Across the United States, there’s a secret network of women working outside the law and the medical establishment to provide cheap and accessible home abortions. Investigative reporter Lizzie Presser shares how she discovered their story and brought their work into the light.
Reporting on the decolonization of South African science for Nature, Linda Nordling—a native of Sweden who had long lived in the United Kingdom before moving to South Africa more than a decade ago—found herself in an uncomfortable spot. She was passionately interested in the subject, but worried whether it was right for a white journalist from a former colonial power to tell such a story. Here, she talks about confronting those doubts and becoming the custodian of someone else’s story.
When BuzzFeed News’s Nidhi Subbaraman began covering the Rosebud Sioux tribe’s lawsuit against the U.S. government for its failure to provide treaty-mandated health care to tribal members, she discovered “seriously horrifying stories” of substandard care and neglect. Digging deeper, she found a narrative of not only hurt and outrage but also resilience and activism. Here, Subbaraman tells the story behind her story.
When ProPublica and NPR put out a call for stories about women who died or nearly died in pregnancy or childbirth, they got thousands of replies. But only 200 about the experiences of black women—even though they are most affected by this issue. That’s when ProPublica engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo got creative and used a StoryCorps model to get more black women involved in the conversation.
Earth has a memory problem. Few rocks have survived from the first billion years of the planet’s history. This amnesia has made it hard for researchers to answer big questions like How did we get here? and Are we alone? But it hasn’t stopped them from trying. In a recent story for Quanta, freelance journalist Rebecca Boyle reports on the latest efforts to settle these existential questions. Here, she shares how she tackled the oldest story in the world.
Experts say the U.S. health care system wastes an estimated $765 billion each year. In a year-long ProPublica investigation, reporter Marshall Allen searched for the sources of these squandered dollars. His resulting series chronicles several cases of needless spending, including a shocking story about a nearly $2,000 ear piercing. Here, Allen tells Rachel Zamzow about what inspired him to tackle this gargantuan topic and how he found real people to make his story come alive.
A quarter of the 520 pandas in captivity today are descendants of an individual named Pan Pan. As Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote last year at FiveThirtyEight, “Pan Pan saved his species by being really, really, ridiculously good at sex.” But Koerth-Baker also shows that Pan Pan’s story is as much about conservation’s limitations as its triumphs. In Pan Pan, Koerth-Baker found not only a protagonist, but a black-and-white avatar for an issue that is all shades of gray.
In an award-winning 2015 Science story, “Cradle of Life,” Mexico City-based journalist Lizzie Wade tagged along with scientists trying to pinpoint the event that gave rise to the Amazon’s staggering biodiversity. The group trekked through the Peruvian Amazon on a grueling 10-hour hike, crossing three different ecosystems and many microclimates to collect samples that might offer clues to the region’s past. Here, Wade talks about her experience reporting and writing her award-winning story.
On the campaign trail leading up to last year’s presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump claimed, based on a debunked 2014 study, that the election was rigged by fraudulent voters, many of whom were illegal immigrants. Coverage of the 2014 study tended to focus on its mistakes. But FiveThirtyEight staff writer Maggie Koerth-Baker wanted to find out why those mistakes occurred. Here, she tells the story behind her May 2017 feature “The Tangled Story behind Trump’s False Claims of Voter Fraud.”
Almost all patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, die from respiratory failure, usually within two to four years of initial diagnosis. But sometimes, patients get better. Duke University neurologist Richard Bedlack investigates such ALS “reversals,” in hopes of discovering something such people share in common that could offer answers about the disease. In a January 2017 episode of the podcast Reply All, Peter Andrey Smith and Sruthi Pinnamaneni talked with Bedlack; here, they tell the story behind the story.
Few journalists tackle mythic topics like resurrection, the biblical flood, original sin, sons making sacrifices for their fathers, and the ultimate fate of humanity. But stories of biblical proportions are what The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen likes best. In July 2016, he traveled to Arctic Siberia to report on a father-son team trying to reestablish an ice age ecosystem—including woolly mammoths—to fight warming that threatens the Arctic. His feature “Welcome to Pleistocene Park” appeared in the April issue of the magazine.
In a December 2016 Scientific American feature that was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and won first place in its category in the AHCJ Awards for Excellence in Health Care Reporting, journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer wove together the stories of contract hog farmers; the science of antibiotic resistance; the public policies that help perpetuate resistance; and researchers’ efforts to understand how the problem can spread from farm to table, and might spark more drug-resistant infections in people. Here, she tells the story behind her story.
FORTHCOMING FEBRUARY 1, 2020
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