Last October, with the Greek bond crisis emerging as a danger to the European economy, Michael Lewis wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about an order of monks accused of manipulating the crisis to bilk the Greek government out of billions of dollars. It’s 12,000 words about bonds, corruption, politics and markets, yet it moves [...]
Tag Archives: The New York Times Magazine
“Why’s This So Good?” No. 9: Herbert Muschamp builds a metaphor
August 23, 2011 – 11:41 am
What do Silly Putty, Superman and Marilyn Monroe have to do with architecture?
Short answer: Nothing.
Long answer: Herbert Muschamp. In 1997, New York Times architecture critic Muschamp traveled to a then little-known industrial city in northern Spain to see a building. He came back with a 5,000-word swoon, which ended up on the cover of the [...]
Cynthia Gorney on embracing complexity “while maintaining a sense of justified outrage”
August 19, 2011 – 10:31 am
Our latest Editors’ Roundtable looks at Cynthia Gorney’s story “Too Young To Wed,” from the June issue of National Geographic. In addition to her work for National Geographic, Gorney is a professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, she worked [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 8: Katherine Boo takes on the ties that bind
August 16, 2011 – 10:03 am
I only saw my great-aunt a few times – she lived far away – but in my family, she was kind of a legend. She wore purple every day, and kept a stash of matching purple toilet paper that she’d break out for company. She watched the Denver Broncos every Sunday with her old lady friends and yelled at the television [...]
What we’re reading: baseball, life at Disney World, and strange summer stories
June 23, 2011 – 11:41 am
A man with advanced ALS heads out for a fishing trip with his wife. A reporter goes to Walt Disney World with his children and a reefer-addicted friend. A Korean-American sportswriter over at the intriguing new Grantland site reflects on his cultural confusion when Ichiro Suzuki came to play for the Seattle Mariners. (Should he be [...]
What we’re watching: musical fracking, award-winning photojournalism, and documentaries from Cannes
May 18, 2011 – 3:26 pm
From a groovy explainer to a broken contortionist, here are some visual experiences worth a look.
“My Water’s on Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song),” by David Holmes, Andrew Bean, Niel Bekker, Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker from @Studio2oNYU in collaboration with ProPublica. The most entertaining (and catchy!) explainer we’ve seen in a long time. It recalls the [...]
Eliza Griswold on religion, violence and reporting
May 3, 2011 – 8:50 am
We spoke last week with Eliza Griswold, winner of the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.” In addition to winning the Lukas Prize, which is co-administered by Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation, Griswold has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The [...]
The Union general, Malcolm X and the tides of history
April 15, 2011 – 12:29 pm
Our latest Notable Narratives are a pair of stories that focus on race in America. Both Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Legacy of Malcolm X” (from The Atlantic) and Adam Goodheart’s “How Slavery Really Ended” (from The New York Times Magazine) take a narrative approach to key events in African-American history, albeit from opposite ends of a [...]
What we’re reading: underground art, sleepy shrinks and killings by a CIA contractor in Pakistan
March 22, 2011 – 2:44 pm
This week’s installment is a grab bag, offering both comedy (a courtroom debate over what exactly a copying machine is) and tragedy (the tsunami in Japan). These stories’ styles also vary wildly, ranging from a non-narrative yet suspenseful investigation into the killing of two Pakistani men by a CIA contractor to an unsettlingly intimate encounter [...]
Evan Ratliff on The Atavist: narrative throwback or the future of nonfiction storytelling?
February 9, 2011 – 2:41 pm
We talked by phone this week with Evan Ratliff, one of the founders of The Atavist, a just-minted publishing house that makes original narrative nonfiction available on digital mobile reading devices. Last year, Ratliff made a splash with a story of his own for Wired, in which he tried to vanish. He has also written [...]
