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What I Learned by Reading 31 Longreads in 31 Days
Now that I’ve wrapped up my 31 Longreads in 31 Days challenge, here are some thoughts, observations, and takeaways from the experience. 1. Longform nonfiction is alive and well With the collapse of the magazine industry and the shrinking newspaper business, many have suggested that longform nonfiction feature writing is a dying genre, with business…
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The Art of Writing the Tough Profile
Gay Talese’s famous “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is a legendary profile for many reasons, perhaps most notably because the iconic singer wouldn’t talk to him directly. Talese nonetheless delivered an incredible profile of Sinatra, without the benefit of a direct interview. I thought briefly of Talese’s story when I read Nick Paumgarten’s excellent New…
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Long-form narrative and the art of cooking slow food
In the Washington Post last week, Joel Achenbach wrote an interesting feature on the diminishing opportunities for long-form narrative nonfiction in the newspaper-death-spiral/Twitter/iPhone era. As seems to be the case anytime that I read about trends in the magazine and news business world these days, the outlook isn’t promising. There seem to be two lines…
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The stories we tell
One of my favorite shows of all time was Six Feet Under. What made the show so great was that, even though every once in a while something extraordinary happened, most of the drama came from every day life decisions: where to go to school, whether to stay in a relationship, or when to change…