For most of the last decade, the lifestyle section of a serious publication has been the place where the rigour of the rest of the paper was, at least implicitly, allowed to relax. Lifestyle was where you went to write about food without having to source the claim, or about home without having to challenge the trend piece, or about a city without having to ask who was being displaced. A new generation of writers has spent the last few years quietly putting an end to that arrangement, and the result is the most interesting body of work the form has produced in a generation.

What unites this new writing is not a particular subject — there is excellent work in this vein on food, on home, on the way we move through a city, on the way we dress, and on the way we think about our own time — but a method. The method is reporting. The writers treat the materials of everyday life with the same rigour and the same willingness to challenge a received wisdom that has traditionally been reserved for politics and business.

What the method looks like

A piece on a single kitchen knife, in this new style, is also a piece on the supply chain that brings the steel from a foundry in one country to a workshop in another to a counter in a third, and on the wages paid at each stage. A piece on a single small apartment is also a piece on the housing policy that put the rent where it is, and on the design choices of the developer, and on the compromises the tenant made to get the keys.

This is not, on the whole, a depressing or accusatory form. The best of the new writers do not treat the material of everyday life as a series of failures waiting to be exposed. They treat it as a series of choices that have been made by particular people for particular reasons, and they are interested in those choices, and in the trade-offs they involve, with the same seriousness that a political reporter brings to a particular vote in a particular legislature.

Why now

Three things have made this writing possible. First, a long-running conversation within the industry about what a lifestyle section is actually for, and a slow but real shift away from the assumption that its purpose is primarily to drive commerce. Second, a generation of writers who came up in an era when the form was being hollowed out and have responded by trying to make it mean something. And third, a readership that is, on the evidence of the data, genuinely hungry for it.

The most encouraging signal is the response from the wider industry. Editors at publications that would not have run a 4,000-word reported essay on the geography of a single street five years ago are now commissioning them, and are paying for them, and are putting them on the front of their sites. That is not a guarantee that the form will survive the next downturn, but it is a guarantee that, for the moment, there is a real audience for it and a real place to publish it.

What to read

There is no single publication that owns the form. The best work of the last year has appeared in a dozen different venues, from legacy newspapers to small independent magazines to standalone newsletters. The common thread is the method. If a piece treats a small, specific, material object or situation with the seriousness and the rigour that would normally be reserved for a story about a government department, the chances are good that it is part of this quiet revolution.

It is the kind of writing that, in another era, would have been called essay writing and that, in this one, is increasingly being called reporting. The label matters less than the work itself.