For one thing, it’s 42,535 words long. This lets you know that you’re into Serious Business right there, before you even get started. Then comes the opening, torn straight from a 19th-century adventure novel and refracted through a cyberpunk prism: “In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three [...]
Tag Archives: Wired
“Why’s this so good?” No. 21: Neal Stephenson’s plot-free adventure story
November 22, 2011 – 12:14 pm
“Why’s this so good?” No. 15: Michael Lewis’ Greek odyssey
October 11, 2011 – 10:00 am
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 [...]
Old story, new media: David Dobbs brings family secrets to the Atavist
July 26, 2011 – 2:13 pm
We recently talked by Skype with David Dobbs about the mystery that began with his mother’s dying wish. Dobbs’ years of efforts to solve that mystery eventually became “My Mother’s Lover,” which was published last month byThe Atavist.
Dobbs has written at many lengths in several formats: He’s completed three books on science and environmental [...]
What we’re reading: death in all its guises
March 8, 2011 – 1:21 pm
A week into March, we’re eager for spring, but the narrative stories we’ve unearthed lately consistently offer up darker themes that go against the promise of the season. We’ve rounded up a few that focus specifically on death: murder on campus, suicide at work, death in combat and perhaps most surprising, a delicately crafted obituary [...]
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 [...]
Harvey Smith on environmental storytelling and embedding narrative: “It has to be possible to miss some things to make finding them meaningful”
January 14, 2011 – 1:44 pm
In a bit of serendipitous surfing last fall, I stumbled onto “What Happened Here?” a presentation by Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch at the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The presentation focused on environmental storytelling and referred not only to gaming, but also to documentary photography, narrative journalism and a treatise on comic [...]
What we’re reading: novelists do nonfiction, a witness recants, and two friends jump into the Charles River
November 5, 2010 – 11:29 am
Today, we set aside election reporting (which we’ll return to soon) in order to gin up some reading for your Thursday anxieties: dubious conviction and cultural claustrophobia, not to mention suicide and delusion. But there are surprises – and hope – tucked in here: the rich life of the first child diagnosed with autism (now 77), the [...]
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 [...]
USC’s Henry Jenkins on multimedia storytelling: what can journalists learn from He-Man?
May 28, 2010 – 5:18 pm
When it comes to narrative multimedia, how can we reimagine storytelling from the ground up? What if templates for new models were right in front of us? In a recent post on his blog, University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins addressed the topic of “He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia.” (Hat tip to Nieman Lab [...]
Boston Bookfuturists look at mapping, charting new narratives
February 11, 2010 – 11:48 am
Continuing the “future of narrative” theme for this week, today we look at some of the experimental stories discussed at the first-ever Boston Bookfuturists Meetup on January 29, hosted by Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum. Nieman Lab director Josh Benton attended and brought back some links to interesting new approaches to narrative.
The discussion touched on “Mr. Plimpton’s [...]
