Five Easy Pieces

This blog is about the dying art of the magazine feature.

I don't mean "at home with" interviews in Hello!, as wonderful as they are. I mean in-depth feature reporting, as practised most notably by several American magazines, such as Harper's, Esquire, GQ, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and also by my employer, the Sunday Times Magazine. It's the kind of journalism accountants don't like.

Here are five features I love. Read them, then we'll talk.

First, the original new journalism masterpiece, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Gay Talese wrote it for American Esquire in 1966, after a proposed interview had gone tits-up.

Then, go up and down on Nick Paumgarten's epic New Yorker piece about elevators.

Admire Sebastian Junger's cojones in Blood Oil, a profile of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2007.

Watch Jennifer Senior bring Graydon Carter to a park bench in 2000, for New York Magazine.

And know hope, with Barack Obama and Larissa MacFarquhar, in the New Yorker.