Our “Work the problem” series continues with a psychological situation that every writer faces: How do you make peace with stories you wish you’d done differently? Fielding this one is Esquire legend Tom Junod, who lightly revisited his controversial 2007 Angelina Jolie profile this week after Jolie revealed, in an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s New York Times, news about a [...]
Tag Archives: Slate
“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. [...]
Dahlia Lithwick on long-form, sob stories and the Supreme Court
March 23, 2012 – 7:00 am
In this week’s Notable Narrative, we took a semi-quantitative look at how Dahlia Lithwick’s story on a wrongful conviction used one person’s experience as a narrative thread to present a bigger problem. The piece, which followed the exoneration of Bennett Barbour, is right up Lithwick’s alley. As a senior editor at Slate, she writes the [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 15: Michael Lewis’ Greek odyssey
October 11, 2011 – 10:00 am
Last October, with the Greek bond crisis emerging as a danger to the European economy, Michael Lewis wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about an order of monks accused of manipulating the crisis to bilk the Greek government out of billions of dollars. It’s 12,000 words about bonds, corruption, politics and markets, yet it moves [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 11: Tom Junod on Mister Rogers and grace
September 13, 2011 – 1:01 pm
When I was living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and came back sometime later to see what was left, one of the things I found was the November 1998 issue of Esquire magazine. The cover with Mister Rogers on it was faded, and the pages were worn thin from rereading. There may have been [...]
What we’re reading: underground art, sleepy shrinks and killings by a CIA contractor in Pakistan
March 22, 2011 – 2:44 pm
This week’s installment is a grab bag, offering both comedy (a courtroom debate over what exactly a copying machine is) and tragedy (the tsunami in Japan). These stories’ styles also vary wildly, ranging from a non-narrative yet suspenseful investigation into the killing of two Pakistani men by a CIA contractor to an unsettlingly intimate encounter [...]
Richard Just on long-form journalism and online cover stories at The New Republic
January 25, 2011 – 12:07 pm
Last week, The New Republic began posting “online cover stories” on its website. Announcing the move, the magazine’s new editor, Richard Just, wrote about his belief that “beautifully crafted, methodically edited, intellectually rich long-form writing can also thrive online.” He introduced the inaugural story, an extensive review of health care reform and its possible repeal. As fans [...]
Facebook as narrative: The Washington Post tries it out online and in print
December 10, 2010 – 12:02 pm
This morning’s Washington Post print edition carried a story built out of an annotated Facebook feed. The piece was posted to washingtonpost.com last night with the title “A Facebook story: A mother’s joy and a family’s sorrow.” While I’d seen the Post and other papers structure stories around Twitter and Tumblr feeds, and Slate’s mock [...]
Statistics vs. storytelling: the grudge match?
November 19, 2010 – 11:09 am
Narrative journalism has been dogged for years by the idea that it is too subjective or somehow less capable of conveying hard numbers to the public than a traditional news story. In a world where data mining and visualizations have become more fluid and accessible, it’s no surprise that the tension between numbers and narrative [...]
