You don't see stories about gentleman cat burglars anymore. But one of the best reads in recent weeks is a story called, "Pipino: Gentleman Thief."

The story by Joshua Davis and David Wolman appears in Epic Magazine, which bills itself as a publisher of "extraordinary true stories." Set in Venice, Italy, the tale of the thief Vincenzo Pipino and his brother, magician Alfredo Pipino is "extraordinary," and then some.

The descriptions of Venice are vivid, but what kept me reading was the bizarre tale of what happened to a painting called The Madonna col Bambino.

Davis has written a book called "The Underdog" as well as numerous magazine articles, mostly for Wired. Wolman is another veteran magazine writer.   His books include "The End of Money." | Oct. 29, 2014

One of the best investigations of the year is The New York Times' searing report on American soldiers who were injured by old chemical weapons stockpiled in Iraq.

The story by reporter C.J. Chivers, a former captain in the United States Marines, is not about the active program of weapons of mass destruction, the stated reason for the most recent war in Iraq. While troops never found an active weapons program they did encounter, as Chivers reports, "remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West."

Soldiers were not adequately prepared to handle the old chemical weapons they found. Worse yet, the military covered up many of the injuries and forced the injured soldiers to keep quiet. Thus, new troops handled shells, unaware that their fellow soldiers had stumbled upon chemical weapons while performing similar duties. The story is a must-read.

Here's a PBS interview with Chivers about the story: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/uncovering-secret-chemical-weapon-victims-iraq-war/ | Oct. 22, 2014

The New Yorker's Patrick Radden Keefe has a fascinating tale examining a potential Alzheimer's treatment that became the subject of a large insider trading case.

Keefe, who won a National Magazine Award this year, knows how to tell a story and has plenty to work with: a doctor with a sterling reputation; the eager trader who becomes a son figure; and billionaire Steven Cohen.

The back stories or the doctor and the trader help explain the relationship that develops and make them tragic and at least somewhat sympathetic characters.

The story is a page-turner probably worthy of a book. | Oct. 13, 2014

The Chattanooga Times Free Press was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting this year for stories on the city's "no snitch" culture.

One of the reporters on that project, Joan Garrett McClane, has produced a beautiful narrative about a man named Franklin McCallie who found a way out of the entrenched racism in Chattanooga and has now come up with a plan to help others do the same.

McClane portrays McCallie honestly, not shying away from his past attitudes. Her writing is vivid and the story has particular resonance at a time when the turmoil in Ferguson, Mo. shows how much race continues to divide America.

Good to see The Times Free Press continuing the tradition of top notch journalism by small and mid-sized newspapers.  | Oct. 6, 2014

For weeks The New York Times has provided excellent coverage of the Ebola outbreak, but today's story, "A Hospital From Hell," has to be among the finest.

Three paragraphs of utterly chilling description open the story by Adam Nossiter, the paper's West Africa bureau chief. | Oct. 1, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post

Months ago I highlighted impressive work by Josephine Marcotty at The Minneapolis Star Tribune who has been examining the implications of the bee die-off, first noted in 2006 and referred to as "colony collapse disorder."

Marcotty and photographer Renee Jones Schneider added their fourth installment to the bee series on Sunday, and it's another grabber.

This story profiles Marla Spivak, a University of Minnesota researcher on the front lines of the effort to save bees, considered crucial to one-third of the nation's food supply.

Fine writing and gorgeous photos make this project well worth viewing. | Sept. 29, 2014

There's little room for nuance in most discussions of the death penalty. But Pamela Colloff's brilliant and moving story, "The Witness, published in Texas Monthly is the exception.

Colloff tells the story of Michelle Lyons, who worked for more than a decade at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville. Lyons was a public information officer. She was required to attend every execution. She had also covered executions as a reporter for the Huntsville Item. In all she attended 278. | Sept. 3, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post(4)

Tommy Tomlinson has one of the most entertaining stories I've read in a long time in ESPN The Magazine. Here is the first paragraph:

"Jared Lorenzen and I are in love with the same woman. Her name is Little Debbie, and she makes delicious snack cakes. We're not the only ones who love her. Nick Saban has two Oatmeal Creme Pies every morning for breakfast. I'm more of a Nutty Bars man myself. "They're all right," Lorenzen says. "But I'll kill a fudge round." | Sept. 2, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post

Parents know the cold fear that hits when a child is missing in the neighborhood or at the mall -- for even a brief period. Imagine being separated from your child trying to cross the border.

Today's Washington Post features the moving story of a family from Honduras who became separated from their 10-year-old daughter while trying to flee into the U.S. | Aug. 20, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post

For many years, The Washington Post has featured some of the best writing in American newspapers from reporters like David Finkel, Anne Hull, David Maraniss, Gene Weingarten and many others.

A new generation of writers (Eli Saslow, Todd C. Frankel, Stephanie McCrummen) is keeping the paper among the best in the country. 

Sunday's Post had another Saslow narrative full of cinematic detail. The story follows a 37-year-old sheriff's deputy in one of the poorest counties in Texas as he works on the front lines of America's border crisis.

Saslow, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for insightful reporting on America's food stamp program, has become an expert in bringing large, complex problems into sharp focus. | Aug. 11, 2014

The Washington Post has an investigative report shedding fresh doubt on one of the most notorious death penalty cases in America.

In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the state of Texas after being found guilty of deliberately setting the house fire that killed his three young daughters.  | Aug. 4, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post(2)

Skip Hollandsworth, has long been one of the nation's best magazine writers, and this year the Texas Monthly narrative specialist was one of the speakers at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference at the University of North Texas.

He talked a lot about this story, a classic later made into the movie "Bernie."  The story revolves around the murder of a wealthy widow and the man who confessed to the crime. | July 16, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post

The New Yorker has a sad, but fascinating story showing how a "no excuses" testing policy led to Atlanta's test-cheating scandal.

The story is a gripping cautionary tale that raises questions about what can go wrong with the now-fashionable policy of making schools accountable for low test scores.

Reporter Rachel Aviv humanizes the teachers who tried to help their Middle School survive in a "No Child Left Behind" world and wound up systematically changing students' test answers. It is easy to demonize the cheaters until you get to know their struggling school and what it is up against.

Aviv shows the reader just how difficult the task is at Parks Middle School in Atlanta. We come see that it isn't nearly enough to order that principals make their schools meet test standards. Districts that don't take the time to understand why students are falling below standards are of little help to the students or the schools. | July 15, 2014

I knew about the still unresolved kidnapping of 300 Nigerian schoolgirls on April 14 by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, but I'd failed to connect the event to a larger crisis. I'm guessing that other readers are in the same position.

This morning I read Robyn Dixon's powerful dispatch from Nigeria for the Los Angeles Times and realized for the first time that the government there has ceded control of large portions of the country to the terrorist group.

Dixon's story places the kidnapping of the schoolgirls into context, the most egregious in a torrent of abuses going on in Nigeria. The story isn't very long, but packs a punch. | July 8, 2014

Almost four years have passed since more than 30 Chilean miners were trapped 2,000 feet below ground. Much of the world followed their day-by-day ordeal until it was over.

Now, the New Yorker tells the story in rich detail, bringing to life the personalities of the Chilean  miners who shared a life-or-death struggle that stretched beyond two months.

The story by Los Angeles journalist Hector Tobar puts the reader inside the sweaty, desperate hole where the miners prayed and searched for hope and tried to preserve their sanity. Tobar gives what appears to be an honest account, void of any Hollywood-style heroics.

The author, who has a forthwoming book expected in October, shows us what happens to men when the comforts of home and family are stripped away and replaced by an overriding will to survive. | July 7, 2014

The newspaper industry's financial problems are a threat to great journalism, but it's heartening to see how much good work is done, even at small and mid-sized papers.

In Maine, award-winning reporter Colin Woodard devoted more than a year of reporting and writing to the series "Unsettled," which chronicles the trials and tribulations of the Passamaquoddy People.

Woodard, a former foreign correspondent, has a colorful story to tell and allows it to unfold with the pace and character development of a novel. His story reminds readers once again what newspapers can do when they put their best people on old-fashioned investigative reporting and story-telling. | July 3, 2014

For years, I've been aware of massive bee die-offs, a development that spawned a new and vaguely frightening term: colony collapse disorder.

What I realized this weekend as I read The Minneapolis Star Tribune's illuminating story "Bees at the Brink," was that until now I'd never quite understood why this was happening and why it mattered. | July 1, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post(3)

Two picks today.

If you like history and have an interest in World War I, don't missThe New York Times' elegant and informative special section on the Great War (an unfortunate name if ever there was one).  | June 27, 2014  »Read Full Blog Post

The New York Times had been running an illuminating series on the under-explored subject of maternal mental illness. You may know the condition as severe post-partum depression.

But today's story is haunting, a seemingly "levelheaded" lawyer who became so deeply depressed she leapt to her death from her 8th-floor apartment in Harlem, carrying her 10-month-old son strapped to her chest. 

Cindy Wachenheim's despair appeared to begin after her 4-month-old fell and hit his head. She became increasingly convinced that she had allowed her son to suffer brain damage.

Pam Belluck, a veteran Times reporter, tells the story well, weaving back and forth between sections on recent research and others developing Wachenheim's heartbreaking tale. | June 17, 2014

Thirty years ago, a New Yorker no one had heard of found the oldest subway tunnel in the world under a half-mile of Brooklyn. But Robert Diamond believed his greatest discovery was still to come: a locomotive buried in the tunnels along with lost pages from the diary of John Wilkes Booth.

This bizarre, fascinating story appears in Newsweek, of all places. And it's terrific. What a yarn!

Newspapers and magazines seldom publish stories about the fringe characters who live their lives on the far edges of the news. Joseph Mitchell used to write these stories for The New Yorker decades ago.

The current Newsweek story is by writer Joe Kloc. Check it out.     | June 11, 2014