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 [...]
Tag Archives: The New York Times Magazine
What we’re watching: musical fracking, award-winning photojournalism, and documentaries from Cannes
May 18, 2011 – 3:26 pm
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 [...]
Katy Butler shows the bitter side of medical intervention
July 2, 2010 – 5:07 pm
In our latest Notable Narrative “What Broke My Father’s Heart,” from The New York Times Magazine, the broken heart that reporter Katy Butler writes about is both emotional and literal. Her father’s slow heartbeat leads to the insertion of a pacemaker, which at the end of his life prolongs an increasingly debilitated existence. Butler describes [...]
David Grann on murder, madness and writing for The New Yorker
April 5, 2010 – 3:48 pm
After years spent thinking he would become a novelist, David Grann turned to nonfiction, realizing that if he found intriguing characters and situations in real life, he “simply had to excavate them and tell them in a compelling way.” He has gone on to produce many memorable tales, like his account of a deeply problematic execution in Texas [...]
Sports Illustrated‘s Alexander Wolff on writing and the future of narrative: “I’m not sure I’m going to be on that train”
April 1, 2010 – 1:36 pm
Yesterday, we highlighted a Sports Illustrated story about the lone goal from a U.S.-England World Cup match in 1950 and the tragic disappearance of the man who scored it. Today, we hear from Alexander Wolff, who wrote the article. If writing awards could play ball, Wolff could field a football team from his trophy case, but in these [...]
Two Americas, Two Restaurants, One Town
November 18, 2004 – 12:24 pm
Skloot explores the parallel political, cultural and gastronomic universes of two restaurants: a locally owned, eccentric bistro and a Bob Evans. We happened to read this piece not long after reading “Just Getting By,” a first-person account in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer about waiting tables at a Bob Evans. The two make a nice pair [...]
