{"id":15665,"date":"2025-06-20T13:16:05","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T13:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/?p=15665"},"modified":"2025-06-20T13:16:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T13:16:29","slug":"remembering-william-langewiesche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2025\/06\/20\/remembering-william-langewiesche\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering William Langewiesche"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter,<\/em><\/a> delivered every Friday in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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***<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Dear Storyboard community, <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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On Sunday, June 15, we lost one of the giants of narrative nonfiction. William Langewiesche<\/a>, whose stories for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine brought clarity and precision to complex subjects and covered everything from airline disasters to the horrors of war, died of prostate cancer in Connecticut<\/a>. He was 70. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Remembrances are pouring in, including from his longtime editor, Cullen Murphy<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Langewiesche had no taste for manufactured drama. Real drama, he believed, could be found almost anywhere, in any story, if you looked deeply and patiently enough. Similarly, there was nothing overwrought about his prose. His sentences relied on ordinary words, but for all that possessed a pure and crystalline character that turned reading into compulsion. He rarely injected the first person into what he wrote, but the reader was treated to a seemingly omniscient perspective from right behind his eyes. And that perspective was earned. To ask Langewiesche how he knew a particular fact or how he knew what someone thought\u2014the kind of thing fact-checkers and editors ask all the time\u2014was to embark on an explanatory excursion that underscored how hard he worked for every morsel of insight. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Langewiesche (pronounced long-gah-vee-shuh) was also a professional pilot, and his expertise brought depth and understanding to stories such as \u201cThe Crash of EgyptAir 990\u201d<\/a> (which won a National Magazine Award in 2002) and \u201cWhat Really Happened to Malaysia\u2019s Missing Airplane\u201d<\/a> in 2019. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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At the same time, Langewiesche\u2019s skill on serious subjects shouldn\u2019t overshadow his sense of humor, his friend and colleague Keenan Mayo wrote for Vanity Fair<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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William Langewiesche was funny. When people talk about him now \u2026 they will invariably mention the serious nature of his work. After all, this is a man who wrote 20,000-word articles about the Iraq War and a National Book Critics Circle\u2013nominated book on the rubble cleanup from Ground Zero. Over his long career, he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award 10 years in a row. He won twice. It should go without saying that none of those nominations had anything to do with humor.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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But if you had a keen eye, you couldn\u2019t miss the delight William routinely took in poking fun at the absurdity of life. In his article about Red Bull\u2013sponsored parachutist Felix Baumgartner, \u201cThe Man Who Pierced the Sky<\/a>,\u201d he took a shot at the entire country of Austria for reasons only he understood.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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\u201cRed Bull is an Austrian company,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand a big deal in that town.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Here at Nieman Storyboard, you can explore Langewiesche\u2019s work through the writers who admired him. Our long-running series \u201cWhy\u2019s This So Good?\u201d features Thomas Lake on Langewiesche\u2019s 2006 story \u201cRules of Engagement\u201d for Vanity Fair<\/a> and Jonathan Clarke on his book \u201cInside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight,\u201d<\/a> a collection of Langewiesche’s aviation writing. In one passage, Langewiesche describes the view from the sky<\/a>, offering an apt metaphor for what great writing and reporting can do: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The aerial view is something entirely new. We need to admit that it flattens the world and mutes it in a rush of air and engines, and that it suppresses beauty.  But it also strips the facades from our constructions, and by raising us above the constraints of the treeline and the highway it imposes a brutal honesty on our perceptions. It lets us see ourselves in context, as creatures struggling through life on the face of a planet, not separate from nature, but its most expressive agents.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Rest in peace. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Podcast: The Black List’s Franklin Leonard on the power of ‘Based on a true story’ in Hollywood<\/a><\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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\"The<\/a>
The Black List’s Franklin Leonard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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For this week’s Nieman Storyboard podcast<\/a>, I’m excited to share my conversation with Franklin Leonard<\/a>, the film and TV producer and founder\/CEO of The Black List<\/a>, which he launched 20 years ago as a survey of the best unproduced screenplays. It became an immediate sensation, getting passed around Hollywood, and it has since grown into a thriving community for screenwriters and novelists to share their work. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We talked about the state of storytelling in Hollywood, and how journalists should navigate practical and ethical questions when it comes to adapting stories for film and TV. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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“\u200a[Director and writer Anthony Minghella said], \u2019On some level what you want to do with any story that’s based on a true thing or a novel is to deeply consume it and have reverence for it, and then you have to put it aside and retell the emotional story as accurately as you can.\u2019 Those aren’t his exact words  \u2014 that was what I took from it  \u2014  but that rang really true to me. And oftentimes that’s hard for a journalist because you’ve been educated as journalists to report the facts. And that’s not the job of a screenwriter. That’s not the job of a television writer. The job of a film and television writer is to take the audience on an emotional journey.”<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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