Welcome to the Open Rehearsal Project

From our man in Ukraine

Over the coming weeks you’re invited to watch a story come to life — from inception to publication.

The story is “The Empire Strikes Back,” and its author is Noah Sneider. Noah has been covering the events in Ukraine and Crimea for, among others, The New York Times and Slate and as the story began building we asked if he’d like to keep a separate notebook to record all the many ideas, impressions, scenes, and sounds that might never make it into his dispatches.

The idea was to come to a point where he might be able to step back and make sense of what he was seeing, and as he did, to take us back with him on his journey through this troubling land at this extraordinary time.We also thought it might be interesting to take readers into the journey that is the creation of a story. Along the way you will meet Noah, as well as his editors, Mike Hoyt and Cissi Falligant, and the Big Roundtable’s publisher, Anna Hiatt.

And there will be the opportunity for you to weigh in, to offer thoughts.

For now, however, we’d like to leap in.

The story of this story begins with a series of emails between Michael Shapiro, the Big Roundtable’s founder, and Noah, a correspondence in which the idea gets hatched and framed.

From,

Your friends at The Big Roundtable

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