These were all exceptional pieces – I suppose that’s what happens when assigned all Pulitzer Prize-winning articles – but the one I liked the most was Jennifer Senior’s Atlantic piece about a family’s grief after 9/11 (and not because of the Princeton connection, though I appreciated it). Not only was the McIlvaines’ story fascinating, but her writing was amazing. She had so many amazing one liners: “a scent once so powerful that New Yorkers could smell it in their eyes,” “she’d kept too much in, and she was fermenting in her own brine,” “It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.” And that’s just to name a few.

It was such a fascinating protrayal of grief and its many forms – and how it affects life and marriage, and the paths that people take in life. The piece was long, but I flew through it. And I liked how she structured it too: telling the story, and then analyzing it from each member’s point of view. She gave the mountain metaphor and then went through how each family member saw the story and coped with the grief. It was fascinating and captivating, not to mention emotional. And I appreciate she ends with a quote – a small nod to an earlier comment (I’m sure this was intentional, and it does not go unnoticed).

The New York Times Magazine piece reminded me of a piece of advice that, ironically enough, came from a writer for the New York Times Magazine (Nicholas Confessore): don’t give your readers any off-ramps. And in my opinion, Engelhart gives multiple off-ramps – any time she goes on a tangent from the story about a medical study about dementia or a philosophical arguments about a fictional “Margo” (as fascinating as I found that section), I found it distracting. It gave me a place to leave the story – I was interested in the story, not necessarily the academics surrounding it. Perhaps that’s why I loved Senior’s piece so much: she never detracted from the story. Even the mountain metaphor was relevant, and it provided structure to the rest of the story. I didn’t feel the same for Engelhart.

Drost’s piece was similar to Senior’s in that she remained focused on the story, for the most part. I found that I didn’t mind when Drost took time apart from the story to give context on the Darien gap, because it’s important to understand. What did distract me, though, was I kept wondering how – how did she know all of this. She made the reader feel like she was traveling alongside the Cameroonians and Pakistanis the whole time. How did she know these details and these quotes without traveling with them? Get the photographs (which go uncredited until the end)? And if she was traveling with them, why wouldn’t she help them in their pain and struggles? I wouldn’t have minded inserting herself in the story as Senior did.

The Washington Post article(s) from Saslow were also great, but I found myself asking once again (and perhaps this is the journalist in me who is struggling to juggle multiple stories) : how? How could Saslow go so deep in these stories, from all over the country, and produce four in one year? Each of them emotional and intricately detailed – how?