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.
