This week’s One Great Sentence, by the novelist John Cheever, has stayed with me all week. It’s an existential matter for writers and artists of all types, the battle between the introspective and mostly solitary process of creating and the … Read more
I was recently taken with a piece that ran earlier this year in High Country News. Written by Michelle Nijhuis, “Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35” explores the idea of family roots and also offers a brief meditation on Western … Read more
Scenes, character, a human voice and the first person soften and enliven the investigative approach in this piece about gruesome deaths on Western oil and gas fields. Lacking clear statistical evidence, Ring builds his case against the industry through narrative: … Read more
This piece is one in a series of stories Nijhuis wrote for the High Country News that uses narrative techniques to get at the complicated issue of climate change. This story is indirectly related to the global warming, but like … Read more
In this piece, we liked Aschwanden’s mix of folksy language and humor with serious explication of scientific debate. She very clearly gets at what’s at stake in the story; we were primarily engaged by this, by the question of how … Read more