At least I have time to continue blogging again.

Here’s a list, from The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, of some of his favorite pieces of journalism over the last year:

Nearly 100 Pieces of Fantastic Journalism

Stephen King’s advice to young writers (for any writer, really). Read a lot. Write a lot. Maddeningly simple.

Here’s my favorite book review, written by H.L. Mencken in 1909, and collected in H.L. Mencken’s Smart Set Criticism, William H. Nolte, editor: (remarks in brackets [ ] are Mencken’s)

A Novel Thus Begins

Apologies for Love–F.A. Myers. ” ‘Do you remain long in Paris, Miss Wadsworth?’ Earl Nero Pensive [!!!] inquired, as he seated himself beside her. His eyes, like beaming lights out of shadowless abysm, were transfixed upon her as by magic force. . . .” Thus the story begins. God knows how it ends!

David Grann, the author and New Yorker staff writer, is profiled in this article from Slate. I read The Lost City of Z and, while I enjoyed it, especially the deep reporting and vivid scene reconstruction, I was ambivalent about Grann’s central “trick,” (and I’m sorry to call it that, but that’s what it felt like). It’s his technique of sending the reader through the narrative, as Slate puts it, with blinders on,

 building up our expectations in one direction, then yanking the rug out from under us—often to reveal another rug, soon to be yanked, beneath that one.

Throughout “Z,” Grann knows something important but we don’t get the final reveal until the closing pages. I had two reactions: First, I gasped. Then, I thought — well, hell, if I had known this 200 pages ago I wouldn’t have needed to read all this. Then I thought, well, of course — that’s what a story is. The storyteller knows how it ends and the reader doesn’t. Why read a murder mystery when the author could say, on page 3, “It was the jealous husband.” The end.

So what bothered me couldn’t have been that he simply withheld information from the reader. That’s a writer’s job. What I can’t put my finger on is why it bugged me in this book. Why did the final “a-ha!” feel like a trick to me?

I like David Grann and as soon as I have some spare time I’m going to read The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Meanwhile, any thoughts on how he handles surprising the reader?

Lots of posts about violence, war, and death. So here’s one from Ian Frazier, “Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father.” It’s his Old Testament take on parenthood.

Here’s one from NYT Mag near the top of the page on longform.org today by Alex Kotlowitz, an author and teacher whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, and on This American Life, among other places.

In this 2008 piece, he profiles Violence Interrupters in Chicago, and a doctor who aims to treat urban violence not as a moral problem, but as a public health crisis.

The first step to containing the spread of an infectious disease is minimizing transmission. The parallel in Slutkin’s Chicago work is thwarting retaliations, which is precisely what Hoddenbach was trying to do in the aftermath of Emilio Torres’s murder. But Slutkin is also looking for the equivalent of a cure. The way public-health doctors think of curing disease when there are no drug treatments is by changing behavior.Smoking is the most obvious example. Cigarettes are still around. And there’s no easy remedy for lungcancer or emphysema. So the best way to deal with the diseases associated with smoking is to get people to stop smoking.

Kotlowitz is the author of Never a City so Real, and The Other Side of the River.

Tim  Hetherington, nominated for an Oscar for “Restrepo,” and Chris Hondros, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for Getty Images were killed in Misrata, while covering fighting in Libya. Two other photographers were injured. You can read about it here. Here’s a trailer from “Restrepo,” worth watching again.

In 2010, 57 journalists were killed around the world in the course of doing their jobs.

Photos by Chris Hondros.

As my Facebook friend Rebecca Skloot pointed out on her Twitter feed (something about this phrase is gross, but these are mod-dren times) this was a good year for science writing. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, took this year’s Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Since I’m swamped grading student essays and getting the magazine out on time, I will leave you for the rest of the day with an excerpt from his book. Here’s a list of this year’s other Pulitzer winners. And speaking of Rebecca Skloot, check out The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

(image from Amazon)

The team of elderly badasses at “60 Minutes” has looked into the claims of author Greg Mortensen in his inspirational memoir “Three Cups of Tea,” and found problems with his  facts. In his book, Mortensen said he became lost in northern Pakistan after failing to summit K-2. The residents of a small village rescued him and nursed him back to health. Inspired by their kindness, he promised to come back and build a school. Now, his Central Asian Institute claims to have built 170 schools in the region.

The “60 Minutes” story challenges the basic facts of the narrative, in part by talking to Mortensen’s porters who claim that he was never lost. But it gets worse than allegations of fudging a memoir. The BBC sums it up nicely:

The CBS 60 Minutes report alleges that his charitable foundation took credit for building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan which do not exist.

The documentary also says Mr Mortenson uses the charitable group as a “private ATM machine”.

Mr Mortenson denies the allegations.

Do we have another case of an author who should have disclosed to readers that he had fictionalized his story? Do we add that to the list with “Love and Consequences,” and “A Million Little Pieces,”?

Mortensen, the NY Times is reporting, is already backing down a little bit, at least on the issues of the narrative (no link to the NYT because I’ve reached my 20 article limit this month and haven’t decided what to do about a digital subscription):

But he added a disclaimer in an interview with The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, saying that while he stood by the information in the book,” the time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993.”

I have other deadlines this morning so I only have time for a mini-sermon. If you’re going to say it’s true, be pretty damn sure it actually happened. Don’t come to me later and say it was “true enough.” If you said from the beginning it’s “true enough,” then I know how to process it. But people are drawn to “true stories” because they are factually true. “Did that really happen?” readers ask. It matters. No dissembling after your audience has made you into a beloved millionaire. That’s just shitty.