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: withhold information. As the writer Paul Metcalf put it, “The only real work in creative endeavor is [...]
Tag Archives: New York magazine
“Why’s this so good?” No. 67: Dan P. Lee and Travis the killer chimp
December 4, 2012 – 9:58 am
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 [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 56: Nora Ephron and the thing about breasts
August 28, 2012 – 8:30 am
Nora Ephron was a writer of many gifts. She was fearless. She was blunt. She was dazzlingly perceptive. She was writing at the right time. Her connections were fascinating. She could turn coincidence and happenstance into substantial proof that something important was going on – cosmic journalism. She composed what are commonly called zingers – [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 50: Jennifer Gonnerman and real lives
July 17, 2012 – 8:23 am
I often tell students, both undergraduate and graduate, that beautiful stories are everywhere. You can head off to Iraq and Afghanistan and pen a riveting war epic, but you can also discover scintillating stories much closer to home – in the faces of people you see everyday, in the mom-and-pop store up the street, even in [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 45: Adam Sternbergh on … walking
June 5, 2012 – 8:36 am
Let’s start with the headline. Sometimes, when I am trying to headline a piece and my heds are getting more and more punny and convoluted, I gather myself and remember this New York magazine story, a story I often think of as the Platonic ideal of an explanatory feature. Did they headline it “Hardened Sole?” No. [...]
Jessica Pressler on New York, “millennium girls” and the love story that wasn’t
October 28, 2011 – 12:52 pm
This week’s Editors’ Roundtable dives into Jessica Pressler’s story “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age,” from New York magazine. A contributing editor and blogger for New York since 2007, Pressler has profiled a wide range of subjects of late, from movie star Channing Tatum (for GQ) to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Prior to joining New York, she [...]
