When stories fall onto your doorstep

NONREQUIRED READING

Digging neck deep in the archives, finding a Deep Throat, FOIAing to beat the beasts, pounding down doors, running the risks of others—from such stuff is journalistic legend made. Yet, sometimes great stories can be plucked from right off the front page. Where almost everyone turned away, Tom Junod turned his gaze. The result is Falling Man, an article Esquire’s current editors figure to be one of the best seven the mag has ever published.

(Given all the teary-eyed talk about Esquire’s decade-plus of revolutionary perfection and glory under Harold Hayes, the selected seven heavily weighted to the present: three from the days of Hayes, one from the forgotten middle decades, the other three from 2003 to the present. This is not to knock the newer items; my first swallow went down very smooth. But if it really was ‘the best magazine ever’, as GOOD Magazine figures, wouldn’t that make up the whole selection? Is this a case of pressure to say ‘Look! We’re still good!’? Or is the nostalgia overdone?)

Regardless of all-time merit, the article is undoubtedly a slick piece of writing. Junod took a clever idea and executed it well. To me, the simplicity is most striking. The sentences are short, repetition is common and the structure is straightforward: We are introduced a character, name first, usually in section-opening bold, and we run with them for a while. Then we hit a return—five small stars—and we pick up another character, again with their name leading the section. It’s almost as if each name is falling down the page.

What do you think?

*A search of Google News and nytimes.com seemed to indicate that non-required is hyphenated in all cases except when it comes before "reading". This held true in both for the book series and in lower-case usage. Is this right, or just a case of poor copy editing? For that matter, what's the rule on lower-case and copy editing?