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“Atonement” (31 Longreads in 31 Days, Day 29)
There is a simplicity to Dexter Filkins’ Atonement in the October 29, 2012 issue of The New Yorker: a company of Marines got into a firefight and wound up killing a number of civilians, including many members of the Kachadoorian family. Ten years later, one of the men in that company tries to find them…
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“The Hacker is Watching” (31 Longreads in 31 Days, Day 25)
From increasingly powerful mobile phones to free FaceTime or Skype video chats to inexpensive GPS navigation tools, we’re living in a time where a lot of science fiction of our childhoods has become reality. For tech geeks like me, we live in a golden age. We’re instantly connected with the rest of the world in…
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“Never Let Go” (31 Longreads in 31 Days, Day 19)
I’ve read at least 50 longform stories to this point this month, and I’ve picked 18 to write about so far. But none of them have affected me as deeply Kelley Benham’s “Never Let Go” seres for the Tampa Bay Times. The series is actually three stories — Lost and Found, The Zero Zone, and…
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“Fatal Distraction” (31 Longreads in 31 Days, Day Four)
I started reading Gene Weingarten’s “Fatal Distraction” in March 2009. I didn’t get to the final page until yesterday. My first attempt to read the story stopped at page six. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. “Fatal Distraction” is about people whose children die after being forgotten and left in cars, something that happens…
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A little narrative goes a long way
In last night’s NFC Championship game, which the Giants won 20-17 in overtime, the outcome pivoted twice on turnovers by San Francisco punt returner Kyle Williams. Williams muffed a punt late in the fourth quarter, which gave the ball back to the Giants, who shortly after took the lead. San Francisco managed to tie the…
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Washington Post’s “Facebook Story”
As I’ve noted before, many modern web communications create natural narratives. “A Facebook Story” by Ian Shapira in the Washington Post is a powerful work of narrative journalism that follows the story of a pregnant woman’s journey through her posts and those of her family and friends. Most of the story is told through the…
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Eclectic Method’s “story”
Over the years, I’ve been a huge fan of all forms of mash-ups and bootlegs. Back when I used to have free time, I did a bunch of my own audio mash-ups for kicks, some of which got picked up and played around the world. Anyway, I recently discovered Eclectic Method, a group that specializes…
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The Thanksgiving Narrative
The original Thanksgiving narrative is a semi-true tale about a harvest festival between American colonists and native Americans in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Reportedly, there was no pumpkin pie, only boiled pumpkin. Meh. The narrative usually stops there, leaving out subsequent massacres and wars. Anyway, the key storyline was about different people and cultures coming…
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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…