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From Esquire Classic: Mark Warren on “The End of War” for C.J. Chivers
C.J. Chivers, widely regarded as a superman of war coverage, covered conflicts for The New York Times and Esquire for 14 years. In “The End of War,” Mark Warren explains what made Chivers such a...
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From Esquire Classic: Bill Zehme and Johnny Carson’s last interview ever
Esquire marked Trevor Noah’s transition to hosting “The Daily Show” by putting him on the cover of its March 2016 issue (see “Trevor Noah…Is Not Like You”). Noah has to step out of the large shadow of...
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Annotation Tuesday! Matt Negrin and “Silence in the Favela”
Matt Negrin writes politics, not sports. Just 29, the Bloomberg Politics reporter’s first job after college was live-blogging about President Obama for Politico, and he’s also written for ABC’s World...
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Dale Russakoff: “How do you write a book without a hero?”
Dale Russakoff spent 28 years as a reporter for The Washington Post before writing her first book, “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?” Russakoff, who took a buyout in 2008, was near the...
View ArticleEsquire Classic: Mark Zwonitzer on the making of “What It Takes”
“What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s exhaustive account of the 1988 presidential election, took so long to report and write—six years in all—that it wasn’t published until the 1992 election. Clocking...
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Annotation Tuesday! Sarah Scoles and “How to Save People from Snakebites”
Science presents particular challenges for narrative writers, like deciphering the often arcane language of scientific studies, or coaxing pithy quotes from scientists accustomed to speaking in...
View ArticleEsquire Classic: Mark Warren on the odyssey of Stephanie Lee, “Patient Zero”
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, Esquire executive editor Mark Warren and writer at large Tom Junod drove to Mississippi to visit the displaced families of National...
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Three points in favor of “literary journalism”
Josh Roiland Nobody’s really happy with the term “literary journalism.” But we need to learn to love it, says Josh Roiland, assistant professor of communication and journalism at the University of...
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Annotation Tuesday! “Criminal” and “The Fifth Suspect”
Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer launched “Criminal” in 2014, with producer Eric Mennel. Judge and Spohrer had worked together on “The Story” with Dick Gordon, a public radio program that went off the...
View ArticleWhy’s This So Bad? Confirmation Bias and Failed Narratives
There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s scathing journalism send-up “Scoop” where Wenlock Jakes, the world-beating American reporter (based on John Gunther of the old Chicago Daily News), is sent to the...
View ArticleFollowing the money to great stories
The audacious claim by the government of Bangladesh that hackers spoofed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York into giving them tens of millions of Bangladesh’s dollars has us salivating at the prospect...
View ArticleFrom Esquire Classic: “Love in the Time of Magic”
Mid February marked the anniversary of Magic Johnson’s 1992 return to the NBA after having retired the previous fall, when he announced he was HIV positive. He turned in a triumphant, dramatic...
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Annotation Tuesday! Sarah Schweitzer of the Boston Globe on “The life and...
Sarah Schweitzer has spent almost two decades honing her narrative instincts at The Boston Globe and the St. Petersburg Times. In April 2015 she was acknowledged by the Pulitzer Prize committee, which...
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Radio Diaries’ Joe Richman and “The Last Man on the Mountain”
Joe Richman David Gilkey Joe Richman practices narrative without narration. His production company, Radio Diaries, crafts public radio stories whose characters do all the talking. In the absence of a...
View ArticleEsquire Classic: Elizabeth Kaye and great profile writing
Esquire has long been fascinated by men in power—and by the frailties and anxieties that lie just beneath their polished facades. Beginning in the late eighties, contributing editor Elizabeth Kaye...
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Journalism and Art: Complementary and Collaborative Storytelling
Carrie Roy saw it in her head before the conversation was even over—a giant wooden sculpture of the back half of a cow, atop a square brown plinth of manure. She was sitting in a bar in Madison,...
View ArticleEsquire Classic: Colum McCann, Bitcoin and the Winklevoss twins
The last time most of us heard of the Winklevoss twins—hell, the first time we heard of them—was in David Fincher’s acerbic 2010 movie, The Social Network. You remember: Tyler and Cameron (brilliantly...
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“Power of Narrative” Conference: How Shakespeare would go viral
What does Shakespeare have to do with clickbait? How much in common did ancient indigenous peoples have with the Twitter community? Was Dante’s “Inferno” the original “explainer” story? Amy O'Leary The...
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Annotation Tuesday! Antonio Regalado and liquid biopsies
In August 2014 Antonio Regalado introduced an almost heretical approach to cancer treatment to the wider world in a feature he wrote for MIT Technology Review. Regalado, the senior biomedicine editor...
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Esquire Classic: Mike Sager’s country includes old men
Back in 1998, magazine writer Mike Sager was best known for his fearless profiles of drug dealers, crackheads, porn stars, and neo-Nazis. But that year Esquire handed him a very different kind of...
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