It was a sideshow story whose horror was so extravagant that it bordered on vulgarity: On Feb. 16, 2009, a 14-year-old male chimpanzee named Travis, who had been raised from infancy by Nancy Herold, attacked a friend who was visiting her home in Stamford, Conn. Over the next 12 minutes, he ripped or chewed off [...]
Category Archives: why’s this so good?
“Why’s this so good?” No. 67: Dan P. Lee and Travis the killer chimp
by Peter Trachtenberg |
December 4, 2012
“Why’s this so good?” No. 66: Eli Sanders and the bravest woman in Seattle
by Mary Rajkumar |
November 27, 2012
The friend who first sent me “The Bravest Woman in Seattle” told me it was stunning but also so unsettling that I should not read it before going to bed. She was right on both counts. The story, by Eli Sanders of the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, is one of the most harrowing I have ever [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 65: David Grann and the death row prisoner
by Pam Colloff |
November 20, 2012
Four years ago, I began looking into the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was put to death by the state of Texas in 2004. Willingham had been convicted of murdering his three children in 1991 after they died in a house fire; prosecutors argued that Willingham, who had managed to escape, had actually set [...]
“Why’s this so good?” by the numbers: Readers’ choice
We’re coming upon our 65th installment of “Why’s this so good?” – in which notable journalists dissect their favorite pieces of narrative journalism. Our contributors have included Adam Hochschild, Jennifer B. McDonald, Eli Sanders, Megan Garber, Wesley Morris, Ann Friedman, Chris Jones and Ben Yagoda, and covered Joan Didion, Calvin Trillin, Michael Paterniti, Nora Ephron, John [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 64: David Grann and Sherlock Holmes
by Justin Ellis |
October 23, 2012
There is a good reason tales of true crime make for great magazine writing. Or good procedural TV shows and movies. It’s because the best stories of unsolved murders, missing persons, or outrageous heists have the ring of fiction. They almost have to in order to succeed. We’ve all seen (or, let’s face it, written) [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 63: Michael Paterniti and the earthquake
by Joanna Kakissis |
October 16, 2012
After a 7.0 earthquake destroyed Haiti on Jan. 23, 2010, I spent weeks reading news reports about a tragedy so massive and devastating the numbers alone overwhelmed me: more than 316,000 dead, 300,000 injured, a million homeless. But I didn’t cry until almost a year later, when I read “City of Dust,” Michael Paterniti’s New York [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 62: Ian Parker profiles Alec Baldwin
by Jason Fagone |
October 9, 2012
As far as I can tell, the New Yorker staff writer Ian Parker has no Twitter feed, no website, no LinkedIn page and no TED profile. Even for that magazine, he’s pretty anonymous. I think he may be the best semi-anonymous nonfiction writer on the planet, and I admit to wanting to write about his work partly just to [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 61: John McPhee and the archdruid
by Adam Hochschild |
October 2, 2012
The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s – by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and others – made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. The best of it may endure, but, 50 or 100 years from now, will people still be enthralled [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 60: Jeanne Marie Laskas and the empire of ice
by Geoff Van Dyke |
September 25, 2012
For the past few years, GQ correspondent Jeanne Marie Laskas has explored the myriad behind-the-scenes lives that help make our first-world reality what it is today. To borrow a couple of sentences from the current political discourse, “You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Someone mined the coal so that, when you flip the [...]
