By Monique Brouillette and Jacqui Banaszynski

[dc]C[/dc]ongratulations to Cerise Castle and Carvell Wallace, this year's recipients of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. The prize was launched in 2018 by the Heising-Simons Foundation as part of a mission to support journalism as "an essential arm of U.S. democracy." The award, which is an unrestricted $100,000 cash prize, goes to freelancers who demonstrate excellence in long-form journalism about underrepresented or misrepresented groups in America. Like recipients of the MacArthur Fellows Program, often known as the MacArthur Genius Grant, the winners are nominated anonymously — there's no application process — and chosen by a panel of esteemed journalists.

The Mosaic mission is stated on its website, but I was curious about the foundation's particular focus on journalism, and especially freelance journalism. We asked Brian Eule, director of journalism and communications. His response:

Journalism is a crucial for a multicultural democracy. And exceptional journalism has the power to bring about new understanding. It can break down isolation. It can hold the powerful accountable. Furthermore, in today’s journalism, freelancers are both vulnerable and valuable. They are a one-person team of journalist, business manager, administrative assistant, accountant, and lawyer. They often work with limited financial resources. And yet, some of the most important works of journalism come from these individuals who have the freedom to commit long periods of time to their work.

So, in 2018 we launched this prize. The hope was that it could help call attention to the recipients’ great work and promise, and give them the financial freedom to continue their work. And by being the largest dollar amount for a journalism prize in the country, we hoped it would signal the importance of their work—of amplifying the voices and stories of underrepresented and misrepresented communities.

Bravo that. And bravo to the important work that earned Castle and Carvell the support to do more on behalf of a struggling society. Links to specific projects that caught the Mosaic judges' attention can be found on the website, and more on the two journalists' individual sites. Nieman Storyboard reached out to both to talk more specifically about their start in and passion for journalism. The conversations have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

CERISE CASTLE

[caption id="attachment_174013" align="alignleft" width="500"] Cerise Castle[/caption]

Cerise Castle is a multi-platform journalist who has written for The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Magazine, and has produced and hosted segments for VICE News Tonight, NPR and the nationally syndicated radio program Marketplace. Her stories explore trends and issues playing out in the neighborhoods and communities of her lifelong home in southern California: COVID-inspired underground party scenes, LGBTQ skateboarding groups and a stoner hangout site formed in the rubble of a long-forgotten landslide.

More recently, her reporting has taken a sober turn with "Tradition of Violence," an ambitious investigation and 15-part podcast that exposed the culture of criminal gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department. Castle discovered a total of 18 gangs inside the department, complete with gang names, initiation rites and a wide array of criminal activities. The investigation won a 2022 American Journalism Online Award for the best use of public records and a 2022 International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award. It also drew harassment, retaliation and physical threats from inside the sheriff's department.

How did you get into journalism?
 In eighth grade, my class visited New York City on a school trip. We stood outside Rockefeller Center where they were shooting the Today Show, holding signs and everything. Co-host Ann Curry came out and spoke to some of the people gathered there. When sheasked me what I wanted to do for my career, I said wasn't really sure. Then she asked me what I enjoyed in school, and I said English and history. She suggested that I might consider becoming a journalist. I went home, joined the school paper and have been reporting ever since.

What are your guiding principles in your work?
I like to get to the bottom of things, to really figure out what's going on and present an honest depiction of the situation. I am always thinking about what I consider to be pretty basic tenets of journalism: talking to everyone, asking a lot of questions and keeping a healthy sense of skepticism. I don't think we talk enough about how you need to be unafraid to be assertive.

Can you give an example of when you had to draw on these principles in your work?
The deputy gangs story is the kind of story that's hard to report on because the members are so secretive. You really need to have someone on the inside to get to the bottom of it, but it's difficult to figure out where things stand and what people's motivations are. It can be hard to discern where the truth is when everyone has an agenda. You're trying to figure out why this information is being offered and how valid it is. You really need to remember all of those things and keep them at the forefront.

How do you navigate that uncertainty?
One thing I always tell new journalists I mentor is to not be afraid to be assertive. It can be intimidating, certainly, to sit down across from someone who is a power broker and ask very difficult and potentially infuriating questions. I've received threats from people in power about stories I've published or worked on. And it can be scary to have an official telling you that there will be consequences if you publish a story or to have or to be banned from a public building as a result of publishing something.

But those actions should also remind you how important the story is, and how crucial that kind of work is.

I was highly motivated to get the deputy gang's story out in a timely manner because the sheriff was running for reelection against some challengers. I wanted people to have a really good understanding of what is going on inside the department, what the culture is like and how much influence these deputy gangs have. I wanted to share that information to help the public cast an informed vote.

How do you define your writing voice?
I think the voice that I use to tell this story is different from other outlets that cover policing because I'm not afraid to call things out, ask the hard questions and question the police narrative. I am relying on those basic tenets and haven't abandoned them. I was the only reporter that was using the words “deputy gangs” to describe these criminal organizations inside of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Two weeks ago, I saw the Los Angeles Times use the term “deputy gangs;" that's the first time I've seen them use that reference. What we usually see is very couched language like “subgroup fraternity” or “clique,” which lessens what exactly is going on.

How do you think of your audience? Who do you try to reach with projects like this?
I want to reach everyone in Los Angeles County. It is why I'm so passionate about sharing the deputy gangs story in as many mediums as possible. I've written a series and done a podcast. I'd like to see this become a television show, a documentary, a movie or perhaps a feature film.

Beyond Los Angeles County, this is something everyone needs to know about. We aren't the only county with criminal gangs in our police forces. I've been contacted by police officers across the United States who have begged me to come out to their locale and investigate the gangs they're seeing within their own forces. I want as many people as possible to know that this is happening so they can make informed decisions about how their policing policies are created, how they are hiring sworn officers and how they are disciplining and dealing with people who are violent and commit crimes.

CARVELL WALLACE

[caption id="attachment_174012" align="alignleft" width="425"] Carvell Wallace[/caption]

Carvell Wallace is a journalist, author, podcaster, essayist and memoirist based in Oakland, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, and MTV News, where he writes about race, arts, culture, film and music. His 2019 book "The Sixth Man," the co-written biography/memoir of Golden States Warrior forward Andre Iguodala, spent four weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.
"Closer Than They Appear," his 2017 podcast on the Al Jazeera network, examined the divisions in America following the 2016 presidential election; an episode, in which he returned to his hometown to find a childhood friend he hadn't seen in 27 years, was honored by the Radio Television Digital News Association.

Wallace has an eye for highlighting the humanity in his characters, taking us into the lives of athletes, actors, social justice leaders and everyday people; he explores their struggles and the drive to move past them. Along with profiles of others, he has written about his own childhood trauma and recovery.

How did you get into journalism?
It was a creative thing I could do when I had kids. I trained in theater and I also played music pretty seriously, but both of those things required spending long periods of time away from home. Writing was something that I could do at home after the kids went to bed. That's part of why I got more serious with it. Then I wrote something on Facebook that went viral. Huffington Post asked to publish my blog and I got a few editors asking me if I'd be willing to write about various things for their publications. For a year or so, I did that sporadically while I worked full time; I would write at night, work during the day and parent my kids in the evening after school. At some point, I ended up getting offered a somewhat full-time job at MTV News.

Do you have a guiding principle for your work?
I try to look at everything through the lens of love. Not romantic love or love as a nice feeling, but the work and action that we undertake in order to grow our humanity, protect our humanity, share and feed our humanity. We live in a world in which there are so many things that ask us to turn our back on our humanity. There's great suffering, we have to choose between us or them, and when I write I'm always concerned with the question: How do we resist that? How do we resist the draw to abandon our humanity? That's the lens that I look at everything through.

In "The Sixth Man," which was the biography of NBA player Andre Iguodala, I didn’t have to tell the story of how this guy played in his youth leagues, what happened in high school and college, when he got drafted and when they went to the championships. Don’t get me wrong, that’s all in there. But the real question is what has this guy tried to do in order to maintain his humanity? And what forces in his life and career work against that? I think that is the main thing that I look for when I approach my work.

You write a lot of profiles. Do those questions guide your approach to them?
Yeah. Profiles are a good vehicle for that. Because the main question of a profile is Why is this person like this? We know who they are, but why are they like that? By the time we profile someone they're usually already famous and we know some things about them. But the job of the profile writer is to figure out why they're like they are. Most people are the way they are because they are trying to feed something inside of them — a need they have. Even terrible behavior can be a misguided or perverted way of trying to fill a human need. That leads me to observe things like how they engage with me at the table, how they eat their food, how they interact with the world as we sit in the park.

I tend to think about stories, both fiction and nonfiction, as having three central elements: a person, character or group of characters who really want something; something that stands in the way; and a reason they want the thing. The thing that stands in the way might be the forces of racism, the community, or it might just be life. You want to go to the moon, but we can’t go to the moon. The observed part is all of the listening and paying attention to what the person is saying and what they're not saying. It's like knowing how to sit in silence and let a person reveal themself to you.

I think sometimes, as reporters, we want to go in with a list of questions and get the interview done. I rarely have lists of questions anymore. I usually have two or three questions that I'm going to get to, but I have to see how the conversation unfolds. I ask this person how their day was, what they experienced on the way over to this meeting and what that brings up for them. I know that ultimately we will get to the question of why they walked away from the scholarship or whatever the primary driving question of the piece is. I don't think I can get them to answer that unless we've established all the build-up of who they are. So that's the observation part.

Then the reporting part is knowing how to put what you observe into words that other people can understand and experience. That requires a lot of patience with yourself as a writer. You have to understand your own feelings and emotions and what emotions this person brings up in you.

What issues are most important to you in your work?
I'm really interested in justice and liberation. For justice, I want to know whose story hasn't been told correctly. Who was underrepresented? Are our systems working fairly to provide a real chance of life for everyone?  As I grow older, I think more about liberation, which asks what it takes to be free from the systems that oppress us. These systems that we operate under are actually screwing all of us over. The older I get, the more that's clear to me.

How do you bring these issues out in your stories?
The first piece I wrote that went viral was about being a single parent of two elementary school kids on the night that we were waiting to hear from the grand jury in the Michael Brown testimony. (Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.) Instead of writing about how Brown shouldn't have been shot, I wrote about every parenting decision I had to make on that day while I was waiting for the grand jury to announce they were going to indict. I wrote about those mundane parenting decisions — picking up my kids, deciding what to get for dinner, stopping at the grocery store, thinking about homework, braiding my daughter's hair and my son having a tantrum before bed — so people could feel less alone. This world that we live in, in which we have to focus on horrifying things while also trying to maintain the logistics of our homes and families, that's a thing that's happening to all of us. By putting it on a piece of paper you're giving people a chance to say, “Oh, I'm not trapped here.” We're actually collectively in this, and there is liberation in understanding our collective goals and struggles, as opposed to keeping our struggles individual.

***

Monique Brouillette is a freelance journalist based in southern Maine who writes about science, health and tech. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, Quanta, Science and several other publications.

The post Courage and empathy: Winners of the 2023 American Mosaic Journalism Prize appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]G[/dc]igi Georges is a self-described city kid. She is a long-time policy advocate and advisor who was born and raised in Brooklyn and spent most of her life moving between cities in the northeast working in local and national politics. But shortly after Georges had her first child, a daughter, her family moved out of Boston to a small town in New Hampshire, and spent more time at their home on Mount Desert Island, Maine, near Acadia National Park and split their time between the two rural communities.

Her family’s relocation not only meant a new way of life for Georges, but also a very different childhood for her daughter than the one she had growing up across the river from New York City. The national conversation about rural America had a “very downbeat tenor” at the time and Georges couldn’t help but wonder what effect it would have on her daughter? Would she feel the need to escape her rural childhood to find happiness? Could she have a fulfilling life and career without abandoning the small town she was raised in?

These questions provided the spark for her new book, “Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America.” She set out to find answers by peppering her local reverend with questions about the young people in the community, and then a principal, and superintendent. “I wasn't really sure where I was going to take this, it was more of an exploration,” she said.

Through this inquiry she eventually found the five women who would become the central characters to her book. They were young women growing up in Downeast Washington County, an area that fit all the stereotypes of rural America: an older population due to an outflux of young people, industries that were succumbing to market pressure, high rates of poverty and years of economic stagnation. But these women seemed to be thriving and achieving despite the challenges. They were happy and succeeding although their communities had significant hardships. “What I was hearing about rural America didn't feel quite like what I was seeing,” she said. “I felt like the lens wasn't quite wide enough that maybe it wasn't capturing everything.” She spent the next four years following the lives of these women as they made the journey to adulthood. Each one had a slightly different story that was representative of the community:

The scholar who ended up at an Ivy League school. The girl from a family struggling with abuse and opioid addiction. The empowered woman who supported herself through lobster fishing. The basketball star and hometown hero. And the girl from the established, well-to-do family.

What results is a book that goes beyond the typical media accounts of struggle and gives voice to the young women coming out of these towns.

As someone who recently moved with my family from the city to a more rural area in New England, and as a journalist who is interested in telling the stories of communities far away from my own, I was curious how Georges was careful in telling a story about an unfamiliar place in a way didn’t promote stereotypes. And how she established herself as a confidant to the community that entrusted her to tell their story.

[caption id="attachment_165182" align="alignright" width="450"] Gigi Georges[/caption]

[dc small]H[/dc]ow did the idea for this book come about?
I moved to New Hampshire in late 2013. And I was paying close attention to what was going on in rural America, as many people were at the time. And what I was hearing didn’t quite match what I was seeing. Raising a daughter in a more rural place, I started to see that what what we so often hear in the broader national conversation that tends to focus on hopelessness and despair wasn’t what I was seeing. I saw something else; something more than that. I saw thriving despite the challenges. Hope, not hopelessness.  And a community spirit.

There's a friend of ours who is a reverend based at a nonprofit called the Maine Seacoast Mission. I sat down with him early on in my thinking process. And he said, “You know, if you're interested in rural issues and in rural education and you want to get a real feel for it, just go an hour up the road from Acadia National Park. You'll be really surprised by what you see.”

He made a couple of introductions to the school superintendent in Downeast Washington County and to the local principal and a couple of other folks. They were all incredibly welcoming. I didn't go in with a preconceived set of ideas. I went in, essentially, with a blank slate. And they were incredibly gracious and said, “Look, if you want to sit down with a bunch of the kids of high school, we'll arrange it.” Then I did a series of informal focus groups, and out of those focus groups came the five young women that I ended up chronicling over these past four years.

When I met the girls through the focus groups I had this “aha” moment where I saw the girls exceling. In many ways they surpassed the boys in academics, in athletics, in the arts, and in general ambition and leadership.

We often hear that young people need to escape rural American in order to succeed, right? There is a notion that rural American is something to be left behind, that one cannot succeed or find happiness there. That theme dominates in the media and the movies. I wanted to widen that lens. In my early time in in rural places, particularly in Maine, I saw people who were dealing with the challenges in a very upbeat, positive and optimistic way. They were people who felt good about the future of their towns, who leaned on each other who had tremendous communal spirit, and who have an amazing amount of social capital. I felt like that was something that needed to be captured.

How did you pitch the story?
I had the good fortune to have a great agent, who helped me think about how to package this. And we worked through a proposal that focused on two broad themes. The broader theme was around widening the lens on this dominant, downbeat narrative. But we really leaned into the second theme, which was following the lives of five young women in an intimate, on-the-ground way. By immersing myself in their lives and in their stories, I would be able to tell a story that has not yet been told — and that is the story of young women's voices in rural America.

How did you deal with the ethical concerns involved in following and identifying the girls?
Right from the very beginning I gave them the option of anonymity of whether or not they wanted to use their real names. Because it's such a small-town environment and everyone knows everyone, we had a conversation where we acknowledged that everyone in these towns would know who they were immediately. And I wanted to make sure that each of them recognized that and was comfortable with it. The level of anonymity is a thin veil, if you think about it.

I felt that changing the names would at least give them the ability to have some shield with the broader audience and some level of privacy. We had a number of discussions early on about that and came to the decision to have all of the names changed, including those of teachers, the principal, mentors and family members. I recorded and transcribed all of the interviews. Whenever there was anything sensitive that we talked about, I would go back and check and re-check with them. Ultimately, I shared their sections with them. Each of them had an opportunity to read through for accuracy all of the work that would include their stories. I said to each of them, “Tell me if anything in this is factually incorrect, if I'm reflecting anything contrary to your remembrance of it.”

There was nothing in those drafts that any of the young women felt needed to be altered or that they felt uncomfortable with. I was really pleased by that. I honestly think that that really reflected the fact that we spent so much time (prior to my writing) just going back and forth, and over all of their stories, and their remembrances. I really felt confident that I was getting the broader story right as they remembered it.

What was the reporting process like?
I spent about six months before I even started interviewing anyone digging into the data of Down East Washington County, which ended up being a really important part of the book. I got as many public records as I could about economic issues in Washington County, and about the status of rural women there, and more broadly about domestic abuse in Washington County. About marriage, childbirth and education issues, particularly around vocational education and the state of schools. And about faith and religion. Those were my big buckets.

Once I felt like I had somewhat of a grasp on that, I went in and started spending time in Washington County. Our house in Maine is an hour's drive from there. I would get up in the morning and drive to one of the towns and spend the day interviewing the girls and, ultimately, hundreds of community members, family members, educators, and mentors who lived and worked in that area. I continued to do that over the course of the four years as I got to know more and more people.

With the girls, it started with a sit-down in the school cafeteria or in a local restaurant. That expanded eventually. With Mckenna, for example, I went out on her lobster boat a couple of times and fished with her. I went to her softball games. I went to her classes in school and to her home and visited with her family. With Josie, I visited her at Yale. I needed and wanted to be with them, and experience their lives throughout the year. There were a lot of road trips and a lot of hanging out. They were so gracious to let me tag along.

And finally, how did you take all the piles of research and notes and interview transcripts and pull it together into the book?
After each interview, I would take some notes for myself about what I saw and what I perceived. I would sit with the transcription, and quickly highlight some of the pieces that I thought were most resonant or most interesting, or that I wanted to follow up on. The vast, vast majority of interviews were recorded. It was helpful to have those transcriptions, even for some of the conversations that were not central to the book’s focus, because that gave me a sense of environment and atmosphere. I would also talk into my digital recorder or into my phone as I was driving along, and take video because I wanted to capture and remember the Downeast environment, which is really the sixth — or perhaps first — character of the book.

***

Monique Brouillette is a freelance journalist who covers science, health and technology. She recently relocated from Boston to southern Maine.

The post How the voices of five young women from remote, coastal Maine challenge stereotypes appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]M[/dc]ost stories about female inventors simply congratulate women for being as capable as men. But Pagan Kennedy, author, podcast producer and New York Times columnist, thinks we need to move beyond this storyline. When she set out to write her latest work, “The Rape Kit’s Secret History,” published on June 17, 2020, in the New York Times, she asked a different question: What are the things designed by women that truly changed life for women?

In the 8,000 word story, Kennedy recounts the invention of the rape kit — the forensic collection device for people who are sexually assaulted. The invention marked a powerful turning point for women in the late 1970s, whose rape accusations were typically dismissed.

The idea came to her when reading news reports about a backlog of thousands of unprocessed rape kits that were piling up in warehouses across the country. Some of the kits dated back 30 years and held evidence that was never used to bring perpetrators to justice. Kennedy was outraged, of course, but was also struck with awe at the mere existence of such an important tool. “I was just thinking, isn’t it amazing this exists at all!?" she told me. "Not many other technologies are so designed from a female point of view that in a way that empowers women like this."

[caption id="attachment_160120" align="alignright" width="468"] Pagan Kennedy[/caption]

Formerly the New York Times Magazine’s “Who Made That?” columnist, Kennedy has chronicled the history of inventors who changed the world with their ideas. She considers herself an expert in finding people. But, when she set out to find the inventor of the rape kit she kept running into walls. First, there were conflicting accounts for whom to credit. Some reports cited the Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, who had died years before. And others cited activist Martha Goddard, who had seemingly vanished from existence. Kennedy set out on a quest was to find the truth.

She spent hours collecting little clues on Goddard’s whereabouts, talking to her friends, listening to oral histories, tracking down family members, reading obituaries, marriage certificates and birth certificates, and systematically calling people in the yellow pages. The research was so time-consuming that Kennedy hired two research assistants to help her scour records and make phone calls. She became “obsessed” and “completely fell down the rabbit hole” during the six months she spent following the twists and turns of the rape kit’s history. Eventually, Kennedy would find out that Vitullo, the domineering police sergeant, had taken credit for Goddard’s idea. Goddard herself had slipped into obscurity, living in a trailer park in Arizona, battling alcoholism and depression and eventually dying alone, after alienating most friends and family.

Stringing together details from oral histories that Goddard recorded, interviews with friends and family, and a pile of research taken from newspapers and criminal justice textbooks, Kennedy takes us on a journey deep into the world before and after the rape kit. The story also echoes timely themes like police negligence, discrimination and abuse.  The story caught the attention of TV producers; Kennedy is the process of negotiating it as a TV series.

Neiman Storyboard reached out to Kennedy to learn more about her process. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

[dc small]T[/dc]he details of the story are so vivid. One really gets a sense of how assault against women was downplayed in the 1970s. You quote cases where police threw out evidence and textbooks that declare incest was most commonly initiated by daughters with their fathers. How did you find all these little details?
Actually, very little had been written about it. So, I began just going through the Chicago papers. I have a newspapers.com archive and I search in these specific years 1972-74 for any mention of rape in Chicago, and that's how I hit upon all these news stories that had been totally forgotten. And then I was able to kind of reconstruct day-by-day what was happening.

The article is remarkably timely considering the debates we are having about police abuse of power. How did you manage this?
It was ready to go in March and then the COVID shutdown happened. My editors wanted to hold it and I agreed. And then the George Floyd protests started. It got held for a very long time but I feel like they ran it at just the right moment as people were really having discussions about the role of police.

I did a little bit of rewriting on the article before it went out because I always feel like you don't want to be too obvious. You want the reader to feel like they're connecting the dots instead of you, so I alluded to the controversy about the police. This story was relevant because it told a story of how deeply out of touch the police were with actual crime-fighting.

Were you ever tempted to tell this story from the point of view of the victims?
This is not just a personal story but the story of what we want criminal justice to look like, and what happens when you bring the female gaze to criminal justice. I didn’t want to tell a victim story, but the story of how the criminal justice system ended up being so biased and failing to serve so many people. What I am fascinated with is how people who suffer from a problem are uniquely positioned to solve it. And how other people who are in power are very bad at solving problems because they don't have skin in the game. If you're an able-bodied person, for example, and you look at a pair of stairs, you don't see a problem there. But if you are in a wheelchair your view of how the designed environment should be is completely different. And if you're somebody who is vulnerable to sexual assault, as many people are, then your view of how things should be is very different.

What kind of feedback have you gotten about the piece?
In the reader's comments that people were making the connection to today’s events and saying, you know, “I can't believe my police force just bought a helicopter for a million dollars that they can't process rape kits.” It got people to think about the values reflected in the way that policing happens not just from a race angle, but also from a gender angle.

There is a lot of suspense and build up around the whereabouts of the main character Martha Goddard, which you reveal at the very end of the piece. How did you decide to put this “big reveal” at the end?
I have an MFA and studied under novelist John Barth at Johns Hopkins. As a young writer, I was fascinated with the type of book that was super readable and would sweep readers up. And so, I read screenplays and screenplay books and looked at the mechanics of film writing for inspiration. Writing in screenplay mode you can only convey something as visual images and dialog, actions and characters. Everything has to be shown; nothing can be told. You're trying to create a movie inside of virtual reality for the reader. So then instead of telling them things, you're making them go through the world and see the clues. You want the reader to be a kind of detective.

How do you work this suspense into the story?
You need to advertise it. You have to give the reader some kind of foreshadowing and let them know this is going to be something so you better stick around. I have taught writing a ton and one mistake I see people do over and over again is frontload or do an info dump because they are afraid the reader won’t know enough.

How did you finally track Marty Goddard down?
I called all the places that Marty Goddard had lived. I hired someone to help me with the phone calls. But then, the thing that cracked it for me was that two people I interviewed had mentioned Marty’s brother died in a freak scuba diving accident in the 1980s. She had been close to his kids, including her nephew, Scott Goddard. I spent so long searching for the brother’s obituary, but couldn’t find it. By the way, obituaries are a really incredible tool for finding people and histories and tracking things down. I hired a researcher also who searched birth and marriage certificates. And I found a marriage certificate that lined up with Marty Goddard and had her father’s name on it. So, I began searching for that name and found a bunch of obituaries, including the man who died in the scuba accident. That’s when everything fell into place. I tracked the location of the family down and found the right Scott Goddard. He was able to tell me about Marty’s later years.

What was the biggest challenge in this search?
People were not super excited to call me back and talk about a family connection to the rape kit. It's not like you're telling them they are connected with the inventor of penicillin or something like that.

You are in the process of selling the rights of this article for a TV show, how did you negotiate that with the New York Times?
My contract with the New York Times was very murky about film and TV rights. Before I submitted this article, I thought it might have TV potential, and I said to my editor, “I really need to maintain the dramatic rights.” And they put a clause in the contract about that. Then, I reached out to a TV agent and the offers came in.

Monique Brouillette is a freelance journalist based in Boston who covers science, health and tech. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, Quanta, Science and several other publications.

The post What happened when a journalist tracked the origins of the rape evidence kit appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When I let myself indulge in celebrity profiles, I expect an enjoyable mix of gossip, gawking and who’s who. The successful mix usually includes a broken marriage, a rift with a parent or a glimpse into an admirable social life.

That is what I thought I would be getting when I tucked into the profile of Reese Witherspoon in the March issue of Vanity Fair. It’s Reese Witherspoon after all, whom I mostly associate with beyond-spunky Elle Woods, the sorority girl turned Harvard law student as played in the 2001 rom com “Legally Blonde.” I had a vague sense that it might be about the actress reinventing herself mid-life, making the leap from perky starlet to entertainment mogul. That would have been a good read, hitting all the marks.

But the story wound up being so much more. About mid-way through, it became clear it was more social commentary than celebrity dish. Witherspoon, a champion who has fought for equal pay and better roles for women in Hollywood, serves almost as guide to other women in what can be a brutal industry, showing the way forward in a post-#MeToo world. The rising Hollywood power player doesn’t just give lip service to the goal of equality for women; she actually creates roles for them and demands equal pay.

By the end of the profile I had moved from blindsided to inspired. The Witherspoon I was introduced to here was an embodiment of new feminism.

Then I paged back to the beginning for another surprise: The profile was written by the celebrated novelist Ann Patchett.

Refusing gotcha journalism

Patchett has written seven novels, including “Bel Canto,” for which she won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. She also has short stories, some memoir-esque nonfiction and essay collections to a long list of credits. Last year, she published her first children’s book.

The Witherspoon profile was, in some ways, another debut for Patchett. She was contacted by an editor at Vanity Fair who wanted the profile to coincide with the new HULU series, “Little Fires Everywhere,” based on the novel by Celeste Ng and co-starring Witherspoon. Patchett and Witherspoon both live in Nashville, Tennessee. They first met in 2018 when Witherspoon interviewed Patchett for her book club website “Hello Sunshine,” about Patchett’s purchase of Parnassus, an independent bookstore in Nashville. Later that year, they met again when Witherspoon was touring to promote her memoir, “Whiskey in a Tea Cup.”

Patchett agree to do the profile, but insisted that she would not write anything damaging or negative about the actress. She told the editor that “I’m not going to dig. I’m not going to talk about her first marriage. I’m just not going to do any of those things.” Or, as she told me, “I really like this person.”

Even without the usual celebrity dish, the piece is compelling read that paints a well-rounded picture of a woman who lives on her own terms, and has had an enormous impact on an entrenched industry. I was drawn into a woven narrative that let me eavesdrop on breezy conversations between two successful women, then led through bursts of revelation and insight. It finishes with a new understanding of what it will take for women to succeed.

I spoke with Patchett about her process in crafting this profile.  Our conversation is edited for length and clarity, then followed by an annotation of the text.

When Vanity Fair approached you to do this profile, did the editors give you any guidance on what they wanted it to cover?
No. And not only that, but when I asked how long they wanted the piece to be, they said “anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 words.” That is a big gap. A 2,000-word piece is one thing and a 5,000-word piece is a completely different thing. It was very strange for me to go in with that kind of open space. And they pay by the word. They were basically saying that I was allowed to decide how much I wanted. Claire (Howorth) was like, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

How did you decide on structure?
I default to chronology and structure a piece around how the day is structured. I type up all my notes and pull out the good quotes. I run a highlighter over whatever I think is actually interesting. And then I just tell it like a story.

I’m a novelist. So it’s like, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Then I looked for the transitional moments where I could fold in the things about (Witherspoon’s) past or her career or the project she’s working on. But I use the actual time that we’re together as the scaffolding and then look for places to stick in the backstory.

What do you see as the difference, if any, between this kind of writing and your fiction?
Oh, there really is no overlap (laughs)! Except that I know how to write. But nonfiction is so much easier for me than fiction. In fiction you have to come up with everything —  endings, characters, everything. I always feel like I am on a vacation when I’m writing nonfiction.

But, in nonfiction, I worry about hurting people. You can make up your mind about somebody before you meet them and use their words for them or against them.

Here is an interesting thing: I won’t read interviews that I’ve given. I find it the most excruciatingly painful thing. Because I can say something and reporter will love me and I can say something and reporter will hate me.

But is there any overlap between character development in fiction and non-fiction?
In fiction, something that I think about goes back to a writing class I took in college. My teacher used to say that when you read Chekhov, if a postman delivers a letter, you have some sense of that postman even if even if the guy is on stage for one sentence. Through the words, you have a sense of that person. So I think that as far as minor characters are concerned, that is something that I get from fiction. Reese’s son walks in the room. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to embarrass him, or drag him into it. He’s a teenager. He’s got his private life. But I can say he walks in the other room and plays piano. You have some sense of this kid, but it’s respectful.

The annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; responses from Patchett in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button, which you’ll find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu, or at the top of your mobile screen.

THE BOOK OF REESE

Reese Witherspoon talks to ANN PATCHETT about stardom, career paths, the pursuit of happiness and—what else?—reading

I first met Reese Witherspoon three years ago at Parnassus Books, the store I co-own in Nashville. She’d come to interview me for Hello Sunshine, her media company, and when the interview was finished, our events manager asked Witherspoon if she’d be willing to have her picture taken with one of our shop dogs, Mary Todd Lincoln, a dappled, silky dachshund who’d been photographed with any number of celebrities in the past. It’s Nashville, after all; it’s the kind of thing we do here. Witherspoon took the little dog and tucked her into an open space in the bookshelf behind her, then proceeded to run the gamut of human emotion: joy, surprise, eagerness, love, suffering, hope—spinning out a master class of acting in less than a minute. The amazing part was not how good Witherspoon was at this—she’s a very good actor—the amazing part was how she managed to shine the enormous light of her talent onto a nine-pound dog. In frame after frame, the viewer’s eye skips the movie star and goes straight to the dachshund, which first appears coy, then knowing, then resplendent. If Oscars were given to pups, everyone would have agreed that this was Mary Todd Lincoln’s year.

Which is pretty much the point I want to make about Reese Witherspoon. People are complicated and have many dimensions. As someone writing a profile you wield great power in what you choose to say about your subject. How did you make those decisions? It would have been just as easy to write a 4,000-word profile on who she is on her television shows. Shrill, grating, undermining, playing into stereotypes about women, you know? I would have never done that. You really have to decide about how you are going to approach somebody. Is respect one of your top considerations? As we all know, this isn't what I do for a living, right? Maybe if I was trying to make my living as a celebrity profile writer, I would think I need to make myself as exciting and interesting and important as possible. But I don't feel that way.

Boiled down to a series of brightly colored squares on a board game, Witherspoon’s career would look something like this: success as a teenager, including a starring role in The Man in the Moon at 15, then at 23 an indelible performance as the irritatingly determined Tracy Flick in Election, then full-blown stardom at 25 for the even more indelible Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, then an Oscar at 29 for playing June Carter Cash in Walk the Line.

And after that? Well, after that things fizzled. Maybe success wasn’t a good fit with her scrappy, driven nature, or maybe by looking for more roles as rich and complex as June Carter Cash she was essentially looking for polar bears in Los Angeles. They simply weren’t there. The years that followed yielded nothing particularly memorable, and in 2012, The New Yorker flung her on the ash heap of has-beens, in a cutting sentence, deep in a profile of another actor, laundry listing stars who were no longer stars. Reese Witherspoon was officially washed up at the age of 36.

Thirty-six is ancient for a gymnast, late for a model, midlife for an opera singer, nascent for a surgeon, and fuzzy for a female actor. Many talented women have been chewed up and spit out by 36, while a lucky few keep going. At this point in the story of Witherspoon’s career, there was no guarantee of professional longevity. Reese’s history is condensed quite compactly here and it works. How do you figure out your pacing — where to condense and where to draw it out? [annotate color=" blue"]You write it and then you read it. Where your eyes start glossing over, trim it up. And then notice the part you are interested in.

Here she gives a great deal of the credit to her husband, Jim Toth, for helping her reimagine her job. She and Toth, her second husband, have a seven-year-old son named Tennessee. Toth had been a very successful talent agent at CAA and was recently named head of talent and acquisitions for Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile video start-up. (I throw this in to highlight the fact that the marriage of Witherspoon and Toth includes two people who stay ahead of the curve.) He told her that if she wasn’t finding the roles she wanted, she needed to develop them herself.

If she felt like betting, she should bet on herself. If she felt like fighting, she was the one she should fight for. Toth also pointed out what should have been comically obvious to his wife: that she reads more than anyone he had ever known.

Reading is one of Witherspoon’s superpowers. She is fascinated by stories, whether in books, in film, in dinner party conversation. She wants to tell stories, and she wants to encourage other people to tell them. “I always knew from the time I was seven that I wanted to be a storyteller or an actor or a singer,” she says. “Or a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. I think that’s why I’m in awe of writers because I’ve tried to sit down and do it. I have ideas for stories all the time. I could never figure out how things ended. I always have ideas about how things begin but I never know how they end.” It’s clear to me that you like Witherspoon; you are quite kind. Did you relationship with the actress complicate your objectivity? This is not journalism. I'm not interviewing the CEO of Monsanto about Roundup. I am not, I am not, I am not offering a service for the public good. Vanity Fair has talked to an actress and they've said we want to put you on the cover of magazine and the actress is no doubt thinking: I've got this new show coming out on Apple TV.

Sometimes, a strong beginning is all it takes. When Witherspoon decided to start a production company with her own money, she turned to her constant companions: books. She optioned the rights to two novels that had yet to be published. The first, Gone Girl, she produced, and the second, Wild, she produced and starred in. (Wild yielded Academy Award nominations for both Witherspoon and Laura Dern, who played her mother.) Then she optioned a novel by Liane Moriarty called Big Little Lies. After that, no one was questioning Witherspoon’s ability to spin paper into gold.

In the middle of this new period of success, she also started a book club, becoming something of a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket for a number of books. “It’s nice to highlight authors who don’t have a track record of selling a lot of books. To watch what happens to them is extraordinary, and really emotional for us.” But finding those authors and just the right book requires a boatload of reading month after month. Where does an actor who is—once again, or still—heading the A-list, who has a thriving media company, a lifestyle brand (Draper James’s Nashville outpost is a mecca for Tennessee tourism), an enormous social media presence, and three children find the time? She makes it, as making time seems to be another superpower.

She told me she’d been able to spend four hours just reading the day before. “And nobody interrupted me! To me, that’s a vacation.”

Seeing as how books were the key to so many parts of the story, it made perfect sense for us to meet back at Parnassus Books for this interview. It was late December and Reese had come home to Nashville for Christmas. It’s where she grew up, where her parents live, where her brother and sister-in-law and two nieces live. She agreed to come to the bookstore early so that we could talk before the shoppers arrived.

At eight o’clock in the morning, Reese Witherspoon looks less like a movie star and more like a pretty girl with really good hair. I use the word girl with intention, both because we’re in Nashville and because in her jeans and sneakers she doesn’t look old enough to rent a car. After she accepts a cup of coffee from the appalling coffee machine and says good morning to all the booksellers, we begin making slow loops around the tables and past the shelves, playing the parlor game devoted readers can never get enough of: Have You Read This? How did you decide to meet at the bookstore? I want to plug books and Reese always wants to plug books. That's our connection now.

Witherspoon opens with Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, the January pick for her book club. “It does such a good job exploring work dynamics, race, class.”

I counter with Greek to Me by Mary Norris, which she hasn’t read. I have it in my head that this book would make a terrific movie and the next thing I know I’m pitching her. “A copy editor at The New Yorker decides to learn ancient Greek!” I say. “It’s like Wild but for the mind.”

She shakes her head. “Too interior.”

We stop at the new releases table to profess our mutual admiration for Colson Whitehead, then Attica Locke. Witherspoon leans over to pet the cover of Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage. “Love,” she sighs, as if it were a picture of Marcello Mastroianni.

Witherspoon likes to read nonfiction in the morning (The Moment of Lift, Sapiens, Three Women) and fiction at night (she hugs a copy of The Secret History to her chest and declares it one of her all-time favorite books. She had just bought a copy for her daughter, Ava, who is 20.)

Then we break into a mutual rhapsody over Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations. In addition to being an opinion writer for the New York Times and the author of one of the best books of the year, Renkl had once been Reese’s favorite high school English teacher here in Nashville and remains a friend. Since we are speaking of local authors, I try to give her a copy of Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here but she says no, she’s brought her credit card, she’ll buy it herself, thank you very much. When I offer her the store discount she turns that down as well.

“Why are there all these writers in Nashville now?” she asks. “Does Lorrie Moore really teach here?”

Lorrie’s my neighbor. She teaches at Vanderbilt. Witherspoon gapes in disbelief that I know Lorrie Moore, much less live close to her. Then she asks if she could take the class.

Had Witherspoon been a smart, entrepreneurial actor who figured out how to get meaningful parts at 36 by optioning books and producing films herself, that would have been a good story, but that’s not the story at all. What Witherspoon did was create a whole new playing field in Hollywood. In making parts for herself, she found that she wanted to make parts for other women as well, women her age but also women who were older and younger. She wanted to make parts for women of color, because if she was having a tough time finding good roles, she could see that what they were facing was considerably harder. This is the moment we realize that this profile is going to jump beyond the “reinvent yourself” trope. Did you know you would be making social commentary going into the profile? If you ever sit down and read 15 celebrity profiles about someone, you realize how bad they are. Like how incredibly boring they are. The only way you're going to do something that's better is to bring some kind of intellectual construct to the piece, and to the person. There are two lines: There's the line in which is the action happens. Here we are in the restaurant, this is what they order, blah, blah. And then there is what they mean culturally.

And what about getting more women behind the camera? “I can remember being in pictures in which I was the only woman on the set and there would be 150 men,” she says. “Maybe there would be a couple of women in wardrobe. I remember when I was a kid I would find them and cling to them.”

Why weren’t there more women directors and screenwriters? Why weren’t there women working cameras and doing sound and editing? If she were the one making the movie then she could hire them. She could prove that it was possible to fill a movie with all sorts of women: women of different races and ages, women from the LGBTQ+ community, women who are differently abled. It’s the kind of thing the people in Hollywood say.

The difference is that Witherspoon is actually doing it, and her projects make money. Lots of money. She went out to find water, then called her friends so that together they could dig a well, lay a pipeline, and change the landscape. That included demanding equal pay for equal work, an agreement she won from HBO.

“An actress came up to me at a party and said, ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ I had no idea what she was talking about. The day after the HBO equal pay thing went through, they called her agent to rewrite her contract. She was then paid twice as much as she had been.”

Witherspoon is happy to talk about money and contracts. She believes in the power of information, because if other women don’t know how much you’re being paid, the only person who stands to benefit is the person who’s writing the checks. She has a group of friends she talks to regularly in order to share information, a list that includes and is in no way limited to America Ferrera, Shonda Rhimes, Tracee Ellis Ross, Ava DuVernay, Nancy Meyers, and Laura Dern.

“You know, you meet people, you’re friends with people, but I say about a few women in my life, they are my sisters. I don’t have a sister and I found my sister in Laura. No one makes me laugh like Laura. She’s magical.”

“Reese is a miracle,” Dern says. “She is the gold standard of what it means to be a champion. She has always been a champion of art, and other artists, as well as friends and family. But discovering how she will never stop until other women are honored for their voices and their skills with not only a seat at the table, but paid and paid well for it, is a rare marvel. Because of her, so many other women in positions of power have followed suit. As an only child, finding family has always been very important to me. And that I get her in both areas of my life—personal and professional—is an outrageous blessing.”

Witherspoon has a way of using every question as a means of highlighting someone else, and in her case it feels less like deflection and more like a genuine sense of wonder for everything and everyone who moves her. I tell her the thing I find so remarkable about her story is that she was pregnant when Election came out, that she had a baby at 23. I can’t think of anyone else who had success as a young actor, had a baby at the same time, and didn’t get derailed.

“Kate Winslet,” she says, without acknowledging my astonishment. “She was 25. She had a baby after Titanic. We talked all the time.”

When I tell her I watched her acceptance speech for the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award, the first thing she wants to know is if I watched Kerry Washington’s introduction. Well, she asked me that after taking several minutes to praise Sherry Lansing’s leadership. Washington and Witherspoon are making a limited series out of Celeste Ng’s smash novel Little Fires Everywhere, about privilege, class, race, motherhood, and ownership, with Witherspoon in the role of Mrs. Richardson, a paragon of oblivious entitlement. “Creating that character was a new challenge for me,” Witherspoon says. “Despite her intelligence and social grooming, she has a deeply embedded lack of awareness of her privilege. She’s constructed a life that’s impervious to the world she lives in. She’s so comfortable in her social standing and her wealth that she feels entitled to analyze anyone outside her sphere but never takes a hard look at her own shortcomings.” Here we start to see the theme of Witherspoon helping other women. Is this something you knew before the interview or did it strike you in your conversation? I had done my homework. I had read all of the other celebrity profiles and saw that Reese is not just going to say "Black Lives Matter" or "women must be treated equally." She is going to sit down and figure out who to hire and and not make a big deal of it. I knew all of that going in. But then meeting her, when I told her that I had watched the (leadership award speech) speech, the first thing she said was “Did you watch Kerry Washington's introduction?” Her first impulse is, don't look at me — look at her. Everything she does is like that. And it's natural. It's who she is.

Or to put it another way, this character is about as far from the actor as she could get.

“Watch Kerry,” she tells me. “What she says about power is so important.”

And she’s right. Washington’s speech is a perfect encapsulation of Witherspoon’s journey and the change in Hollywood. “The new narrative,” Washington says, shimmering from the lectern, “the Reese narrative, tells us that our power lies in our partnership. That real power comes from succeeding with people, not succeeding off of people. That real power is borne of the humility and grace of sisterhood. That’s what empowerment means. The more power you share, the more power you have, and the more power you have, the more you must share. This is the lesson that you must learn when you are in Reese’s orbit. This is the lesson so many of us are learning from her.”

The HBO series Big Little Lies began its addictive spin in February 2017 and quickly became as much the story of five women living with privilege and abuse in scenic Monterey as it did about the five actors who were finally getting a chance to work together. When Witherspoon found out that Nicole Kidman’s production company was also interested in the Moriarty novel, she moved to partner instead of outbid. Witherspoon and Kidman joined forces, taking joint executive producer credits and equal starring roles. Read an interview with Dern and she’ll talk about how much she loved getting to work with Witherspoon, then Witherspoon is quoted praising season-two addition Meryl Streep, who has nice things to say about Kidman. They all loved the younger women, Shailene Woodley and Zoë Kravitz, who in turn learned so much from their elders.

If all of them are acting their way through these interviews, well, they’re extremely convincing. Those reliable tropes about bitchery and catfights, about women undercutting other women, are suddenly rendered useless. All reports point to the genuine shared affection and respect among the cast. And those other tropes about men not being interested in watching shows about women, and shows about women not being profitable? Big Little Lies blew those up as well. What is missing from this piece is any in depth discussion of Witherspoon’s TV shows, which is how I mainly associate with her. Is that intentional? The thing that was hard for me in all of this is that I don't watch television. I haven't watched television since I was in my early 20s. None. Zero. So I'm not qualified to talk about television. But I talked about who she hired and how she produced and how well she worked with the other people and how they all had nice things to say about each other.

So while the show wasn’t responsible for the #MeToo movement, the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, or any of the other dominoes that fell behind him, the actions feel inextricably linked. Quell false rumors about women’s inability to support one another, have the year’s most successful show produced by women, and then watch women who had nothing to do with the show stand up and say they have been harassed, raped, and silenced, because maybe they’ve seen what’s possible—a world in which women have each other’s backs, a world in which women, at least on HBO, can be in charge of a hit, a world in which the women to whom you tell your stories will believe you.

Into that world of #MeToo and Time’s Up, a legal defense fund for women fighting for equality and the end of sexual harassment in the workplace, Witherspoon arrives with The Morning Show, a series with Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell that is the launchpad for Apple’s entrance into the world of streaming services. Apple TV+ is pretty much staking its success on Witherspoon’s ability to deliver the kind of audience she brought to Big Little Lies. Again, we get the backstory of female friendship and collaboration. Witherspoon and Aniston have been friends since 2000, when Witherspoon guest starred as Aniston’s sister on Friends. The Morning Show provides a vehicle with two strong (very strong) female leads.

All good, but the thing that makes this show worth watching is the 10-hour dissection of what it means to be caught up in a #MeToo moment. Because while we can read accusations and denials in the paper, watch a perp walk on the news, and listen to no end of discussion on what has happened and what needs to happen, it’s something else entirely to see it play out as art. If our understanding of the Great Depression is forever linked to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and then John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath with Henry Fonda’s creation of Tom Joad, our understanding of #MeToo may well be shaped by Witherspoon and The Morning Show. As the morning anchor who is hired to replace Carell’s fallen character (in a turn that can’t help but call Matt Lauer to mind), Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson must pick her way through the aftermath of sexual misconduct. Layer after layer of bad behavior, mediocre behavior, friendship, power, consequences, and culpability are examined from the point of view of every player until absolutely nothing seems clear—except that working in morning television appears to be a really undesirable job, and sleeping with one’s colleagues is a universally bad idea.

Again, Witherspoon is quick to give credit where credit is due, in this case to the showrunner and director, Kerry Ehrin. “She’s an incredibly empathetic woman. She just kept peeling back the layers. This behavior that men have carried on for hundreds of years, thousands of years, suddenly isn’t okay. The world changed in about six months and everyone is just scrambling to keep up.”

Speaking of scrambling to keep up, I have a question that has long stumped me: How is it that so many women discussing their own experience with harassment in articles are photographed draped backward over a sofa with no top on under their jacket? Is it fair to say that sends a mixed signal?

Witherspoon thinks about this for a minute. “I can tell you what my daughter would say.” It is clear she means to be patient and kind, to actually explain it to me. “Why should a woman have to sublimate her own sexuality, because that’s not her responsibility, the way she’s viewed, right? Her sexuality shouldn’t be diminished because she’s having a conversation about consent. You should be able to be sexual, to display your sexuality, because consent is consent, no matter what.” It’s here that Witherspoon becomes almost a teacher who is educating us about a new mode of feminism. Was that intentional? To me, this is the best moment in the story. She really taught me something. And she was speaking to me in that moment like we're in Nashville. I understand why you think the way you think because that's the way I used to think. But that in itself could have been a whole piece. That's so interesting. It's like I'm not going to criticize another woman for taking her shirt off. She explained it to me and I love that.

She can see that I’m still struggling a little.

I know,” she says, “it’s complex. It’s not how I grew up. I grew up thinking you dress the way you want to be treated. But things are changing.”

I point out that there aren’t pictures of her wearing a jacket with no shirt.

She nods. “I always had a thing about exploiting sexuality. When I came up in the business, there were all these men’s magazines we were told to cater to. I was never in Maxim. I was never picked as a GQ girl, and I’m okay with that because that’s not how I wanted to be viewed. That’s not how I see myself. I always say, ‘Funny doesn’t sag.’ I always just wanted to be funny, you know? And you can’t be rendered obsolete if you just keep being funny. Guess what gets rendered obsolete? Your boobs go south, your face goes south, your ass goes south, but you can always be funny. And those are my idols, my heroes—Goldie, Holly Hunter, Diane Keaton, Nancy Meyers—smart and funny.”

This is the moment in which I lose any semblance of journalistic integrity because I’m already envisioning a line of T-shirts for the bookstore that say “Funny doesn’t sag.”

We have stayed too long at the fair. Parnassus is now packed with holiday shoppers, and while none of them seem to be paying any attention to the movie star, it’s time to go someplace quieter. Witherspoon wants to show me the house she bought two years ago and has just finished renovating. Behind the wheel of her husband’s car she’s a canny local, taking a series of back roads to avoid the crush of holiday traffic. She talks about her parents, her friends, her brother, John. “We have that inexplicable bond of childhood. Two people forged in the same fire. It’s interesting because we’re very different, but we manage to love and care for each other with a ferocity that defies words. I call him Brother. He calls me Sister. Very Southern sibling stuff.” I notice there aren’t too many personal details about Reese’s childhood and personal life. How did you decide what details to include and what to leave out? To be a very successful woman and have somebody ask you about your parents — it's demeaning. And it's something that happens to me all the time. It doesn’t happen with men. Did Reese and I sit in the kitchen and talk about our parents? Yes, we did. But she didn’t have to say this is off the record because she knew I wouldn’t do that to her.

We talk about Harpeth Hall, the all-girls school she attended here. I ask if she liked going to a girls school, if she thought it was helpful.

“Yes,” she says, “very much so. It definitely encouraged whatever tiny little feminist pilot light I had.” Though she makes it clear there was also a lot of fun in those days. “I was very opinionated, a little devious. I had a master plan. I might have tried to put beer in the Coke machine.”

I had asked Margaret Renkl, her high school English teacher turned author and friend, about her memories of that time. “When you’re a high school teacher and you teach bright kids, there’s always going to be one kid who’s waiting for you to prove that you’re smart enough to be her teacher,” Renkl said. “Reese was always that one. She was a little bit skeptical, a little unsure, but it wasn’t long before she became the student whose eyes never leave your face because you are saying what they need to hear. Somehow, through some miracle, you’re teaching exactly what they need to know at exactly that moment in their development. It was like talking about literature was food and she was hungry.”

Did Renkl think, all those years ago, that Reese Witherspoon would turn out to be this person? Not just an actor but a force for change in the world?

Renkl smiles. “She was often stamping her foot mad about something. She was outraged by injustice in any form she encountered it. But she was also funny and fierce. She was like any other teenage girl in an all-girls school—she never wore makeup or combed her hair unless it was a dance or picture day.”

Witherspoon shakes her head at the memory of her British lit survey and Margaret Renkl, who left Harpeth Hall at the end of Witherspoon’s junior year. “I cried when she left.”

Witherspoon pulls up in front of a beautiful house that is no more and no less than its beautiful neighbors. But when we step inside I have to say it stops my heart for an instant, the flooding light in the foyer, the sweeping staircase, the openness in every direction, the wallpaper. There is different, complementary wallpaper in room after room, including a wallpapered ceiling that looks like the tiled floor of a French bistro. I have no idea what the neighbors’ houses look like on the inside, but my guess would be nothing like this. The house is welcoming and warm in a way that feels almost like a memory, but better than a memory as it is both traditional and explosively joyful. While I am exclaiming, she looks around herself, maybe seeing it again.

“Growing up, all my friends at Harpeth Hall lived in houses like this. I always wanted to live in a house like this, and now I do. It’s some sort of childhood fulfillment.”

And that’s exactly it, because I grew up in Nashville too and went to a different girls school. This was the house of childhood dreams, or a better version of it. This is the place a person spends her whole life looking for. I love this scene where you enter Reese’s house. Your sense that it was like the “other girl’s” houses that you went to private school with. It seems like Nashville and the south almost become a character in the story. How much did you pull from your own experience? It was weird. When I walked in, I had such a visceral reaction to that house. And when she said, this was the house that the other girls lived in, I was like, yeah, that's exactly right. It was this incredible combination of this classic, old, beautiful Southern house. She just kind of like tapped in on every primal home fantasy.  

We go and sit in the big bright kitchen to talk some more. I ask her if she thinks it’s a dangerous thing to be a child actor.

“The ambition?”

No.

“Oh, you mean the hope that it could happen?”

No, I mean, is it dangerous to be a child working in an adult world?

“Ah,” she says, “yes. Bad things happened to me. I was assaulted, harassed. It wasn’t isolated. I recently had a journalist ask me about it. She said, Well, why didn’t you speak up sooner? And I thought, that’s so interesting to talk to someone who experienced those things and then judge them for the way they decide to speak about them. You tell your story in your own time when you’re ready. But the shame that she tried to put on me was unreal, and then she wrote about how selfish I was for not bringing it up sooner. There wasn’t a public reckoning 25 years ago when this stuff happened to me. There wasn’t a forum to speak about it either. Social media has created a new way for people to express themselves that I didn’t have. That’s the great strength in power and numbers. I think we have a lot of judgment and that’s unfortunate because we’re all tender-footed in these new times. We’re trying to find our identity. That’s what I really like about The Morning Show.”

There is a knock at the back door and Witherspoon’s sister-in-law, Jennie, arrives with her two daughters. Then Witherspoon’s 16-year-old son, Deacon, appears from wherever he’s been in the house. Suddenly there’s a coffee cake and talk of diving practice and where everyone should go to lunch. Witherspoon has plans to meet her mother, and Jennie’s taking Deacon and the girls to lunch downtown at Robert’s Western World.

“Seriously?” I ask. “You can eat lunch there?” I had always thought it was a giant bar but am told they have fried bologna sandwiches.

“You know Reese and I were in the same class at Harpeth Hall,” Jennie Witherspoon tells me. “We were both in Ms. Renkl’s class.”

I wonder if Jennie felt the same way the first time she walked into this house. I wonder if she too thought that it was the kind of place the other girls lived.

Jennie Witherspoon starts talking about The Morning Show. She and John had watched the final episode of the season the night before. “We were so into it!” Jennie says. “We kept forgetting it was you.”

After the cake has been eaten and the lunch plans have been made, Deacon slips off to play the piano for two minutes (and I can say, based on those two minutes, he is very, very good) while Jennie and the girls pull on their coats. How do you choose what to include about a minor character in the story and what to leave out? I could have mentioned his haircut; his hair was cut short and shaved on one side like in an ‘80s Cyndi Lauper video. You see that shit over and over again, but it’s not nice. It’s rude. The writer is making themselves look clever by their observation but there is an inherent cruelty in the observation.

Everyone says goodbye. Witherspoon asks me if I want to use the powder room before I go, and I tell her no, I’m fine.

“Use the powder room,” she says.

Under the front staircase is a tiny door to the tiniest bathroom I have ever seen. It is the Alice in Wonderland of bathrooms, with swallows painted in the miniature sink. I’m speechless.

“Right?” she says.

Witherspoon offers to drive me back to the bookstore, where I’ve left my car. I tell her the traffic will be awful, but she waves me off. She may have a home in Nashville but she and her family still live in Los Angeles. She has a completely different notion of what constitutes traffic. And anyway, there’s a book she wants to pick up for her mother.

When we go back into the bookstore we can barely cut a path through the last-minute holiday shoppers. No one notices us in their rush, but Witherspoon sees a painting of a small dachshund reading a book that’s hanging on the back wall.

“Is that Mary Todd Lincoln?” she asks me, and then, derailed by a sudden, awful thought, asks, “Is she…”

I assure her the dachshund is fine. We’re in the process of having all the shop dogs’ portraits painted.

“You know I had my picture taken with her the last time I was here.”

I tell her I do in fact remember, though I’m amazed that she remembers. I tell her that’s how I want to open this piece, with her shining her light on the dachshund. “I’ve done enough for myself,” Witherspoon replies, deadpan. “I need to do more for the Mary Todd Lincolns of the world.”

I have no doubt. She will come to the aid of small dachshunds everywhere, once she gets the rest of the world straightened out.

Monique Brouillette is a freelance journalist based in Boston who covers science, health and tech. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, Quanta, Science and several other publications.

The post What happens when a superstar novelist is asked to profile a superstar actress? appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]O[/dc]ne of the things that distinguishes the coronavirus outbreak from disasters that have come before is the disorienting flood of research and information. Credit — or blame — that on the growing sophistication of science and science journalism, the competitive cacophony of TV news, the pervasiveness of social media, the ubiquitous reach of the virus, the controversy over responses, or all of the above. Whatever the reasons, our desperation to understand what's going on has flooded news feeds with reports explaining new concepts in epidemiology, virology and immunology. Flattening the curve, food safety, antibodies, ventilators, droplets, and aerosols are now all a part of daily discourse. And because this crisis calls on everyone to change their behavior, the reading feels essential. It’s as if America has just been dropped into a high school biology class and the final exam is approaching.

But we’ve also been dropped into economics, history, and civics classes. The reach and impact of coronavirus is on a scale few people alive today have witnessed. And the virus lack of respect for boundaries of geography or class means we are not just witnessing it happening elsewhere — we are experiencing happening it all around us. It promises to affect all areas of society and shape American life for years to come. Wrangling all the angles, events, information and gravity of these times feels too much to manage — especially in quick-turn journalism.

That didn’t stop Ed Yong.

Yong is a science journalist, author and staff writer for the Atlantic. He tackled this massive topic in an epic piece published in the Atlantic on March 25, 2020, simply and boldly  titled, "How the Pandemic Will End.” He pulled multiple threads of that nagging, anxiety-inducing central question to weave its tendrils into one coherent tapestry. Yong chooses a structure that guides the reader through the journey of how we got into this mess, what steps we likely need to take to get out of it, and — the ultimate question — how our lives and our societies might be changed forever.

[caption id="attachment_155628" align="alignright" width="200"] Ed Yong[/caption]

Yong writes on a wide range of topics in health and biology. He began his career writing a blog called “Not exactly Rocket Science,” joined the Atlantic in 2015, and has multiple awards for the knowledge and clarity of his reporting on science. (According to his website, his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.5 million people.) He lasers in on what seem obvious but who-knew questions, digests the science behind them quickly, and then spins compelling reads.

"How the Pandemic Will End" is no exception. As a science and health freelancer, I was intrigued about how Yong was able to worked his way through such a sweeping subject in ways that the touched on all the salient aspects of the pandemic, conveyed complex scientific information in understandable ways, and set everything in relevant context for the reader. He tackled a speculative question (no one can predict the future with certainty; we can only project or opine) but grounded it in facts that made his conclusions credible. He braided science, economics and politics without being pedantic.

If that's not enough, he told me he wrote the piece in about seven days, interviewing “several dozens” of sources and condensing several weeks of information on the burgeoning crisis into one great read.

I talked to Yong about how he tackled this massive undertaking, and he graciously agreed to an annotation of his entire reported essay. He was open to talking about some of the criticism the piece received, from people who felt he failed to consider opposing views about the severity of risk, and from others who felt he crossed the line from reported journalism to advocacy. Our exchange has been edited for length and clarity.

[dc small]T[/dc]he question of how long is this going to last is a big one that is obviously on everyone’s mind; how did you know that this was a story that had to be by late March? Infection and death rates were changing dramatically every day; civic responses varied, and the science behind the virus was still far from certain.
It was the mandate I got right from the start (which I agreed with) that was that we should take the biggest possible look at what is going on. This crisis is that it is so huge and encompasses so many different sectors of society that it's very easy to get lost in it. There's so much information to process in so many different angles that even we as readers are just getting inundated. We really wanted to create something that would act as a synthesis that would unite lots of different pieces of information into a coherent picture of how we got to here and then what the what the way forward is. So that was the goal of the piece right from the start: Look big, think big and allow ourselves and our readers to really out and understand the bigger picture.

With so many angles to explore, how did you stop yourself from getting lost in the weeds?
I have great editors. I'm very grateful to mine (Ross Anderson) for working through my draft saying “there’s too much here; this needs another anchoring sentence here.”  And I think just having a clear structural sense. The piece has four different components to it. It was very clear what each of those needed to do and what was what needed to go into each one. No piece can do absolutely everything, but I think if you get the structure clear it does help you to balance things out when you're reporting.

This is a deeply reported piece with multiple links to research and other articles. Did you have any help with the reporting? I interviewed several dozen sources — somewhere between 30 and 50. I didn't have any formal research assistant or anyone like that. It was just me. But because the Atlantic has been publishing amazing pieces about the pandemic for months now there are a lot of pieces to link to. Part of the function of the piece is to draw together a lot of work that had already been done, point people towards it, add a bit of new reporting on my own, and then add some conceptual ideas that I hope will ground a lot of pieces going forward.

Who was the intended audience?
Everyone. This pandemic is really is touching everyone and everything. And so we really wanted to make sure that this was accessible and relevant to as broad a readership as possible. The one constraint is that it focuses on America because there's no way you can do a global piece in any sort of reasonable word length. This piece is already 5,500 words long.

Despite describing a very dire and grim reality here, you decided to end the piece on an upbeat note. Can you tell us about that decision?
I did want to end on a bit of hope. I genuinely want readers to feel empowered. Some of them are living through the worst times in living memory, and I want them to know that there is a better future at the end of it.

The annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; responses from Yong in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button, which you’ll find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu, or at the top of your mobile screen.

How the Pandemic Will End

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

By Ed Yong

Originally published in the Atlantic on March 21, 2020

The title implies a conclusion when, in reality, the story is about multiple scenarios that are models and possibilities. Can you tell me how the title, which implies strong certitude, was chosen? Obviously you can't be sure how the future will play out. So maybe the title should be “How the pandemic could end.” But we wanted to convey a sense of strength. We are making a powerful assertion with this. Maybe this piece is going to date really badly in a year or so. But I'm okay with that, because I think we've been clear about what the range of possibilities are and what the what the sort of contingencies are that might go into it. I don't think I'm going to be very embarrassed by this in a year's time. And if I do, it'll be because we did much better (at containing the virus) than I wrote.

[dc]T[/dc]hree months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.

A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”

So, now what? In the late hours of last Wednesday, which now feels like the distant past, I was talking about the pandemic with a pregnant friend who was days away from her due date. We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.

As we’ll see, Gen C’s lives will be shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks, and by the losses we suffer as a result. But first, a brief reckoning. On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.

 “No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,” says Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at the Boston University School of Medicine. More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza, the new coronavirus is also stealthier, spreading from one host to another for several days before triggering obvious symptoms. To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.

As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.

The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. This is a really cool sentence, I like it a lot. But, it clearly reveals your opinion and places a value judgment on the mishandling of COVID-19. How do you walk the line between opinion and journalism here? I think what might not be obvious is that where I'm making a very strong assertion liking what actually happened to what might happen is based on a ton of interviews. When the sixth or seventh person tells me that testing is the central failure point for this entire response, then I feel quite confident saying that testing is the central point of this response. I wouldn't make this assertion myself so I was triangulating across a lot of different expert opinions. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country. Overstretched hospitals became overwhelmed. Basic protective equipment, such as masks, gowns, and gloves, began to run out. Beds will soon follow, as will the ventilators that provide oxygen to patients whose lungs are besieged by the virus.

 With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency. That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition; some worried hospitals have bought out large quantities of supplies, in the way that panicked consumers have bought out toilet paper.

Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear. Instead of springing into action, America sat idle.

 Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.

I. The Next Months

The article guides the reader through the jolting, confusing catastrophe we are going through, tells us how we go here and takes us out the other side. How did you come up with the structure of the piece? The structure of the piece very rapidly crystallized. We said, “Let's look as quickly as possible at how we got here, and then let's look immediately into the near-term future.” Next, having got to here, how do we get out of it? Then, what are the what are the possible end games for the pandemic? And how do we get to those? And finally, what is the world going to look like afterwards? Those ended up being exactly the four sections that are in the piece.

Having fallen behind, it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April. As of last weekend, the nation had 17,000 confirmed cases, but the actual number was probably somewhere between 60,000 and 245,000. Numbers are now starting to rise exponentially: As of Wednesday morning, the official case count was 54,000, and the actual case count is unknown. Health-care workers are already seeing worrying signs: dwindling equipment, growing numbers of patients, and doctors and nurses who are themselves becoming infected.

Italy and Spain offer grim warnings about the future. Hospitals are out of room, supplies, and staff. Unable to treat or save everyone, doctors have been forced into the unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are most likely to survive, while letting others die. The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one. By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans, notwithstanding those who will indirectly die as hospitals are unable to care for the usual slew of heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. This is the worst-case scenario. To avert it, four things need to happen—and quickly. One of the criticisms of the piece was that it focused only on this model from Imperial College and ignored others. How do you respond to that? The Imperial model is useful because of its prominence in the discourse. It is certainly not the only model out there. But including all the models in multiple paragraphs saying, “this model says this, this model says that” would frankly be tedious and not actually have that much explanatory heft. There is another point towards the end of that second section, which talks about another model that looks at ventilator capacity and stuff like that. I do think that the best models are all roughly saying the same thing. The numbers might vary, but the points are fundamentally the same. I haven't yet found an expert who thinks this will be done by the end of spring, and that we can just kind of relax and it'll be fine.

 The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment. If health-care workers can’t stay healthy, the rest of the response will collapse. The tone in this section sounds more like a call to action than straight journalism. Was this intentional? It's a little intentional. I don't want the piece to be like a PSA. It’s not. It's still journalism —not an act of advocacy. But these are urgent times. And if everyone I'm interviewing is in unison on what needs to happen right now, then part of our duty is to make clear to readers what that is. There is a fine line between explanation and advocacy, and we try to very carefully about tone. In some places, stockpiles are already so low that doctors are reusing masks between patients, calling for donations from the public, or sewing their own homemade alternatives. These shortages are happening because medical supplies are made-to-order and depend on byzantine international supply chains that are currently straining and snapping. Hubei province in China, the epicenter of the pandemic, was also a manufacturing center of medical masks.

In the U.S., the Strategic National Stockpile—a national larder of medical equipment—is already being deployed, especially to the hardest-hit states. The stockpile is not inexhaustible, but it can buy some time. Donald Trump could use that time to invoke the Defense Production Act, launching a wartime effort in which American manufacturers switch to making medical equipment. But after invoking the act last Wednesday, Trump has failed to actually use it, reportedly due to lobbying from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and heads of major corporations.

Some manufacturers are already rising to the challenge, but their efforts are piecemeal and unevenly distributed. “One day, we’ll wake up to a story of doctors in City X who are operating with bandanas, and a closet in City Y with masks piled into it,” says Ali Khan, the dean of public health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

This agency can also coordinate the second pressing need: a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests. Those tests have been slow to arrive because of five separate shortages: of masks to protect people administering the tests; of nasopharyngeal swabs for collecting viral samples; of extraction kits for pulling the virus’s genetic material out of the samples; of chemical reagents that are part of those kits; and of trained people who can give the tests. Many of these shortages are, again, due to strained supply chains. The U.S. relies on three manufacturers for extraction reagents, providing redundancy in case any of them fails—but all of them failed in the face of unprecedented global demand. Meanwhile, Lombardy, Italy, the hardest-hit place in Europe, houses one of the largest manufacturers of nasopharyngeal swabs.

Some shortages are being addressed. The FDA is now moving quickly to approve tests developed by private labs. At least one can deliver results in less than an hour, potentially allowing doctors to know if the patient in front of them has COVID-19. The country “is adding capacity on a daily basis,” says Kelly Wroblewski of the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

On March 6, Trump said that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” That was (and still is) untrue, and his own officials were quick to correct him. Regardless, anxious people still flooded into hospitals, seeking tests that did not exist. “People wanted to be tested even if they weren’t symptomatic, or if they sat next to someone with a cough,” says Saskia Popescu of George Mason University, who works to prepare hospitals for pandemics. Others just had colds, but doctors still had to use masks to examine them, burning through their already dwindling supplies. “It really stressed the health-care system,” Popescu says. Even now, as capacity expands, tests must be used carefully. The first priority, says Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, is to test health-care workers and hospitalized patients, allowing hospitals to quell any ongoing fires. Only later, once the immediate crisis is slowing, should tests be deployed in a more widespread way. “This isn’t just going to be: Let’s get the tests out there!” Inglesby says.

These measures will take time, during which the pandemic will either accelerate beyond the capacity of the health system or slow to containable levels. Its course—and the nation’s fate—now depends on the third need, which is social distancing. Think of it this way: There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. Group B must now “flatten the curve” by physically isolating themselves from other people to cut off chains of transmission. This is an interesting way of framing the “flatten the curve” idea that I haven’t seen before. Did you come up with this yourself or was it from a source? That was me. I just wanted a way of very simply explaining to people that this is what you need to do. A lot of the rhetoric around flattening the curve was useful but a little bit too abstract. I think the reason our framing works is that it creates a kind of collective sense of duty that you need in order to shoulder a lot of these personal inconveniences and hardships. Given the slow fuse of COVID-19, to forestall the future collapse of the health-care system, these seemingly drastic steps must be taken immediately, before they feel proportionate, and they must continue for several weeks.

Persuading a country to voluntarily stay at home is not easy, and without clear guidelines from the White House, mayors, governors, and business owners have been forced to take their own steps. Some states have banned large gatherings or closed schools and restaurants. At least 21 have now instituted some form of mandatory quarantine, compelling people to stay at home. And yet many citizens continue to crowd into public spaces.

In these moments, when the good of all hinges on the sacrifices of many, clear coordination matters—the fourth urgent need. The importance of social distancing must be impressed upon a public who must also be reassured and informed. Instead, Trump has repeatedly played down the problem, telling America that “we have it very well under control” when we do not, and that cases were “going to be down to close to zero” when they were rising. In some cases, as with his claims about ubiquitous testing, his misleading gaffes have deepened the crisis. He has even touted unproven medications.

Away from the White House press room, Trump has apparently been listening to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan on new epidemics, and now sits on the COVID-19 task force that meets with Trump roughly every other day. “He’s got his own style, let’s leave it at that,” Fauci told me, “but any kind of recommendation that I have made thus far, the substance of it, he has listened to everything.”

 But Trump already seems to be wavering. In recent days, he has signaled that he is prepared to backtrack on social-distancing policies in a bid to protect the economy. Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the “high-risk” people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit “low-risk” groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick. This issue, like most in America, is somewhat divided along party lines. By getting into the political here, were you worried about losing some people who don’t agree? You can't write an article about this without delving into politics; it would be an abdication of duty and journalistic responsibility. A lot of our vulnerabilities transcend administrations, but some of them are very specific to this one. A lot of the failures in the response to coronavirus are specific to Donald Trump in particular and his administration in general. Discussing that inevitably is going to lose people, but I think that’s better than to have something that whitewashes reality.

A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care. There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.

If Trump stays the course, if Americans adhere to social distancing, if testing can be rolled out, and if enough masks can be produced, there is a chance that the country can still avert the worst predictions about COVID-19, and at least temporarily bring the pandemic under control. No one knows how long that will take, but it won’t be quick. “It could be anywhere from four to six weeks to up to three months,” Fauci said, “but I don’t have great confidence in that range.”

II. The Endgame

Even a perfect response won’t end the pandemic. As long as the virus persists somewhere, there’s a chance that one infected traveler will reignite fresh sparks in countries that have already extinguished their fires. This is already happening in China, Singapore, and other Asian countries that briefly seemed to have the virus under control. Under these conditions, there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.

The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.

The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems. The United Kingdom initially seemed to consider this herd-immunity strategy, before backtracking when models revealed the dire consequences. The U.S. now seems to be considering it too. 

The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.

It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.

But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones. The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They’ll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t cause severe side effects. They’ll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.

“Even if it works, they don’t have an easy way to manufacture it at a massive scale,” said Seth Berkley of Gavi. That’s because Moderna is using a new approach to vaccination. Existing vaccines work by providing the body with inactivated or fragmented viruses, allowing the immune system to prep its defenses ahead of time. By contrast, Moderna’s vaccine comprises a sliver of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic material—its RNA. The idea is that the body can use this sliver to build its own viral fragments, which would then form the basis of the immune system’s preparations. This approach works in animals, but is unproven in humans. By contrast, French scientists are trying to modify the existing measles vaccine using fragments of the new coronavirus. “The advantage of that is that if we needed hundreds of doses tomorrow, a lot of plants in the world know how to do it,” Berkley said. No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people’s arms.

It’s likely, then, that the new coronavirus will be a lingering part of American life for at least a year, if not much longer. If the current round of social-distancing measures works, the pandemic may ebb enough for things to return to a semblance of normalcy. Offices could fill and bars could bustle. Schools could reopen and friends could reunite. But as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.

Much about the coming years, including the frequency, duration, and timing of social upheavals, depends on two properties of the virus, both of which are currently unknown. First: seasonality. Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for SARS-CoV-2, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect. “Much of the world is waiting anxiously to see what—if anything—the summer does to transmission in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Maia Majumder of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer. Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 lies somewhere in the middle, people who recover from their encounters might be protected for a couple of years. To confirm that, scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.

Scientists can use the periods between those bouts to develop antiviral drugs—although such drugs are rarely panaceas, and come with possible side effects and the risk of resistance. Hospitals can stockpile the necessary supplies. Testing kits can be widely distributed to catch the virus’s return as quickly as possible. There’s no reason that the U.S. should let SARS-CoV-2 catch it unawares again, and thus no reason that social-distancing measures need to be deployed as broadly and heavy-handedly as they now must be. As Aaron E. Carroll and Ashish Jha recently wrote, “We can keep schools and businesses open as much as possible, closing them quickly when suppression fails, then opening them back up again once the infected are identified and isolated. Instead of playing defense, we could play more offense.”

Whether through accumulating herd immunity or the long-awaited arrival of a vaccine, the virus will find spreading explosively more and more difficult. It’s unlikely to disappear entirely. The vaccine may need to be updated as the virus changes, and people may need to get revaccinated on a regular basis, as they currently do for the flu. Models suggest that the virus might simmer around the world, triggering epidemics every few years or so. “But my hope and expectation is that the severity would decline, and there would be less societal upheaval,” Kissler says. In this future, COVID-19 may become like the flu is today—a recurring scourge of winter. Perhaps it will eventually become so mundane that even though a vaccine exists, large swaths of Gen C won’t bother getting it, forgetting how dramatically their world was molded by its absence.

III. The Aftermath

The cost of reaching that point, with as few deaths as possible, will be enormous. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote, the economy is experiencing a shock “more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced.” About one in five people in the United States have lost working hours or jobs. Hotels are empty. Airlines are grounding flights. Restaurants and other small businesses are closing. Inequalities will widen: People with low incomes will be hardest-hit by social-distancing measures, and most likely to have the chronic health conditions that increase their risk of severe infections. Diseases have destabilized cities and societies many times over, “but it hasn’t happened in this country in a very long time, or to quite the extent that we’re seeing now,” says Elena Conis, a historian of medicine at UC Berkeley. “We’re far more urban and metropolitan. We have more people traveling great distances and living far from family and work.”

After infections begin ebbing, a secondary pandemic of mental-health problems will follow. At a moment of profound dread and uncertainty, people are being cut off from soothing human contact. Hugs, handshakes, and other social rituals are now tinged with danger. People with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder are struggling. Elderly people, who are already excluded from much of public life, are being asked to distance themselves even further, deepening their loneliness. Asian people are suffering racist insults, fueled by a president who insists on labeling the new coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” Incidents of domestic violence and child abuse are likely to spike as people are forced to stay in unsafe homes. Children, whose bodies are mostly spared by the virus, may endure mental trauma that stays with them into adulthood.

After the pandemic, people who recover from COVID-19 might be shunned and stigmatized, as were survivors of Ebola, SARS, and HIV. Health-care workers will take time to heal: One to two years after SARS hit Toronto, people who dealt with the outbreak were still less productive and more likely to be experiencing burnout and post-traumatic stress. People who went through long bouts of quarantine will carry the scars of their experience. “My colleagues in Wuhan note that some people there now refuse to leave their homes and have developed agoraphobia,” says Steven Taylor of the University of British Columbia, who wrote The Psychology of Pandemics. All of these things are just predictions and not everyone agrees on them. That's the basis of some of the criticism of your piece. What was your thinking here? There are several points in the piece where this idea of a lack of imagination becomes a theme. We think that people who are experts didn't foresee that testing could fail to the extent it has. That people in the West, who are not experienced with SARS, failed to imagine what a virus like this could do to a society. Our inability to envision what the details of a catastrophe like this could be like has contributed to delays and sluggishness. And part of the goal of the piece was to help people imagine what the future might look like.

But “there is also the potential for a much better world after we get through this trauma,” says Richard Danzig of the Center for a New American Security. Already, communities are finding new ways of coming together, even as they must stay apart. Attitudes to health may also change for the better. The rise of HIV and AIDS “completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic,” Conis says. “The use of condoms became normalized. Testing for STDs became mainstream.”

Similarly, washing your hands for 20 seconds, a habit that has historically been hard to enshrine even in hospitals, “may be one of those behaviors that we become so accustomed to in the course of this outbreak that we don’t think about them,” Conis adds.

Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements. “This is the first time in my lifetime that I’ve heard someone say, ‘Oh, if you’re sick, stay home,’” says Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University. Perhaps the nation will learn that preparedness isn’t just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but also about fair labor policies and a stable and equal health-care system. Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose America’s social immune system, and that this system has been suppressed.

Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells.

Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too. Citizens who saw China as a distant, different place, where bats are edible and authoritarianism is acceptable, failed to consider that they would be next or that they wouldn’t be ready. (China’s response to this crisis had its own problems, but that’s for another time.) “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”

Veterans of past epidemics have long warned that American society is trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. After every crisis—anthrax, SARS, flu, Ebola—attention is paid and investments are made. But after short periods of peacetime, memories fade and budgets dwindle. This trend transcends red and blue administrations. When a new normal sets in, the abnormal once again becomes unimaginable. But there is reason to think that COVID-19 might be a disaster that leads to more radical and lasting change.

The other major epidemics of recent decades either barely affected the U.S. (SARS, MERS, Ebola), were milder than expected (H1N1 flu in 2009), or were mostly limited to specific groups of people (Zika, HIV). The COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, is affecting everyone directly, changing the nature of their everyday life. That distinguishes it not only from other diseases, but also from the other systemic challenges of our time. When an administration prevaricates on climate change, the effects won’t be felt for years, and even then will be hard to parse. It’s different when a president says that everyone can get a test, and one day later, everyone cannot. Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.

After 9/11, the world focused on counterterrorism. After COVID-19, attention may shift to public health. Expect to see a spike in funding for virology and vaccinology, a surge in students applying to public-health programs, and more domestic production of medical supplies. Expect pandemics to top the agenda at the United Nations General Assembly. Anthony Fauci is now a household name. “Regular people who think easily about what a policewoman or firefighter does finally get what an epidemiologist does,” says Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Such changes, in themselves, might protect the world from the next inevitable disease. “The countries that had lived through SARS had a public consciousness about this that allowed them to leap into action,” said Ron Klain, the former Ebola czar. “The most commonly uttered sentence in America at the moment is, ‘I’ve never seen something like this before.’ That wasn’t a sentence anyone in Hong Kong uttered.” For the U.S., and for the world, it’s abundantly, viscerally clear what a pandemic can do.

The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions. Such dynamics will be pivotal in the coming months, says Ilan Goldenberg, a foreign-policy expert at the Center for a New American Security. “The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes.”

One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero. During the second term of his presidency, the U.S. turns further inward and pulls out of NATO and other international alliances, builds actual and figurative walls, and disinvests in other nations. As Gen C grows up, foreign plagues replace communists and terrorists as the new generational threat.

One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation. Buoyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges. Gen C kids write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists. Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy. The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.

In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month. How did you come up with this last line? The first draft had basically the same ending except without that last line. My editor, Ross Anderson, just sent a note back saying, I think that needs to be in your voice and it needs to be one beautiful line that ties it all up. I spent a couple of hours trying to work out what that was. The horrible thing about this is that the same thing has happened in two of the last pieces I've written, where my editors have said, I think he just needs one last line. Now all the other editors I work with know that this is a really great way of getting a really good last line from me. That's my life.

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Every story has a beginning, middle, and an end. But in the telling, stories don't necessarily conform to that neat order. For Dave Cullen, freelance journalist and bestselling author, there is plenty of room for creativity in this age-old writing convention.

Cullen’s book “Columbine” traces the April 1999 high school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, from an hour after the shootings, when Cullen arrived on the scene, through the following 10 years. In his search for answers — Why did the two high school classmates become killers? How does a community recover from such searing trauma? — he found that much of the known narrative about Columbine was wrong. That led to what has become something of a dark specialty for Cullen: the culture of gun violence and, more specifically, school shootings. His book “Parkland: Birth of a Movement” was published this February, based on rare access to the Florida high school students who refused to be silent victims in the face of carnage.

Cullen shared what he learned along the way about core story craft at the 2019 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University last month. His keynote focused on two of the nonfiction storyteller’s primary challenges: Structure and character.

When it came time to write “Columbine,” the 10-year span of reporting presented a major hurdle: There had been extensive media coverage, and most of his prospective readers already knew the basics of how things had played out on that horrific day and in the years that followed.

So Cullen had a difficult choice to make:

Put the climactic scene, where students Erik Harris and Dylan Klebold go on a murderous rampage, at the end of the book. The problem with that structure, Cullen said, is that as the rest of the story builds and builds, it sets readers up to wait for a dramatic payoff, like “violence porn.”

Or begin with that scene. That creates what Cullen affectionately referred to as the cliché of “Saving Private Ryan,” in which the most dramatic action all happens in the first 25 minutes of the plot, leaving the audience little incentive to watch the rest of the movie. If he opened his book with the school shooting, readers would have been immersed in the primary drama and might not be compelled to read the hundreds of pages that followed.

Either way, Cullen was confronted with a tension problem, which created a structural problem. His solution? He stood on the keynote stage at the Power of Narrative conference, and held up a piece of paper showing the classic story arc — akin to a bell curve: brief establishing exposition or scene, intense rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Then he ripped the sheet half.

In that move, he demonstrated how, rather than picking one place for the climactic killing scene, he split it up, dispersing the action throughout the book.

“I get a lot of what I do from novels and films or cinema,” he said.

He opened his book in the days before the shootings, introducing some of the characters and foreshadowing some tension. When he gets to the morning of the shootings, he limits it to the moment the shooters get out of their cars and begin their rampage on the way into the school. Instead of having readers continue to follow them into the school, Cullen cuts to some exploration of the aftermath, only returning to the shootings in bits as he takes us through a more complex, multi-layered narrative. He followed that in-and-out timeline through the book, alternating pain and horror with humor and inspiring moments.

He also alternated the narratives of the killers and the victims. Cullen said his goal was to keep readers in suspense as he unspooled the story of the community reeling from the carnage.

That structural challenge was exacerbated by the challenge of character. Cullen wanted to tell the story of community response and recovery through individuals, but he had too many to choose from. There were 2,000 students at the school that day, and another 15,000 people in the community. In deciding how to select the right few to carry the story of many, he again borrowed a strategy from film. He selected people that best resembled typical character archetypes like “the good cop,” “the bad cop,” “the victim,” “the angry dad” and so on. Each character’s point of view was examined in alternating chapters. Together, they revealed the unfolding of a town healing from tragedy. That approach, he said, was borrowed from the use of multiple protagonists in William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.”

Cullen’s solutions seem obvious — and maybe easy — in retrospect. But he said there are no easy solutions or set ways of doing things. “I don’t know what I want it to look like,” he said about the early stages of reporting and writing a book. “But I know what I want it to feel like and what I want it to convey to the reader.” That requires a lot of thinking, and a lot of trial and error. The walls of his writing office are covered in white boards filled with scribbles and sticky notes. “I have a vague idea and just fumble toward it,” he said: The beginning is often murky and the middle is “mucky.” But if you can fumble around to a good solution, the storytelling will be vivid.

“You don’t need to have a process and stick to it,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t stick to anything.”

Cullen’s third book, “Soldiers First,” due out next year, is an account of two gay soldiers whose friendship carries them through two decades of war and changing military policy.

Boston University graduate student Jenny Rollins contributed to this story

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