Narratively is a media platform and production company that celebrates the diversity of humanity through authentic storytelling.

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Lost your four-legged friend in a natural disaster? This unexpected duo will find them.

Melissa Hart explores the inspiring story of Katie Albright and her hard-working sausage dog Franklin on their quest to become wildfire pet detectives, facing treacherous conditions for the thrill of reuniting lost pets with their families.

Jodie Bentley

The pet rescuer in the disaster zone

How do we judge a person's culpability when their formative years have been compromised by war?

Dominic Ongwen was an A-grade student until he was kidnapped by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army at the age of nine. He spent 27 years rising through the ranks of the guerilla movement, before defecting. He later became the first former child abductee to be tried in the International Criminal Court — here,  Johannes Boehme considers whether he should have been there in the first place.

Sean Crisden

The extraordinary trial of the child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

He was Chicago's beloved Zookeeper, and the star one of the most unpredictable tales you will ever hear.

In this remarkable piece for Narratively, Tony Ho Tran tells us the story of how a cigar-chomping, bear-wrestling bricklayer became the unlikeliest celebrity-influencer of the early 20th century... and changed zookeeping forever.
"Always sporting an impressive mustache and a tiger-tooth watch fob, DeVry was well known throughout the city for his eccentricity and steadfast devotion to his animals. But now, any semblance of that caring man seemed to have disappeared. Instead, the officers and onlookers watched DeVry coil with fury, then pounce like a lion upon the hapless quarry who had dared encroach upon his home.

As the onlookers gawked and the police officers attempted to separate the two men, no one could have predicted that the scuffle would set off a course of actions that would ultimately lead to arrest, scandal, public uproar, and the controversial firing of the city’s beloved zookeeper. But with Cy DeVry, everything was dramatic."

Simon Mattacks

Smokin’ Cy DeVry was the original Tiger King

He became the first Black player in major league sports — a year before Jackie Robinson.

Kenny Washington's life is certainly one story to listen to, and yet even his own kids never fully knew it. Born in LA in 1918, Washington went on to play football for UCLA, eventually making it to the NFL with the Rams, who had just moved from Cleveland to the West Coast in 1946 — an unprecedented achievement for a black sportsman at the time. Pushing past brutal racism through most of his life, Washington's inspiring career has been somewhat shadowed in the history books. In this piece for Narratively, Geoff Graser tells us more about him.

"In 1939, Kenny Washington was the college football star, leading the NCAA in total yardage and winning the Douglas Fairbanks Trophy as most outstanding player. Still, NFL teams refused him. And although he eventually became the first Black player to go pro in any of America’s big four sports post–World War II, he’s the only player among those who broke the color barrier in these major league sports who has not been inducted into his sport’s Hall of Fame. A shameful era of football still hides in a whitewashed history inflated with more than its share of Lambeau and Lombardi legends, rendering an early civil rights hero a real-life Invisible Man."

Mark Deakins

How Kenny Washington broke the NFL’s color barrier... and why you’ve never heard of him

This way of dealing with injust employers has taken off in Italy — can it take over the world?

Fed up with low wages and abuse, these outraged employees are naming and shaming 'shitty owners' in splashy protests complete with megaphones and bags of poop. But have they gone too far? Alessio Perrone explores their entrancing case in Narratively.

"On January 31, 2019, Davide woke up late in the tiny apartment he shared on the outskirts of Bologna, where he slept in the living room and lived with a housemate who never cleaned. He picked up the grey bike he used for deliveries and cycled 30 minutes along the main road leading into town. He stopped at a small store to buy a handful of white cardboard masks for €1 each, then cycled to a spot around the corner from the bar. As the others arrived, they recapped the plan: who should hold the megaphone, who should place the stickers, who should talk. After the action, they would dash off via secondary roads, remaining together until they found a place without security cameras, where they could take off their masks and disperse. It was critical to remain focused, precise and fast — if the owner called the police, they should run for it."

Gary Furlong

The masked vigilantes coming for your horrible boss

"The city was the site of the largest man-made explosion before Hiroshima."

In 1917, a ship collision In Halifax, Canada ended in the biggest accidental blast the world has ever seen — and while the city’s male leaders dithered, an inspiring band of volunteer nurses leapt into action. Claire Horn tells their remarkable story in Narratively.

"As the ships attempted to pass one another, the Imo struck the Mont-Blanc, causing the fuel to spill and ignite. The Mont-Blanc’s crew fled in lifeboats bound for the city of Dartmouth across the water, shouting to anyone in earshot that an explosion was coming, while the freighter drifted ablaze toward the Halifax shore. 

After burning for long enough to attract crowds of sailors working on the docks and curious children delaying their arrival at school, the ship exploded. The blast’s shock wave briefly revealed the bottom of the harbour and shattered windows throughout the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth and the city of Truro, 60 miles away. An estimated 2,000 people were killed instantly, and another 9,000 were injured; 25,000 were left homeless, and many were trapped beneath the rubble of their homes or workplaces. The community of Richmond, closest to the blast, was decimated. Though fires burned across the city, all but one of the members of the crew responsible for Halifax’s lone fire truck had been killed while attempting to extinguish the Mont-Blanc."

Marni Penning

The heroines of Halifax and the world’s greatest explosion

A lightning strike doesn't give you powers, but it does leave you scars "beyond the physical realm."

After the sudden and intense drama of getting hit by lightning, Shana Williams Turner suffered from devastating symptoms that wouldn’t go away. It seemed like no one could help — until she found out there were many others like her. In this fascinating story for Narratively, James Walker tells Turner's story, exploring how she found comradery in the most unexpected of places.

"When lightning hits a person, it sends 300 million volts of electricity across the body in three milliseconds. The current flows externally, disrupting or short-circuiting the body’s electrical systems, such as the one that controls the heart. Cardiac arrest is the most common cause of death from a lightning strike. Brain damage from blunt-force trauma caused by the shock wave is also common. The jolt can severely burn skin, and in some cases it etches an intricate web of scars on the body that resembles the form of a lightning bolt itself, known as Lichtenberg figures, which fade within days for reasons unknown. Most people survive because the lightning hits the ground nearby or passes through a taller object such as a tree, or, in Shana’s case, the transformer."

The secret society of lightning strike survivors

It all started with a mysterious message, then reality itself seemed to crumble.

Utsa Chatterjee, a 19-year-old student was inundated with lewd messages and fake Facebook profiles pretending to be her — the most shocking part was the person behind it all. In Narratively, Amira Aleem tells Chatterjee's shocking experience with online harassment.

Sarah Naughton

Her best friend was her secret stalker

How COVID brought new hardships to an already gruelling way of life.

In this extraordinary article for Narratively, journalist Thacher Schmid follows members of the NE 33rd Camp as they struggle to survive the year of the pandemic, and the community around them rapidly grows.

King Chaos, Queen Cricket and one long, strange year in a roadside homeless camp

He knew the loch, and its inhabitants, as well as anyone — and yet today, his name barely remembered.

A humble Scotsman saw something strange in the water — and daringly set out to catch it — only to have lecherous out-of-towners steal his fame and upend his quest. Paul Brown tells us in Narratively the extraordinary story of Alexander 'Sandy' Gray.

"Sandy Gray was fishing in the peat-black waters of Loch Ness when he discovered an unusual animal. It was a sleety Saturday in March 1932, and the animal was a large, elaborately colored bird with a glossy green head, a fan of coppery-red plumes, and a dark-metallic breast. Sandy spent much of his free time on the loch (the Scottish word for 'lake') and knew that this creature was a rare discovery. The bird was badly injured; it appeared to have been shot or trapped. Sandy, a bus driver from the tiny loch-side village of Foyers, attempted to save it. He took it home but could only keep it alive for a few days. After it died, Sandy took it to the nearby town of Inverness to have it identified."

Jonathan Booth

The obsessive life and mysterious death of the fisherman who discovered the Loch Ness Monster

The most epic murder case you will hear in a long time, featuring a Texan investigator with hooks for hands.

Jay J. Armes is a legendary and controversial private investigator with over six decades of experience chasing criminals. His firm, The Investigators, was associated with finding Marlon Brando's son when he went missing in 1972, a case that rocketed Armes into stardom. But his biggest and most surprising challenge came in 1991, when he was appointed to find Lynda Singshinsuk and the man who killed her, Donald Weber. In Narratively, Dylan Taylor-Lehman tells the wild story.

"Armes had blown his hands off playing with explosives when he was a kid, and his prostheses could apply pressure three times that of the human hand. He was adept at everything from answering phones to firing weapons with them, and these tools even gave him seemingly superhuman crime-fighting abilities, like punching through windows and reaching into flames unharmed, adding to the lore surrounding him.

During his six decades in the business, Armes had investigated kidnappings, murders and extortion schemes, and traveled all over the world in pursuit of his quarry, a modern iteration of the unorthodox lawmen dating back to El Paso’s early days as a rough-and-tumble frontier town. (Early “Hell Paso” was said to be so awash with cowboy violence that Wyatt Earp, the hero of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, quit his post after a few days because the city was too dangerous.)"


America’s most flamboyant private eye and the 8,000-mile manhunt

A woman suffering from depression found comfort in the most unlikely of places.

When Krista Diamond moved into a haunted building in a ritzy resort town and sank into a terrifying depression, she never dreamed the thing that would save her was going to be the woman who died in her apartment. Here, she shares her gripping story for Narratively.

Sharon Bott

Snowed in with a ghost

The fascinating story of how an extremely unexpected friendship came to be.

He was the star of a popular reality dating show. She was his feminist lesbian Personal Assistant. In Narratively, Joanna Greenberg reflects on her time spent sorting through the metaphoric and literal dirty laundry of the city’s most famous bachelor.

Andi Arndt

My secret life as a personal assistant to “America’s most eligible man”

A near-death experience on a trip to Barbados led to a completely new way of understanding life.

Ali Francis spent years practically glued to her computer. Then one heart-stopping encounter left her thankful to be alive — and made her realise she wanted to live much differently. Here, she relives that moment and the lessons she learned in this remarkable piece for Narratively.

How the world’s most venomous fish convinced me to stop working myself to death

Narratively on Curio: exploring the remarkable story of Seattle's Feminist Karate Union.

When the serial killer Ted Bundy terrorised the city in the 1970s, these women banded together to defend themselves. Now, decades later, they’re teaching a new generation to take control. In Narratively, Ivana Rihter recounts their origins and evolution through the years.