When a Single Story Has a Thousand Sides
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âRenditionâ tries to be thoughtful and respectful of complexity while at the same time honoring the imperatives of commercial entertainment.
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One in 10 parents struggle to understand the tales they read to their children.
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It takes a person about 10 minutes to  read a 2,500-word, front-page feature story in the Wall Street  Journal. Computer programs increasingly being used by investors  to parse news stories can process one in about three  one-hundredths of a second.
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A good subplot can be one of the most intriguing parts of a sports story. Sammy Sosa chasing Mark McGwire while the Cardinals chased the Cubs. Shaq and Kobe feuding while the Lakers ran off three consecutive championships.
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A simple question yields a surprising answer.
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Sometimes it's tough for patients to tell the whole story.
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When truth becomes stranger than fiction, it's time to duck your head.
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Thereâs a lot going on under the surface of âFeel the Noise,â far more than its indefensibly generic title suggests.
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Reader Sunaina Yadav shares her experiences.
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This childrenâs reading-readiness series on PBS uses fairy tales to communicate the power of reading. But they are fractured fairy tales.
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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One of the tongue-in-cheek rules that we column-writers have is, &quot;Often wrong, never in doubt.&quot; Take a stand, don&#39;t duck and weave too much.
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Calling this one a statement game doesn't do it justice.
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There's one way to sift through all it has to offer.
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The stories readers have been talking about this year.
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Historical fiction is a difficult genre to get right. Neglect research and facts at your peril, because someone is sure to accuse you of dilettantism.
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It can sometimes happen that on the sidelines of an event that might otherwise be merely an asterisk of history, the veil lifts somewhat to reveal the possibilities of something greater.