The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  But it was not these titles alone that turned the 2015 National Magazine Awards into a digital steeplechase: this year, almost twenty of the finalists were either digital-only entries or were pieces—like the Rebecca Traister columns for The New Republic included here—first published online. This digital success story may lead some readers to wonder, What makes pixels on a screen a magazine? The answer is the same online as it is in print: editorial vision and readers who share the same interests and passions, not merely the same zip code.

  A glib answer to a difficult question does not, however, make the task of the Ellie judges any easier. Every year since the awards were founded in 1966, the number of judges needed to evaluate an ever-expanding tally of longer and more complex entries has grown. This year, 340 judges—magazine editors, art directors, photography editors, journalism educators—gathered on two of the coldest days of the year at the Columbia Journalism School in New York City to read the 1,548 print and digital entries submitted by the 263 magazines that summoned the courage to participate in this, the most competitive of journalism-awards programs.

  The judges chose five finalists in each category except in two very popular categories—Reporting and Feature Reporting—in which seven finalists were chosen. After the winners were selected from among those finalists, the judges’ decisions were ratified by the National Magazine Awards Board, composed of veteran judges and other industry leaders. One week later the finalists were Twittercast … very slowly … to an audience mostly composed of magazine journalists—writers and reporters who, in the middle of the day, appeared to be oddly underemployed.

  Then at the beginning of February came “the magazine Oscars”—an awards dinner with a special glamour all its own, at least to fans of print and pixel. This year some 600 editors and publishers attended the dinner, hosted by the gracious—and efficient—anchor and managing editor of ABC News’s World News Tonight, David Muir. The 2015 dinner included the presentation not only of the twenty-four Ellies but also of a lifetime achievement award to the photojournalist James Nachtwey, whose inspiring acceptance speech is posted on the ASME You-Tube Channel. And so ended an awards cycle that had begun six months before.

  The members of ASME owe both David Muir and James Nachtwey thanks for joining us at the 2015 dinner, but there are many others who deserve gratitude for their work in making the National Magazine Awards possible. First, the judges: many of them sacrifice weekends and holidays to prepare for the judging then travel at their own expense to New York to spend those two days in crowded conference rooms that are either too hot or too cold. What all the judges share is a dedication to the task of identifying and honoring the best work published in American magazines in the preceding year.

  Also deserving of thanks is the ASME Board of Directors, especially the 2014–15 president of ASME, Mark Jannot, who in his spare time is the vice president for content of the National Audubon Society. The board not only oversees the administration and presentation of the Ellies but also fiercely protects the integrity of the awards.

  Since they were founded a half century ago, the Ellies have been cosponsored by the Columbia Journalism School. ASME thanks Steve Coll, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author who now serves as dean of the journalism school and Henry R. Luce Professor, for his support of the awards. Abi Wright, the executive director of the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Awards, also deserves recognition for her help organizing the judging and for her work as a member of the National Magazine Awards Board.

  On behalf of ASME, I especially want to thank Evan Ratliff, the cofounder and editor in chief of The Atavist, for writing the introduction to this edition of The Best American Magazine Writing even as his first child was being born. Evan is also to be congratulated not only on The Atavist’s first Ellie—the 2015 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for “Love and Ruin,” by James Verini—but also for the seven other Ellie finalists The Atavist has published in the last four years.

  As always, the members of ASME are grateful to our agent, David McCormick of McCormick Literary, for his skillful representation of our interests. ASME’s editors at Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal and Michael Haskell, also deserve thanks for their commitment to this series, their enthusiasm for magazine journalism, and, most of all, for their talent and patience.

  ASME works closely throughout the year—and especially during the months when ASME functions as the “National Magazine Awards Company”—with the members and staff of MPA, the Association of Magazine Media. I want to express our thanks for their support to the chair of the MPA board of directors, Steve Lacy of Meredith Corporation, and Mary Berner, the president and CEO of MPA. Most deserving of recognition is my ASME colleague Nina Fortuna, who answers every phone call and e-mail with Spartan discipline.

  But really, all our thanks belong to the writers and editors who make the Ellies—and this book—possible. Their dedication to the craft of journalism is a not-so-simple gift to every reader.

  For more information about the National Magazine Awards, including a searchable database of winners and finalists, visit http://www.magazine.org/asme. To watch the presentation of the 2015 Ellies, go to the ASME YouTube Channel.

  The Atlantic

  FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  In hindsight, it is clear that the publication of “The Case for Reparations” in the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic marked the beginning of new era in the way Americans think about race. As the Ellie judges said: “Ta-Nehisi Coates’ passionate argument for reparations, based on centuries of injustice that continue into our own time, has changed the national conversation about race and history. His reporting on the impact of racism on individual Chicagoans makes his case all the more convincing.” Coates’s “Fear of a Black President” won the Ellie for Essays and Criticism in 2013. Founded in 1857, The Atlantic is now one of the most innovative of multiplatform publications, reaching nearly 14 million readers every month.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  The Case for Reparations

  And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

  —Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

  Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

  —John Locke, “Second Treatise”

  By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it.

  —Anonymous, 1861

  I. “So That’s Just One of My Losses”

  Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of thirteen children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a forty-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

  In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually
robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

  The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.

  Well into the twentieth century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”

  When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

  This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

  Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.

  Then, when Ross was ten years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father seventeen dollars.

  “I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.”

  The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for fifty cents a pound, the Ross family might get fifteen cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a seven-dollar suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.

  It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”

  Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

  Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the twentieth century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.

  Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.

  In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the 1940s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.

  Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

  The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told the Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

  Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the
1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

  Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

  “A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”

  The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/ White Wealth: