Friday, July 31, 2015

Great New York Times writing - by Cook, McFadden, Dove, Mooallem, and Weiner

There's been some remarkable writing for the the New York Times I've seen over the past few weeks, including four recently done stories and one from 2012 that I not long ago saw linked to on Twitter.

The first story to note here was written by Gareth Cook with "The Singular Mind of Terry Tao," an interesting account of a math genius who also happens to be very normal and grounded.

The three other recent Times pieces share the common bond of being about people doing great things for others. "Nicolas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children from Holocaust, Dies at 106" was an obituary written by Robert McFadden"Black South Carolina Trooper Explains Why He Helped a White Supremacist" a piece by Robert Dove and for the New York Times Magazine was "You Just Got Out of Prison.Now What" by Jon Mooallem. This last piece has the subtitle "Carlos and Ruby are two ex-convicts with a simple mission: picking up inmates on the day they're released from prison and guiding them through a changed world" and is just a very cool read.

The last piece to mention was by Eric Weiner from 2012 with "Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer," a piece about "thin places," those that as Weiner writes "transform us - or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves."