A Life of Paying Attention

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Tracy Kidder, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who died this week at 80, devoted his career to immersion: embedding himself for months, sometimes years, with his subjects, and turning what he saw into stories that are hard to put down. His work traversed worlds—he followed a group of computer engineers racing to build a new machine, spent nine months in a fifth-grade classroom in Massachusetts...