I didn’t know the woman honored in an essay in the Phoenix Spirit, a Minnesota-based publication focused on emotional and spiritual health. Even after reading it, I only knew her first name, Eileen, that she was a professor and gardener and walker, that she explored with art, and that she had died of ovarian cancer.

Yet by the end of the piece, I felt I knew far more about writing, and about life.

That happened throughout the tribute, written by the woman’s walking friend, Mary Lou Logsdon. I met Logsdon in a writing workshop several years ago. She had, over the years, moved away from more traditional career pursuits and was working as a spiritual advisor; as part of that, she writes a column for the Phoenix Spirit, which is as thoughtful as it is well-crafted.

Her tribute to Eileen is a masterpiece of profile writing. Much of Eileen’s story seemed quotidian stuff, but Logsdon had a way of punctuating it, at paragraph ends, with a little hitch of surprise or meaning. Consider these two grafs:

While I was already retired from my first career, she was fairly new at the University. She had married right out of high school to an Army man she met while her father was stationed in Alaska. She soon had two children, was living in a trailer house near her husband’s Wisconsin family and left alone while he told stories into the night at the local bar. She walked her children past and sometimes into the nearby college, peeking around corners to see what life was like for the students she saw, not much younger than her. She feared they’d know she didn’t belong.

When she told him she got a job at the college, he assured her they would never keep her. What could she offer? She took one college class followed by another, growing in confidence and amazement as she discovered a new side of herself.

The pacing and detail kept me going through a story I otherwise might have given a brief scan. As I read, I was able to touch the edges of Logsdon’s loss. I learned about a person I would like to have known. I thought about my own close friends and what I most value about them. I considered what they give to my life, what I would miss about them if they were gone, and whether I spend enough time tending to the gifts of their friendship.

These are the kinds of things not only eulogies, but all intimate storytelling should do. They tell us the story of one to tell us the story of all — and of ourselves.

That was capped, with grace, by the last paragraph of Logsdon’s essay, and by a last line that is a stunning bit of both writing and life wisdom:

Eileen died June 10, 2024. She leaves a big hole in my life and in my heart. A person could protect themselves from this aching sorrow by not bothering to venture into love. That would come at a much higher cost. Besides, there’s more room in a broken heart.

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I often ask the journalists I work with who they write for. A more productive way of framing that question is to ask who they envision as the audience for their essay or magazine story or book. Who do they most want to reach, and why? Is it their sources? The publication they are writing for? The editors?

Or is it, if they’re honest, for themselves?

Acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood offered her own answer in a March 2023 interview on Here & Now, with the Boston-based NPR affiliate WBUR. A recent rebroadcast of the interview was pegged to the paperback release of Atwood’s short story collection, “Old Babes in the Wood.”

Midway through the interview, show host Scott Tong mentions the death of Atwood’s long-time partner, fellow novelist Graeme Gibson, in 2o19. He asks if some of the themes in “Old Babes” were, in part, a way of dealing with her grief. The question is apt: The book is dedicated to Gibson, and themes of love, aging, loss and death are stitched throughout the stories.

Atwood’s response is succinct and, perhaps to some, surprising:

“Writing isn’t really for the writer. It’s for the reader.”

She goes on to say that any writing she might do as part of a personal catharsis would go into a journal and never be published; it would be for her and her alone. But when she’s writing for publication, the focus and purpose shifts outward. She describes a delightful old convention among writers who, when a work is finished, say:

“Go, little book, out into the world.”

That attitude strikes me as both practical and generous. Journaling is fine. It’s how some people sort through their thoughts and their place in the world. It’s how some of the best published writers I know explore their nascent ideas. Longform magazine writers and project reporters sometimes use it as a form of keeping and organizing notes.

But when it comes to work you actually want to publish, all that internal focus needs to shift outward to serve an audience and purpose beyond yourself. Or, as Atwood put it:

“Once you’ve finished something, it’s not yours anymore. It belongs to whoever receives it.”

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The 2023 novel “North Woods” by Daniel Mason is about apples, or about a patch of land where a disaffected traveler grew apples, or about the house he built that then crumbled, or about all of that — and also none of that. Apples are a thin throughline and occasional metaphor, but mostly  provide a tart-and-sweet juiciness to a book that’s about wonder, war, family, history, terror, faith, marriage, parenthood, sex, nature, betrayal, seasons, America, grief, fashion, hunger, race, class, survival, philosophy and more. Yes, more, including a panther. Like this list, the book conforms to no obvious or traditional order; chapters range from a long collection of one-sided letters between closeted gay lovers to dialog-driven scenes to poems. It is somewhat chronological, but only as it dips back into the history of the singular place it is set in — a vague and remote patch of land in what would become Maine (or Massachusetts?) where a widower escaped the griefs of society to nurture his twin daughters and his apple orchard.

The book had been urged on me by many reader friends. I was intrigued that even as they raved, each said it was “different” or “challenging” or mentioned that it took them awhile to pick up its rhythms, but then they were hooked. They were right, although my summary would be that Mason’s book is what I think of as a slow read — a book you have to engage with, chapter by chapter, page by page, graf by graf, sentence by sentence. As such, it’s gutsy. It not only defies the solid underpinnings of known structures, but it defies this era of short attentions.

It also rewards those who yearn for that time when a book — a well-told story — became a whole world. For writers — whether of fiction, nonfiction or poetry — it offers permission to dare break some rules. For readers, it invites — even requires — full attention and, I have found, frequent re-reading of passages — at first, for me, to pick up the threads of plot and changing rhythms of language, but, soon enough, to absorb the layers of flavor in each sentence. If the book were an apple, it would be more Honeycrisp than Red Delicious.

Once I found that reading zone, I also found myself listening (because readers do ”hear” writing with an inner ear) for echoes to today’s issues in a book that is, on surface, as far removed from today as it could be. Perhaps the strongest echo is man’s imprint on nature — or, at times, the reverse: nature’s imprint on man. In either direction, that imprint can be life-giving — or an assault.

A strong echo came with the latest news about global warming. This in a story from the Los Angeles Times by environmental reporter Hayley Smith:

Humanity is ignoring major planetary vital signs as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soar to all-time highs and Earth records its 12th consecutive month of record-breaking heat, international climate officials warned this week.

At 60.63 degrees, the global mean temperature in May was a record 2.73 degrees hotter than the preindustrial average against which warming is measured — marking an astonishing yearlong streak of heat that shows little sign of slowing down, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“North Woods” is not an environmental treatise per se. Yet, perhaps inevitably, it is. Wilderness turned to orchards. Orchards destroyed by disregard. Bodies that are fed by nature then return in death to feed nature. And that panther.

The LA Times story sent me hunting back through my dog-eared pages of “North Woods” to find a sentence that held me when I read it. It may even be the heart of the entire book — what we clumsily call a “nut graf” in traditional journalism. It comes in a long chapter of musings written by a father — the original apple orchardist — to his daughters as he prepares to head for war. He’s trying to leave them a lifetime of perspective and value, passion and purpose, in case he doesn’t return. One of his stories calls on the apple’s mythical status in ancient Greece and the annual tradition of sharing wassail with the tree roots to assure a good crop the following year.

The widowed orchardist admits to his daughters that he doesn’t really believe the myth; he has seen Nature (which he capitalizes as a proper name), do just fine without the impositions of man. But then he writes this:

… I have come to the opinion, generally, that he who does good to the land shall be protected, while he who trespasses upon her will be met with most violent return.

I have read little poetry and few prayers that use words to worship more beautifully.

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Clichés are to good writing as fill in your preferred cliché here.

A student of mine once challenged that notion. She insisted that clichés are a good thing: They are a universal shorthand — a way to make stories shorter and more understandable.

Yow!

Rather than lecture, I threw several clichés out to the class, asking other students what they thought the phrases meant. (Bonus points if they knew the origins of a phrase that has become a cliché, and thus its original meaning.) A few came close, but most were in the "um, I think it's sort of like when" camp. Generational differences quickly emerged, even with terms as basic as "one-horse town." Most figured "party line" was a reference to politics rather than phone service. My era of pop culture references— think lines from early "Star Trek" and "Saturday Night Live" — was as foreign to them as Instagram influencers are to me. As for the actual foreign students in the class, one from China and another from India, they just looked dazed by it all; they were probably wondering how to explain this part of their spendy education to their parents back home.

The point was made. Mostly. But it led to some great questions. Students wanted to know why and when things go from fresh descriptions to tired clichés. How do they know when a common phrase makes writing conversational and when it makes it confusing? What about all the casual language used in broadcast? Isn't it insulting to people with deep knowledge of a subject — maybe sports or hip-hop or business — to describe things in overly literal terms?

We brainstormed some solutions, mostly focused on platform and audience. Brief bits on radio and television allow more latitude for conversational phrasing; it's how people talk in daily life, and context often carries enough meaning. Stories meant for a niche or speciality audience can rely on some level of insider language.

But I cautioned that clarity remains the prime directive of journalistic writing. So if you're going to use a cliché, don't do it because it's easy. Do it in context, and make it fresh. Push it, turn it on its head, make it surprising, dare to make it original.

That's harder to say than to do. It's even hard to provide examples. So I was thrilled to come across one last week, from Charles P. Pierce. While Pierce's primary gig is writing his Esquire politics blog, he got his start in journalism covering sports, and still draws on that world for a wide range of metaphors in writing about politics. He also is as good as anyone I read at drawing on references from religion, history, music, movies, literature and pop culture, then riffing those references into something new.

This week, he did it to anchor the first graf of a piece about the death and life of controversial college basketball coach Bobby Knight, who died at 83. It's not your usual tribute; Pierce does not gloss over Knight's dark side. And written for the employee-owned sports-and-culture site Defector, it sinks pretty far into sports minutiae.

You don't need a key to that clubhouse to pull out some of the lessons in Pierce's profile. He does it at the end, when he places Knight in the dark side of a Jekyll and Hyde frame. Scan through the basketball trivia to that end and you'll see that, as well-known as that literary reference is presumed to be, Pierce resummarizes enough of the story to make the analogy work whether you've read the original or not.

And as for those clichés made new, all you need do is read the first paragraph, which closes with this fresh twist on a very tired phrase:

For many people in and around college basketball, Bob Knight’s career became an accelerated trip through a wilderness of last straws and an endless graveyard of camels who died of broken backs.

To use a sports cliché about Pierce's writing — because in this context, why not: He shoots. He scores!

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The question has confronted me more frequently, its challenge heated by the contraction of newsrooms, rise of mis- and disinformation, indifference to facts, intransigence of opinion and a depressing distrust of the legitimate press. That question, at heart:

What good is what we do if nothing changes?

I am just as prone to frustration about the current state of affairs as anyone. I stepped into journalism as the press called politicians to account over the Vietnam War and The Washington Post took on a presidency. I have boxes of letters from readers testifying to the changes in laws, hearts and minds because of courageous and compassionate reporting. Now analytics claim that the most popular stories — the ones we should chase — have as much to do with tease headlines and quick-hit sensationalism as with serious societal issues.

So I get the question when it comes from students or early-career journalists. I also know it would be insulting to blow some idealistic smoke their way.

My solution: I tell them two things:

• You never know how a story touches someone; you just have to do meaningful work and trust that it matters.
• Even if nothing changes that you can track, we remain the first, rough draft of history. Without us, history is too easily shaped as a lie.

Much as I believe both of those things, I know they aren’t an easy sell. And on the darkest news days, I wonder if maybe I’m just trying to convince myself. So I paused in deep gratitude when nonfiction author David Grann started a chapter, late in his epic history “Killers of the Flower Moon,” with this calm and sure statement:

History is a merciless judge.

Grann’s 2017 book was released last month as an major motion picture, directed by Martin Scorcese, studded throughout with an all-star cast. The book sat on my shelf unopened for a few years, as the restlessness of COVID had me reaching for the escape of fiction. I grabbed it when I heard the movie was coming out — a lifelong habit of wanting to read the real thing before I indulge in the hyped Hollywood version.

The book did not disappoint. Grann went back 100 years to tell of the multiple, mysterious murders that haunted members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. Investigation of those murders helped launch the modern FBI, so we also get glimpses of how the charismatic and controversial J.Edgar Hoover launched his reign. It’s a compelling read without once compromising rigorous reporting or source transparency. That’s are worthy lesson on its own.

But there’s also the declarative note about history. When Grann hits a dead-end in what he finds in various records, he remains convinced — as did some of the primary investigators at the time — that there were more murders that were never solved. So he keeps digging and, in the final section of the book, proves that the “Reign of Terror” was a more complex and extensive conspiracy than the FBI revealed. Grann dug back through history — much of it found by mining old newspapers — and fashions a fuller narrative. In the process, he teaches us about the racism that is a continued legacy of our social systems.

Reporting tomorrow’s history

I had just finished “Killers of the Flower Moon” when I came across a loud echo in today’s news. New York Times court reporter Adam Liptak did a short-but-clear explainer (one of his super-powers) on requests from the media to allow audie and video broadcasts of the upcoming trial involving charges that Donald J. Trump conspired to undermine the 2020 presidential election. Cameras in courtrooms is a long-debated issue, and the requests face, as Liptak wrote, “a distinctly uphill fight.”

But then he digs into a back-up argument, filed by NBC News,  based on something called “Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.” The NBC argument is based on the interpretation of just three words in the ruling. The network posits that while live broadcasts are not allowed “from the courtroom,” that doesn’t prohibit the recording and release of those broadcasts through other venues and at other times.

It may seem like typical legal hairsplitting. But the stakes are much higher, as noted by Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC’s president of editorial:

“At minimum, I urge this court to allow the video recording of proceedings for historical posterity,” Ms. Blumenstein said in a sworn statement submitted with NBC’s application. “It would be a great loss if future generations of Americans were forever deprived of being able to access and view the events of this trial even years after the verdict, which would immeasurably improve the ability of future journalists and historians to retell accurately and meaningfully analyze this unique chapter of American history. … Americans — and history — should not lose the chance to see video of this watershed trial, which involves alleged conduct going to the heart of our democracy.”

I don’t know that history is always a merciless judge. But it can’t be an honest one without a full record to draw on.

And that full record often starts with journalism.

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That phrase has stayed with me for years, since I read John Steinbeck's last novel, which was cited when the iconic 20th century author was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is, according to publisher Penguin Random House, "a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis." I suppose, but I find myself turning and turning it in my mind, seeing layers of meaning that feel just out of reach.

I also suppose I should be embarrassed that I didn't know — or didn't remember if I once knew — that it originally was a line from an even more iconic author: William Shakespeare penned it in "Richard the Third," his play about civil war in England. But I find that embarrassment is usually time wasted unless I use it as a motivator to learn something, which I did in this case. (Hello, Google.)

That said, I'm grateful I knew that the line is part of classic literature, even if I couldn't accurately trace its provenance, when it breezed by early in Episode 4 of the 2023 Amazon Prime series "Deadloch."

Deadloch is a quirky village on the Australian island state of Tasmania. A serious and highly professional Dulcie Collins (played by Kate Box) has moved there with her wife after she left her detective job in Sydney to save her marriage following an affair. When a nude body washes up on a beach, the boy-brass send another female detective — the ribald and highly unprofessional Eddie Redcliffe (played by Madeleine Sami) — to take over Dulcie's case. Hilarity ensues, as the saying goes. So, too, more dead bodies, lesbian sex, un-woke gender smack-downs and rapid-fire dialog in so many shades of blue that Crayola would blush. IMDb calls it "a feminist noir comedy set against a bucolic backdrop with a rising body count."

I was not at all certain when I first tuned in. I'm far from reverent when it comes to language or entertainment, but this felt several bridges too far. Something kept me watching, though, and soon enough I fit into Vanity Fair's neat summary: "This delightful Australian import, originally called Funny Broadchurch, starts off as a spoof before blooming into an addictive, hilarious thriller that stands on its own."

But back to the focus of these posts, and how this applies. For a hint, check the previous graf to see if you can identify the two literary references tucked therein. That leads me to the delight in noticing that very brief, unspoken moment in Episode 4 of "Deadloch."

Eddie Redcliffe is without lodging or proper clothing for the town's upcoming winter festival. She's bunking overnight at the local outfitters store, and wearing camo and fleece she grabs off the racks. The clerk comes in one morning to open early in anticipation of festival sales. As she rousts Eddie from her camp chair, she is holding a sidewalk sandwich board. It reads:

NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCOUNT TENTS.

I was so afraid I had imagined it that I hit pause and rewind — twice. There it was, to my spit-laugh delight.

That put me on alert for the other, many refs — pop-culture and beyond — splattered through the dialog. A lot were American; whether we like it or not, media is our biggest export. Many, many more were Aussie slang, much of it that blew by me without real understanding.

No matter. You don't have to know the Shakespeare/Steinbeck allusion, or many of the others dropped throughout the script of this raunchy comedy, to get a kick out of. But so much more fun if you do. And certainly far more fun for the script writers.

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Picture a sandy-haired Dennis the Menace, 11 years old.

He wandered into News Connect, the Wichita Journalism Collaborative's pop-up newsroom, in the downtown library on a recent day.

Our collaborative – a partnership of 11 local news and community organizations – was on week five of an experiment to see what impact making ourselves easily accessible to the public might have.

"What's in here?" he asked no one in particular.

"Journalists," we told him. "We do the news."

"BORING!" he declared.

He tried to leave, but I waved him back in.

We introduced ourselves and our jobs: A news photographer from The Wichita Eagle, a radio reporter from KMUW, and me, editor of The Wichita Beacon, a nonprofit, online news outlet.

He pointed to us one at a time: "Newspapers are dead! Radio is boring and... I don't even know what you are." That last was directed at me.

I was not about to give up. Generation Alpha was in my sightline.

I asked him: “What if we wrote about stuff that mattered to you?” He seemed bored but slightly curious. I continued:

"Journalists are for when something isn't fair, and you want someone to find out why. Is there anything in your world that isn't fair?"

He started talking. Nonstop. About how schools don't give you enough time to eat lunch. About how you don't get enough time for recess. About how if you stand up to bullies, you get in trouble, too.

"Are you writing this down?" he asked me. He leaned over me to check my notepad. I started writing. He kept talking.

"Are you going to write this story?" he asked.

I explained I couldn't do that without his name, without him being on the record. He

immediately told me his full name and spelled it.

And before he left, he went over to his mom with one of our promo cards, scanned the QR code on the back with his cell phone, then handed it to his mom, directing her to input her name and email. Another subscriber to our free newsletter.

Victory!

The news, it seems, is more interesting when you see your world in it, and when journalists are writing about what's not fair in that world.

Relevance still reigns

Are you writing this down?

In our industry’s frenetic quest to survive, we pretzel ourselves to deliver what we think the reader wants. We often look at the younger generation and believe the answer lies in new “news products'' because, we’re told, young people don’t read. They prefer audio and video.

But maybe that misses the point. Maybe the real solution is relevancy, as it’s always been. People, whether kids or adults, want to read about themselves and people they know, and to count on journalists to address what’s unfair.

* * *

Polly Basore Wenzl is editor of the non-profit startup Wichita Beacon in Wichita, Kansas. She formerly was an editor at the Wichita Eagle and worked as a writer for nonprofit and education projects.

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Most streets worth walking — and bars worth drinking in — contain multitudes. Writers love to have choices. But with so many options available, the challenge becomes guiding a reader into both the soul of a place and the heart of a piece.

That’s the beauty of Cynthia Barnes’s lead into a very personal remembrance, published May 4, 2023, in Denver Westword. How do you invite a stranger to share the sudden and unexpected loss of the signature bartender at your local? It’s a story that needs to be shared, but also demands decorum, even a little privacy.

And so Barnes begins on the street, a street famous all on its own. The longest commercial street in the United States, Colfax Avenue even features its own contested mythology. The story goes that Playboy once called it “the longest, wickedest street in America” but the actual Playboy story where this might have happened is still AWOL. If you’re reading in Denver, you know where you are. And if you aren’t Denver-savvy it doesn’t matter because with a single detail you already know you’re on a street of stories:

On East Colfax, it’s not terribly unusual to see grown men crying in the middle of the afternoon. But this week, the grown men crying at Nob Hill Inn are (mostly) sober. Some may have done a little time back in the day. Some definitely could — and would — kick your ass, should your ass be in need of kicking.

And then we enter. If you’re a stranger drinking in a strange town, it’s always a good plan to understand and respect the atmosphere. And here Barnes lets you know who you’re drinking with, and even the possible consequences. Maybe that stool is empty for a reason. But sit here on the other side, and let me tell you a story….

* * *

Erik Ness is a science and environmental journalist based in Madison, Wisconsin. His work can be found at linedried.com.

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Context is a core to good reporting, especially when current events are informed by history, law, geopolitics, culture, economics or the many other things that complicate modern life. A singular moment is seldom that.

Context can, and often should, be woven throughout a story, placed where it helps readers understand various points. But it almost always is needed as a part of the nut graf or nut section, too. Few stories can cover everything about a complex situation, so readers need to know whether a particular story is being told in the context of politics or law or religion, for example. More than anything, tight context signals to readers the significance of an event.

Peter Baker, who has covered five presidential administrations for The New York Times, delivered a marvel of a contextual writing in his deadline piece posted soon after the criminal indictment of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump. Of course, speculation about a possible indictment has been swirling for months, and grew intense in recent days, so Baker no doubt had a few stories teed up depending how the news actually broke. That, too, is smart reporting.

His piece, as a whole, is sharp news with a weave of reaction, law, politics and history. It uses nut grafs as the actual lede.

His first graf starts with a contextual clause, repeated in a second sentence for purposeful emphasis. Note that the seven words that start the sentence are echoed exactly at the end of the second sentence, adding to the impact.

For the first time in American history, a former president of the United States has been indicted on criminal charges. It is worth pausing to repeat that: An American president has been indicted for a crime for the first time in history.

In that treatment, the indictment itself plays second fiddle to the significance it holds.

Then Baker dishes up two paragraphs that deepen that context, sweeping in a concise reminder of the tenor of the Trump era, then placing that era and this week's decision in the context of all of American history.

So many unthinkable firsts have occurred since Donald J. Trump was elected to the White House in 2016, so many inviolable lines have been crossed, so many unimaginable events have shocked the world that it is easy to lose sight of just how astonishing this particular moment really is.

For all of the focus on the tawdry details of the case or its novel legal theory or its political impact, the larger story is of a country heading down a road it has never traveled before, one fraught with profound consequences for the health of the world’s oldest democracy. For more than two centuries, presidents have been held on a pedestal, even the ones swathed in scandal, declared immune from prosecution while in office and, effectively, even afterward.

No longer. That taboo has been broken. A new precedent has been set.

From there, Baker deftly pivots to the questions raised by this moment of news. He doesn't speculate on the answer to those questions, but lets the questions themselves amplify the importance of the moment and gives readers a road-map to follow into the near future:

Will it tear the country apart, as some feared about putting a former president on trial after Watergate? Will it be seen by many at home and abroad as victor’s justice akin to developing nations where former leaders are imprisoned by their successors? Or will it become a moment of reckoning, a sign that even someone who was once the most powerful person on the planet is not above the law?

Finally, he anchors it all with an authoritative and independent voice: "Whether the indictment is warranted or not, it crosses a huge line in American politics and American legal history,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush.

That's how it's done: A story about an unprecedented (if expected) led by a nut-graf lede and wrapped in context.

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You don't need insider access, aka paid subscriber status, to the news to overindulge in speculation about the possible indictment coming down from a Manhattan grand jury against former President Donald J. Trump. You also probably don't need me to recap the news, no matter where on the planet you live, but just in case:

The former occupant of the White House is looking down the barrel of charges that he paid $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about a sexual encounter he denies. The issue isn't so much the sex, even in these prudish dis-United States; it centers on whether the payout violated campaign laws because it possibly affected the 2016 presidential election and therefore should have been reported.

Back to this week's news and insider access to a story by Nate Cohn, chief political analyst. In The Tilt newsletter sent to subscribers, Cohn provided a concise and entertaining guide to multiple investigations closing in on Trump, and whether indictments (unprecedented for a current or former U.S. president) would help or hurt Trump at the polls.

Cohn launched his assessment with what could be glossed over as an easy cliché: "...we're approaching uncharted waters." But then, with admirable literary control, he played that out, like an ancient sailor unspooling a sounding line to determine the water's depth.

Cohn set up his analysis with a clever acknowledgement: Even the most informed of political predictions are  political predictions are more like reading "one of those yellowish, distorted maps from the age of exploration. It offers only a rough guide of what lies ahead."

Then he was off, in an extended metaphor that never got strained:

This is the blurry corner of the map where we can’t do much more than draw fantastical sea creatures. We know this part of the world is probably ocean, but we don’t know much else. We’re sure it’s dangerous.

We’ve learned a thing or two from previous expeditions by Donald J. Trump into rough, faraway waters. Already, he has survived multiple federal investigations, two impeachment trials and countless predictions of his political demise. Every drunken sailor at the pub knows he can’t be counted out. But if Mr. Trump has defied the odds before, he hasn’t always come back unscathed. It’s not wise to tempt fate too many times.

Cohn then provides an outline of the "map" of investigations against Trump as "we edge toward a possible indictment."

The rest of the piece draws on polls, history and legal considerations. It wisely reaches no firm conclusion, but lays out the factors at play, including the erratic behavior of Trump, his supporters and his political opponents. Then it wraps back to the metaphor at the very end:

These possibilities lie even farther off the edge of our map. If he’s convicted, that might amount to falling off the map altogether.

Who says political analysis can't be creative and clichés can't be made new?

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