As a writer who routinely embeds in her subjects’ lives, the COVID pandemic was a blow to Lane DeGregory’s reporting. She was barred from sit-down interviews, where she would normally run through a list of 30 quasi-psychoanalytic … Read more
Science journalist Ed Yong of The Atlantic has earned the reputation as one of, if not the, top chroniclers of the COVID-19 pandemic. He won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting with a series of in-depth pieces … Read more
In late August, the Los Angeles Times published an unvarnished description of illness and death from COVID-19, written by a respiratory therapist who has worked on the front lines of the pandemic: “Here’s what the seven stages of … Read more
A brief anecdote in a Denver Post story about Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Sheeler describes how a new reporter was seated next to him in the newsroom of the Rocky Mountain News. When he introduced himself, … Read more
Before she penned a nearly 9,000-word feature about the choices that parents navigate when leaving Orthodox Judaism behind, Larissa MacFarquhar hadn’t covered this particular community. A self-described generalist, The New Yorker writer has chased her curiosity across varied subject … Read more
It was while listening to a Tamil story on Spotify that the thought occurred to me: Listening to stories in vernacular Indian languages had changed my writing. Some of the influence came from the cadences of speech. Some came … Read more
When ProPublica health policy reporter Lizzie Presser tackles a new national story, she follows the dictum of essayist E.B. White: “Don’t write about Man; write about a man.” So when she and her editor, Alexandra Zayas, wondered if using … Read more
On Saturday, the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, I was listening to coverage on NPR and wonder whether there was anything meaningful I could say on social media. Mindful of a friend’s entreaty that “if … Read more
Stories about grief can shape themselves into as many forms as grief itself. And when grief is multiplied by several people and 20 years, it splinters and reforms again and again. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, people found … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute. As the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 looms, I am reminded of one of my favorite anthologies of journalism: … Read more