“The Possibilian” by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker. Researcher David Eagleman drops study subjects from 110 feet in the air and challenges drummers with Brian Eno to see how our brains experience time and trauma.

A few years ago, Eagleman thought back on his fall from the roof and decided that it posed an interesting research question. Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed, or is some other mechanism at work? The only way to know for sure was to re-create the situation in a controlled setting.

“Elif Batuman: Life after a best seller” from The Guardian (via @longreads). In which Batuman does Batuman: talks about Dante and football, tries to buy marijuana from Jonathan Franzen after a book awards reception, and backs her way into some intriguing reflections:

I noticed a while ago that many writers of my acquaintance tended to leave the country after a successful first book. I didn’t understand this at first, but now I do. Moving abroad lets you keep, in some degree, an aesthetics of bewilderment. Still, certain facts are inescapable, no matter how far you go. You start out as a young person bewildered by things, and then suddenly you’re the one bewildering the young people. I can see it in their faces.

“The World of Holy Warcraft” in Foreign Policy by Jarret Brachman and Alix Levine. The strange world of digital jihad.

The online world of Islamic extremists, like all the other worlds of the Internet, operates on a subtly psychological level that does a brilliant job at keeping people like Abumubarak clicking and posting away – and amassing all the rankings, scores, badges, and levels to prove it. Like virtually every other popular online social space, the social space of online jihadists has become “gamified,” a term used to describe game-like attributes applied to nongame activities. It turns out that what drives online jihadists is pretty much exactly what drives Internet trolls, airline ticket consumers, and World of Warcraft players: competition.

“Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy,” by David Cloud for the Los Angeles Times (via @longreads). A spare tick-tock of a military strike in Afghanistan that should never have happened.

At 5:37 a.m., the pilot reported that one of the screeners in Florida had spotted one or more children in the group.

“Bull—. Where!?” the camera operator said. “I don’t think they have kids out at this hour.” He demanded that the screeners freeze the video image of the purported child and email it to him.

“Why didn’t he say ‘possible’ child?” the pilot said. “Why are they so quick to call kids but not to call a rifle.”

The camera operator was dubious too. “I really doubt that children call. Man, I really … hate that,” he said. “Well, maybe a teenager. But I haven’t seen anything that looked that short.”

“When the Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts,” by Evan Abramson for Yale Environment 360. Tribes pushed toward famine and armed conflict by the shifting shoreline of Lake Turkana on the Ethiopia-Kenya border tell their stories plainly but movingly. Water scarcity gives rise to violence, illustrating the vulnerability of people who already live at the mercy of climate change.

“Burning Desperation,” by Lynsey Addario of The New York Times. Before she was kidnapped in Libya, Addario created this disturbing, haunting portrait of Afghan women who set themselves on fire.

“Saying goodbye with my camera,” by Briony Campbell for The Guardian. A father and daughter approach his impending death from cancer through an extended meditation on reasons to fight the disease, the temptation to surrender to it, and how much of his thinking centers on those he’ll leave behind.

“Above the Law,” by Clifford Levy and Ellen Barry for The New York Times. A series of videos and articles looks at corruption in Russia two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. From a human rights activist on trial for speaking out after a murder to strategic arrests and intimidation, it offers a dispiriting look at Russia today.

“Deadly Threats: Successors to the Paramilitaries in Colombia,” by Stephen Ferry (and Getty Images Grants for Good) from Human Rights Watch. Slide shows depict a military conflict in Colombia that continues despite the announced demobilization of paramilitary groups years ago.

We previously featured three of this year’s nominees on Storyboard. Read our Q&A with the creators of “Welcome to Pine Point,” which looks at memory and identity in a town that was wiped off the map. Hear from the makers of “Brèves de Trottoirs,” multimedia portraits from the streets of Paris. And see what Marie-Claude Dupont of Canada’s National Film Board has to say about “GDP,” a yearlong project documenting the Canadian economic recovery one person at a time.

While big names like Martha Stewart, Twitter’s Biz Stone and Arianna Huffington get to decide who will take home the official prizes in these categories, you, too, can make your voice heard by voting in the Webby People’s Voice Awards. (Voting closes April 28.)

Image detail from footage by Evan Abramson in the Yale Environmental 360 project “When the Water Ends.”

“Swansea Love Story” from Leo Leigh and Andy Capper for VBS.tv (Vice Media), an episode of their “Rule Britannia” series. The filmmakers stick close to a group of young heroin users to explore epidemic drug abuse in South Wales, but they also delve into Swansea history and its shattered economy. Some scenes are hard to sit through because of their terrifying intimacy, while others may remind viewers that Vice Media is behind the movie. But the characters’ unexpected humor and frankness – and smart editing – make the story simply unforgettable. The link above is to the full episode, but you can also watch the trailer.

“Narcocorridos: Singing Songs of Drug Violence,” from Shaul Schwarz (edited by Brian Chang) on Time’s website. A look at the American cinematic and musical trend of transforming horrific Mexican drug violence into the stuff of ballads and folklore. In one scene, a drug lord custom-orders songs from a performer, who delivers.

“Homegirl Cafe” by Lucy Nicholson for Reuters. The daughter of gangbanging parents leaves jail and hopes to turn straight, waiting tables while she learns to box on the side.

“Five Days in the Favela” from The Guardian, part of a series looking at the slum communities in Rio. In this video “Pastor Nininho,” a DJ and evangelical leader, connects with his community in church and on public radio.

“Losing His Way,” by Peter Power and Erin Anderssen, part of a series on dementia from The Globe and Mail. This slide show is beautifully done, but it’s Mario Gregorio’s searing audio about living his life while he’s losing his mind that makes this story worth a look.

Two efforts we’ve noted before on the site also make an appearance in these categories and deserve a second mention: “Highrise: Out My Window,” a multicity, multiyear project from the National Film Board of Canada, records “the human experience in global vertical suburbs”; while “Take Care” from MediaStorm follows a teen mother who works to become a nurse as she cares for her dying grandfather.

Insane Clown Posse

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 the form. The first, “Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy,” runs through a dizzying talk with the rap duo on The Guardian’s website.

The conversation jumps off with the acknowledgement that despite their ultra-violent lyrics, the pair are evangelical Christians. Reporter Jon Ronson moves on to reveal that the performers suffer from depression. As the story unfolds, even those who contest the importance of hate-spewing clowns may find the interview compelling, funny and disturbing, and perhaps not in predictable ways. Here’s an excerpt of Ronson’s dialogue:

Violent J shakes his head sorrowfully. “Who looks at the stars at night and says, ‘Oh, those are gaseous forms of plutonium’?” he says. “No! You look at the stars and you think, ‘Those are beautiful.’ ”

Suddenly he glances at me. The woman in the video is bespectacled and nerdy. I am bespectacled and nerdy. Might I have a similar motive?

“I don’t know how magnets work,” I say, to put him at his ease.

“Nobody does, man!” he replies, relieved. “Magnetic force, man. What else is similar to that on this Earth? Nothing! Magnetic force is fascinating to us. It’s right there, in your f**king face. You can feel them pulling. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t touch it. But there’s a f**king force there. That’s cool!”

Shaggy says the idea for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment.

“Gravity’s cool,” Violent J says, “but not as cool as magnets.”

The struggle between interviewer John H. Richardson and actor Christian Bale in Esquire’s December issue is more convoluted. As Richardson attempts to build a narrative that illuminates Bale as a person, the temperamental actor throws up roadblocks, refuses to participate, and ends with an insult to his interviewer’s efforts to reveal anything at all about him.

The narrative builds and destroys itself, eventually piling up a kind of story:

BALE: Why are you questioning those things?

ESQUIRE: Just curious.

BALE: Why are you putting all that muddle in your brain that’s not needed to be there?

ESQUIRE: I guess you just look at the choices people make and wonder, What’s up with that?

BALE: But why are you worrying so much about everybody else? Let’s start looking at you for a minute, all right?

A standoff ensues not unlike the scene in Antonioni’s The Passenger when Jack Nicholson is interviewing a witch doctor who clearly thinks he’s an obnoxious idiot. “Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answers will be about me,” the witch doctor says, turning the camera around so it’s pointing at Nicholson. Major existential moment as Nicholson stares into the abyss between sign and signifier. But we have seen this movie, and it does not turn out well — the spell must be reversed.

BALE: It should just happen. It should just happen. If something’s true and sincere, it happens regardless of marketing. The more I talk about it, the more I’m telling people how they should react. And that is an asshole.

ESQUIRE: Not to argue, but that’s not really true.

BALE: Are you calling me a liar? Am I lying?

ESQUIRE: Sometimes the ground needs to be prepared. And you’ve laid down these onerous rules on me — all I can do is a Q&A.

Actually, these are forbidden words that you are reading right now. Bale is in the habit of requesting that his media interviews be printed in a Q&A format. He also prefers to conduct them at the same five-star luxury hotel in Los Angeles, and makes it known that he dislikes personal questions.

Both these interviews end up far afield from straight transcription. The interviewer’s after-the-fact insertion of connective tissue between segments of the Q-and-A shape the story arc and set the tone.

Very long long-form

“Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager” a book-length series of interviews, falls into an even longer-form category. Keith Gessen, editor of the political and cultural journal n+1, conducted a series of interviews in which a financial player chronicled the economic collapse and its aftermath.

In a phone conversation last month, Gessen described how in small and large ways, events in “Diary” began to take a narrative turn – not just in chronicling the meltdown but in the hedge fund manager’s outlook and life. Asked to what degree he imagined the book as narrative during the interview process, Gessen said,

I was very much thinking of it in terms of Studs Terkel, and there’s another book that I read some years ago, an updating of Studs Terkel called “Gig.” That book is amazing. These people have these crazy jobs, and as they talk about them, details of their lives emerge.

With “Diary of a Very Bad Year,” initially, I just wanted to find out what was going on with the financial crisis. I knew I didn’t know what was going on, and I had this sort of acquaintance who I thought could explain it. After I did the first interview and transcribed it, I was surprised. It had a lot of information. He had a very charming way of explaining the financial system. Some very talented financial people need to be able to tell stories about what they’re doing – that’s just part of him being good at his job. He was so good at explaining it that you could see how he thought, his mind at work. I thought that was exciting.

At first, I just thought we’d put the interviews in the magazine. Halfway though, he became very frustrated with his job. At the end, he quit. I didn’t know for sure where we were going initially, but when he decided to quit, we had a whole narrative arc.

Contrasting doing long-form interviews with the kind narrative features he’s written for the New Yorker, Gessen noted the different goals of the interviewer:

I’ve done a fair amount of traditional journalism where you’re interviewing people. There’s a very specific way in which quotes are used in a New Yorker article. They’re partly there to be informative; they’re partly used to reveal the character of the person who’s being informative.

When you do those interviews, you’re looking for a particular thing, a particular moment, from that person. You more or less know what you want from your subject. And I wouldn’t say it’s manipulation – that’s too strong a word – but because the frame that you’re putting on the story has so much weight, your subjects become characters in the story and have particular roles to play in it. When you’re doing those interviews, you’re waiting for them to say a particular thing, as if they were fictional characters who were uncooperative.

With the hedge fund interviews, I wasn’t waiting for anything. I was waiting for him to be interesting. I wasn’t waiting very long. In a way, it was more pressure doing those interviews, because I wasn’t going to be able to write around him. So he had to be the one who was interesting.

Gessen was pleased enough with the hedge fund interviews that he searched out people from other fields, only to find not everyone was as engaging when it came to talking about work. But with the right interviewee, “to hear a live and intelligent and very particular human voice,” Gessen said, “that’s very exciting to a reader and very immediately accessible – as accessible as anything.”

Radio Q-and-A’s

Though they have a long tradition in print, interviews own a sizable share of other media, as well, and many of them are narrative. Lisa Mullins, chief anchor and senior producer for Public Radio International’s “The World,” makes it a goal to frame real-time narratives as she interviews subjects. Talking by phone last week, she outlined her approach:

When I’m preparing an interview, I want a beginning, a middle and an end. It may not stay that way when I actually execute the interview, but it always helps to have an arc to the story and have some kind of a narrative. Sometimes that narrative centers on a subject – meaning the issue that we’re talking about – or sometimes the narrative unfolds from the person’s own thoughts and history. It can go either way, but I like to have a start and a finish and then a takeaway – something that the audience will come away with at the end.

I honestly don’t believe that we always need a neat and poignant ending. We need some kind of end that doesn’t sound random. It has to be something that makes the interview whole, that gives it a sense of direction and gives listeners a sense they’ve taken a mini journey someplace, even if they haven’t gone anywhere, even if it’s just a Q-and-A on the telephone.

Mullins doesn’t employ storytelling out of a sense of duty to tradition. Her motives, she admits, may be a little more selfish:

One of the reasons I really cherish the practice of interviewing as narrative is, frankly, ego. A lot of what we do is to convince people that they will be interested, entertained and edified by whatever we’re presenting. But it’s not a given. I don’t take that interest for granted.

So my goal is to give them what I know is going to attract any listener: a really interesting story, especially around an issue they didn’t know they could be interested in. By working with this rubric of storytelling and narrative, no matter what you’re doing, you’re going to get a much better interview for yourself, you’re going to have a more cooperative interviewee, and you’re going to get the listener paying attention. It’s not like they’re being spoon-fed; they’re just being informed and entertained in the most natural way of all, and that’s through storytelling.

Mullins also emphasized the real-time role of the interviewer and the importance of discipline when a Q-and-A is going to be the final product – not to block spontaneous surprises from emerging, but to string a narrative thread that the audience can clutch, giving listeners “a place to touch down.” Interviewers have a narrative role to play, even when they’re not the ones telling the stories.

[For more on interviews as stories, read Lisa Mullins' tips for doing narrative interviews.]

“A Year at War” from The New York Times. A comprehensive interactive project that follows the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division as it heads to Afghanistan. This reminds us of AP’s 2009 “Killer Blue” project on steroids. Videos from 15 seconds to several minutes show everything from a morning shave to personal reflections on leaving home. Visitors are invited to stay tuned all year to follow the battalion’s experiences at war, and to contribute letters, photos and video to the project.

“Torn Apart” from Dai Sugano of the San Jose Mercury News (via @koci). A wife and mother tries to stop the deportation of her husband and gets arrested, too. What happens to a family when six children stand to lose both parents?

“Ramadan 2010 – Your Images” from the Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture.” A vibrant photo essay marking the end of a month of fasting for Muslim communities around the world.

“The Week in Wildlife” from the Guardian (via @otolythe). A collection of animal pictures made more interesting by links to stories in the captions (though we’re less excited about clicking to a press release for the sea slug image).

“Where Good Ideas Come From” by Stephen Johnson on YouTube (via @mediastorm).  A four-minute video of an illustration-in-process explains a concept, start to finish.

“Meet Nelson, Coupland and Alice” three different possible futures for books. Do you love them, or do you wish they would go away?

From Debbie Millman's "Look Both Ways" (details at end of post; click to enlarge)

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES

“Life in America’s toughest jail” by Erwin James from The Guardian (via The Browser). One ex-con considers the memoir of another.

Using a golf pencil sharpened on his cell walls and any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, Attwood began chronicling the abuse that he and his fellow prisoners were subjected to. He smuggled his articles out to his parents, who posted them on the internet under the mantle of Jon’s Jail Journal. It was the first blog by a serving prisoner and soon attracted a large international following. Cockroaches featured heavily.

“The Education of Ms. Barsallo” by Robert Sanchez from 5280. Sanchez follows an Ivy League Teach for America recruit in her first year.

“You all want to get to fourth grade, right?” Barsallo continues. “And you want to get through elementary school, middle school, high school, and go to college, right? Because, I’ve got to tell you, people are looking at your reading level and making a bed in prison for you. They’re betting half of you aren’t finishing high school.”

“Telling Tales” by Tim O’Brien from The Atlantic (via Arts & Letters Daily). A first-person essay on why so many stories are boring — and how to make them interesting.

When Batman was 6 years old, he grew a big, bushy tail. Often, it popped right out of his pants. This was embarrassing, of course, especially in a place like Sioux City, where tails were out of fashion among midwestern children. As a result, Batman had no friends. Kids laughed at him. One day after school, as Batman was walking home, his tail dragging in the mud behind him, he looked back and saw that he had painted a long dark stripe down the center of the road. His grandfather, who happened to be driving by, took note of this, and of how the stripe neatly divided the road into two separate lanes. What a wonderful way to prevent collisions, thought his grandfather.

“In death, a promise for the future” from Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times (via Gangrey). A terminally ill woman gains a kind of immortality.

A friend suggested that she start a blog, but she was reluctant. Jeering at ALS was fine if done in private, but she worried that her irreverence might offend those further along with the disease. Still she knew the value of words, and on June 23, 2008, posted her first entry. “I might as well join the rest of the human race,” she wrote, “and start blogging to kill a little time, since time is busily returning the favor.”

BOOKS

“Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design” by Debbie Millman from HOW Publishing. A design guru lays out first-person stories mixed with professional observations in a series of essays, each formatted with a layout and fonts that directly or indirectly evoke an aspect of the essay they present. Cross-stitched text anyone? (Check out the sample pages at the top of this post.)

“Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager” from n+1 magazine and Harper/Perennial. A book-length interview gives the skinny on how and why the economy blew up.

n+1: And so the computers themselves are making these trades?

HFM: You build the models and the computer does the trading. You actually do all the analysis. But it’s too many stocks for a human brain to handle, so it’s really just guys with a lot of physics and hardcore statistics backgrounds who come up with ideas about models that might lead to excess return and then they test them and then basically all these models get incorporated into a bigger system that trades stocks in an automated way.

n+1: So the computers are running the…

HFM: Yeah, the computer is sending out the orders and doing the trading.

n+1: It’s just a couple steps from that to the computers enslaving—

HFM: Yes, but I for one welcome our computer trading masters.

Pekar was a non-fiction storyteller who recorded his daily existence for others to draw. In the medium of American comics, where the power fantasies of corporate superheroes in tights are the norm, Pekar’s work stands out as the extraordinary testimony of an ordinary working-class man in an ordinary American city. Pekar’s main topic was the chronic ache of life, and reading his work brings relentless reminders that life takes death along for the ride.

Newspapers have published lengthy obituaries on Pekar (see our list at the end of this post). Comic book fans and specialists have populated the Web with profiles of all kinds. Harvey Pekar was, for a time, a trending topic on Twitter. But Pekar has already told us about his life in excruciating detail, and so the best source on his life may well be Pekar himself.

Encouraged by Robert Crumb in the early 1970s, Pekar started writing comics. Even when his work was illustrated by well-known graphic artists such as Crumb and Dean Haspiel, the creative spotlight was always on him as writer and protagonist. His work offered the ordinary adventures of a middle-aged file clerk suffering from a restless existential angst.

“Curmudgeonly” is perhaps the word most often used to describe him, but the tone and themes of his stories were as diverse as the team of artists who rendered his dialogue and plots. To read an issue of his “American Splendor” series is to perceive a single life as a polyphony where a character’s psychological and physical identity is never the same.

So what was Harvey Pekar’s contribution? How were his comics different?

A comic book author who could not draw, Pekar became one of the leading artistic figures of an often unappreciated medium. Like the graphic genius of underground masters Harvey Kurtzman and Crumb, Pekar’s comics were an anomaly. Nothing in them reflected the “splendor” that had defined comics for decades. His narrative universe was in fact a form of “minor literature,” focusing on the deliberately picayune instead of the grandiose.

Part Steinbeck and part Bukowski, Harvey Pekar unwittingly reimagined the Great American Novel as a comic book. If any greatness were to be found in this exercise, it would be in shedding light on the grim reality of everyday urban life. “American Splendor” did for comics what Allen Ginsberg’s “Reality Sandwiches” did for poetry, but unlike Ginsberg, Pekar’s writing was always part of a collaborative effort, where dramatic dialogue was waiting to be “performed” through the illustration styles of a gallery of artists.

Coming from the streets of Cleveland, “American Splendor” proved that “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” The series was inserted into the black and white tradition of underground cartooning, but it shied away from the hallucinogenic scatology of the 1960s comix that Crumb and others pioneered. Unlike many of his peers, Pekar did not cater to fantasy. He made no attempt to imagine a better world. He simply wrote his life as he lived it, and in collaboration with the artists he created a very personal form of urban, hyper-local, working class, neurotic autobiographic storytelling. His narrative skills transcended the grids of printed comic book pages to reach the realms of film, music, and biography and webcomics.

Like other key figures of American comic book culture (Robert Crumb, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware) Harvey Pekar was a passionate collector of jazz records, and it is possible to read in his work the syncopated melancholy of an art form in danger of extinction. “Our Cancer Year,” the graphic novel he wrote with his wife Joyce Brabner, represents the height of his drive for the existential monologue, which he had inaugurated in an early collaboration with Crumb (“The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” later translated into the 2003 film “American Splendor,” in which he played himself, as did star Paul Giamatti).

If ever there were a comic book tragic hero, it is Pekar. More Hamlet than Macbeth, he was constantly concerned with self-reflection and the imminence of death: the hospital archive where he worked most of his life until retirement was a constant reminder of life’s futility, and therefore of the importance of stories not usually told. Pekar’s storytelling was, most literally, a survival mechanism, a life-affirming exercise.

His aesthetic and political perspective acquired the critical appreciation of an educated elite; nevertheless Pekar wanted to write “clearly” in order to be understood by everyone. In 2003, he appeared in a movie about his life and work, and his belief that “you can do anything with comics” guided his life project.

In his final years, Pekar told the story of his troubled teenage years for the first time in “The Quitter,” which received widespread critical acclaim. For Smith magazine, Pekar worked with a team on “The Pekar Project,” creating an ongoing webcomic series to explore in different formats and styles his concerns about life and death in corporate America. His last work is journalistic in nature, offering glimpses of what the future of online, non-fiction graphic reporting might become.

Pekar achieved an intensely personal, visual body of work that was nonetheless collaborative. Seamlessly combining the short story with long-form narrative, he employed his obsessed depression to illuminate the beauty of the mundane.

In Harvey Pekar’s comics, life and art merge, but between the romantic ideal of success and the objective hardship of daily life, there is still a chasm. Pekar might have been successful enough to become a regular guest on David Letterman, but his pen (and tongue) remained too sharp to settle in the soft focus of mass media. His work was tense with contradictions: optimistic in its negativity and funny in its seriousness. Moreover, in a medium built on fantasy and lies it told the uncomfortable truth.

[For more on Harvey Pekar's life, see these links to obituaries and remembrances worth checking out, from Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times (with others here and here), New York Daily News, The Washington Post, The Washington Post’s comics blog, Mediaite, Comics Reporter, Comics Beat, The Comics Journal and The Guardian.]

Ernesto Priego is researching comics and narrative as a Ph.D. candidate in information studies in the U.K. at University College London. He has written previously for Nieman Storyboard on manga memoir and on comics as narrative journalism.

If you want to pass along stories you think we should include in future lists, please don’t hesitate to send them along via email or Twitter.

SPORTS

“In search of the perfect round rolling object” by Ian Jack from The Guardian online (via TheBrowser.com). Jack looks at the evolution of the soccer ball in international affairs from Kashmir in the 1890s to this year’s World Cup in South Africa.

The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series – The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski (via Tommy Tomlinson).

Tony Perez was standing at home plate, ready to hit. They called him the Big Dog, or Doggie for short. Doggie had grown up in Cuba, before Castro’s men came rushing down from the mountains. He had been raised to spend his life lugging bags of sugar at the refinery near his home. That’s what his father did, that’s what his brothers did, and when he turned 14, that’s what he did too. He would never forget the way his body felt at the end of those days. And he would always tell his mother that he wanted something more, he wanted to play baseball in the United States under the bright lights. She told him to grow up and stop dreaming about nonsense.”You will work in the factory just like everyone else in this family,” she told him.

THE BP OIL SLICK

Not surprisingly, now that the oil has begun to come ashore in the Gulf states, classic storytelling about human-petroleum encounters have begun to appear.

“Oil blankets Pensacola Beach,” by Ben Montgomery from the St. Petersburg Times, with a nod toward the Book of Revelation.

The tide came in Tuesday night, under a moon almost full, and when the sun came up and the water retreated there it was: a broken band of oil about 5 feet wide and 8 miles long. It looked like tobacco spit and smelled foreign, and it pooled in yesterday’s footprints as far as you could see.

“Seven Days in the Life Of A Catastrophe,” by Gary Smith from Sports Illustrated. The svengali of sports profiles looks at the Gulf spill up close for a week, from the God’s-eye view to the perspective from the ground, and tries to figure out what it has to do with athletics.

PARENTAL LEGACIES

“Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure” by Thomas Goetz from Wired. Goetz looks at Google co-founder Sergei Brin’s odds of getting Parkinson’s, the $50 million he’s plowed into research and the ways in which the flood of data made possible by technology will change the way medical research will be done.

“A love of story was my Dad’s gift to me,” a Father’s Day remembrance by Roy Wenzl from The Wichita Eagle (via Gangrey.com).

Dad grinned a half-grin. He was dressed in the grease-stained denim jacket he wore to drive the tractor in winter. “Why is Achilles interesting?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because he is great?”

Dad frowned, and opened the door to walk outside.

“Achilles is interesting because Achilles is flawed.”

“What flaw?” I asked. “WHAT FLAW?”

“Figure it out,” he said.

“Where I Was,” a blog entry from Laura Zigman on HearLauraBrant.com (via @susanorlean).

Everyone has had a phone call, or a moment, like that — one that divides the present and the future: who you’ve been and who you suddenly become. My phone call came on a cold quiet day in early January. It was from my mother telling me she’d gotten her CAT scan results back and that there was a growth on her pancreas.

THE WAR

“From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not winning hearts and minds,” from former Washington Post editor Henry Allen.

I’d done some counterinsurgency work as a corporal in the Marine Corps. This was in 1966, three years earlier. I was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was understandable. We’d gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong worked with him too, by cutting off his head. I think of him when I read of Taliban reprisals against Afghans who work with Americans.

One day our 105mm howitzer battery was particularly noisy, taking out a Viet Cong hamlet. Then came a cease-fire order. It seemed it wasn’t a Viet Cong but a friendly hamlet. We’d leveled it.

“Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You” stars Ali, if use of such a deliberately awkward voice counts as starring. Other characters include a California couple (“the Lipkins”) and Wells Fargo Bank, which threatens foreclosure on  the Lipkins’ house.  

Ali’s tale, which has the tone and pacing of an improbable sitcom, relates his first effort as a solo practitioner of California law. He makes us squirm in fear along with him as worries about failing clients whose trust he has inexplicably gained.

Invoking icons from American pop culture in his crusade (Rocky, Bigfoot, a Jedi Knight), Ali portays Wells Fargo as a “feces-covered bear” with whom he has a protracted wrestling match. The story follows Ali’s struggle to find the right person to talk to and the right thing to say to the disembodied telephone voices controlling the Lipkins’ future.

It’s a comic piece, but the tragedy of millions of all-too-real homeowners in foreclosure around the country undergirds the humor with substance. The dozens of unreturned phone calls and Ali’s random discovery of the magic words that get Wells Fargo to respond make it clear just how steeply the system is stacked against the Lipkins in a way that a non-narrative piece never could.

Ali bears watching, as he’s more than a lawyer who has written an interesting first-person story. He blogs and referees submissions at Goatmilk, writes regularly on Muslim communities and issues for The Guardian, and scripted a play about Muslims in post 9/11 America.

“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:

Abhinav Ramnarayan

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.