full of moments like these that make the piece sing.

But why, in the end, does his story matter? Is he just calling out Michael Jordan for ingratitude? I don’t think that’s all there is to it, but, boy, does the story do that. Is it to show how far a man can fall, despite all the good he does in the world? Maybe. But it seems to me that in telling this story, Lake is going for something bigger, reminding us of the negligence that accounts for too much of human traffic. It’s never said explicitly on the page, but all the same, I get the feeling that Lake is wondering what we’ve done lately for our own Pop Herrings.

For more about this story, read Brandon Sneed’s interview with Thomas Lake.

At more than 12,000 words, Colloff’s narrative – which ran in the January issue of Texas Monthly – unfolds largely as straight chronology. It reads cleanly, with each section focused on a single piece of the story. But the reader can feel thousands of pages of documents lurking in the background, leaving a psychic trail on the page even as Colloff compresses events for readers.

We find out that the boy, Andrew, would have had to eat 23 teaspoons of Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning or 6 teaspoons of table salt to hit the lethal level. We learn about the amount of water in his stomach, which has implications for what happened in the hours before he received medical attention.

But along with information that seems to exonerate Hannah, Colloff also delivers the specifics of her delay in getting Andrew to an emergency clinic. Describing the trial, she writes that “just as the prosecution could not show exactly how Hannah had forced Andrew to ingest a lethal dose of salt, neither could the defense give precise details for how the four-year-old had come to have so much sodium in his body.”

This journalistic restraint matters. Colloff shows that it is possible to create tremendous emotional engagement while giving readers enough information to interpret events for themselves.

She doesn’t seem interested in presenting a story of angels or demons, but writes on a plane where humans, often with unknowable motives, act. How do we evaluate those actions with imperfect information? Colloff suggests that the way we answer that question makes a difference. On the heels of a 2010 story that helped secure a man’s release from prison, she presents another problematic conviction, asking whether justice has really been served.

For more on this story, read our Q&A with Pamela Colloff.

Montgomery reports that Neal, a 23-year-old African-American farmhand, was arrested in 1934 on suspicion of the rape and murder of a young white woman. Hidden from white mobs for days, he was eventually taken at gunpoint from a jailer. A lynching party was set up; invitations were issued. The governor of Florida, along with millions of others, knew of the publicly announced plans to kill Neal, but no state or federal investigators intervened in Florida. What happened afterward was horrific. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.

The narrative sticks with the third person, and the writing is subdued and steady, as if to say, It’s okay, you can keep reading. I’ll be right here with you. The story is rooted deeply in place, and Montgomery evokes the landscape and the era in one beautifully compact paragraph.

Jackson County, Florida, 1934: Drip coffee, Purity Ice Cream, turnips, chuck roast, mustard for 15 cents a quart, 26 cents for a dozen eggs. Sun-bleached overalls, Baptists, Methodists, kerosene lamps, screen doors, mosquitoes, pine trees, knee stains, brick chimneys, K & K Grocery, and cotton, 12 cents a pound. Cotton on the roadside and cotton in the ditch and cotton in forever rows stretched across fields flat as tabletops.

While the details of the story are terrible, Montgomery keeps away from thundering indictments, letting events speak for themselves. It seems entirely possible that Neal did commit the murder that sparked the mob’s fury, but the community’s response was beyond barbaric, and the story shows how the devastation inflicted on the family continues to echo down the years.

Some of the living know who was responsible for the murder of Claude Neal, but if they were to name the killers (all dead now), what kind of hatred and judgment, they ask, would be heaped on the killers’ innocent descendants? Montgomery does not even need to point out what is implicit in the tale. If Neal’s executioners remain anonymous, his family will have to continue to bear the weight of history alone.

The ending of the story is a beginning – in the last paragraphs, the FBI arrives to investigate. No doubt there will be more to report in the coming months and years, but for now, the narrative draws literal and symbolic closure from the fact that justice has stepped in to address racism and vigilante justice, even if it has come 77 years too late.

Visit the Times’ site to see Edmund Fountain’s striking video and photos for the project. And read our interview with Ben Montgomery about “Spectacle.”

The multimedia project tells the story of Derek Boogaard, a 28-year-old player found dead in his apartment by family members in May. Going beyond the well-done print piece and galleries of images, the Times has also produced a series of video interviews and – most notably – a triptych movie on Boogaard’s life.

Each installment runs about 12 minutes. The first chronicles his awkward childhood and his adolescent realization that the only way he would get to play hockey was to learn to use his fists on the ice. The second follows his unlikely entry into professional hockey and rise to popularity in the NHL. And the third traces the toll of his career: injuries and addiction that cascaded into a death spiral.

The storytelling technique is chronological and classic, following the arc of Boogaard’s life in three stand-alone sections. Boogaard isn’t romanticized – the filmmakers present him as someone who became an addict and was willing to hurt other people very badly in exchange for a lot of money. Yet there’s something glorious in watching him score a goal – a feat not commonly accomplished by an enforcer – and seeing the arena explode. This moment shows the life he really wanted, a life that might have let him stay in the league and survive. But that life was not the life he got.

The visuals are stellar in their very mundaneness: The talking-head interviews with other enforcers and Boogaard’s family. The snippets of fight after fight, with spectators cheering in the background. The footage that has already aired on television, including some scenes we may even remember having watched before. We experience Boogaard’s life in part as a sports audience watching hockey footage, but also as an audience for a video that shows the price our interest exacted. While people who have never enjoyed hockey or been to a hockey game might not feel it, for sports fans the feeling of being caught between the two roles – the pleasure in watching the game, and discomfort over the toll that our pleasure took on Boogaard – lends a gripping tension to the Times video project.

The night the final video installment posted, I exchanged messages about the project with AP photographer and multimedia producer Evan Vucci. Asked why it impressed him, he wrote,

Anytime I look at a multimedia project online I go straight into critique mode – how was it shot – how was the editing, does the story flow, etc… Three minutes into the piece I forgot all about that and was engrossed in the story. I’m a HUGE sports fan – I’ve probably photographed hundreds of hockey games, and I’ve always assumed that fighting was just part of the game. This story changed my perception of something I thought I knew really well. I had never even thought to ask these questions. That is the key to engaging a viewer and making a powerful story.

There’s a devastating moment near the end during an interview with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, where he says that in the League “we don’t allow fighting. Fighting is punished.” And he points to the preliminary nature of the research into brain damage from hockey.

The finding of brain anomalies in dead players may still be an evolving story. But the Times video makes the link between Boogaard’s profession and his death more than clear, and underlines the central nature of fighting to hockey.

The story feels epic in part because of the stature that Boogaard attained before his dramatic, premature death. But the Times doesn’t go for the exposé or easy hit. Though the video raises questions, there’s no indictment of a single family member, coach or team. The Times is thinking bigger here, looking at the future, asking questions about human suffering and how willing we are as a society to deliberately cause it.

It’s easy to imagine this piece done differently for a big magazine. The writer would travel to Moscow and watch Hallberg perform as the first non-Russian principal in history to be invited to be a premier dancer with the Bolshoi, so that the arc beginning in a town of 60,000 in South Dakota would have its natural climax.

But what if you have to write the story without the climax – before Hallberg debuts in Moscow? Noveck handles this challenge by throwing a curveball, telling you right up top that he’s earned a place in history. The question pulling the reader along goes from what will happen next to “how does a boy dancer go from Rapid City, S.D., to stardom in Russia?”

Providing that answer, Noveck is a master of compression. Large chunks of time are taken care of via quick transitions (“Things moved quickly after that,” “over the next few years,”). She’s confident enough to give the reader information without stopping to explain it, such as a passing reference to the Bolshoi Ballet being older than United States of America.

Along with that tidbit, Noveck delivers just about all the history you need in order to understand what Hallberg’s accomplishment means:

In the ballet world, earthshaking news is hard to come by. Long gone are the days when dancers such as Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn and Mikhail Baryshnikov were household names. Dancers debut new roles, join companies, get promoted, retire. Faithful fans track it all, but it’s an insular world.

This, though, was pretty big. Exactly 50 years after Nureyev defected to the West for artistic freedom, and 37 years after Baryshnikov did the same, Hallberg was being offered a reverse voyage of sorts, one that showed how much the world has changed since those events, and how global culture had become.

In three sentences, we get several grounding themes: local boy makes good, an artist on a journey, and a historic cultural transformation. Not to mention a short primer on the names of some of the greatest dancers in history, folded painlessly into conversational writing.

Noveck uses quotes instead of dialog but places the quotes where they can play off each other. When Hallberg says that as a teen, he “was teased,” his mother comes right behind, clarifying: “He was bullied.”

Constructing the piece as more scene-ish than scenic, Noveck tilts toward story without pushing her arc into a structure that doesn’t fit. She frames the story into loose sections without pressing for a cinematic feel, letting the material settle in its own best form, resulting in a delightful read that portrays the personal triumph and global importance of a ballet dancer from Rapid City, S.D.

GQ’s Michael Paterniti nails down the tiniest details of the story: the structural materials used to build Hiromitsu’s family home, his schedule rationing the food that happened to be in his pockets when the wave hit, a message recording his lost wife’s birthday written on a comic book page and marker recovered from the water.

But keep an eye out for exactly how Paterniti decides to tell the story. Notice the direct way that his words echo the language of fairy tales and legends: “Rise now, hiromitsu, man of men, and accept your fate.” The wave that tears Hiromitsu from his wife’s arms is “this monster.” Swept out to sea, the castaway recalls the wisdom of “a famous Japanese adventurer” (albeit one seen on television) in order to survive. Paterniti knows that Hiromitsu has lived through a personal tragedy worthy of an epic, that his effort to memorialize his wife and honor his parents in his darkest moments recalls the engines driving the oldest stories we have.

The writer marshals the facts of the disaster, the days adrift that followed it, and Hiromitsu’s quest to rejoin the world of survivors. He shares the story with us, his readers, but he is not telling it to us. Paterniti is telling Hiromitsu’s story of loss and survival back to him, in a way that is surely both alien and familiar to the widower:

The second night is interminable. The stench of oil thickens as you shrivel. The water seems to rise. The grinding reverberates from the center of the earth. The roof is disintegrating beneath your feet. If there’s a force trying to crush you, you realize now that it’s neglect. Where nature brought the full bore of her attention on you, cleaving you from all that was precious, it has abandoned you here, in these black, oily fields. No singing now. At some point, the blue light returns — billowing pods, otherworldly ocean mushrooms, phosphorescent jellyfish, it turns out — but if someone could see you in that supernatural glow, they’d see a thin, hunched man, mouth in that grim line of your father’s. You’re too tired to be amused or feel optimism. The light can’t feed or save you. Maybe it’s not a sign after all. The tunnel narrows. You write another note, to your parents this time. I am sorry for being unfilial, it says.

Let it go, Hiromitsu, man of men.

Paterniti commands his subject to live through the story again, as the writer lifts it up, turns it inside out, and delivers it back to him as a gift. The story of a man’s love for his lost wife, “The Man Who Sailed His House” is also the story of an author’s love for the hero he renders immortal.

It is to Paterniti’s credit that he simultaneously tells a tale of something smaller and more human, showing grief’s relentless motion in the face of despair. James Joyce created Johnny the mill horse going round and round the statue in “The Dead.” William Butler Yeats gave us Cuchulain using his sword to tilt with nature herself. And faced with equally dramatic real-world material – a shuddering planet, an unstoppable wave, the death of the beloved – Paterniti delivers Hiromitsu, sweeping, sweeping with his broom, even as the tide of the living rises around him and can no more be held back than the past or the sea.

Filkins backs away from pure narrative to employ the language of an investigator – a language familiar to anyone who has ever watched prime-time television:

The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later.

We are not taken deep inside the last moments of Shahzad’s life; rather, Filkins keeps us at a slight distance. We see the story through Filkins’ eyes and follow along as he assembles his facts. He had known the journalist, a little, and makes clear that he both respected and had misgivings about the dead man’s work.

The restraint of Filkins’ approach creates a boomerang effect, rendering the clinical details as they are gathered that much more distressing: Shahzad’s body, we learn from one source, was found stuck in a grate atop a dam with “his tie and shoes still on.” An autopsy later discloses ruptures of his lungs and liver. Information that something very like a metal rod was used to beat Shahzad is introduced during speculation about whether his executioners intended to kill him or were just engaged in intimidation.

Distinctions like these hardly matter to the reader in the face of the suffering and price paid by Shahzad, but they do matter in a larger sense. And it is this larger arena to which Filkins moves as he builds a case that passes through the long shadow of American ties to Pakistan and the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies abroad.

Our latest Notable Narrative comes from the Boston Globe project “9/11: 10 years on,” a wide-ranging collection of print stories, slide shows and video. Many news organizations have unveiled impressive packages for the 10th anniversary of the attack on the U.S., but we were particularly impressed by Eric Moskowitz’s story “Little noted or known, they bear the scars of that day.”*

Moskowitz’s piece is the third of eight articles for the Globe’s 9/11 project, and looks at a small set of survivors:

They are the rarely noticed casualties of the terrorist attacks: the security guard, the ticket agent, the baggage handler on the ramp. They made it home that night, but with images they couldn’t shake, a pain uncomfortable to voice. They can’t believe it has been 10 years. They can’t believe it has only been 10 years.

Trying to reflect the point of view of several characters can sabotage the readability of a narrative. But by selecting a focused group of people, Moskowitz pulls it off. He looks at Logan Airport employees who, in some heroic fantasy of omniscience or psychic radar, might have stopped the attacks, or at least kept someone on board one of the doomed flights from dying.

But fantasy is not real, and no psychic radar exists. The ticket agent thoughtfully shepherds two of the terrorists to their flight. At the last minute, the baggage handler interdicts luggage that holds all the clues of what was about to unfold – but he doesn’t open it in time. Stories of the people who survived terrible moments of lethal ignorance at Logan Airport intertwine in an ongoing series of “what ifs.”

With such a momentous event, Moskowitz is wise to go small and stick close. Instead of one-off quotes from characters reflecting on the past, which would distance readers, he opts for bits of dialogue, mostly taken from 9/11 itself. Instead of trying to capture the scope of the horror, he gives us a cat throwing up on a carpet or a flight attendant late for work. He will not let us out of the moment, or that day, until we see it through the eyes of those who will always wonder if they could have done something to stop it.

Mercifully, the story doesn’t frog-march readers into a staged sense of closure. It doesn’t even suggest that final healing is possible. Instead, Moskowitz gives readers a muted tribute to those still trying to restart their lives, still learning the impossibility of erasing the past.

Image from AP Photo/Portland Police Department.

*Registration is required, but access is free.

So opens the story of Baby Donuts. Waldmeir doesn’t stage a full-blown narrative so much as she uses the anonymous baby’s discovery and entry into state care as a thread running through a sketch of 21st-century China. Wanting to know what happened to Donuts but unable to get information through obvious channels, Waldmeir contacts the Shanghai department of foreign affairs and claims to be writing a story. This ends up, of course, being the very story we are reading.

A first-person narrator leveraging intimacy to fold in a broader story, Waldmeir stands perfectly poised to tell this tale: She is a financial correspondent in Shanghai and uses that background to ask questions about money and government that shed light on the issue at hand. Her outsider status and insider knowledge help her to interpret the events that follow the baby’s discovery. As an adoptive mother, she has a pretty good idea what kinds of things the baby will wonder about her origins in a decade or so. And the reflections that Waldmeir’s daughters offer on having been abandoned push back against her own thinking, helping to paint a picture that stretches the story beyond any single person’s perspective.

We learn the mechanics of adoptions. We learn how orphanage care has evolved in the last decade. We learn how disabled babies are treated by the state, and the ways in which the state itself wants to be perceived differently by the world. Waldmeir cleverly coaxes us into what is in many ways a policy and economic story about modern China by leaning on our worry – which is her worry, too – about what the future will hold for Baby Donuts.

In our latest Notable Narrative, St. Petersburg Times reporter Michael Kruse collects relics of the life of Kathryn Norris, a woman whose mind progressively destroyed her ability to hold a job, to maintain a marriage, to keep friends, and even to talk with her family. Eventually, she cut off contact with the world and died in her car, inside her garage, where she remained for more than a year while her house was sold at foreclosure.

Kruse asks,

How could a woman die a block from the beach, surrounded by her neighbors, and not be found for almost 16 months?

Keeping the more sensational details of Norris’ death and decomposition to a minimum, Kruse threads them through a litany of documentary evidence, some of which he discovered (he told us this week) by wading through a dumpster full of trash. The artifacts he found there and elsewhere tell the story of a woman who had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, who had been involved in lawsuit after lawsuit, who had called police several times about strange cars and people, and whose body was missed by bank foreclosure agents cataloguing the interior of her house on two separate visits. She was present in the world, demanding its attention; yet she had become invisible.

One kind of narrative journalism unspools public events that beg for explanation and interpretation. Another type searches out unknown people and proves their significance. Some of the best stories also tell us something about ourselves, although the revelations are not always flattering.

Here Kruse combines these three traditions by taking a tabloid story and turning it inside out. He hooks us with our desire to know the background on a shocking death, then reconstructs Kathryn Norris’ last years and days, transforming her from a freak who died forgotten to a woman who will be remembered – two years too late.