Tag: reporting

For 50 years, Enthusiastic Sobriety programs have offered to help teenagers kick drugs and alcohol. But former followers say ES doesn’t save lives—it destroys them.

The writer describes her process of reporting and shaping her recent essay, “The State of Waiting,” which explores love in the shadow of war and immigration policy.

How a journalist found her voice as her mother lost hers.

“We were interested in dead girls, but so interested in them that we were trying to do the opposite of what had been done before.” 

May Jeong searches for answers after the death of her friend, journalist Kim Wall.

Fahrenthold on how he follows the money, “shows his work,” and solicits leads from Twitter in covering Donald Trump.

“I’ll never go back to dating a real woman again — no matter what happens.”

New York Times reporter Jack Healy was sitting in a diner when he received a tip about a father who had lost two of his three adult children to opioid overdoses.

When you work the night shift for too long, the murders start to link up with one another, blending cause and effect in a centrifugal force that gnaws away at the city. The veteran reporters start to see this; the man gunned down one night is related to an ongoing gang dispute, which originates in […]

Now, imagine you’re on a mission with a platoon of Afghan soldiers in a valley that you know to be under the control of insurgents, and imagine your task is to show that fact. On the one hand, you don’t want the soldiers to be ambushed—what kind of person would want that?—but on the other, […]

There must be few journalistic feats more difficult than getting inside the head of a teenager. But with “13, Right Now,” Washington Post staff writer Jessica Contrera joins the ranks of reporters who have skillfully chronicled the lives of children and teens, including Susan Orlean (read her classic Esquire piece, “The American Man, Age 10”) and more […]

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Barry Newman reflects on 43 years of feature stories that explore the eccentric humanity of our world.

Only one of the rape victims in Krakauer’s book, “Cecilia Washburn,” is identified with a pseudonym. “And I didn’t interview her,” Krakauer said. (Krakauer says he discussed the possibility of an interview with Washburn’s attorney multiple times, but she replied each time that her client likely would not consent to an interview.) The rest of […]

In 1973, Tom Wolfe published The New Journalism; the seminal book was part manifesto for a new style of nonfiction writing and part anthology of its early greatest hits. It contained work by Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, among others. Below is a short excerpt from the book’s first chapter, where […]

In the Tampa Bay Times, Leonora LaPeter Anton examines the suicide of one of her sources, a woman named Gretchen Molannen who was suffering from an embarrassing genital arousal disorder. Was there anything Anton could have done to prevent the death?

“While Hastings would later speak of having received ‘the Lindsay Lohan Mean Girls’ treatment from other political journalists, of the half-dozen fellow reporters on the charter with whom I spoke, all expressed affection for Hastings. ‘The truth is he was parachuting in to do something all of us wish we can do and can’t,’ says […]