Here are a set of recent stories for your reading enjoyment, gathered from Los Angeles to London. They each deal with the collision between one understanding of the world and another: in traumatic experiences, literary encounters and visions of jihad.
“The Possibilian” by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker. Researcher David Eagleman drops study subjects from 110 [...]
Tag Archives: The Guardian
What we’re reading: marking time, bugging Franzen and the gaming culture of jihad
April 26, 2011 – 9:46 am
What we’re watching: highlights from this year’s Webby Awards honorees
April 14, 2011 – 9:57 am
For our latest roundup of visual storytelling, we’ve selected some entries from the 15th Annual Webby Awards Official Honoree Selections announced yesterday. The following stories made the first cut but did not cross the bar to become nominees. We thought, however, that among those projects left behind, there were some really engaging pieces we wanted to [...]
Interview as story: on radio, online and in print
December 16, 2010 – 3:40 pm
Whether they use full-on storytelling or just crib a few literary devices, interviews have their own narrative arcs and angles. From political drama (think the Frost-Nixon standoff or “The Fog of War”) to Studs Terkel’s cultural layering, interviews create a kind of permanent present-tense experience for viewers.
Two recent magazine interviews underline the narrative potential of [...]
What we’re watching: in which a battalion deploys, Ramadan ends, and a drawing unfolds to illustrate an argument
September 24, 2010 – 4:15 pm
Perhaps it’s just the nippy fall weather descending, but we have a multiplicity of crowdsourced, interactive and on-the-horizon projects. So, depending on your constitution, here are some nuggets of future-of-journalism ideas to make you itchy or jazz you up. Either way, you’ll have the weekend to work it out.
“A Year at War” from The New [...]
What we’re reading, back-to-school edition: prison voices, the failure of imagination in storytelling, and the secret diary of a hedge fund manager
September 2, 2010 – 12:57 pm
Teenage lifeguards abandon their perches to leathery veterans. The county fair’s bounty of funnel cakes and fried beer peters out. Corduroy shopping starts in earnest. The academic year begins. In honor of those entering the hallowed halls of education, reluctantly or with excitement, we offer these takes on prison, the challenges of teaching and what [...]
What we’re reading, second edition: in which we offer soccer balls, the Book of Revelation and a visit to the Khyber Pass
June 30, 2010 – 3:38 pm
In our new installment of written work worth checking out, we encourage you to think about the history of the soccer ball, the awesomeness that was the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, the expanding ramifications of the oil disaster in the Gulf, the many things we receive from our parents, and one former Marine’s problem with the [...]
Wajahat Ali in McSweeney’s “Panorama”: the American financial collapse as sitcom
March 11, 2010 – 12:12 pm
When literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly jumped into the newspaper business for their winter issue, much of the buzz was about the concept. A literary quarterly does a newspaper? Layout was debated, along with cost and replicability. But inside “Panorama” lurked a delightful, messy nonfiction narrative by Wajahat Ali.
“Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You” stars Ali, [...]
The Guardian essay on Hindu super-temples? It might be news to you (and me)
November 9, 2009 – 3:05 pm
Talking about narrative journalism, The St. Petersburg Times’ Lane DeGregory once told me
“One of the stupidest stories I ever did had the biggest response. It was an ‘up all night’ piece about what happens between midnight and 6:00 am. I had all these old ladies calling me up and saying, ‘I’m never up that late, and I didn’t know about any of this.’ It was so gratifying to take readers someplace.”
Taking readers someplace they are unlikely or unable to go is a prime service narrative can provide. Witness these two nicely done but very different stories:
[caption id="attachment_972" align="alignleft" width="101" caption="Abhinav Ramnarayan"]
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Supermarket, superstores—why not a supertemple? “The Many Gods of Ilford,” a Guardian trend essay on multi-god Hindu temples in former recreation centers, touches on religion and tolerance while revealing that cockroaches can evoke nostalgia. A few useful posted comments about disability, caste, and monotheism add to Abhinav Ramnarayan’s original piece.
Over at The Daily Beast, Tim Mohr’s “Did Punk Rock Tear Down the Wall?” looks at the East German ’80s punk scene and recounts the career of Die Anderen (“the Others”), a band that straddled the East-West divide.
What other keyhole views into history or a community have generated memorable narratives? We’d like to hear from you.
