Month: November 2025 (Page 5 of 6)

I’ve been thinking about how the unique trait of longform stories is that they don’t simply tell you what happened, but make you understand why people acted the way they did, or how something big feels up close. It’s a much more introspective form than news that gives you the facts in motion. Longform slows them down, rewinds them, and asks what they reveal about people and systems once the noise dies down. It’s journalism that doesn’t rush to close the file, because the editorial function is so inherently different.

Pamela Colloff’s story is about corruption, but what really sticks is the slow pace of it, and how small compromises pile up until a man might die because of someone’s performance in court. The piece doesn’t rush to outrage, and instead it lets you sit in the absurd normality of the system. It’s almost boring at first, and that’s the point. By the time the story opens up, you realise the horror isn’t just the lie, but how routine the lie became.

Jennifer Senior’s essay on Bobby McIlvaine does something similar but with grief instead of injustice. There’s no clean shape to it. No beginning, middle, and end. It’s full of detours: family arguments, memories, other people’s versions of the same story. But that’s how grief actually works. You read it and think that’s what loss sounds like when everyone’s trying to make sense of the same silence in different ways.

Kathryn Schulz’s earthquake piece works on the opposite end. She’s talking about a disaster that hasn’t happened yet. Still, she writes it like it already has, tracing the science and history until the “when, not if” feels personal. Paradoxically, I did not find it particularly sensational. It’s just steady, calm, and terrifying because of it.

The Ukraine piece is all about how governments try to get ahead of a story, and how information becomes part of the battlefield. It’s fast, reactive, almost like a news feed, but still grounded in people making impossible choices in real time.

Reading all these together, what struck me most was how they’re all wrestling with control: who has it, who loses it, and how stories themselves are a form of it. Each writer builds structure out of something messy and uncertain.

John McPhee said structure in nonfiction “causes people to want to keep turning pages,” but it also feels like a way to hold chaos still just long enough to look at it. These pieces don’t pretend to solve anything. They just give the mess a shape so we can stand it for a little while, and maybe understand it better before it starts moving again.

In 2016, the German Consulate in New York City received 350 applications from Jewish individuals reclaiming their citizenship. In 2024, however, that same consulate received 1,500 applications, resulting in 700 naturalizations. Many attribute this increase of over 300% to the reelection of President Donald Trump and his increasingly authoritarian governance. 

Eva-Lynn Podietz, a retired social worker in New York City, told NPR in July, “I just thought, well, it really would be good to have this passport…Jews are almost always in exile. So maybe that’s just part of being Jewish.” Laura Moser, Jewish author and former politician who moved to Germany in 2020, told me something very similar when I met her in a Berlin cafe in October, “I do think there’s something very Jewish about having an exit plan.”

However, for many Jews returning to Germany two generations after their ancestors fled Nazi persecution, the reality reveals that the nation has not moved as far from its past as they once imagined.

When I asked Moser how she explains her repatriation to native Germans, she told me, “I don’t volunteer that I’m Jewish anymore…I did in the beginning, but they fetishize us… They’re like, oh, wow, it’s so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much…They feel exonerated.”

She also offers me another interesting piece of information: “Almost all the congregations here are led by Germans who converted…I find it really distasteful to sort of adopt this victim’s mentality when their grandparents were literally Nazis.” 

Deborah Feldman, who moved from New York City to Germany in 2014, recently released a book called Judenfetisch (Jew Fetish), exploring this phenomenon – and, more specifically, those she describes as “fake” Jews who convert and “lie about their ancestry and their upbringing in order to position themselves politically in ways that are personally profitable to them.”

In this story, I want to report on Jewish Americans who have reclaimed their German citizenship and either already relocated or are considering relocating to Germany. I want to use these first-hand accounts to depict the potential differences between their expected reception in Germany and the realities they face upon arrival. 

To report this story, I want to contact Deborah Feldman, whom I quoted above, Tanya Gold, a Jewish journalist who has worked on similar projects previously, and, through talking to these sources, hopefully get in contact with more Jewish-Americans in Germany. 

In conclusion, I hope this story illuminates how U.S. domestic politics and Germany’s conception of “memory culture” shape the experiences of Jewish Americans both in Germany and at home, while also touching upon questions of return from exile and the limitations of historical redemption.

This week’s readings on structure and long-form pieces of journalism were quite interesting to read in conjunction. In his book and New Yorker article, John McPhee outlines different ways to structure long-form articles and books alike, centering chronology and main characters that remain consistent throughout pieces. Transitions, too, he writes, are important to ensure that readers can keep track of the line of the article and remain engaged. However, I found McPhee’s description of structure types to be extremely formulaic. Unlike academic writing, which often follows a rigid essay or study structure, I typically do not think about structure in journalistic writing as something so prescriptive – likely due to the more creative, storytelling aspect of it. My process of writing articles normally starts with a draft that is written intuitively, which I then revise and restructure afterwards. Some of the long-form articles we read this week also shed this rigid structure. 

Kathryn Schulz’s “The Really Big One” in the New Yorker starts with a gripping lede – the first-hand account of the 2011 earthquake that struck Japan. However, it takes her a while to actually get to the topic at hand, not the great earthquake mythologized to occur in California along the San Andreas fault line that is referred to as “The Big One,” but rather a more disastrous potential earthquake stemming from the Cascadia subduction zone. She then goes through a series of historical examples of earthquakes as well as a way to physically imagine the intensity and mechanics of this potential earthquake. While she has one notable character included in the lede, that character is not really followed throughout the story. Despite not following a structure that may not be typical within long-form articles, I found Schulz’s story to be fascinating – especially considering the amount of technical information she needs to convey to readers. 

Jennifer Senior’s “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” conversely, centers one family grappling with the death of their young son, brother, and soon-to-be fiancé, Bobby, on September 11th, 2001. The tension driving the reader to keep reading the article in this case takes the form of a physical artifact: the final diary that Bobby wrote before his death, the possession of which sparked tension between his mother and girlfriend. The story is for the most part structured around these characters, who each describe their grief and how the twenty years since 9/11 have shaped them. However, structure itself plays a role in this story. Senior describes how a 22-year-old Bobby critiqued the fact that she concluded her first five pieces in the New Yorker with a quote from others. She writes, “I credit Bobby with teaching me a valuable lesson: If you’re going to cede the power of the last word to someone else, you’d better be damn sure that person deserves it.” Thus, of course, she leaves the last words of this piece to Bobby – a snippet from his final diary in which he reflects on his perception of his role in life. This piece exemplifies the way that structure can itself play a role in a story and not just act as an apparatus for storytelling. 

Does John McPhee not have an editor? I, too, have spent afternoons agonizing over how I could possibly start or continue or finish a piece. Luckily, I’ve editors who I can consult and who sometimes know the inside of my brain better than I do. Or maybe this is a consequence of McPhee’s antipathy towards a nutgraf — something that I have always found to be a useful exercise, even if it does not remain in the final form of the piece.

I, for one, found his description of structure totally incomprehensible. Clearly, he has found a consistent way to do things, but I think Ceci is correct to say that this is more a look inside his head than applicable advice for us other human beings. I felt similarly with Rosenthal’s napkin drawings. Are the lines meant to indicate rising tension, or the story “coming back,” or something else?

In my experience, structure is intimately tied to the content of the reporting. I feel that McPhee and Rosenthal really gloss over this (Stewart feels slightly better). Sometimes, the narrative is obvious: X happened and then Y happened which shows Z. A scene might be so arresting and strongly reported that it can stand entirely on its own, the connections to the rest of the story so obvious they don’t need to be drawn out. Others might require popping in and out of the narrative to explain to the reader what exactly is happening. You don’t know what the story requires until you get down to the ground-level details.

I take the position, then, that the reporting comes first, and then the structure. Following a story requires chasing threads and conducting interviews that might end up being dead ends; naturally, those do not go in the piece. I think reporters generally have an instinct that, for their story, they need a central character or anecdote, some contextual information, and a thesis, and they will keep reporting until they have found all of those components. That’s not structure, which is much more intimate. I see that as much closer to gathering the basic ingredients for a story. I suppose the process of structuring can reveal deficiencies in reporting: you really need another scene, or don’t quite have the correct contextual quote, or some other crucial building block. But I guess I still don’t see that as structure guiding the reporting. Yes, you know that you need something specific to plug the hole; but you only know that specific thing exists and is sourceable because you’ve spent all that time reporting in the first place.

I am surprised that McPhee seems to skip over another essential component of the structuring process: deciding what doesn’t go in. “When I was through studying, separating, defining, and coding the whole body of notes, I had thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with two or three code words representing a component of the story. All I had to do was put them in order,” he writes. The presumption at the beginning of the writing process that it will all fit is astonishing. I have never once found that to be the case in my writing.

Central Question: How does education continue to define and transform the lives of Afghan women as they move from restriction to exile?

Overview: This piece would be a three-part story that follows the role education plays for Afghan women at different points throughout the integration process (in Afghanistan and abroad). Each section will connect to the next, tracing how Afghans adapt at every stage. I would be looking at what education looks like now after the shut down, those who still want to leave, and those who are integrating to a new education system and life abroad. The article would explore not just what was lost, but how people are continuing to learn, teach, and integrate in different ways. 

• Part One: This section would focus on the first wave of disruption. What does one do when you’ve built your identity around being an educated young woman, and suddenly it’s taken away? This section would look at what education means within the community and what this means for women trying to get an education abroad.
  • Interviews:
    • Female and male Bard Berlin students (3).
    • Mustafa Mayer — who completed his master’s and now works at the Brennan Center. 
    • A number of former teachers and journalists (who also have kids).

• Part Two: The second section would look at people who still want to get out, or who continue their studies in secret either through underground networks, VPNs, or private lessons. This part explores how education survives, and what drives people to keep studying. 
  • Interviews:
    • An organization working in Afghanistan right now to help get people to Germany. 
    • The executive director of another organization that works on the ground in 19/34 Afghan provinces. They primarily implement programs in the country that center around youth leadership.
    • A man whose sister is still in Afghanistan learning from home.

• Part Three: The final section explores what happens next: how do people rebuild their educational lives after leaving Afghanistan? How do they integrate into new academic systems, navigate language barriers, and redefine their sense of self as students and people in a foreign context? This part will tie the story together by also addressing the careers Afghans, especially Afghan women, are able to have.
  • Interviews:
    • 2 Afghan business owners who started off in very different places, but now own very successful companies.
    • Afghan Cultural Center that employees and helps integrate countless Afghans in the United States.
    • Afghan scholars that can speak to this integration process.

In Gummersbach, I met a dozen young Ukrainians who had come to evangelical Christianity after fleeing the war. They spoke at length about how the teachings of Baptism had helped them think through the trauma of losing family and the uncertainty of navigating refugee life — and how they felt the Orthodox church couldn’t provide those answers. My piece seeks to answer how faith became transmitted to these young people. Are they entirely reliant on evangelical communities already present in the places where they fled? Are there particularly prominent online influencers? And how prominent is this movement? Is it powerful enough to ruffle feathers with the Orthodox Church? My day in Gummersbach will be one scene in this.

I’ll be speaking to:
– Friends of the young Ukrainian churches I met in Gummersbach, who represented multiple churches in western Germany, including in Essen and Dusseldorf
– Ukrainian church leaders and their young congregants in the United States

I am presently considering any evangelical movement, not just Ukrainian Baptists; I am interested, for instance, in talking to Sunday Adelaja, a Nigerian-born Pentacostal preacher who ran a megachurch in Kyiv before the war. I am also keeping an eye for influences from American evangelicalism; there is not a single obvious Ukrainian who has emerged as a particularly prominent voice for conversion.

Upstairs, four American college students from Tennessee rifle through a pile of wooden planks and rubbery wallpaper, occasionally landing on a dusty roll of film or movie poster. One girl has been collecting trinkets for the past two days and has amassed a collection of coins and floral tiles to bring home with her. Downstairs are more Americans and around twenty Ukrainians diligently drilling holes and hauling branches into large red containers. All are intent on turning this dusty, cavernous theatre – which still shows signs for Indiana Jones 4 – into a new church and community space for the upwards of 1000 Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach, Germany. 

Among them is Pastor Nickolas Skopych, an unassuming man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard and kind eyes. He grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, born to parents who did not believe in God. At 18, feeling young and aimless, he stumbled across a few American evangelicals on the street distributing brochures about Christianity. “I took it because we didn’t have literature about Christianity. It was impossible to have the Bible, or New Testament,” Skopych explained. These brochures changed the trajectory of his life, infusing it with new meaning. “I take this brochure, and read it, and think about life. I understand that the very high meaning of life, I can only find with God,” he said. “It helped me.”

Decades later, Skopych — having become a Pastor of the Almaz church in Ukraine — visited Gummersbach just before the start of the war. After Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of his congregants and friends followed, bringing their friends and family members with them. Skopych had spent the past year praying for a larger church space. Last year, Skopych met the senior pastor of First Baptist Church (FBC), a megachurch in Hendersonville Tennessee, who was visiting Germany. This pastor had been seeking a “native, German-speaking” church to collaborate with, but was so moved by Skopych’s story that he changed course. A few months later, he returned with the head of church missions, who was similarly compelled. Skopych found the theatre space. FBC paid for it. All of this culminated in 10 FBC members flying to Gummersbach on a mission to convert the theatre into a church. 

Since the start of the war in 2022, 152 Ukrainian churches have been planted across Europe, 64 of which are in Germany. When I spoke with the head of missions at FBC, he expressed a desire for the mission to extend beyond Almaz church in Gummersbach. “This will be a central training hub,” he said. “It will be an opportunity, not only for Ukrainian churches to be expanded, but also, I feel that this is the beginning of a revival of Christianity in Europe.” 

My piece will thus explore the growing connection between American evangelicals and Ukrainian refugees, with a focus on Germany, but possibly expanding to Ukrainian experiences in Tennessee as well. Why are these American evangelicals so interested in assisting Ukrainian refugees in particular? How have these 64 new Ukrainian churches across Germany been shaped by American missionaries and ideals? How do these newfound connections through Christianity impact the politics of evangelical Americans back home when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war? Is this actually reviving German/European Christianity on a larger scale? 

My reporting from Gummersbach will play a central role, supported by scenes described to me from Tennessee. I have already spoken with most members of the American mission, the head of FBC missions, as well as Pastor Nickolas, his children, and his friends. I have also spoken with one of the Ukrainian women whom a member of the American mission, Mike Bible, sponsored to come to America through U4U. I plan to support these with interviews from a few more new Ukrainian churches in Germany (contacts I can access through Pastor Nickolas), and academics who study church planting. 

I’ll contextualize my piece in reporting on how American evangelicals have lobbied to support Ukraine in the U.S. and the history of evangelical church planting. I find it an interesting connection that evangelical Christianity was disseminated to Ukraine through American missionaries in the first place, and now these Ukrainians – persecuted for their Christianity by Russians – must turn to these same American evangelicals to support their religious and communal lives in the diaspora. There has been no reporting on this topic outside of Church blogs and Christian media, so I’m hoping to get this piece published in a Tennessee news outlet or some more mainstream American media (likely combined with Miriam’s reporting on the related topic of how and why young Ukrainians have been turning to Christianity to process the war). 

My final piece will be about Germany’s adherence to the legal principle of ‘universality’ and the Syrian community’s changing climate of faith in German legal institutions after the fall of Assad in Syria. I want to cover the Trial on the Siege of Yarmouk, which was what I was writing about initially and is a centerpiece to the discussion on an ongoing universal jurisdiction case, but I want to write more generally about the history of universal jurisdiction in Germany, how it has impacted the Syrian migrant community, what German justice systems mean to Syrians after repatriation efforts enacted by the government, etc.

What does a system like universal jurisdiction mean to Syrians in a nation increasingly plagued by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment? What does it mean when so many of them, after countless years of living in German society, still haven’t obtained their German citizenship? What does it mean when both universal jurisdiction and asylum are both rooted in a legal philosophy of universality that Germany claims to stand for, but only the former is being actively embraced? I would like to weave the stories of Syrian-Germans, lawyers, and experts in universal jurisdiction to craft my final piece. I would ideally like to extend/incorporate the profile of Hesham Moamadani in the final feature — Moamadani was a Syrian refugee, but recently gained his German citizenship and can enjoy its benefits. How has his experience differed from his friends, who are Syrian but have not yet obtained citizenship? I also want to incorporate my interview with Syrian lawyer Anwar Bunni, who, even after experiencing the horrors of Assad’s government, remained robustly faithful to the German legal system, as well as my interview with Berit, who spoke with me about anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany and EU law.

Reading John McPhee’s piece on structure then Cece’s response affirmed my initial reaction to McPhee’s piece. As someone who writes frequently and and in great volume, structure has always been my best friend. But I think that journalistic writing specifically often benefits from a lack of structure, or at the very least, the lack of an anticipation for structure. A story should build itself based on the evidence provided — one shouldn’t ‘decide’ on a story before seeking out the sources to support it. This is difficult, because by the time I’m interviewing my subjects, I usually have a vague idea on what my final story will look like, and therefore seek out subjects knowing that they would play a certain role in my story. Which isn’t to say that many of the interviews I conduct go exactly as anticipated — it’s often quite the opposite. But I wonder if McPhee’s understanding of effective structure, like Cece outlined, is only achievable when structure is already presumed before the reporting process begins and merely becomes more visible after the writing process starts. I also disagree with McPhee in that ‘good structure’ is something that you can learn by reading about structure. I think it’s a muscle you train that gets better at recognizing more effective structures over others — the best way to learn good structure, I think, is to read pieces with good structure, not read about good structure itself. Also, while I was not a huge fan of McPhee’s prose (which consisted mostly of random, abrupt anecdotes in his time as a writer,) I did appreciate how much emphasis he placed on the importance of the visual. While the bigger question of whether structure is anticipated/planned afterwards remains unanswered for me, I do believe that organizing your story visually is significantly more helpful than, say, organizing it through text. Flashcards, doodles, and drawings have served me very well in organizing some of my longer works. I enjoyed Rosenthal’s piece for this reason: it visually summarizes some common formats that great writers have used to format their stories. I especially liked the radiolab drawing, which I think is how a lot of great investigative podcasts are structured: starting small then expanding into something much bigger than itself. I thought the New York Times piece we read on Skalnik embodied this structure well — starting off with a smaller case that initially did not seem related to the key character of the piece, we eventually expand into the subject himself, and the different cases he influenced the rulings for. Of course, knowing these drawings to heart alone will not produce a good story — the core needs to support the flesh. But once you’ve developed a moderately strong writerly muscle, I think they can be more than helpful.

The readings this week provided information on a less talked-about aspect of storytelling, structure. Journalists must all eventually decide how to best shape their story for their readership, yet structure is rarely discussed. Rob Rosenthal, John McPhee, and James Stewart all suggest that structure is a crucial and overwhelmingly important aspect of the storytelling process. Reading their reflections, suggestions, and advice was extremely helpful in educating me on what my own journey could look like as I decide what the structure of my piece will look like. Likewise, reading Pamela Colloff’s New York Times investigation into how a con man’s testimony sent dozens to jail made it clear that structure is what allows the audience to best comprehend information, especially when the story has a lot of characters.

What connected all of these readings for me was the fact that structure seems to be a deliberate decision that each journalist makes when writing a story. Each author approaches this process differently, yet their lessons overlap in many ways.

Rosenthal, for example, describes story structure as a visual process. His napkin drawings illustrate how a narrative can unfold. What intrigued me most about this approach was that he seems to emphasize that the drawings he makes help shape the motion of the narrative, and aren’t necessarily meant to be inflexible. I thought the pictures were likewise really helpful when it came to showing structure as a rhythm rather than a strict outline. His examples, probably deeply influenced by his past in radio storytelling, show how structure helps determine the pacing of the piece. This was not something I had previously thought applied to the written word.

John McPhee takes a different approach to structure. What stood out to me most early in the article was how he used note cards to make sense of an overwhelming amount of information. His method seems more structured and methodical than Rosenthal’s, but just as useful. I especially appreciated his thoughts on how crucial order is in storytelling. McPhee, for example, has his beginning and ending planned out before he writes a story. I wonder, however, how he knows when the piece should end before he even starts writing. Finally, his honesty about the paralysis that comes with trying to condense so much reporting into a limited number of sentences really resonated with me.

Pamela Colloff’s story about the serial jailhouse informant is a perfect example of how the principles discussed by Rosenthal and McPhee can be brought to life in practice. Her investigation could have easily unraveled when she started to explain decades’ worth of legal records, yet she constructs a structure that guides readers effortlessly. Colloff begins with a single, vivid case that grounds the narrative in reality, then gradually introduces characters, scenes, and details that reveal more about the con man, Paul Skalnik. By switching from the micro to the macro throughout her piece, Colloff shows how to create an emotionally gripping story.

Seeing how Colloff’s structure holds such a complex story together made me think about how I might apply similar principles in my own writing. That’s where James Stewart’s perspective felt particularly useful. His advice that “using chronology as your paramount organizing principle doesn’t mean simply telling a story in strict chronological order” was eye-opening. Even chronology, something seemingly self-explanatory, can be used to make a story more interesting.