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 preventative double mastectomy. Looking at the hindsight issue more generally, Junod tells Storyboard:

I don’t really go in for self-flagellation. Or, rather: I flagellate myself so enthusiastically while writing my stories that I don’t have the time or the energy to flagellate myself once they’re done. In general, I don’t divide stories into Good and Bad or Perfect and Imperfect—I divide them as Finished and Unfinished.  The Finished stories are just that—stories that seemed to settle into final form before they were shipped to the printer. The Unfinished stories are the stories that were, in some way, taken away from me before they were finalized. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard at them and (Esquire editor) David (Granger) didn’t devote his full attention to them; there’s nothing I’ve published in Esquire that hasn’t been gone over, by everyone, 10 or 20 times.

Unfinished stories are just stories that fall away from some Platonic ideal of what they might have been. In general, however, I’ve written so many more Unfinished stories than Finished ones—which is to say, I’ve written so many more stories that bear the marks of violent struggle, and were delivered by Caesarean rather than naturally. I’m quite aware when stories are coming easily and when they’re not, and when they’re not, I walk around with a rather low opinion of myself. But a writer is like a quarterback or a relief pitcher: You have to be able to put the bad throws behind you, or you can’t do the job.

I don’t flagellate myself because I’m aware that it would be crippling to flagellate myself, and the one thing I know beyond anything else is that I can’t afford to cripple myself. The other thing I know is that an Unfinished story is not necessarily a bad one, and neither is a story that shows itself to be born in struggle (see Leonardo DiCaprio). Hell, even “bad” stories are not necessarily bad ones. I remember walking into a dinner party after Slate called the Angelina profile the Worst Celebrity Profile of All Time. My arrival was greeted with silence; people did not know what to say. So I brought it up, not just to ease the tension but also because I was, like my editor, perversely proud of being so honored, knowing that you can’t hope to write the Best Celebrity Profile of All Time unless you are absolutely prepared to write the Worst. I’m not in this business because I expect to be admired but rather because I want the freedom to say what I want to say and get some kind of reaction for saying it, so if I can’t enjoy the fact that Slate devoted 2,500 words to the Angelina profile then I’ve lost something of myself that I desperately need to preserve in order to write the way I want to write. The great vice of journalism in the age of social media is not its recklessness but rather its headlong rush for respectability—its self-conscious desire to please an audience of peers rather than an audience of readers—and the first step towards respectability is regret.

Several years ago, I interviewed Gong Show host Chuck Barris and he told me that anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is either a liar or a psychopath. And he’s right—but only about life. Not about journalism. As a journalist, I don’t just (metaphorically) sing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” after I write my stories. I make myself sing it, even though it’s a damned hard song to sing.

For “Work the problem” archives, go here. Got a narrative issue you’d like help resolving? Email us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org and we’ll try to get you an expert answer.

AUDIO

Chosen by radio producer and editor Julia Barton, who writes Storyboard‘s Audio Danger column, and Julie Shapiro, artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

“Poetry, Texas”

Producers: Pejk Malinovski and Falling Tree Productions

Pejk Malinovski is a New York-based, Denmark-born radio producer and poet, and he’s found his ideal subject in Poetry, Texas. His half-hour documentary for the BBC takes a wide-eyed look at a small East Texas community and finds much to wonder at. Malinovski’s narration is sparse but just right, as when he interviews a lonely man outside the town’s only gas station. The man, Malinovski tells us, has been diagnosed with cancer. Soon after we find out the man is clutching a pack of cigarettes. When he says “dime,” it drawls into “dawm.” “I wonder if anyone ever recorded this man’s voice,” Malinovski says. “And I shiver with the thought that this might be the last time that anyone does.” (nominated by Third Coast International Audio Festival artistic director Julie Shapiro)

“Retraction”

Producers: This American Life

This brutal self-takedown on the part of Ira Glass and This American Life also makes for gripping audio. Earlier this year, TAL achieved its most-downloaded episode when it excerpted Mike Daisey’s monologue about working conditions at Chinese plants that manufacture iPhones and iPads. But his story turns out to be conflated or downright false. Glass cedes much of the episode to Marketplace’s China correspondent, Rob Schmitz, as he does the shoe-leather reporting that rapidly takes apart Daisey’s account. It’s brave, truthful, and a model of transparent journalism –  though it begs some larger questions about why we fall for fabulous narratives over messy reality time and again.

“Grumpy Old Terrorists”

Producers: Pat Walters and Radiolab

Like This American Life, Radiolab struggled with its own ethics controversy this year: Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich were excoriated for treatment of a Hmong interviewee in this episode (though to their credit, they did something rare in public radio and aired an interview gone awry). In general, it’s been fascinating to hear the show expand beyond science and take on the wider world with its trademark embrace of risk and ambiguity. Producer Pat Walters’ podcast short “Grumpy Old Terrorists” raises all kinds of questions about how our government, and all of us, respond to people who seem to be planning horrible things. (And for more on host Jad Abumrad’s insistence that the program grow and change, read his manifesto, punks.)

“Pike County, OH – As Black as We Wish to Be”

Producers: Lu Olkowski and State of the Re:Union

Independent producer Lu Olkowski stumbled upon a remarkable story in southern Ohio: a town where most people identify as “black” – and suffer N-word treatment by surrounding communities – although generations of intermarriage have rendered most residents completely “white” looking. Olkowski and State of the Re:Union host Al Letson take what could be just an absurd, uniquely American curiosity and go deep, letting us hear how the residents of Jacksonville, Ohio, have to make tough choices about identity and family.

“Artists Disturbed And Inspired By Syria’s Violence”

Producers: Kelly McEvers and NPR

It’s hard to highlight only one narrative out of Kelly McEvers’ coverage of the Middle East this year. Whether in Bahrain, Yemen, or Syria, she’s able to make us really feel what people are going through in this traumatized part of the world. One piece of hers I can’t get out of my head is a simple report on a performance in Beirut – a late-night, secretive set of monologues based on letters and stories from Syria’s war zones. And don’t miss the accompanying web feature on an artist who satirizes the Assad regime with finger puppets, at huge risk to himself.

MAGAZINES

Chosen by Paige Williams, writer, Storyboard editor, and Nieman Foundation for Journalism narrative writing instructor.

“Animals,” by Chris Jones, Esquire

At last count, journalists had produced four long narratives of the weird news out of Ohio – that a suicidal zookeeper had freed scores of tigers and bears and other animals before shooting himself – but none more poetically, or with more narrative tension, than Jones.

“The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador,” by Karen Russell, GQ

You may know Russell as the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swampladia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, but in her first long magazine narrative she proves herself an equally compelling teller of true stories. She doesn’t gild her sentences; she wires them.

“The Innocent Man,” by Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly

Colloff has become a one-woman justice league with her stories about wrongful imprisonment. With this two-parter, about a man accused of killing his wife, she continues the work, laying out the whole saga in straightforward prose that you can’t put down.   

“The Throwaways,” by Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker

It’s impossible to talk about the year’s most important work without including Sarah Stillman’s remarkable piece on the law enforcement community’s growing reliance on young confidential informants. Stillman focuses on the death of a 23-year-old drug informant named Rachel Hoffman (“She had never fired a gun or handled a significant stash of hard drugs. Now she was on her way to conduct a major undercover deal for the Tallahassee Police Department, meeting two convicted felons alone in her car to buy two and a half ounces of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and a semi-automatic handgun.”) but covers an entire American subculture of pawns.

“The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann, The New Yorker

It’s a love story, a war story, an expat story, a mystery, a history lesson, music.

NEWSPAPERS

Chosen by the Tampa Bay Times‘ Ben Montgomery and Michael Kruse and Sports Illustrated’s Thomas Lake.

“Never Let Go,” by Kelley Benham French, the Tampa Bay Times

Not because we know her and love her, but because Kelley Benham French lived an amazing story and had the good sense to recognize that, and to go back and report the hell out of it.

“In Rust Belt, a teenager’s climb from poverty,” by Anne Hull, the Washington Post

Because Anne Hull is back on the Post and we missed her deep and empathetic immersion reporting so much.

“Former Black Panther patches together purpose in Africa exile,” by Christopher Goffard, the Los Angeles Times

Because of Goffard’s very last paragraph and all those that led to it.

“At the Corner of Hope and Worry,” by Dan Barry, New York Times

Because Dan Barry is the Homer of Americana.

“A teacher, a student and a 39-year-long lesson in forgiveness,” by Tom Hallman Jr., the Oregonian

Because a good feature story is about something universal, like an apology, and Hallman knew when to pay attention.

“Caballo Blanco’s Last Run: the Micah True Story,” by Barry Bearak, the New York Times

Because Micah True’s was an almost perfect death, if there is such a thing, and Bearak handled it masterfully, and the New York Times gave it the space it deserved.

“Life of a salesman,” by Eli Saslow, the Washington Post

Because this story about the shifting myth of the American dream made every last one of us wish we had thought of it and done it so well.

“The Princess of Matamoros,” by Mark Collette, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times

Because Collette found a love story, full of change and redemption, in a washed-up hell-raiser and told it with skill.

ONLINE

Chosen by Mark Armstrong, founder of Longreads and editorial director for Pocket.

When I started Longreads in 2009, more than 70 percent of the stories shared in the community were pieces that started out in a print magazine or newspaper. That’s changing, slowly. Print publishers are still responsible for the vast majority of the deeply reported pieces that are online, but it’s heartening to see so many online-only publishers, new and old, embrace in-depth storytelling on the web. Here are a few favorites from this year, in no particular order:

“Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the Biggest Troll on the Web,” Adrian Chen, Gawker

Chen spent much of 2012 tracking down the real humans behind some of the anonymous and/or despicable characters of the web. And Gawker and sister publications Gizmodo and Deadspin already have an impressive track record with these stories.

“How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist,” Rob Trucks, Deadspin

The first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next.

“The Wedding,” Katherine Goldstein, Slate

The story of Will and Erwynn, the first gay couple to marry on a military base.

“Imagining Myself in Palestine,” Randa Jarrar, Guernica

A Palestinian-American writer attempts to fly to Israel to visit her sister.

“The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills,” Ben Austen, Grantland

A forever disappointed fan base, a team that’s threatening to leave town … and Zubaz.

“Lost in Space,” Mike Albo, Narratively 

I have complicated feelings about Kickstarter and journalism – it feels like a sugar high for niche publishers – but I guess it works, because love Narratively, and I loved Mike Albo on navigating the online hookup scene.

“A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus,” McKay Coppins, BuzzFeed

This year, the most restrained, thoughtful story about Romney’s religion came from BuzzFeed.

“Grandpa Was a Baller,” Matt Kallman, The Classical

Another Kickstarter-backed publisher, still doing great work after its first year. Kallman digs into his grandfather’s past as a pro basketball player for the Chicago Stags in the 1940s.

Other online publishers I loved this year: The Rumpus, The Hairpin, SB Nation, The Verge, The Awl, The Billfold, The New Inquiry, Splitsider. Looking forward to in 2013: Matter.

It’s a masterpiece of a headline. It crystallizes exactly what’s at stake in the story in three short words. And even better, it is unbelievably sticky. I dare say no literate human could see that headline and not read the first paragraph. It does a number of things perfectly, but the first thing it does is offend me, the reader. “What the hell?” I shout, maybe out loud. “Whaddya mean, I walk wrong? I’ll show you!” Before I’ve read word one, I’m curious and engaged and invested in this subject. I’m gonna prove this jerk Adam Sternbergh wrong. I walk right!

Kois

This article accomplishes a lot in less than 5,000 words. It serves as a consumer guide to an entirely new and captivating kind of footwear — so successfully that I recall, the day after the magazine came out, calling one of the companies whose barefoot-style shoes Sternbergh featured in the piece and being told that all of a sudden they were sold out but if I didn’t mind waiting three to four months they could probably get me a pair. The story teaches readers why urban walking is a relatively new phenomenon, why we call wealthy people “well-heeled,” and what it’s called when the toe of a shoe arcs upward so it doesn’t touch the floor (“toe spring”). It convinces readers that shoes themselves are the problem, and that cavemen and Kenyan marathoners have it right: Barefoot is the way to go.

The feature ultimately convinces readers that the impossible claim made in the headline is in fact true. You walk wrong. You should be walking as if barefoot, using your toes to spring forward, paying close attention to the terrain beneath you. The fact that you don’t do so isn’t your fault − it’s the fault of your shoes − but nevertheless the more you walk wrong, the more likely you are to develop foot, ankle or knee problems later in life.

The story bounces back and forth between Sternbergh’s engaging explainer voice, continuing the second-person address of the headline −

Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet − your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet − are getting trounced in a war that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.

− and mini-profiles of the experts backing the story’s assertions, such as Galahad Clark, the Wu-Tang-loving “scion of the Clark family, as in the English shoe company C&J Clark, a.k.a. Clarks, founded 1825.” We also get first-person chronicles of Adam’s attempts to correct his own gait through a walking class in Chelsea, a Rolfing session with a structural integrationist, and a couple of days spent wearing Clark’s barefoot-esque shoe creation.

What I love most about this piece, though, is that Sternbergh’s voice retains its characteristic good humor while patiently, point by point, dismantling any argument I might have with his thesis. Fifteen paragraphs begin with some kind of conversational gambit. “I know what you’re thinking.” “Try this test.” “Let’s face it.” “Here’s another example.” The device gives the impression that the author is feeling, or has felt, the same doubts as you, and that he’s anticipating our disbelief and defusing it before it can drive us out of the piece. It all comes to a head in a one-sentence paragraph about two-thirds of the way through the piece, a paragraph that serves as the Eureka! moment. Sternbergh’s “walking teacher” in Chelsea has picked his foot up and placed it back on the ground and has asked him to trust his bones to hold him up:

And I have to tell you, in that brief moment, it felt like I had never stood up properly on my own two feet before in my entire life.

After that, we’re goners. I want to feel that too! How can I feel that? Oh God, I do walk wrong!

This piece wasn’t reported from a war zone. It doesn’t unearth any great scandal or free an innocent man from prison or unveil the side of a star we’ve never seen before or bring readers to tears. While I love stories that do all those things, I also love a story that just makes me think about something simple in an entirely different way. (Surprisingly, not as many magazines have followed this golden template as you might think. Men’s Journal did “You Breathe Wrong,” and Slate did “You Poop Wrong,” but has anyone written “You Sit Wrong,” “You Swallow Wrong,” “You Fart Wrong” or “You Dream Wrong?” I’d read the hell out of any of those.)

Sternbergh’s piece engagingly, humorously, and comprehensively reorganized a tiny part of my brain for the rest of my life. I still walk wrong, and I’ll never stop noticing.

Dan Kois (@dankois) is a senior editor at Slate, where he edits the Slate Book Review. He is also a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and an advisory editor of At Length. He lives in Arlington, Va., with his family. He and Sternbergh are friends and colleagues, but for the purposes of this essay he considered him a mortal enemy. 

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. To pitch an installment of “Why’s this so good?” please see our guidelines. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

We’re glad we caught up with Lithwick by phone this week – in addition to talking with us about her story, she had interesting news about the future of long-form journalism at Slate. In the following excerpts from our conversation, she talks about that news, the value of a good editor, and what rising journalists should do to save the field and get a job like hers.

How did you find out about Bennett Barbour’s wrongful conviction?

Two ways – first from the folks at the Innocence Project here in Charlottesville. I’ve written about some of their work before, so I’m always in touch with Deirdre (Enright) there to know what’s going on in the Innocence Project world. And then also, unrelatedly, Brandon Garrett, the law professor I cite in the story, sent me an email saying, “Wow, you should take a look at what’s going on with the DNA testing in Virginia.” So this actually came in stereo, where both he and Deirdre were responding to the Frank Green piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Did you debate with yourself on whether the story should focus on Bennett Barbour, the exonerated man, or Jonathan Sheldon, the attorney who is on a mission to get the names of the innocent?

Well, I kind of wanted to do both. I spoke to Barbour, and it’s just such a completely heartbreaking thing to talk to him, because he really is very, very sick, and he did lose this new marriage. He had this baby daughter; his life was wrecked by this. As I was writing at the end of the week two weeks ago, he was sent back into the hospital. This guy’s life is so shattered by what’s gone on.

And then at the same time, when I started talking to the Innocence Project folks, they said, “This guy John Sheldon is amazing. What he’s done really is sort of the pivot here.” And then I spoke to him several times and started emailing with him, and I think I realized that the part of the story that is an amazing new twist is that this guy singlehandedly took on DFS and has made it his crusade to get word to these folks.

You spend time on both of them, but you open and close with Barbour. Did you ever sit down and tease out exactly how you planned to structure the story?

I give huge credit to Will Dobson at Slate, who edited this story. By the time I turned it over, it was probably 1,000 words longer than it ended up, and I was very invested. And Will, more than anyone, sat down over the weekend with it, so I really can’t take credit for the final draft. The structure looked a lot different after his last edit. He really helped me bring it back to Barbour at the end.

Can you talk about how what you turned in was different than the final product?

When I turned in the draft – there were a lot of drafts. This is longer, quite a bit longer than the typical Slate form. The ordinary turn of events at Slate is that you file something at noon and it goes up at 4 – and this is not that kind of piece. So this was a big departure for me, in terms of really taking two weeks to write a piece instead of five hours. As the drafts went along, Will was really pushing, “Go back and talk to the Innocence Project people. Go back and ask Sheldon about this.” This was a real lesson for me in how you can take two weeks to write a piece and have it come out really significantly better reported.

I’m not slamming on Slate’s ordinary style. We are trying to be quick and to pivot fast. But for me going back and getting the second and third interviews with people made a huge difference. And at every turn, Will was saying, “Wait, wait, wait. Go back and ask this, too. Wait a minute – he defended the D.C. sniper? Just wait a minute.”

It went up on a Monday, but we had planned to run it the Friday before. We were trying to get a photograph of Barbour, and I got word that he was back in the hospital. You start to have that sinking feeling, understanding that the guy is really, really ill. And I think it was Will who rejiggered it so that the last paragraph went back to Barbour. It was almost completely a function of being reminded that there’s a person in the middle of this who’s very sick.

We get a lot of details about Barbour in passing, but you didn’t expand on his life – what he’s done since he got out, the details of the relationship with his daughter. Was that an attempt to streamline the story, or was it even a deliberate choice?

I give huge credit to Frank Green who wrote these pieces on Barbour for the Times-Dispatch, because he had done a lot of that reporting. So what I was trying do was to take three steps back and look at the legal story. And I think the local NPR affiliate had also done a really good interview with Barbour, where they talked about how he was a chef and he became a good cook in prison.

There was a lot of great color that felt to me like it had already been reported. So I wanted to talk to the crime lab, and I wanted to talk to Sheldon, who hadn’t really been a central part of the story before. There was a feeling that this other material about Barbour, while hugely important, wasn’t as necessary for me. I wanted to tell the legal story. Some of that stuff felt like it would have been making this piece even longer, and what I really wanted to do was to get to how the system got set up and how it’s failing.

America’s courts are your beat. Do you have an overarching goal when writing stories about them?

Yes, I do. Sometimes I think that court reporting is so mystified, it becomes a form of science reporting, where it’s this obscure thing in which we have to spend a lot of time explaining the physics and how things work. My own sense of it is that this can’t be the way we talk about the courts, because the courts impact every single aspect of our lives. Things like eyewitness identifications that go wrong affect every single one of us. We pay millions of dollars into a criminal justice system that I think is fundamentally broken.

A lot of the overarching goal from the beginning has been to try to be an ambassador or a translator between the very lofty, and I think jargon-y, language of the court system and the average American, who is hugely interested but sometimes feels like the meaning has been obfuscated. So I try really, really hard, particularly in some of these criminal justice cases. Think of Thompson v. Connick, a big Supreme Court case also involving someone who was exonerated. People care so desperately about this, but you need to strip away the patina that this is too hard to understand, and really try to formulate it in ways that are interesting and also urgent, so that people can come to realize, “Oh my God, this is what we are doing in this country, and this is why it matters.”

That sounds awfully high self-regarding, but the objective is to do for court reporting what really good political reporters do, which is to say, “This seems like it’s way off in the ether, but it’s actually affecting every part of your day-to-day life.”

You also recently had a long piece in the New Yorker, a book review. Are you planning to do more long pieces?

I’m probably not the best person to talk about it, because I think it’s happening at the editorial level, but I think Slate is really rethinking its view of long-form writing. We have tended to say for many years that people just click off at 1,400 or 1,500 words on the Web. It turns out that that’s not true.

We had in fact thought because it’s so un-Slatey to run a 3,000-word piece on Barbour, we had thought that maybe we would break this story into two pieces over two days. But it was a piece that wanted to be one long piece, so we just put it up.

I think that editorially Slate is going to try to challenge the idea that folks simply can’t read X number of words on the Web, because we’re seeing in a lot of ways that that is no longer true, if it was ever true at all. It may have just been an assumption we all made at the beginning of Internet writing that was wrong.

I do think, certainly at Slate, that we’re going to see more long-form pieces. We all did those Fresca projects. And while the Fresca idea is just flat-out brilliant – to get out of your wheelhouse and do something you’ve never done – it was dominated by the idea we had to do three 1,400-word reported pieces because that’s what people read. I think the new Frescas are going to be a lot longer, and that’s a good thing. I think we had some mistaken assumptions about how readers read Slate.

Hopefully you’ll see more of it from me, but I think you’ll really see more of it from Slate. And as we think through what Web reporting is going to do, the idea that it all has to be quick and bloggy and newsy and that we leave long-form reporting to other sources, I think it’s going to start to go in the other direction, and that’s a great thing. Both the New Yorker piece and the Slate piece really benefited from going back and forth four or five times with an editor. Holy cow, it really is humbling how much better a piece can be when two people are working crazy hard on it.

How do you think of balancing human stories of people whose lives have been changed by judicial decisions with educating your readers about the history and process of the courts? Do you have ways you think about the language?

Those of us who went to law school and then turned to legal writing, we just get so bogged down with the jargon. We really have this notion that if we use all this jargon we used in drafting briefs, that it’s somehow better, and that really long sentences are really good because they seem to be good in the law. I do think you have to do this dual project of draining a lot of the legal, what looks like loftiness but what is in fact kind of wordiness, out of your writing. That is really a hard thing to unlearn after law school – that more words isn’t better.

At the same moment you’re draining it out, there’s a real secret shame in legal writing of passionately caring about something, about making it urgent and important. There’s that dispassionate distance that you learn really works when you’re drafting memos or documents for court, because judges read things differently. But the American public desperately cares if an innocent man is in jail for many years. They desperately care if Garner and Lawrence weren’t having sex. These things matter.

It’s a little bit of unlearning what you thought made legal writing important with a capital “I” and then relearning that fostering these connections and creating a sense that if something is unjust, it’s okay to say it’s unjust.

I come at this largely as a Supreme Court reporter. When people walk into the Court, they’re always surprised that the plaintiff has fallen out of the case. You’re lucky if they’re sitting in the courtroom; more often than not, they’re not there. If they are in the courtroom, nobody references them, nobody pays attention to this person whose whole life for five years has been this case. They evaporate into very highfalutin’ talk about the Dormant Commerce Clause, or whatever we’re talking about.

I think the trick is to loop them back in. I’m lucky – I come out of this tradition. Nina Totenberg is all about that, Adam Liptak, Joan Biskupic. There’s a whole host of court reporters who have very much dedicated their writing to the idea of “Hey, meet the person at the center of the case, who you won’t hear about for the next two hours.”

When you’re paying attention to making it human, do you ever worry about veering into melodrama?

Yeah, that goes back to that shame. Lawyers aren’t supposed to care about personal details, and  they’re not supposed to tell sob stories. Justice Scalia is always the first person to say, “If the opinion starts, ‘Little Mary Jane was walking back from school,’ you know where this is going.” It is a yank at the heart strings, but I think it’s important to realize that the Supreme Court justices deploy that all the time. We like to pretend we’re dispassionate automatons, but even at the Supreme Court level, we constantly dip in and out of the language of real life and real people. What you do depends on which ends you’re trying to serve.

It’s incredibly important to remember to remember that what all courts have to do at some level is disaggregate the human drama from the rule that they’re going to create going forward, and that little Mary Jane walking home from school only goes so far in solving workable problems for the future. But for my purposes, a story is always the best way in, the best way to get a reader to care, to find something familiar.

In a deep way, that’s what the Lawrence case, that book review, was about, the concentric circles that become doctrine. It does no one any good to start a case from the dry, dry legal rule and hope that people will become passionately engaged. I think you have to walk that line, between not manipulating your readers but helping them understand that this could have been them. That Bennett Barbour could have been them. That Lawrence and Garner could have been them. The courts touch every single part of our lives, and yet we think they’re out in the stratosphere doing God’s work.

Is there anything else we should know that we wouldn’t from reading the piece?

One of the heartbreaking trends in the media right now is the demise of the local court reporter, the local crime reporter, folks who used to sit around courthouses and watch every single trial. At the most local, basic level, this beat is disappearing around the country. Thank God for Frank Green, who is doing this in Virginia.

When young reporters call me and ask, “How do I get a legal job?” my advice is to do almost exactly what I’ve done with this Barbour story. Find an amazing story that gets sloughed away as a local story, and tell it.

What we have come to think of as legal reporting is really crime reporting, some fantastic crime story. But that’s sort of cable news driving this beat. I think that this beat needs to be driven by amazing young reporters who are obsessed with the law and who realize that every single day in every courthouse are incredible stories that we need to go back to telling, even if that means sitting in on some trial in Winnetka and figuring out why this has implications around the country. I think this is a form we need to bring back, because it does no good to report only big national crime stories and think that we are monitoring our courts.

*Photo of Dahlia Lithwick by John Looney

The first clues arrive in the opening sentence:

After an hour on a plane, two in a taxi, three on a decrepit ferry, and then four more on buses driven madly along the tops of sheer cliffs by Greeks on cell phones, I rolled up to the front door of the vast and remote monastery.

This delivers the usual Lewis flash — and hints at three less obvious but equally crucial elements: a deft but disciplined use of the first person, an agile manipulation of a standard trip-to-Oz story form, and fluid variations of narrative distance.

Complex stories often demand simple structures; otherwise the reader gets lost. Lewis settled on the venerable first-person journey (think Homer’s “Odyssey,” Dante’s “Inferno,” Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” almost any Cormac McCarthy), and it serves him well. Its solidity simultaneously anchors and frees Lewis even as its familiarity reassures the reader. We quickly come to understand we’re going on a journey to the center of this monastery and its mystery. Since we know we’ll always return to this journey with a friendly guide, we don’t panic when Lewis takes a detour. His choice illustrates something John McPhee stresses in an invaluable Paris Review interview: “If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you.”

And jump Lewis does. Few writers more skillfully shift time, place, and narrative distance. Consider, for instance, how he deploys his first-person presence. Although Lewis often writes from the third person, here he declares the first person right off, essentially inviting us to join him on his quest. With an invitation like his first sentence, who’s going to decline? Even after he makes himself a wee bit ridiculous (and you can’t be much else while trying to talk your way into a vast and remote monastery wearing running shoes, khakis, and a mauve Brooks Brothers shirt), I’m still with him, because I feel out of place myself.  And he’s got me dying to see how these monks shook down the government. He makes his amazement and curiosity mine, too.

Alternating his first person approach with a more standard reportorial voice, Lewis moves fluidly between narrative and explanation. Switching from scene to explication, or from main story to backstory, is damned tricky; it exposes the novice and marks the master. Lewis can leave a scene and return again smack in the middle of a conversation and get away with it.

At that moment, out of nowhere, Father Ephraim walks in. Round, with rosy cheeks and a white beard, he is more or less the spitting image of Santa Claus. He even has a twinkle in his eye. A few months before, he’d been hauled before the Greek Parliament to testify. One of his interrogators said that the Greek government had acted with incredible efficiency when it swapped Vatopaidi’s lake for the Ministry of Agriculture’s commercial properties. [This was the move that enriched the monks.] He asked Ephraim how he had done it.

“Don’t you believe in miracles?” Ephraim had said.

“I’m beginning to,” said the Greek M.P.

When we are introduced, Ephraim clasps my hand and holds it for a very long time. It crosses my mind that he is about to ask me what I want for Christmas. Instead he says, “What is your faith?” “Episcopalian,” I cough out.[*] He nods; he calibrates: it could be worse; it probably is worse. “You are married?” he asks. “Yes.” “You have children?” I nod; he calibrates: I can work with this. He asks for their names …

He shifts narrative distance with similar fluidity, zooming in and out the way a good director varies framing and lens length. Sometimes he’ll park the camera and just watch. These alterations usually move story, build structure, or reveal something. At one point, Lewis is talking with Father Arsenio, the No. 2 monk. Arsenio exudes warmth, charm, intelligence and a frightening omniscience – the Godfather in a merry mood. Amid this Lewis looks out the window to the sea and spends two sentences wondering why the monks never swim. His distraction and aside amuse; they also express his estrangement from the monks’ mysterious discipline.

The end sneaks up. By now Lewis has taken me on and off and all over the island and half of Greece and then back again, and I’m still having fun. He preps me for the finale, though, with a sentence that signals the end of the trip (“The day before I left Greece …”) and opens a reportorial passage about demonstrations and other signs of doom. Then a typographical break gives way to the final section – a single, short paragraph. Here he draws on everything he’s already invested to do something he hasn’t yet done: He gives us a moral lesson. The surprise at finding this direct, distanced indictment only increases its power.

Even if it is technically possible for [the Greek] people to repay their debts, live within their means, and return to good standing inside the European Union, do they have the inner resources to do it? … On the face of it, defaulting on their debts and walking away would seem a mad act: all Greek banks would instantly go bankrupt, the country would have no ability to pay for the many necessities it imports (oil, for instance), and the country would be punished for many years in the form of much higher interest rates, if and when it was allowed to borrow again. But the place does not behave as a collective; it lacks the monks’ instincts. It behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?

He doesn’t need the first person for this. For 12,000 words we have shared his disorientation and then his dismay. Now we rush forward to share his outrage – and even as we set the story down, realize we, too, are implicated.

Lewis is so entertaining that it’s easy to miss that he’s writing some of the sharpest, deepest, and most memorable indictments of our global financial corruption. He’s like the Jon Stewart of print: Loose, but drum tight. Funny, but dead serious.

__

*Lewis lies; he’s not Episcopalian, and we know it because he earlier told someone he’s an atheist. Relating this lie is another sly, splendid use of the first-person: it speaks to Ephraim’s power to both charm and intimidate.

David Dobbs, author of “My Mother’s Lover” and three other books, writes on culture and science for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic and Slate, and at his Wired blog Neuron Culture. He’ll be discussing Lewis’ writing at a workshop at the National Association of Writers meeting in Flagstaff, Ariz., on October 15.

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

Photo of David Dobbs by Alice Colwell.

Tom Junod’s “Can You Say … ‘Hero’?” is a celebrity profile, but the celebrity is the man in the gold cardigan who showed you how to tie your shoes. Of course, like any great story, it’s not simply about what it appears to be about. It’s about love and prayer, grace and humility, and the triumph of the human spirit through television. It’s about Junod, a stuffed animal named Old Rabbit that he had when he was a little boy, a rabbit that he lost. It’s about being a child – “You were a child once, too” is the chorus – and what we lose when we grow up and stop watching Mister Rogers.

Once upon a time, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy’s brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as “Young Rabbit,” or even “Rabbit”; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be. The little boy didn’t know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray.

Occasionally, a fragment of the story will resurface in my mind. Mister Rogers, nude in a locker room, “slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself.” Mister Rogers, visiting his family tomb, “‘And now if you don’t mind,’ he said without a hint of shame or embarrassment, ‘I have to find a place to relieve myself,’ and then off he went, this ecstatic ascetic, to take a proud piss in his corner of heaven.” Mister Rogers, meeting a boy with cerebral palsy, “‘I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me?’ On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, ‘I would like you to pray for me. Will you pray for me?’”

For me, the piece is a talisman. It’s a chant, or what you remind yourself of when everything goes wrong, or a mantra about compassion that does not easily translate into any Western language.

The story works because it speaks to you as if you are the child you once were. It refuses to be snarky and dares to move you. Its author subjugates himself to his true master – the subject – in this case, the man we spent our collective childhood rapt before in the blue glow of a screen: “Mister Fucking Rogers.” Most stories move you forward. That’s how stories work: They unspool. Instead, Junod’s paean is a return, a transgressive retreat to a place where, before we fell from innocence, every day was a wonder and tying our shoes was a miracle.

In the end, Junod, Mister Rogers and a woman who is a minister in Mister Rogers’ church come together in Mister Rogers’ office. Holding hands, they bow their heads and pray together. Here, the true story reveals itself, piercing the heart with its revelation. “What is grace? I’m not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella,” Junod writes. In looking backwards, we see all we’ve lost and feel the weight of that certainty. Having left something behind, we return when we can and take what remains of what was taken from us once upon a time.

Susannah Breslin is an award-winning blogger, freelance journalist and novelist. She writes the Pink Slipped blog for Forbes, and her work has appeared in Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Daily Beast, Variety, The LA Weekly and Esquire.com.

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.

“America’s Ancient Cave Art” by John Jeremiah Sullivan on Slate – excerpted from the Paris Review (via @longreads). “The tunnels got lower, narrower. Our faces were inches from the cave walls. We encountered weird paddle­handed creatures with long wavy arms. I began to feel that I was inside a hallucination, not that I was hallucinating myself – I was working very hard, in that cramped space, to write down Jan’s few cryptic remarks – but that I was experiencing someone else’s dream, which had been engineered for me, or rather not for me but for some other, very different people to progress through. It may have been shamanic. There’s a spring in that cave, Simek said, that can start to sound like voices, after you’ve been in there for a while.”

“The Sleeping Cure” from Stephen Metcalf in New York magazine (via @longreads). “The doctor was a middle-aged man with a low-slung, do-si-do voice, cowled eyelids, and a silver Cross pen poised above a yellow legal pad. I regarded him as little more than an agent of my parents, and so, aside from a twice-weekly deconstruction of Hubie Brown’s Knicks, refused to engage him. What followed was an old-fashioned Freudian face-off: I sat in a stone-cold silence that he declined to break, a magisterial reticence no doubt meant to open a crawlway to my unconscious mind. We were all but motionless in an all-but-airless room, repaying each other’s muteness in kind. It’s no wonder what eventually happened. The doctor fell asleep.”

“Identifying photocopy machine poses problem for Cuyahoga County official” from the staff of The Cleveland Plain Dealer (via @TheBrowser). Think of it as a one-act nonfiction play excerpted from a court transcript.

“Marburger: During your tenure in the computer department at the Recorder’s office, has the Recorder’s office had photocopying machines?

Cavanagh: Objection.

Marburger: Any photocopying machine?

Patterson: When you say ‘photocopying machine,’ what do you mean?”

“Mike Tyson Moves to the Suburbs” by Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Magazine. “One of the few links between his tumultuous past and his more tranquil present are his homing pigeons. He has been raising them since he was a picked-on fat little kid with glasses growing up in some of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods – first Bedford Stuyvesant, then Brownsville – with an alcoholic, promiscuous mother given to violent outbursts, which included scalding a boyfriend with boiling water. (‘He had a tough mother,” recalls David Malone, a childhood friend. “We knew to stay away from her.’)”

“Spy Games” by Scott Horton in Foreign Policy. “If you wanted to identify the low point of U.S.-Pakistan relations, a good place to start would be Jan. 27 of this year. In heavy midday traffic, an American named Raymond A. Davis stopped his white Honda Civic at a light in Lahore’s Qurtaba Chowk neighborhood, drew a Glock pistol, and fired 10 rounds at two young Pakistani men, Faizan Haider and Faheem Shamshad, killing both of them. Davis then attempted to flee the scene but was apprehended by regional police when a car in the road ahead of him stalled. Those facts are the sum total of what U.S. and Pakistani officials have been able to agree on in the six weeks since the incident occurred and Davis, a muscular young former Special Forces officer who, it has since emerged, was working as a CIA contractor, became the center of a diplomatic crisis. The other details have been spun so aggressively by so many different parties that you could assemble a subcontinental ‘Rashomon’ out of them.”

“Aftershocks” by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker. “Kicked up from the seabed, the tsunami amplified in size and slowed in speed as it moved into the shallows beside the Japanese coastline, and by the time it touched land it was a wall of water, black and smooth. It was as tall in places as a three-story building, moving at fifty miles per hour. It flicked fishing trawlers over seawalls, crunched them against bridges. It sent fleets of cars and trucks hurtling from parking lots, and turned homes into chips of wood and tile, before heading deeper into Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures across a span of six miles. Rampaging through former farming and fishing villages, and the cosmopolitan city of Sendai, the wave slowed, but remained too fast for most people to outrun on foot.”

[Image of photocopier courtesy of Flickr member Pneff; used under a Creative Commons license.]

Yesterday you announced that The New Republic will be doing online cover stories. Can you talk about what those stories will look like?

They’re going to be in many ways very much like print cover stories. One of the things that I love about The New Republic and loved about TNR long before I worked here was the kind of variety of magazine journalism that fits within this place. There are places that do wonderful narrative long-form storytelling, there are places that do wonderful argumentative essays, and there are places that do brilliant literary criticism. But you don’t get all three of those within the same magazine that often, and I think that TNR is the place that combines those things, in my opinion, better than anyone.

We do those beautiful narrative stories that are storytelling for storytelling’s sake, just a great human story. We do those in the magazine, and we’re going to do those online as well. But in the same way that a lot of our cover stories in the magazines are arguments, they’re historical essays, they’re provocative arguments, done at length – a lot of these will fall into that category. Many of our cover stories and our best long-form pieces in print are literary pieces. They are, in magazine parlance, back-of-the-book pieces, cultural criticism. In that sense, the online cover stories are meant to be just another outlet for this writing that’s always been part of our signature, an essential part of what the magazine does.

Where did this idea come from and how long have you been contemplating it?

It was my idea. I’ve only been editor of TNR for – I guess I took over about a month ago. This was one of the ideas in taking over the magazine that I really wanted to do, because I look around at the universe of magazine journalism, and what you see is that there are a handful of other places that are still committed to long-form, but there are very few places that have tried to take long-form onto the web, who say long-form doesn’t have to just be confined to print magazines.

It can work on the web. It’s reflected in our traffic numbers, and I imagine if you look at the traffic for other sites, it’s probably reflected there, too. People do read long pieces on the web. For us, frankly, our pieces that do the best on the web, that garner the most attention, they’re often our big print cover stories. So there is an appetite for that.

I think there’s been a conventional wisdom in journalism that we all have to run toward the model, that the way journalism is going in the age of the Internet is for everybody to compete against each other to get to the next nugget of information 30 seconds before the competition does, and to publish it online in a sentence or two. That’s fine; that’s part of journalism, too. But I think that’s left a void where this older idea of what magazine journalism is used to be. This effort is an attempt to fill that void.

You’ve framed the decision as a kind of commitment to an ideal but have also said you think these stories can thrive online. Do you expect the long-form stories will hold their own in terms of online audience against the costs of producing them?

There’s no question that we feel like it is first and foremost an ideal. I believe in the value of long-form for all the reasons I laid out in what I wrote. I believe that there’s a virtue to it. On the other hand, as a magazine editor, you also want to provide things that are good and worthy, but you also want them to be things that are read.

I feel like this is a case where our ideals about what journalism can and should be aligned with what I see as maybe a little bit of a void in a journalistic market – that there’s an appetite for this journalism that perhaps isn’t being filled by the limited number of places that do long-form. Having an additional outlet for it beyond what we can do in the print magazine every two weeks makes sense.

You’re absolutely right to point out that there’s the idealistic part of it and the practical part. My hope is that the two align. I feel like I have some evidence to suggest that they will, but we’ll find out. It’s an experiment – hopefully one that will work.

Will the pieces be written by staff only, or will you use outside writers?

TNR has always been a wonderful combination of the brilliant people we have on staff that are identified with the magazine who write a lot of our big pieces. But a good chunk of our print magazine and a good part of our daily web magazine is filled with really terrific writing by people from outside TNR as well. This will be a similar combination.

What audience do you want to capture? Is there a demographic, is there some mental place these people are at, some education level? What do these people look like?

I think it’s going to be pretty consistent with our readership right now, which is highly educated. Beyond any particular demographic way that you could slice our readership, if I had to describe our readership, I would use the word “intellectual.” People who love politics, but not just politics: people who are interested in ideas.

To me, that’s the thing that unites all the kinds of long-form writing: the arguments, the narratives, the cultural criticism. If you sit down to read a 6000-word piece, it’s because you’re interested in ideas. All great long-form journalism at some level – even the pieces that are just great narratives, and you read them just because you want to see the twists and turns they take – ideas are always implicit in those stories as well.

I think our readership is a very intellectual readership, and I think that will continue to be the case for these stories.

You wrote that “a void has opened where a certain kind of old-fashioned magazine writing used to be.” Is there a particular feel to stories you want to see that is different than long-form pieces that appear online at The New Yorker, or Slate, or Salon?

I think our literary section, which is run by Leon [Wieseltier], is the best in the world, and it has been for decades. That’s always one thing that comes to mind when you’re talking about what distinguishes TNR.

In addition to the kind of great narrative stories that some of the other places you mentioned are known for, I think there’s a real commitment here to long-form argument, which is a rare thing. Ninety-nine percent of what we would describe as political argument takes place in bite-size chunks these days. And that’s OK – blogs have virtues. One thing I said in my post is that this in no way signals a retreat by TNR from the ethos of daily argument that is political discussion on the web. We enjoy being a part of that, and I think our writers are very, very good at it. John Chait is, for my money, the best political blogger on the web. So it’s not a retreat from that. Nothing I’m saying or doing with this project is meant to suggest that there aren’t virtues to that form of argument as well.

But there is something about an argument that’s 6000 words. It takes on a different value and a different form than one that’s conducted over Twitter or in 100-word or 200-word ripostes between bloggers, which is just the way that so much political argument takes place today. I think that there is a real commitment from TNR to the idea of long-form argument, to arguments that take account of nuance, that take account of counterarguments, that are no less impassioned in their conclusions but that are stronger and more intellectually honest and more interesting and more fun to read because they offer evidence to back their points. It’s not the kind of glibness that short-form argument can take on.

Obviously, there are other magazines that still believe in long-form, but I really feel like the commitment to long-form argument is something that distinguishes TNR, something that we do better than anybody else.

What will be the relationship between the long-form pieces on the site and in your print magazine?

Look, in every issue of the magazine, we have several big pieces, usually a few in the front of the book, political pieces, and a few in the back of the book, literary pieces. Those appear on the web, and they will continue to appear on the web. It was the appearance of those on the web and the success that those pieces were having traffic-wise that made me think this might be a good idea. The online stories won’t be in the magazine, because then they wouldn’t be online stories. This is just a way for us to do a little bit more of what we’re already doing.

[For more thoughts about long-form online, see a Nieman Lab piece on how Slate is approaching the issue, as well as New York Times editor Bill Keller's remarks at last year's Boston University narrative conference.]

Here’s a glimpse of what the story looks like online:

I spoke with the story’s editor, Marc Fisher, this morning about the project. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

Where did this story come from? How did you first find out about it?

The reporter for the story, Ian Shapira, heard about it through his wife, who heard about it through her work.

What did you use to put the story together? Was it an existing tool, or something the Post’s developers put together?

We actually had to develop something expressly for this, so it took an enormous number of work hours on the part of both the designer for the web and the print designer as well. So neither was done with any template, really. Both had to experiment to get the Facebook look down right.

The challenge with print was to make it legible. That went through several iterations. And the challenge online was to make it look plausible and recognizable. We struggled with how much in the way of links to have in there. We couldn’t pick up the entire Facebook page as is, so we had to recreate the links on that page.

It’s a story told via a Facebook feed. Does that feel fundamentally different than the long-form narrative the Post has done so often and so well in the past, or is it just a question of presentation?

It is fundamentally different, because the narration is provided by the original source. We had a little bit of a struggle early on in the project about just how much of our voice would be in the story. I was pushing all the way through for us to be very much on the sidelines and providing just the necessary bits of context, so that people understood who these characters were.

One of the gifts that Shana left behind was this extraordinary narration that she provided in great detail. This is the blessing and the curse of Facebook in that people are narrating their lives in this very intimate and granular sort of way, which creeps out some people and is literally fascinating to many others. That really was one of the main reasons we did the piece.

It was a way to get people talking about how people are portraying their lives on Facebook. The story in and of itself has a power, and there’s almost a voyeuristic appeal to it. But I think what makes it worthwhile beyond that is the questions it raises about just how much we’re living on Facebook and whether and to what extent that displaces human contact.

Did you at any point consider doing the story straight and just quoting some sections of the Facebook feed?

My thought from the beginning was that we would do it in the form of a Facebook page. The reporter wanted originally to do it as more of a traditional narrative, and then he very much embraced this idea. There was definitely debate about it in the early stages, all with an eye toward how to tell the story best and how to push the envelope on using Facebook as a storytelling tool.

It’s a story about a death. Social media has a reputation for being light and entertainment-focused. Did you worry about bridging those two ideas, or were you hoping that any tension between them would heighten the impact of what is ultimately a heavy story?

It is a heavy story, but it isn’t so much a story about death as it is love and loss. It’s a tough story, and we’re hearing from a lot of people that it hits them hard. We debated over quite some time whether to leave the death as a surprise in the narrative or to give it away at the very top, and we decided to let the story take its natural course, the way it had in real life, that that was truer to the story.

There is an inherent power to this story, but I think what was equally appealing to us was the chance to talk about what Facebook means and to use this as a vehicle for getting people to think about what kinds of stories we tell on Facebook.

There are real issues about what happens when someone dies on Facebook and who owns the page and how long it stays up. There are lots of users who believe that the page belongs to the person’s friends and should stay there as a memorial, and there are relatives who in a number of cases are fighting with Facebook to get control of someone’s page or to take it down. These are real issues about who owns someone’s story. That came up in the construction of this piece.

We decided we would not do the story unless the family endorsed our doing it in this way. They were totally on board and supportive, but they might not have been.

I was just predicting last week to our sister site, Nieman Lab, that we’d be seeing a lot more stories built out of Twitter and Facebook feeds in 2011, and here you didn’t even wait for January. I was also hypothesizing that these new forms of storytelling might be clumsy for a while. Did anything about the process or the end product feel messy or awkward to you?

It’s a little different, because the restrictions of the form made it more difficult. You can’t go in and edit or change the basic text of the story, because it’s her words, and we didn’t feel we had the right to play with that the way we would with our own copy. The version that’s in the print paper is heavily condensed, but we didn’t change anything that she wrote. The version online is much more full, though it, too, is shorter than the original. It is a more difficult and more time-consuming form to work in, because what we can bring to the story really had to be super-condensed into these little annotations we included between her status updates.

It’s a restrictive form, but if you have the right kind of story – and it has to be a narrative; it has to be something that is very tightly told. Not every story lends itself to this, but I think there are these human dramas and revealing tales that take place on Facebook, and we should be exploring ways to use them to tell them in a compelling way online.

Telling it in print is probably not going to be an everyday kind of thing because of the space considerations. But as an online storytelling tool, I think it has tremendous power and promise.

What else should we know about the project?

For people trying to do this at home, it really was remarkably time-consuming, and the designers – Grace Koerber on the online side and Greg Manifold on the print side – put in lots of long nights trying to make this work. There is no template for this. The upside is that no one can steal our copy on this because it doesn’t transfer, so they’re actually going to have to link to us. But the downside is that it was many dozens of hours of work.

Yesterday, I was talking with an MIT new media researcher who showed me a project that incorporated individual narratives. He felt the need to reassure me that they were not just stories but “stories with teeth.” Dan Conover over at Xark (see item 4 in this post) has for a while now been calling for an end to what he refers to as “narrative-based” news. And Los Angeles Times education reporters caught minor flak in September on Numbers Rule Your World, a statistics blog that has taken to shouting “Story time!” when they think a reporter has jumped the shark, going from data to inventing explanations or causes.

Late last month, John Allen Paulos of Temple University wrote on “Stories vs. statistics” for The New York Times’ philosophy blog, referencing the inevitable C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures lecture and considering how the literature/science divide plays out with regard to what kind of information we prefer. Outlining the tension between stories and hard numbers, Paulos summarized two kinds of errors in statistics: “we’re said to commit a Type I error when we observe something that is not really there and a Type II error when we fail to observe something that is there.” A bit later he writes that which error we worry most about may determine how we want to receive information:

People who love to be entertained and beguiled or who particularly wish to avoid making a Type II error might be more apt to prefer stories to statistics. Those who don’t particularly like being entertained or beguiled or who fear the prospect of making a Type I error might be more apt to prefer statistics to stories. The distinction is not unrelated to that between those (61.389% of us) who view numbers in a story as providing rhetorical decoration and those who view them as providing clarifying information.

Narrative fraud

As early as 2007, Nassim Taleb noted “the narrative fallacy” in reasoning, which he suggested might be better titled narrative fraud. While not knocking narrative nonfiction directly, Taleb indicted our human tendency to link events by creating stories that explain them, the comfort we derive from thinking we understand why something happened if we make a story out of it.

In a TEDx talk from last year, which we covered on Storyboard, economist Tyler Cowen encouraged listeners to distrust stories in proportion to the very degree they find themselves moved by those stories, to understand that when a story begins to convince them of something, a sales job is underway. There are only a few story templates, he noted, and stories tend to leave out conflicting or messy stuff that doesn’t fit the pattern. “The more inspired a story makes me feel,” said Cowen, “very often, the more nervous I get.”

I have no issue with Cowen teaching us to be more critical consumers of story or to ask what information is being left out. And at root, it’s true that stories can be reduced to a few basic themes. If you’ve read one dramatic medical narrative in a newspaper, it’s not hard to find a dozen similar ones on the same topic in other papers that use more or less the same machinery. At times they can be reductive, generic or manipulative. But sometimes something else is happening.

A narrative like Los Angeles Times reporter Thomas Curwen’s “Ana’s Story” might on a surface level have a lot in common with Tom Hallman’s Pulitzer Prize winner “The Boy Behind the Mask.” Both are about coming of age with a facial deformity and undergoing harrowing medical procedures to address the problem. But the two stories’ subtler aspects are more complicated and different than their common template would lead you to believe. Looking at the broad story, it’s easy to miss the specifics that can matter to a given community at a specific point in time. Curwen informed me that when his piece on Ana came out, it was the second most viewed story for the Metro section in the paper’s history.

Not all narratives are the same

People have a tendency to create their own narratives out of stock stories, which includes adding their own meaning to the stories they view and read. It’s worth realizing that those meanings aren’t automatically irrelevant or wrong.

But even if we concede the existence of a buffet of empty-calorie narratives, highly-engineered true stories that engage readers but don’t offer the kind of information that might appear in breaking news reports or policy stories, it doesn’t mean that narrative can’t be useful in conveying news. One celebrated example is This American Life’s “The Giant Pool of Money” episode. Jay Rosen did a good job of explaining why such a narrative was important—the idea that without background on the financial collapse (and, I would argue, recognizable characters to follow through it), many of us were unable to understand individual hard news updates about the economy. Narrative journalism can provide context in ways that not only educate people but that they also value (check out Nieman Lab’s post from this summer about how Slate racks up visits with long-form journalism.)

Narrative as a vehicle

The most important thing, however, may be that narrative appears to be the most efficient vehicle for getting people to understand, remember, or accept new information. Studies done within journalism and outside it have confirmed the power of narrative in conveying information. Previously on Storyboard, we also noted a Kaiser Family Foundation study that looked at the real-world effectiveness that even fictional television characters and narratives can have with regard to conveying public health information.

I recently interviewed Safra Center fellow Michael Jones, who is melding the worlds of statistics and story by analyzing storytelling’s effectiveness in policy arenas. (For his purposes, he identified a story as anything that involves characters, a plot, a setting and a moral to the story or a solution to the problem.) Jones noted that when it comes to policy, not surprisingly, that “even if the narrative is incomplete in a news story, people will fill in the blanks with what they already bring to the table.”

He later added that “[t]he biggest obstacle is believing that you have to communicate narratively to begin with, as opposed to just conveying scientific information to people and letting them fill in the blanks. You have to tell people a story.” As for worries that structuring a story for maximum impact is somehow cheating, Jones noted that most reporters probably want people to read and understand their stories, and suggests that having tools to do that more effectively is not a threat.

If statistics and studies help us better understand how narrative works, and reveal the mechanics by which narrative techniques persuade readers, pretending that we don’t have that information isn’t an option — though that knowledge may add urgency to the journalistic questions of objectivity, transparency and advocacy. And wishing that people didn’t have a tendency to want things tied together in stories won’t make it so.

Story partnered with statistics

It’s worth remembering that researchers and journalists alike are capable of overstating their conclusions or misinterpreting why something happened. And numbers fans dismayed by stories have their own critics: scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson has been trying for years to get scientists to understand the value of storytelling in sharing research.

Both researchers’ and journalists’ work involves focusing on a limited topic, investigating it, and then presenting information about it in ways that can be understood by target audiences. This doesn’t mean that narratives have to pander or oversimplify, though different audiences will have different thresholds for how general or specific information can be.

Simple tools like hyperlinks have made it possible to effectively embed data in narratives and allow readers to evaluate source information for themselves. Comments and social media outlets have given readers options for giving critical feedback that more clearly defines the story. And with tools like IBM’s Many Eyes and Gapminder, which now allow data visualization to combine some strengths of stories with hard numbers, the distance between story and statistics may not be such a vast divide. Even Nassim Taleb’s book criticizing our worst narrative impulses is filled with instructive stories that illustrate his points, make his arguments and entertain the reader.

[I wrote this post in part to prepare for an MIT Communications Forum panel on covering slow-moving crises. For more about the session, check out the full-length podcast or read the summary by Megan Garber over at Nieman Lab.]