What does it take to make a great story? Boston University’s “The Power of Narrative” conference, held on campus April 29-30, aimed to offer some insights. The event included the kind of writing techniques and “show don’t tell” advice you’d expect (and hope for) at such a gathering. But beyond hearing about the mechanics of narrative [...]
Tag Archives: The New Yorker
Life in the cave: highlights from Boston University’s “The Rebirth of Storytelling” conference
May 10, 2011 – 12:50 pm
What we’re reading: marking time, bugging Franzen and the gaming culture of jihad
April 26, 2011 – 9:46 am
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 [...]
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 [...]
“Long-form is absolutely not dead”: insights from ProPublica, “Frontline,” The New Yorker and “This American Life”
March 17, 2011 – 1:35 pm
The New School and ProPublica co-hosted a panel on long-form journalism last night at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City. David Remnick of the The New Yorker, Ira Glass of “This American Life,” Raney Aronson-Rath of “Frontline,” and Steve Engelberg of ProPublica sat down with moderator Alison Stewart (of PBS’ “Need to Know”) [...]
The future of long-form journalism: Frontline’s Aronson-Rath and ProPublica’s Engelberg on multimedia collaboration
March 16, 2011 – 3:16 pm
It’s always “The Future of Long-form Week” here at Nieman Storyboard, but we’re excited to note that this week, some key storytellers from different media are getting together in New York to talk about long-form, well, at length. Tonight at 7.pm., ProPublica and The New School are hosting “Long-form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.” Alison Stewart, co-anchor of the [...]
Lawrence Wright on Scientology, legal pads and creating a “universe of possible sources”
February 18, 2011 – 3:37 pm
The New Yorker put the “long” in long-form this week with “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology,” a piece by Lawrence Wright that weighs in at around 25,000 words. The article has generated a lot of buzz for its compelling storytelling as well as its subject matter: a week later the story [...]
Death, truth and memoir: the debate over Joyce Carol Oates’ “A Widow’s Story”
February 17, 2011 – 10:36 am
What is it that we really want from memoir? The kerfuffle this week over “A Widow’s Story,” a narrative from Joyce Carol Oates about the loss of her husband and their many years together brings this question front and center again. Oates was married to Raymond J. Smith for nearly five decades; in addition to [...]
What we’re reading: the long arc of reporting on Scientology, a different kind of drug war, and a new narrative collaboration
February 15, 2011 – 11:46 am
The long-form buzz this last week has been all about Lawrence Wright’s piece on Scientology for the New Yorker, “The Apostate.” It’s ostensibly a profile, but it’s also investigative journalism and a compelling narrative. Wright’s deft storytelling was recently addressed on this site by Roy Peter Clark, who looked at a passage from “The Looming Tower,” [...]
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 [...]
