Tom Whipple’s recent story in the Times of London about the reappearance of beavers in Devon, England, could have been a deeply serious science piece, laden with facts, numbers and jargon, except for the fact that it was Whipple who wrote it. The science editor at The Times, Whipple is known to readers for his lively and engaging writing. And so his story about the beavers was, yes, a deeply serious science piece, but one written in an inviting, entertaining way.

How did he do that?

TONE. Whipple respects the reader. He doesn’t over-explain. He lets readers in on the joke, when there is one. He writes as though he is writing to a friend. He surprises the readers with word choice and sentence structure.

STRUCTURE. In this piece, he moves from narrative to background/context to narrative seamlessly. The story is lively, the tone is warm and witty. “It’s beaver o’clock,” he writes, as a group of people wait for the beavers to emerge from their den. He uses the word “beavery,” which might not be a real word but which is perfect in this context. He brings in mythology:

Like the nearby Beast of Bodmin Moor, the beavers were spotted in Devon in fleeting glances, glimpsed in implausible sightings — and dismissed as otters.

VOICE. Whipple’s voice doesn’t change between narrative and background; it remains approachable and slightly humorous. He dares to make reference to beaver testicles, and to beavers’ cute button noses:

Conservation researchers don’t name their animals. That kind of sentimentality is discouraged, in what is a serious science. So Holden only occasionally calls him Gordon the Beaver, before hurriedly correcting himself.

HE CARES. As you will see in our conversation below and when you read the piece.

HE’S FUNNY. See jam / bread / sandwich metaphor below.

We reached out to Whipple about the decisions he made as he worked on this story. Our conversation has been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Why did you write this story?
I like beavers!

In all seriousness, one of the great joys of my job is I get to go and see things. It would be entirely possible to do my work sitting in an office, but I would have a lot less fun — and I think readers would probably have a slightly less fun read. As a reporter on The Times it is a privilege that I can see something that is interesting, and then invite myself along to see it, and just have people rearrange their days to accommodate me. (Early on, I was given a very good bit of advice by a grizzled editor: “Always remember, it’s The Times they are talking to, not you.”)

The ostensible point of the piece was that we are now about 10 years on from the start of a formal reintroduction program of the beaver, and also that the conservation charities want to extend the program. Really, though, I wanted to see some beavers, to get out in my raincoat and wellington boots, and hopefully write a nice piece that people wanted to read. Beavers are charismatic animals, and people like to read about them.

How long did it take you from conception to publication?
I think it was a couple of months. It was difficult to coordinate times so there was some back and forth on email, but the reasons for the delay were logistical rather than editorial.

Did it change much during the editing process?
Not really. I wrote it and then it ran while I was on holiday. I think it was the last thing I sent before putting on my out-of-office message on email.

I read it on the beach on my app like everyone else and remember being annoyed about one change (probably unreasonably so). In the piece I had talked about how this beaver presence actually originated with a rogue release of beavers. They were already settled in the river — and this essentially forced the government’s hand. It changed the status quo so that the question wasn’t “do we introduce beavers” but “do we evict them?”

This felt a little analogous to the geopolitical situation, where armies or peoples create “facts on the ground.” So I described how “once there were beavery facts on the ground….” etc. But someone changed it to “beavery signs on the ground,” which made less sense and didn’t frame beavers as geopolitical actors. I probably became unduly fixated on this.

Why was it important for you to be there in person? What did you gain by being there that you might not have gleaned from reportage done by phone or email?
There were no facts in the piece that I couldn’t have got remotely. Probably, with some effort — perhaps watching clips on YouTube — I could have also got some color.

But I believe and hope that something more is gained by being there in person. There are things that people will tell you in the dusk, walking along a river, as the flies dance above the water and after a day spent together, that they won’t in 10 minutes on the phone. I have to think that seeing the dams and meeting the people makes a difference — because if it doesn’t, then I just spend my days in an office in London. And that’s not why I became a journalist.

How did you decide when to move from narrative to background and then back again?
It’s not something I consciously think about, but I suppose all pieces are a little like a meal. To work, you need the filling: worthy, fibrous stuff — the facts. But to actually ingest them, you need someone to have thought about how to make it palatable. So, to slightly mix my metaphors, it’s a sandwich. You have layers of facts, lightened by the jam of color. And, in this genuinely terrible metaphor that I’m nevertheless going to run with, you start with the jam, to draw people in. Then you give them a slice of bread that explains why they should spend their time reading it. Then some more jam so they don’t find it too chewy.

You need both. Everyone likes jam, but without the bread you’d just smear it all over your face. I start with how many facts I need to convey, then separate them with enough color to hopefully keep people reading.

Who do you see as your audience, and how do you tailor your reporting and writing to them? Or do you?
I always assume that my reader is someone who is intelligent but knows nothing. This is admittedly a more useful rubric when writing about quantum mechanics than beavers — which are relatively easy to understand — but it applies here, too. You assume that they will get your jokes, but you don’t assume they have a degree in conservation biology.

I like to think of them as an interested and curious friend. The worst thing you can do is assume your reader is like the people who put cross comments under articles. Then you write defensively and pompously, and you please no one.

Your story opens with this line: “The beavers keep us waiting.” You are putting us right there, in the action, with no prelude. Why did you choose this beginning?
I don’t completely know. I suppose that I’m conscious when starting articles in which I’ve been to see something that there’s a very cliché way of opening, where you try to describe the situation in overly purple prose. “Scoop” (a novel by Evelyn Waugh) parodied it very well with another watery mammal:

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.

So the key is to sit back and think, “what actually happened” and “what did I actually think.” Also, thinking about it more, I suspect that that sentence construction instantly gives the beavers agency and anthropomorphises them — which is something scientists very much disapprove of, of course, but which journalists love!

Throughout the piece are graceful, sometimes amusing phrases and asides:

…it’s “beaver o’clock” …

Like the nearby Beast of Bodmin Moor, the beavers were spotted in Devon in fleeting glances, glimpsed in implausible sightings — and dismissed as otters.

Why did you choose to include humor in what is a serious, reported, science story?
I get suspicious of articles without humor, and of people who don’t joke. Even when writing about COVID-19, which I did a lot of, you can sneak in some humor. You shouldn’t force it. I don’t want to be like the boss in “The Office” (If I was like him, I suppose I’d be the last to realize it), but there’s almost always a place to think, “what’s funny here.” If there is something funny, you should put it in. Some of the best scientists in history were funny. Feynman, Crick, Einstein. Newton wasn’t funny, though; he was an arsehole.

There is no first person in this piece, although the opening line comes close. Yet you the narrator are very much a presence. Was this deliberate? And how did you do this?
Right when I started in journalism, writing on my student newspaper, I put myself into pieces a lot. Then I remember going to a talk by a proper journalist, who said if an article started with “I” he stopped reading. It made me feel like an idiot and I never forgot it.

Of course, he was wrong. There is absolutely a place for “I.” Sometimes things happen to you, and it becomes disingenuous to avoid the pronoun. There are few things sillier in journalism than when articles refer to “your reporter saw” or “told The Times” when they mean “I saw” and “told me” (having said that, I used that construction in an article this morning, where it just seemed more appropriate).

If a beaver had come and nibbled at me, I’d have put it in the piece in that form, and not said “a beaver nibbled The Times.” And, as you point out, I came close at the start — using “us.” In that case, it was pertinent to the story because the fact that a group of people, of which I happened to be one, had come to watch the beavers each night was proof of their popularity.

But I do think it’s a good idea to use yourself sparingly. I’m not what is interesting in this piece; the beaver is. This was appearing on the news pages of The Times. Frankly, I was pushing my luck already to get something this soft in there. If I’d also inserted myself into the story the editor might have raised an eyebrow, and stopped me having so much fun in future.

* * *

Laurie Hertzel is the former book editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She now reviews books for several newspapers and teaches in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia.

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In a few days I am going to start hauling books from the front hallway out into the front yard for a giant give-away. Neighbors will come, and friends, and folks I don’t know, and I hope everyone finds something they like and all the books find new homes.

How many books? I don’t know. Hundreds. What kinds? All kinds. Over the past few weeks I packed ten cartons to give, and then I ran out of boxes and started piling books on top of the radiator. It now holds six stacks, each about two feet high, and there are more piles on the floor.

This is the third time I’ve done a serious cull of my books. The first time was in 2014. I’d been a book review editor for the Minneapolis StarTribune for five years by then, and books were coming into the house at a furious clip. The shelves were jammed. The dining room table was covered. So, too, the bedside table, the bedroom floor, the bedroom radiator, my desk, my other desk and the dining room floor.

Still, getting rid of any books seemed impossible. I couldn’t find any that needed to go. When I picked up a book I hadn’t read, I wanted to read it; if it was a book I’d read, I wanted to keep it. Books are the diary of my life; when I scan a shelf, I see pieces of my past in the spines.

I did try. But when I opened dusty books, I found long-forgotten ephemera — photographs, letters, bookmarks from bookstores long since closed. Some books had been gifts, signed by the giver. Some books had been my father’s, signed by him.

In the end, I got rid of the paperbacks. That felt easy. The print was small, the pages were brittle, the spines had lost their glue. This bought me time; paperbacks took up three shelves, which I immediately filled with books from the table and the floor.

The second cull, during COVID, was easier. This time I took every book off the shelf, one at a time, and studied it. Had I read it? If not, why not? If so, would I read it again? I thought in terms of moving, even though we had no plans to go anywhere: Would I want to haul this book to a different house?

That year I filled more than a dozen cartons and held my first big Front Yard Give-Away. It was a delight. Friends I hadn’t seen since before lockdown showed up, and even though the books were free, some people left gifts on my front step: flowers, candy, homemade jam.

Most of the books disappeared. Those that didn’t I donated to libraries (both Little Free and public).

Now it is four years later, and the books have somehow reproduced. This time, culling is harder. During the first two clean-outs I cut to the bone. This time I am looking critically at the bone itself. I make a plan:

1. Get rid of duplicates. This is not easy, because the books I have in duplicate are books I love, such as Mary McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” a wonderful memoir that is also an exercise in how flawed memory can be. I teach memoir writing, so it’s a good book to have on hand. But do I really need three copies?
2. Do not keep every book an author has written. Calvin Trillin takes up more than a shelf. So do John McPhee and Anne Tyler. Maybe I should just keep their best work and let the others go. (Maybe.)
3. Say goodbye to pleasant novels — books that I enjoyed but will not read again.
4. Don’t be afraid to cull books I haven’t yet read. If I haven’t read it by now, perhaps I never will.
5. Reconsider those thick biographies. Yes, I am interested in Ulysses S. Grant and Barbara Pym, but maybe not interested enough. But be careful. I thought the same of Richard Holbrooke and gave away George Packer’s delightful “Our Man” in the Purge of 2020 — then had to buy it again when I needed it for a talk.
6. Coffee table books! Beautiful to look at, gorgeous to possess, but will I ever actually read them? Swallow hard, and be ruthless. The folks who attend the give-away will be thrilled to find these.

Of course I am violating this plan freely. I am keeping multiple copies of B.J. Chute’s 1956 novel “Greenwillow;” it’s a soothing, peaceful book that I send to friends who are going through a hard time. I need to have a good supply. I am keeping both editions of Dermot Healy’s “Long Time No See” because I love that book; the U.S. edition and the U.K. edition are different, and both are beautiful. And I am keeping all of the Anne Tylers; I re-read them during lockdown, and who knows when there might be another pandemic?

Now I see that the forecast for this weekend calls for rain, so the book giveaway might have to wait. I look at the stacks in the hallway, and I find myself wanting them to be gone. They are no longer books, but baggage. That’s a good thing.

I spy gaps on the shelves. I can’t remember what used to be there, and that, too, is a good thing. Now I can think not of what is gone, but of what is yet to come.

* * *

Laurie Hertzel is the former book editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She now reviews books for several newspapers and teaches in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia.

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It’s a standard story for American newspapers: the story-behind-the-story of someone who has died suddenly and tragically. But when Keith Duggan wrote about the life and death of Sarah McNally for his newspaper, the Irish Times, it became a different kind of story entirely.

“A very Irish life cut violently short” was published April 6, 2o24, just one week after Sarah’s murder at the Irish bar she worked at in New York. But the story only mentions her death in a glancing sort of way, and it barely mentions the accused murderer (a former boyfriend). It is more a meditation on on the typical Irish immigrant experience in New York.

Sarah is the touchstone throughout Duggan’s story, but he resists the predictable dive into  personal aspects of her life and relationships. Instead, he delivers a narrative, with flashes of first person. The story begins with the rain in New York, and the writer’s journey from Manhattan to the Maspeth neighborhood of Queens; it is about the changing neighborhood where Sarah worked, the Irish bars where Irish immigrants like Sarah have long found work, the people who knew her or knew other Irish immigrants like her.

Duggan’s observations are intimate and empathetic:

No matter how many times you make the brief crossing from the teeming city to the Irish enclaves, the difference between those two worlds is always breathtaking.

Sarah’s death happened “at teatime.” The bar where she worked was a place where “people thought the world of her.” It was, as Irish bars in New York often are to Irish immigrants, a place of “sanctuary.”

One theme of the piece is silence. Instead of using the brusque phrase “refused to comment,” Duggan makes it clear that it’s simply too early for people who knew Sarah to talk about her. The mood in the bar was “warm if exhausted.”

Later in the piece, Duggan interviews Eileen Reilly, who runs a community center in the neighborhood. It’s late in the day, but he lets the reader know that she makes time for him:

As we sit chatting in her office, several staff call ‘good night, Miss Reilly,’ from down the hallway as they leave for the evening.

The whole story is infused with intimacy and empathy. It ends with a piercing conclusion:

In the bar life, you meet many people. In an era of remote working, of hours and years staring into a computer screen, the bar trade has remained true to the idea of the workplace as a society. Over a decade in New York, Sarah McNally must have shared a pleasant word with an inestimable number of people and formed valuable friendships with many of those who are today in a state of heartbreak and disbelief. They will remember her for a long time in the various corners of New York. It is probable that there will be a moment of silent reflection before the big GAA match in Gaelic Park this weekend. And silence is appropriate: it is little wonder that Sarah McNally’s nearest and dearest have been unable to speak about her, at least for the time being.

It’s Saturday again and there are no words.

The hows and whys of the writing can best be explained by Duggan himself, with whom I had a discussion via email. The following is edited for length and clarity.

What was the original assignment, and how did you approach it?
The death of Sarah McNally took place on the Saturday of what was a bank holiday weekend in Ireland. I work and live in Washington D.C. as Washington Correspondent for The Irish Times. I got a message at 7 a.m. on the following Tuesday and was on a train an hour later. The assignment was to write a piece for the Weekend section of our Saturday edition, which generally contains reviews and longer pieces. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure how to approach it until I was travelling up to Manhattan and began to think about what had happened.

How much do you consider audience when you write? This felt to me like a story for folks back home in Ireland, though it was also fascinating to me, an American.
I don’t normally think about audience except in the general sense of trying to make a story as appealing or interesting or informative as possible. But this was unusual. To begin with, I didn’t really think of it as a story — more as a terrible event which we were compelled to cover and which I dreaded doing. I’m not a crime reporter per se. I was conscious of how Sarah’s murder was covered in the New York tabloids and began to think about how bewildering and terrible this must have been for her family and friends, including those who were regulars in the bar.

Why did you include small scenes of first person?
The details of the death were documented in all media in Ireland and in the NYC tabloids. Police reports and comments strongly suggested that this was an instance of domestic violence that took place in the most public of settings — an Irish bar, on a Saturday evening. I decided I didn’t want to rehash the grim events of what happened. But I was aware that people back in Ireland were, understandably, shocked. One of the reasons for this, I felt, was that Sarah McNally could have been them or someone they knew. Everyone in Ireland could relate to her story: leaving Ireland for New York, working in the hospitality industry.

Can you also talk about your use of second person, which makes the story feel very intimate? That’s an unusual structure that American journalists would be warned against using.
In some ways I think the American journalistic tradition is a lot more formal than it is in Ireland the UK. In a piece like this, The Irish Times is comfortable in allowing that second-person perspective that you mention. But I really just wrote about what I encountered that day. As it happened, all of New York was engulfed in a dismal rainstorm that afternoon. It changed the entire city. I took the E train out to Queens and knew that this was a journey Sarah McNally must have made many times. All I was really trying to do was to give readers an idea of what Maspeth was like. And the bar, The Ceili House — here was an everyday Irish bar that was suddenly at the centre of a big media storm. And yet when I called in on Tuesday afternoon, it was virtually deserted, just two customers and the bar lady and the little vigil. I had a brief conversation with the bar lady but she asked me not to quote her. I wanted to make it clear that even though she didn’t wish to speak publicly, she was in no way unfriendly.

Most stories in American newspapers that deal with violent death give as many details of the death as possible. You not only didn’t do that, but you made it clear to the reader that you were not going to do it. Why?
It’s always disconcerting for Irish readers to read the way American media covers violent death. In Ireland, those details are never reported until the trial.

I felt that anyone reading the piece either already knew of the details or could easily obtain them. And of course, the attacker was known to Sarah McNally. It was allegedly carried out by someone who had meant something to her. I think because of the circumstances of her death, her personal life had kind of become public property. That’s understandable: Violent deaths are reported. But it did feel like a violation. If there was a way to cover this story without repeating that graphic detail, it seemed the most sensible and respectful way of doing it.

Let’s talk about your opening, which is cinematic — a feeling of movement from Manhattan to Queens, the recollection of a scrum of reporters outside the bar, and then the quiet of the interior of the bar a few days later. Can you talk about how and why you crafted the opening in this way?
That wasn’t down to any great deliberation on my part. I think I wrote that piece on Wednesday because it had to be filed Thursday morning. So I just described what I encountered over the day. I started out getting off the train at Penn Station, where it was absolutely lashing rain, and 90 minutes later was in the bar.

Your story addresses a changing neighborhood — once very Irish and safe for Irish immigrants, now only partly Irish. This gives a richness to the story, avoids clichés. How did you approach the reporting of this?
I took the train over to Jackson Boulevard and then a taxi down to Maspeth. The taxi driver took us by that community hall that I visited. I looked it up and saw that it was run by a lady with an Irish name, Eileen Reilly. And I knew the area must have been an Irish neighbourhood at some stage but it didn’t feel that way now. I called up unannounced and Eileen was wonderful and spoke about the transition of Maspeth from predominately Irish to a multi-cultural part of Queens. It would seem that all of those traditionally Irish strongholds are beginning to fade and change.

Please talk about your last line  — It’s Saturday again and there are no words. — which really stayed with me.
It just came to me as I was writing that end paragraph and thinking of what it would be like for the staff and regulars in the bar the following Saturday.

* * *

Laurie Hertzel recently retired as senior editor for books and special projects at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She the author of “News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist.”

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It had been seven months since I’d retired from the Minneapolis Star Tribune after nearly 50 years in journalism, and, like retired people everywhere, I realized it was time to clean out the basement. On the metal shelves in the laundry room were stacked dozens of crumbling, dusty boxes of old tear sheets, photos, coffee mugs, mini cassettes and reporter notebooks from my years in newspapers. And letters! Oh, so many letters. Most dated from the 1980s, when I was a roving features writer for the Duluth News-Tribune in northern Minnesota.

They came typewritten on letterhead, scrawled on lined paper and hand-written in greeting cards. One — from a child — included a drawing of a wiry-haired woman, presumably me, clutching a reporter’s notebook and saying, “A ha.”

One letter thanked me for my “fine article” on a school bus driver. “ “It’s nice to see, especially on the front page, a positive story on pupil transportation.” I don’t remember writing a positive story on pupil transportation, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that my story meant something to this reader.

A story I wrote about a woman who crochets pleased her so much she wrote twice. In her first note, she told me: “A woman I don’t even know called to let me know that she found it interesting” Five months later, a second note: “I’m writing to thank you again.”

An anonymous letter thanked me for a story about abortion. “People don’t know what it’s like until they go through it,” she said. “I’m sorry that I don’t feel like I can sign my name.”

And one letter, from 1986, praised me while trashing my profession. “Everybody told me not to trust the news media,” the man wrote. “I was expecting a hatchet job. But I was pleasantly surprised after reading your report. Even my pastor said the article was good.”

The letters aren’t all filled with praise; one mentioned an error and several simply requested photo reprints or tear sheets. One pointed out, correctly, that if I had allowed anonymous sources my story would have been quite different. (That was in response to my poll of readers on who does more housework, men or women.)

I don’t remember most of the stories mentioned or any of the people who wrote me. But I saved all the letters. It’s good to be reminded that on the other side of everything we write there is someone reading it.

From huge issues like abortion to small issues like crocheting (and what, I now wonder, did this woman crochet?), the stories we tell touch people more than we will ever know. I wish that people still wrote letters; instead, we get emails, or comments online, or the occasional voice mail, none of which you can put in a box and rediscover 30 years later. More often, people are too busy to reach out to us at all.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there, paying attention. As one woman wrote,

“Thank you for listening to my story.”  And that, I think, is why we do what we do. A ha!

Laurie Hertzel is a freelance book critic and teaches in the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia.

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I’m not usually struck with writer’s block. I’ve been a journalist for 40 years; when you work for a daily newspaper you are not allowed that luxury. You report, you go back to the office, you pound it out on deadline.

But the other day, working on a profile of a famous writer, I found myself with too much information, too many avenues into his life, all interesting, and I could not figure out what to write. What was the beginning? What was my theme? I didn’t know. The fact that my deadline was weeks away did not help.

My blockage was probably my own fault — I’d overprepared. I’d read three of this writer’s books (one of them twice), looked up articles he’d written in his youth, read reviews, watched interviews with him on YouTube, talked to him for more than an hour. When it came time to write, I was stymied. I wasn’t blocked as much as I was confused — what did I want to say? There was so much material, and so many different ways I could go.

So in a moment of procrastination, I posted on Facebook: “I am waiting, in vain, for this story to just write itself.”

The tips came pouring in — writer friends, journalist friends, friend friends. Everyone wanted to be helpful. Everyone wanted to provide the perfect tip that would shake me out of my paralysis.

They were all great tips. I used none of them.

I think we each must find our own way, and none of these suggestions — helpful as they are — was what I needed. For this particular story, I needed to procrastinate, which actually means I needed to put it in the back of my mind and do other things and let my brain work it out. The next day I cobbled together a lede and started writing and went home with 40 inches under my belt. And that night I figured out what the story really is about. I knew that I had to start over, which I will do, as soon as I finish writing this. But I’m not sure I would have figured that out if I hadn’t gone down the wrong road first.

Here are the suggestions from Facebook. They’re all good. You never know. Some might fit you.

1. DON'T listen to the interview again!!!!! Just tell me what you'd tell me about it if you had only one minute.
2. Big piece, little piece? Can you do the "write the second graf first" thing, just to get yourself started? Or do you like to nail a good lede and let it flow from there?
3. Call the person back and say, "I'm struggling to find a theme for your life story. What would you suggest?"
4. Have you tried talking to yourself and stomping around? That helps.
5. The best thing to do is set it out for the elves.
6. I always found a noon run helpful for composing a story. Go for a walk!
7. Sit and pound out, “Hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen! This one's gonna knock you for a loop!” (But remember to cut that later before you move the story.)
8. It never does just write itself. You’ll sweat every word.
9. Dear Mom, ........ Then delete ‘Dear Mom.’
10. Eat a cookie. That is my patented 13th step in my 27-step process of writing a thing.

None of these would work for me. But I am fascinated by how instantly helpful people were (and funny — there were many funny comments) and I am fascinated by how we all have our own rituals. Eating a cookie would not help. Going for a walk might help, but not necessarily. Writing “Dear Mom” to get the fingers typing would mean that the words “Dear Mom” would be all alone on my screen for a long, long time.

Stymied? Blocked? Not to be brutal, but I think the real answer is, figure it out. And then share your advice with a writer friend. Who, I can almost guarantee, will not take it — but will be eternally grateful for your kindness.

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It’s been 16 years since I first read Darcy Frey’s piece about the overwhelming, stressful job of being an air traffic controller – 16 years since I first swore never to fly into Newark. Frey’s powerful narrative scarred me for life.

“Something’s Got To Give” ran in The New York Times Magazine in 1996, 15 years after President Ronald Reagan broke the PATCO union and fired more than 11,000 controllers. Frey made it clear that things had not recovered. He concentrated on Newark, the busiest air traffic control room in the country, where he found aging, unreliable computers; mandatory overtime to the point of exhaustion; steadily increasing air traffic; and so much stress that controllers sometimes went bonkers. It happened so often that they had a term for it: “going down the pipes.” The driving theme of the piece is staving off disaster.

I re-read the story this week, and even if the facts no longer hold up (I have no idea how much has changed in the industry), the power of the piece certainly does. I got scared all over again and have renewed my vow to stay out of New Jersey.

How did he do it?

It’s all about control. Frey has control over his material, his tone, his voice, his characters and his structure. As you read the piece – which follows a couple of men managing a whole lot of airplanes on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the busiest air travel day of the year – you know instantly that you are in capable hands.

In this piece, as in others of his that I have read (“Does Anyone Here Think This Baby Can Live?” and his book, “The Last Shot”), Frey is a master at what some writers call the pivot and some call the swoop and at least one (Alex Tizon) calls “blobs.” That is, he gets you going down the line of the story until you are so captivated you can’t turn away, and then he turns away, away from the narrative line and into facts and background and information (blobs) that you need to know in order to understand what is going on. And you do not get impatient with him because he tells it so cleanly and engagingly, and because he knows exactly the moment at which you will get annoyed or impatient, and it is right before then that he pivots (or swoops) back into the story.

In this piece, Frey writes in the language of the people he is writing about. He doesn’t lapse into jargon or techno speak, but look at the word choice in the lead:

All the way down the bank of radar scopes, the air traffic controllers have that savage, bug-eyed look, like men on the verge of drowning, as they watch the computer blips proliferate and speak in frantic bursts of techno-chatter to the pilots: “Continental 1528, turn right heading 280 immediately! Traffic at your 12 o’clock!” A tightly wound Tom Zaccheo, one of the control-room veterans, sinks his teeth into his cuticles and turns, glowering, to the controller by his side: “Hey, watch your goddamned planes – you’re in my airspace!” Two scopes away, the normally unflappable Jim Hunter, his right leg pumping like a pneumatic drill, sucks down coffee and squints as blips representing 747’s with 200 passengers on board simply vanish from his radar screen. “If the F.A.A. doesn’t fix this goddamned equipment,” he fumes, retrieving the blips with his key pad, “it’s only a matter of time before there's a catastrophe.” And Joe Jorge, a new trainee, scrambling to keep his jets safely separated in the crowded sky, is actually panting down at the end as he orders pilots to turn, climb, descend, speed up, slow down and look out the cockpit window, captain!

“Savage, bug-eyed.” “Frantic bursts of techno-chatter.” “Sucks down coffee.” Casual words, carefully chosen to set a particular scene and a particular jittery mood. Throughout the piece, controllers don’t eat; they “take chow.” They aren’t startled or worried or annoyed – the machines “mess with their heads.” These men look like they’re on the verge of drowning. Their legs pump like pneumatic drills. They fume and squint and scramble and pant. It makes me anxious just to read about them.

Frey’s verbs are powerful and carefully chosen: Huge, passenger-packed jumbo jets barrel up the river and streak across the sky, nervous controllers curse and twitch. They don’t just bite their nails; they “sink their teeth” into their cuticles.

Frey is a great observer, and he spends his day well, watching these poor guys intently as they deal not only with the stress of heavy air traffic and long, long hours (one guy has had two days off in a row only seven times over the last year), but also with the frustrations of rickety equipment: ancient computer screens that suddenly go dark when they are guiding a dozen planes, or radios that fritz out. He watches as they perform rituals that they hope will ward off disaster – rituals that I’m willing to bet these traffic controllers don’t even realize they do:

One controller stands and paces in tight circles while issuing commands; one drops to his knee, his nose touching the glass; one taps the scope with a finger; one holds himself together by singing out loud.

Frey’s voice is so calm, so authoritative, that we do not miss direct quotes. He uses them sparingly – this is narrative, but he has a lot to say, and he doesn’t want the piece to get bogged down. The quotes he uses are spice, not the main ingredient, and yet he chooses them so well you get an instant, strong flavor of the person speaking. For example:

Tom Zaccheo: “I’m gonna come over there, and then I’m gonna rip your lungs out!” and later: “They made a rule you can’t threaten another controller on the job,” he says, bringing his fingers to his enormous chest. “Somebody like me, I had to change my operating way.”

That might be all you need to know about Tom Zaccheo.

What drives this piece is pure tension – the tension in the room, the tension that underlies all the jokes and bravado, the tension that infects the reader. We are all waiting for a crash, waiting for a disaster, waiting for the computers to fall dark, the radio to short out, the controllers to go down the pipes and the planes to smash together in midair.

He keeps this tension going by sprinkling the narrative with reminders of how terrible things are. He doesn’t clump it all together in one blob, but every few paragraphs, every few scenes, he rolls out another reminder that everything could fall apart in an instant. A controller named Jughead finishes an “Iron Man” shift and finds himself at home without recalling how he got there. On a busy Sunday afternoon, controllers with “headset wires wrapped around their ankles” pace and scream like “short-order cooks on speed.” Some of the fired controllers are brought back years later, but they are unable to keep up with a pace that has only become more frantic in their absence.

Nervous yet?

I am. I am never flying into Newark, or, maybe anywhere, ever again.

Frey writes about one traffic controller whose amazing skill is also his downfall; they rely on him so heavily he can’t get any time off and can’t get reassigned and so is slowly going nuts. He writes about how hard it is to learn the job (half of the trainees wash out); he writes about another controller who panicked and deleted all the planes from his screen while they were still in the sky:

Then he turned to his supervisor and announced: “No more planes. Time to get off.” He, too, was sent to counseling, and after a couple of months tried to return, but he could never bring himself to work traffic again. A new nickname entered the lexicon: Dr. Freeze.

And then, just when you feel like you can’t take it anymore, the story hits its climax: the pilots stop responding to commands from the controllers, and after a few terrifying minutes they figure out that the radio isn’t working, so they switch to the backup radio – which also isn’t working.

Man, if that last scene doesn’t keep you out of Newark, then the ending of the piece will. These overworked, jittery men have managed to stave off disaster for that whole terrible day, but it’s not over. That’s the thing about their job: It’s never over. And Frey makes sure their jitters rattle you long after you finish reading.

Laurie Hertzel (@stribbooks) is senior editor for books and special projects at the Star Tribune, and the author of “News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist.”

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every wee

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T.J. Stiles, author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, won a National Book Award in November for his second biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In an hour-long interview with Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minn.) books editor Laurie Hertzel, he talked about the difference between research and investigation, building compelling characters in a work of non-fiction, the rise of e-books, and the importance of story. Here are excerpts:

Your books seem to be both scholarly and populist. The First Tycoon is very readable, and I wondered, was this a conscious decision that you made, and how difficult is it to marry those two?

I believe that there is no reason why we have to sacrifice scholarly standards and investigation for reading pleasure. If we think of the great works of literature, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, they’re a real treat to read. What I like to do in my writing is to tell good stories and ask big questions. I like to write about the making of the modern world. I want to write books that are about complex characters that tell compelling stories, and I want to give the reader a reason to turn every page.

Even when I’m discussing an issue, when I’m presenting information, my rule is if it’s not advancing the story it doesn’t belong on the page. I don’t want to simply provide information or analysis because I know it. It has to be something that makes the reader think and want to read more. I want it to be a part of a cohesive narrative—something that is significant and goes to the heart of what this person is all about and what the events are all about.

How—and when—did you determine what your themes would be, what the point of this book would be?

I came in with certain questions, but certain questions presented themselves as I went along. I knew, for example, that I wanted to bring out the drama of this very physical and dramatic life. I knew I wanted to write about the creation of the modern corporate economy.

But there are a number of important themes that I really only discovered in the process of writing the book. One of them is the way in which we think about the role of the government in the economy, and how that’s gone through dramatic changes. That was something that I didn’t anticipate exploring to the extent I did, and yet it was very much what Vanderbilt’s life was about—modern ideas about government regulation and about corporate powers, America’s transition from an 18^th century hierarchical society to an individualistic competitive commercial society.

And then one of the larger themes which really speaks to what we’ve been through recently—the way in which economic reality was undergoing an abstraction in the 19th century. The idea of a corporation, and the way that money ceased to be simply precious metal coins and became paper money that was a government-issued marker. Stocks and bonds, and the way the financial markets began to develop—all these were huge changes in American culture and in the way that our minds work. It was a real struggle for people to cope with it and understand it. This was a major theme and it’s still something we struggle with today. I had no idea how topical, how pertinent, how contemporary these themes would be as I was writing the book.

I set out to be true to the work, true to the subject, to carry out my investigation with integrity. I didn’t try to teach lessons to the present. And yet the present sort of imposed itself after I’d completed the book.

Talk about how you went about conducting your research.

I found out after I got the contract to write the book why there had not been a biography of Vanderbilt in so long. It’s because he left no collection of papers. And the research process, one year after another after another, was a real struggle, bringing it all together. I really despaired of finishing it at certain points, because it took much longer than I anticipated.

I didn’t realize that so much could be had—there was so much material that would shed light on his life—but that it would take so much work to get at it.

For instance, as I would investigate at the New York Public Library, I found letter after letter from people who were dealing with Vanderbilt during a period that was previously largely unknown, the 1830s and 40s. Old lawsuits provided insights into his personal life and his dealings, lawsuits from his passengers during the gold rush who were stranded in Nicaragua and came to see Vanderbilt in his office. They would describe what his office was like, and where his desk was, and how he put on his reading glasses, just vivid descriptions, contemporary descriptions that I had no idea existed when I started the process. I had no idea it would take so long to pull it all together, and that there was so much of it.

Tell me about how you made the characters come alive.

Since Vanderbilt didn’t leave a collection of his own papers, I had to circle around his life and look at all the people who lived around him. And that had the unexpected benefit of fleshing out all of these other characters who surrounded him.

One of the pitfalls for a biographer is that you get so focused on your main subject that you forget to flesh out the other characters. I was forced to pay attention to the secondary characters, which I think—I hope—helped make my book more enjoyable.

For example, the anti-hero of my book was his son, who was the opposite of everything he was. He was a gambling addict, he was verbose, he was boastful, he was self-loathing, and he wrote incessantly. And so he sheds light on these hidden emotional sides of his father’s life. And he himself emerges as this full character. Because I had to go to his letters to understand his father, I was also able to flesh out this son and his tortured life as well, which I think makes the main story a little richer.

When you talk about your work, you use the word ‘investigate.’ I’m assuming you see it as something different from research.

Research is at the core of what I do. Investigate involves intellectual engagement, and thinking about what matters, and thinking about where this information I found leads me. An example is I’ve often read historical accounts that describe a subject in the 19th century called “stock-watering”—increasing the number of shares in a company. I hadn’t run across a real discussion of why it was such a bad thing. Historians would condemn it because their 19th century sources would condemn it.

Whereas, Warren Buffet just carried out a 50-1 stock split when he acquired Burlington Northern. Nobody is complaining. It’s simply changing the number of shares in your company. But in the 19th century he would have been viciously condemned for doing that. Research would tell me that Vanderbilt was criticized for stock-watering. Investigation is saying, well, why? What does this mean? What does this tell us about the way that people envisioned the economy in the 19th century? What does it tell us about how the idea of the corporation was different then than it is now?

I see investigation as a matter of trying to take nothing for granted—trying to really get inside a world and to assume that just because they use the same words not to assume that they meant the same thing.

Investigation is research, plus creatively analyzing and thinking about the meaning of what you’ve researched.

How long did you think the book was going to take, and how long did it take?

I thought it would take about two years. I thought I would spend a year or so researching and a year or so putting it together. The entire process was about seven years. I basically worked on it full-time; it was really my main endeavor for over six years. I was joking to friends that if I won (the National Book Award) I would ask the audience to have a moment of silence for the 401K that gave its life so that this book could live.

In your acceptance speech, you thanked your designers and copy editors, which made me wonder—can you envision someone reading The First Tycoon on a Kindle?

Oh, sure. My remarks were not meant to be a slam on e-books. My point was with the advent of e-books, there’s a danger that some people will start to think that all people who make my book no longer matter. Librarians, book reviewers, the bookstore clerks and owners—all of the people who inhabit the culture of the book but don’t get the attention the authors do. No book exists without them. Like in any ecosystem, one species cannot survive by itself.

Even an e-book is edited, it is proofread, it is copy edited, it is designed. That’s not the typeface that comes out of the author’s word processor. Even in the Kindle there is a designed page.

Personally, I think e-books are and will be simply one more format. The codex is not going to disappear. It’s a brilliant technology. It’s got a wonderful operating system that never crashes, it has a great power source that never fails, the information in it does not degrade over time, it is a wonderful way to store and access information. It will not disappear.

I do wonder, though, if the digital world will make life more difficult for future biographers, because there won’t necessarily be that wealth of letters that you talk about.

Yeah, why do you think I’m writing about dead people? I completely agree, and it’s kind of ironic—in a way we’re all writing much more than we were ten or twenty years ago because we’re constantly texting or e-mailing, and yet it’s so ephemeral, it’s all disappearing. So yes, future biographers are going to have a very hard time.

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