The New York Times’ Tumblr-like live update stream was the cleanest and easiest to follow: vignettes and bulletins textured with photos, Q-and-A’s, video and tweets. This kind of color and ticktock used to feed the big day-after or Sunday 1A read. But live field reports, presented discretely, make it it easier for the reader to choose her own story thread and decide what’s essential – city closings or a daybreak report from the beaches of Montauk? Yet it all holds together as a narrative timeline. The Times also ran a terrific interactive damage graphic featuring specifics on power failures, flooding, wind and subways/railroads, alongside maps and readers’ tweets and photos. Altogether this kind of information documents data/context and lays a foundation, making the Big Narrative easier to report and write.

The storm happened to hit the most media-centric city on earth, one that’s particularly obsessed with social media, which generated some strong source material. (How diverse was it? Still waiting to see.) Instagram users were posting 10 #Sandy photos per second, Gizmodo reported. TIME magazine had five photographers shoot the storm via Instagram and ran it as a photo essay:

And the Wall Street Journal compiled the most-shared photos and tweets, including this one from Brooklynite Justin Brannan:

Great narrative requires compelling characters, and we’ll see those emerge in the aftermath: the rescue workers, the cleanup crews, the hospital employees who evacuated patients when generators failed. It got a little ridiculous, hearing Mayor Bloomberg’s sign language interpreter, Lydia Callis, called the “breakout star” of Sandy, but that’s what happened as the storm blew in, enough so that she earned tribute gifs and at least one Tumblr fan page.

And of course there had to be a villain. The Twitterverse backslapped BuzzFeed’s Jack Stuef this morning for outing a hedge fund analyst as a fabulist. From Stuef’s story:

During the storm last night, user @comfortablysmug was the source of a load of frightening but false information about conditions in New York City that spread wildly on Twitter and onto news broadcasts before ConEd, the MTA, and Wall Street sources had to take time out of the crisis situation to refute them.

Inevitably, a fake shark showed up. Journalists spent a chunk of the night figuring out which photos were real, and doing damage control on those going viral – the underwater carousel, the flood reports at the New York Stock Exchange, the ominous cloud and towering waves at the Statue of Liberty. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal and his team compiled a post tagging image after image as bogus, legit or unverified. He wrote:

This post, which will be updated over the next couple of days, is an effort to sort the real from the unreal. It’s a photograph verification service, you might say, or a pictorial investigation bureau. If you see a picture that looks fishy, send it to me at alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com. If you like this sort of thing, you should also visit istwitterwrong.tumblr.com, which is just cataloging the fakes. The fakes come in three varieties: 1) Real photos that were taken long ago, but that pranksters reintroduce as images of Sandy, 2) Photoshopped images that are straight up fake, and 3) The combination of the first two: old, Photoshopped pictures being trotted out again.

Journalists, along with the authorities, also spent a lot of time weeding fake viral news reports from the verified narrative of the day.

“Hunker,” meanwhile, became the most overused word of, like, ever, and should never appear in storm coverage again:

The drama wasn’t confined to land. The HMS Bounty, a replica three-masted ship built for the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty, sank off the coast of North Carolina, killing two. The Washington Post’s Ian Shapira wrote a breaking narrative of the disaster. His lede:

The tall ship began to die early Monday morning in the hurricane-ravaged waters off the North Carolina coast. One of the HMS Bounty’s generators failed. Water flooded everywhere. The 180-foot-long, three-masted tall ship was losing power and propulsion.

By about 3 a.m., the Bounty’s once-optimistic Facebook page, which on Sunday had posted “So far so good!” in its daily updates, had issued a new message for its followers: “Your Prayers are needed.”

The Tampa Bay Times’ Marissa Lang told a slice of the story through the eyes of the ship’s retired captain:

“I was very fortunate to have had this ship as such a part of my life,” Boyd said. “We had some good times together. (The Bounty) took care of me.”

As he speaks, his eyes linger for an instant on the signatures around a poster of the ship. The poster is framed, hanging on a wall filled with images of the three-mast tall vessel: oil paintings, photographs, models, sailor’s knots of rope.

In the next room are boxes full of Bounty memorabilia: ship stationery, maps, rigger bags, a bunk bed, lamps.

Roy Boutilier, 71, who sailed with Boyd on the vessel’s first voyage to Tahiti during the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty, gestured to the wall.

“It becomes a huge part of you,” Boutilier said. “I still meet people who will say, ‘You’re the guy who sailed on the Bounty.’ It’s kind of incredible; she’s everyone’s ship.”

And Robin Beth Schaer, a New York writer and former Bounty crew member, soon came along with a short, lovely Paris Review essay. An excerpt:

I want to look away from the broken ship with her masts snapped and hull submerged. I want to blur the crew lifted by helicopters from twenty foot seas. I want to veer from the Captain, washed overboard, and drifting alone in rough waters. I say the truth is unfathomable and the phrase snags in my throat, a trope already taken from the sea. I catch myself saying fathom again: a word that once meant embrace, and then the length from arm to arm of rope or water, and now means understanding. Bounty is on the sea floor and her Captain lost (my ship, my Captain gone); I don’t want to hold, or measure the depth, or understand this loss.

Other kinds of surprises emerged, such as a tangential spat over a “newsjacking” blog post from marketers, featuring ill-conceived tips on how to spin Sandy for profit. Of the HubSpot post, best-selling author and marketing strategist David Meerman Scott wrote:

According to early news reports (I’m writing this early in the morning after the storm hit), Hurricane Sandy has caused $20 billion in economic damage and at least 15 people have lost their lives. A million people have been under orders to evacuate their homes and 7 million people are without power.

This is not the sort of story to promote cosmetics and fashion, two ideas on the HubSpot post.

These sorts of frivolous newsjacking ideas give the concept of newsjacking (and marketers in general) a bad name because it is a blatant attempt to exploit a tragedy.

(HubSpot apologized and announced plans to donate $5,000 to the Red Cross.)

In the middle of all this, moments of literary grace. The New Yorker’s Mary Norris filed a short, lovely narrative of a pre-Sandy boat ride across Jamaica Bay. An excerpt:

Soon I had to take my friend back to her house on the water. I called the boss at the marina, to let him know I’d be a little late—closer to five-thirty. The return trip was faster: now I was going with the tide. Four swans flew over, their necks stretched out like those trumpets they use in productions of Shakespeare to blow a fanfare for the king.

If you know of a great Sandy narrative or interesting narrative-related coverage, let us know and we’ll give it a mention.

I have a kind of love-hate attitude concerning the writer H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger. Hate’s probably the wrong word here. Love-annoyance. Love-if-you-would-just-quit-spouting-off-and-let- me-appreciate-you-as-a-writer. A “noted curmudgeon” is the way Deadspin describes him. “A professional crank,” says Business Insider. And I do wonder if the rants are just professional provocation. Because in so much of his work, Bissinger writes not just beautifully but with warmth, compassion, insight and a sense of fundamental decency. His portrait of Philadelphia, “A Prayer for the City,” is still one the most haunting tales of urban decay that I’ve ever read.

“Shattered Glass,” the 1998 story he wrote for Vanity Fair, also displays Bissinger at his best, a perfect balance of dogged research, astonishingly well-realized characters, told with a thinker’s narrative voice, one that muses, and ponders, and shares in the struggle to understand how a young writer could go so wrong. That’s undoubtedly one reason the piece fostered an art-house film of the same name.

As Bissinger writes, Stephen Glass, an aspiring writer from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, was far from the first journalist to invent a story. Perhaps the previous best-known case is that of Janet Cooke, a one-time Washington Post reporter, who was stripped of her 1980 Pulitzer Prize after it was learned that she’d made up an 8-year-old heroin addict. Reportorial history is scattered with other examples – but no one on the scale of Glass, who wrote 31 stories for The New Republic, of which 27 were at least partly fiction and some entirely so. Or as Bissinger puts it:

But none of these journalists approached the sheer calculation of Glass’s deceptions. He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths.

In that context, it’s probably not surprising that Stephen Glass and his family chose not to talk with Bissinger. A story centered on a wholly uncooperative source presents a storyteller with a distinct challenge. The writer Gay Talese famously overcame this through brilliantly detailed observation of his uncooperative subject in the piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Bissinger obviously doesn’t have that option here; Glass’s “crimes” are long past when he approaches the story and Glass himself is in hiding.

He decides instead to focus on another character in the drama, that of Chuck Lane, the New Republic magazine editor who stumbles slowly, reluctantly – and even painfully – into a realization of the problem.

The story begins with Lane forcing Glass to revisit the scene of a recently published story, a hotel conference center. It turns out to have been closed on the day that a reported meeting allegedly took place there. According to Lane’s notes, Glass expressed bafflement, insisting that the events were real. And from that point on the narrative shifts back and forth continually between Lane’s story and the story of Bissinger hunting the elusive Stephen Glass.

This kind of structure is sometimes referred to as a zipper structure – essentially two narratives that interlock throughout a story. It’s a slightly imperfect description because the zipper image suggests that each section is of a very similar length, which is rarely true. But it does give you an idea of how neatly the writer has set up his tale. Lane’s investigation of Glass, Bissinger’s investigation of Glass – both move forward in tandem.

Lane is an entirely sympathetic character in this telling, an editor shocked by his discoveries, a man desperately trying to do the right thing. “As Stephen Glass spun feverishly,” Bissinger writes, “Lane anguished.” But as we follow Lane through his own investigation, we also come to see that despite the cost, the editor is also determined to see this through: He keeps notes, makes recordings, checks facts, meets with his reporter’s critics.

One of my favorite scenes is a moment of realization. The story begins when Lane is trying to verify a recently published tale of a California software company victimized by a hacker and eventually agreeing to pay extortion money. As it turns out, Glass has invented the company, along the way creating a fake website for it. During Lane’s investigation, a man calls him from Palo Alto, claiming to be the company president.

As Bissinger tells it:

He had no doubt the hacker story was trash, but he was still bugged by the calls from George Sims of Jukt Micronics.

At about 11 p.m., Lane spoke on the phone with senior editor [Margaret] Talbot. He filled her in on what had happened, and by chance, Talbot mentioned that Glass had a brother who lived in Palo Alto, California.

The second she uttered it, Lane knew.

You might think that devious and uncooperative Glass would end up simply the evil counterpoint to the dauntless Lane. But Bissinger doesn’t cheapen the tale. One of the things that elevates this above a standard retelling of a sordid story is that the writer shows such a serious, almost nonjudgmental effort to understand what he comes to see as a very troubled child.

Bissinger does indeed end up on a street in Highland Park, pondering the influence of neighborhood and upbringing. He looks at old yearbooks, college newspapers, the history of Glass’s professional career. He talks to friends and former colleagues, (a few actually go on the record). And he puzzles with all of them over the destructive habits of “the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn’t live up to the expectations he had inherited.”

But he never forgets that whatever the excuses and explanations, the result was damage to people who trusted Glass, to people wronged by the stories and to Bissinger’s own profession. Thus the story ends on a pitch-perfect note with an ironic tribute to Glass’ improbable career: just a damning list of stories, published as nonfiction but real only in the inventive mind of Stephen Glass.

Deborah Blum (@deborahblum) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

10. Internet phenom Maud Newton’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Raymond Chandler sticks it to Hollywood.”

9. Chris Jones, Esquire writer at large, talks with Nieman narrative instructor Paige Williams:

“On reporting for detail, the case against outlining and the power of donuts.”

8. Storyboard editor Andrea Pitzer’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Gene Weingarten peels the Great Zucchini.”

7. Peter Ginna, publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press, with

“When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips.”

6. Science and culture writer David Dobbs’ “Why’s this so good?”:

“Michael Lewis’ Greek odyssey.”

5. Atlantic senior editor Alexis Madrigal’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Truman Capote keeps time with Marlon Brando.”

4. Science writer Carl Zimmer’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“McPhee takes on the Mississippi.”

3. Two celebrated Esquire writers visit Harvard:

“Gay Talese has a Coke: reflections of a narrative legend in conversation with Chris Jones.”

2. Nieman Lab assistant editor Megan Garber’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“David Foster Wallace on the vagaries of cruising.”

1. Pedro Monteiro’s look at storytelling in the tablet and app future:

“Story, interrupted: why we need new approaches to digital narrative.”

Thanks for your support in 2011. We’ve had a banner year here, with a lot of new contributors and record numbers of visitors. We look forward to bringing you even better coverage of new narrative projects and ideas in 2012. Happy New Year!

Long before I first read his take on Jim Brown, I knew Wiley was a sports reporter, a damn good one, whose work I’d wander into from time to time in Sports Illustrated. It wasn’t until I first read “Why Black People Tend to Shout” that I began to appreciate him as not just a journalist but a writer.

Yet before I came to know Ralph Wiley’s work well – in fact, from the first time I read his stories – there was something familiar about him. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

Wiley writes as if he’s recounting a story that just happened, and he really wants to make sure you understand it. He wraps himself into his pieces at the right junctures, especially in navigating – and describing – the tentative negotiations of first encounters. It’s a doom-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach-but-suck-it-up-buttercup kind of thing, even for Wiley, who had been around his share of incredible and impossible people:

Heckfire, Jim Brown even intimidated me, when I first met him at Rockefeller Center, in 1989. Jim fixed me with a level gaze and that granite mug and wanted to know, “What’s your story, little (expletive)?” In order to thaw out my suddenly frozen intestines, I said, “Well, what kind of story would you like to hear, Jim?”

Jim smiled that little half-smile and laughed that slow but sincere laugh: “Heh-heh-heh.” I joined in. His laugh always implied real amusement, not fake butt-kissing. He is complex, though; you never really knew what exactly was so funny to him.

Here’s where things start to sound familiar, and I hear echoes of Eddie’s Barbershop. Eddie’s was a clip joint a couple of blocks from my grandmother’s house in South Minneapolis, the place where, between middle and high school, I sacrificed my head to the god of bad ’90s haircuts. Eddie’s was forever packed. That meant, regardless of the day or time, you had to wait, and waiting meant spending time amongst men, some who professed great things, others who spun fishing line and called it silk.

Eddie’s was where fables unfolded, debates were settled and chops were ruthlessly busted, the place where tales of friends, neighbors or even Jim Brown were crafted and passed along.

Wiley reveals himself as a barbershop storyteller when he pits Jim Brown against not just his peers and contemporaries, but the generations that followed him. There’s Franco Harris, Bill Russell, Eric Dickerson, Michael Jordan. Even Muhammad Ali! And by a large margin Brown has no equal, save, of course, in Wiley’s estimation, John Henry, a man against whom others were destined to be measured:

Jim Brown was John Henry in the live, hard flesh, John Henry in full football pads, only instead of being a Steel-drivin’ man, he was a Pill-haulin’, Stiff-jabbin’, Ground-shakin’, Trail-blazin’ man.

He not only intimidated opponents on the gridiron of the NFL – the Sam Huffs, Gino Marchettis, and Night Train Lanes (Frank Gifford breaks into an epic song until this day if you so much as mention the name Jim Brown). Even his teammates like Bobby Mitchell and Paul Warfield, were intimidated by him, as were all NFL players. Well, maybe not Chuck Bednarik. You’d have to ask Chuck. He’d be the only one, and these were tough, tough guys.

Jim Brown even had Muhammad Ali looking around for him and his approval, wondering what he thought of him. John Henry, in the guise of Jim Brown, was intimidating even to the giants.

Jim Brown, in Wiley’s telling, is not just a man, he’s a monument among action figures, which is why the tone of the piece, a histo-mytho-epic-ballad-meets-BS-session, feels so right. Wiley sets it up as a tale: Jim Brown as an imperfect hero beset by trials won and demons (of the inner type) to vanquish. It would be easy to sing nothing but praises, which can sometimes be the case with legends. But Wiley doesn’t spare Brown criticism, for his relationships with women and his children, or his misguided attempts to “scold” (Wiley’s words) other black athletes for not following his example.

In “Nobody Else is Jim Brown” Wiley recaptures that spirited barbershop storytelling, a kind that celebrates the exploits of heroes, bums, hecklers and hustlers; a kind that is unmistakable and undeniably fun to read; a kind that combines argument and tribute into a new kind of folklore.

Justin Ellis (@Justinnxt) is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where he writes about the future of the news business.

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

I have to admit I do the same thing when I open an issue of the New Yorker and find a piece by Katherine Boo. I don’t think she publishes more than a story or two a year. And fewer, lately. But the stories are remarkable. She takes on heavy, complicated themes – social policy and the lives of the poor – and brings a world of vivid characters to life.

Take the “The Marriage Cure,” a New Yorker feature from 2003. A group of academics and policy types had suggested that pervasive singleness in poor neighborhoods, often assumed to be a symptom of poverty, might instead be a root cause. If they were right, a campaign to promote marriage in poor neighborhoods could help improve their lot. One state, Oklahoma, decided to give it a try. Boo went to see how it was working.

Boo could have made the idea the main thing, and profiled a bunch of people. Or she could have picked one person to be the protagonist – a single woman, or a marriage promoter – and zoomed in close. But she did neither of those things. Instead, she wrote about a friendship. The piece begins:

One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kim Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lamé thong and declared herself ready for church. Her best friend in the project, Corean Brothers, was already in the parking lot, fanning away her hot flashes behind the wheel of a smoke-belching Dodge Shadow. “Car’s raggedy, but it’ll get us from pillar to post,” Corean said when Kim climbed in…

I love this. Our lives are stories of relationships. We aren’t us without them. But it’s actually pretty rare to see authentic, intimate relationships at the center of a reported magazine piece. It’s tough reporting, for sure. People often guard their meaningful relationships closer then they guard their secrets. They’ll tell you the most private things – painful things, shocking things – and then politely hustle you out when their neighbor shows up, or their kid gets home from school. But Boo writes about Kim and Corean and the people in their lives like she’s known them for ages, and has only now, finally, gotten around to writing about them. And they talk like no one else is listening.

When Corean visits a man in prison who, in both sustaining and vexing ways, has become something more than a friend, Boo observes quietly: “Corean stretched her legs, letting her foot graze the instep of his state-issued sneaker.” Then she returns home, weary, and her son, a high-school senior, removes her sandals and sits with her in their dark apartment, squeezing her swollen feet.

“Corean remembered how, when she was a child, hardship had turned members of her family against each other, and was grateful for her own family’s closeness,” Boo writes. “But she also knew that single mothers could be seduced by it. Husbandless, they treated their [daughters] as confidantes and their [sons] as stand-in partners, and were shattered when those companions left them behind.” At least a half-dozen scenes in the piece are so intimate, they’re startling.

So of course, Boo goes with Kim and Corean to marriage class. And Boo lays out the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand: In theory, it’s easier to make ends meet and easier to raise kids as a couple, but none of the women in the class had had great experiences with men. Most of them had grown up without fathers, or been left, or been beaten; two of the women had been with violent criminals. In the projects where Kim and Corean live, Boo writes, “relationships with men were often what stopped an ambitious woman from escaping.” So, it’s complicated.

The piece never really lands explicitly on one side or the other. That’s a sign of Boo’s ambition, I think. The marriage class happens pretty early in Boo’s narrative, and she barely returns to it. Instead, she follows Kim and Corean out into their world – a world they face with resilience and grace and good judgment and, still, problems seem to find them, and cascade. “One unacknowledged consolation of struggling in the inner city is the lack of time one has to indulge romantic discontent,” Boo writes.

Ultimately, one of the women’s chances at a good, lasting relationship seem better than her friend’s. But I’m not going to give away the ending. One of the pleasures of Boo’s writing is that you come to care about her characters and how things turn out for them. I’ll just say that in the end the piece is about hope, and fear, and work, and health, and money, and companionship, as much as it is about marriage. In other words, it’s a true love story.

Douglas McGray (@dougmcgray) has written features for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and This American Life. He is also the editor in chief of Pop-Up Magazine, the co-editor of My Life Is True, and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation (which hosted Katherine Boo the year she wrote “The Marriage Cure”).

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

One could point out many things about craft in the piece. The descriptions of characters are finely observed and sticky. A director “is a man balanced on enthusiasm, as a bird is balanced on air.” Or check out his description of how Brando transforms into Kowalski: “with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated – just as, in this Kyoto hotel room 10 years afterward, my 1947 memory of Brando receded, disappeared into his 1957 self.”

But all that verbiage needed some infrastructure on which to run. Rhythm, narrative or otherwise, is a pleasing regularity in time, and Capote bangs away like a drum major to keep it.

There are two Russian critical terms that are helpful here: fabula and syuzhet. The fabula is the real chronology of a narrative: Brando was born at such and such a time, grew up, and meets up with Capote in 1957. The syuzhet is how the story is told, its internal narrative time. How you convert fabula into syuzhet is storytelling, and Capote is dazzling. He weaves big time (a life) into little time (the hours), always working at two scales. For all its descriptive frippery and meandering actor monologues, the profile is set in reassuring 4/4 time. We never really leave that room in Kyoto even though Capote sweeps across Brando’s entire life.

The first layer of structure is simple, and it’s the one most of us take when we approach long form. Capote starts and ends in the same place. The first graf is knocking on Brando’s door; the last graf is leaving the hotel and walking home. OK, 101. Much of the rest of the work, particularly in the latter half of the story, is done through a remarkably clever rhetorical gadget. Here’s how it works.

About 1,000 words into the 14,000-word profile, Brando’s nominal screenplay co-writer, the pseudonymous Murray, leaves to go to dinner with a promise to call three hours later to do some work.

Murray shook his head; he was intent on obtaining Brando’s promise to meet with him again at ten-thirty. “Give me a ring around then,” Brando said, finally. “We’ll see what’s happening.”

By Chekhovian logic, we know the phone will ring before the story is over; such a call might even end the story, so we’re watching for it. The telephone actually rings four times in the course of the rest of the piece, and each time, we zoom back from wherever we were to the room where Brando is sitting with Capote. The first ring whips us back from the strange James Dean-Marlon Brando relationship. The second ring interrupts Brando’s detailed, inarticulate descriptions of his acting. The third ends an inquisition into whether Brando makes real connections with anyone. And the fourth stops Capote’s masterful description of the actor’s family.

If you plotted the movements with time on the x-axis and distance from Brando on the y-axis, Capote’s perambulations would resemble the elliptical orbit of comets, reaching away from the dinner to various distances, but always returning to late 1957.

That’s how Capote handles big time, always grounding us back into his narrative present and giving his piece the reassuring rhythm that he’s got all Brando’s history firmly under control.

But there’s another aspect to his ploy. Each time the phone rings, some nearly arbitrary amount of time has passed. The first time Murray calls, we know it’s been three hours, though clearly three hours haven’t been described or felt by the reader. In another instance, “an hour seemed to have passed,” in the course of a thousand words. The passage of time roughly tracks with the word length, but not precisely so. And that’s the real trick. By forcing us to pay attention to the real time (the fabula) every so often, Capote is free to play with narrative time (syuzhet) at will, tunneling back to childhood, zooming in on Brando on the stage or on film, stopping, starting, reversing, slow-mo-ing. He’s like a magician distracting us with unnecessary information so that we don’t notice the mechanics of how he pulls the trick off.

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of “Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.”

For more on this new collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see our introductory post for the series. And stay tuned for inspiration and insight from other writers in the coming weeks.

Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, recently popped out with a suggestion on Twitter that the awesome catalogue of narrative that is Longreads should have a companion site that looks at why the writing is great. Max Potter of 5280 Magazine pointed out that Nieman Storyboard was already on the case, solving just such mysteries.

But the temptation to create a literary juggernaut was irresistible. And so Alexis and I connected with Mark Armstrong of Longreads to see what we might be able to gin up.

Our Editors’ Roundtable already showcases a cast of stellar editors looking at contemporary work on a regular basis. But we thought it would be intriguing to host a series of one-off posts by some of our favorite writers looking at classic narrative nonfiction, breaking down the magic of specific stories. Think of it as shop talk. Or a great bar conversation – minus the noise, the alcohol, and the guy spilling his Jägermeister down your back.

The first installment of “Why’s This So Good?” will launch Monday with Alexis posting about a Truman Capote interview from half a century ago. Future contributors will include people who have written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Esquire, Wired, Mother Jones, Harper’s, and many other publications. You can join the discussion, dispute the opinions, and otherwise weigh in on the Longreads Facebook page (“Like” them and us if you haven’t yet!) and Twitter, where you can find all the responsible parties at @alexismadrigal, @andreapitzer, @longreads and @niemanstory.

And if you have an idea for a contribution of your own, you can query us at andrea_pitzer@niemanstoryboard.org.

We hope you’ll stay tuned and join in the fun.