The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  So, at least in the sense that these wacky Internet people lack the moral authority conferred upon the Bolsheviks by virtue of risk, this, uh, otherwise useful comparison between the start-up crowd and the Stalinists does perhaps break down a little. But! But! It gathers new strength insomuch that “the most successful of them” often have recourse to terror, in this case the “terrors of technocracy,” which consist of “the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.” So, there you go.

  • • •

  Just a page later, Franzen inexplicably switches gears and decides that the terrors of technology instead consist of “the algorithms that Facebook used to monetize its users’ privacy and Twitter to manipulate memes that were supposedly self-generating. But smart people were actually far more terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA—it was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself as the only defense against them.” Setting aside the demonstrably false and frankly bizarre claim that recent concerns over the intelligence community’s unprecedented capabilities stem merely from some sort of clever gambit by tech firm CEOs who must resort to falsely “imputing” such things rather than, say, from documented and ongoing revelations about those agencies, it’s hard to see how Franzen can actually believe that the misuse of personal information by powerful corporations should logically preclude “smart people” from also fearing the NSA, as their “less-smart” counterparts have been “persuaded” to do. It’s likewise difficult to see how Franzen can be entirely unaware of the contention that’s been put forth over and over again by many of the very people who have made sacrifices to bring these matters to attention—that we are concerned with the combination of state and corporate power exercised in secret, drawing upon advanced and little-known information technology, wielded in such a way as to narrow further and further the potential for truly private life while also contaminating the very information flow that a citizenry requires if it is to survive above the level of a subject population, defended by an opaque protocol of deception and retaliation, and aided and abetted by a dysfunctional establishment culture that was unequipped to even discover the problem without a great deal of help from outside that establishment, which has nonetheless studiously refrained from learning any lessons from all of this.

  There’s an old joke which holds that in heaven, the cooks are French, the cops are English, and the engineers are German; whereas in hell, the cooks are English, the cops are German, and the engineers are French. We live in a sort of silly cultural hell where the columns are composed by Thomas Friedman, the novels are written by Jonathan Franzen, the debate is framed by CNN, and the fact-checking is done by no one. Franzen’s nightmare—a new regime of technology and information activists that will challenge the senile culture of which he is so perfectly representative—is exactly what is needed.

  ESPN the Magazine

  FINALIST—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY

  “A good columnist says things that haven’t been said,” said the Ellie judges about the three pieces printed here. “Howard Bryant says them in a way that won’t be forgotten. In prose that is as deft and unflinching as it is concise, Bryant shows us why sports offers perhaps the best platform in America for an honest discussion about race.” Bryant joined ESPN in 2007 and now writes for ESPN.com as well as ESPN the Magazine. A regular Ellie finalist, ESPN the Magazine has been nominated in recent years in categories ranging from Reporting to Feature Photography. And it’s not just Ellie judges who have been impressed. In an online poll conducted by ASME in February, readers voted the magazine’s 2015 “Body Issue” their favorite cover of the year.

  Howard Bryant

  Down for the Count and The King Has Spoken and The Power of Sight

  Down for the Count

  In post-Ferguson America, the language has sharpened as violence has increased. The vague “racism” succumbed to the stronger “white privilege,” which has been radicalized into “white supremacy,” a term not just relating to skinheads and lynching but to the daily condition whites enjoy of being the cultural default, the ones in charge, the ones always in the lead.

  The white American boxer is dead as disco, yet the lead of director Antoine Fuqua’s riveting, heartbreaking new film Southpaw is light-heavyweight champion Billy Hope, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s a historical incongruity that wafts like cigar smoke at ringside. The WBA, WBO, and WBC haven’t had a white American light-heavyweight champion in the twenty-first century. The last white American IBF light-heavyweight champion was Bobby Czyz, nearly thirty years ago, in 1987. Yet after six Rockys, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, and The Fighter, the white boxer is one of Hollywood’s enduring leading men.

  Southpaw is hard and fantastic, a statement less about ethnicity than class. Hope was raised through foster care because he was born to an incarcerated mother. He and his wife (Rachel Mc-Adams) met as kids in an orphanage. He has self-destructive rage, but his path and pathologies are humanized. After a brutal fight, his ten-year-old daughter, Leila, receives a text from her mom that reads, “Daddy won.” At home, little Leila counts the cuts on his battered face. He is a father. They are a family.

  Still, despite the movie’s excellence, Hope’s whiteness is what the studio believed audiences needed to care about his story. (Kurt Sutter’s screenplay was inspired by the life of Eminem, who was Fuqua’s first choice for the lead.) Maybe it is because boxing stories are about underdogs, and the one place in America a black man is expected to be the favorite is in sports, especially in the ring. Maybe it is because with a black lead, a character with a dark and troubled backstory would only confirm white resentments and deep-seated fears of black masculinity, making it impossible to generate the necessary sympathy for the protagonist. “As a black man and director, I felt that,” Fuqua says. “I don’t know. Audiences will bring what they feel about black people to the film, and yeah, they can watch the news, see a black player failing and say, ‘That’s what they do.’”

  There is another, simpler reality: Hollywood, like sports, measures its analytics, and the stars make movies happen, as Will Smith made Ali happen and Mark Wahlberg made The Fighter happen. In the case of Southpaw, a would-be Oscar contender with a modest budget, Fuqua made a black film that Hollywood seems to believe couldn’t have a black lead, and even he, director of the brilliant Training Day, cannot always overcome these forces. “It’s economics, really,” Fuqua says. “It comes down to what the people with the money think they can sell. The thinking is, ‘Why take a risk when you can do it with formula?’”

  So as white American boxers face extinction, white movie stars are the wallpaper—the ones who save the day and kiss the girl, receive the humanizing roles, remain the default. This is the meaning of white supremacy: privilege so pervasive we rarely notice and hardly question its existence. “What it is like to be white is not to say, ‘We have to level the playing field,’ but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with,” author Fran Lebowitz wrote in 1997. “The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word ‘advantage’ at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist.”

  The privilege translates into the audience’s caring about Hope, despite his flaws, and to caring about the black trainer who saves him (the tremendous Forest Whitaker, the conscience of the film), and to caring about the black boxing world where his rehabilitation begins. In Southpaw, the only white boxer in the entire film is the lead; everyone and everything else revolves around him, the cultural default at work. It’s not easy to watch or to acknowledge. As Gyllenhaal says to McAdams when she predicts brain damage as the future cost of his fighting, “Why you gotta lay the truth right now?”

  The King Has Spoken />
  In the first 239 days of 2015, 185 black men were murdered in the city of Baltimore. In post-Katrina New Orleans, FiveThirtyEight concluded, black residents are more likely to live in poverty than before the hurricane ten years ago. The Washington Post recently released data indicating that every nine days, on average, American police kill an unarmed black man. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 9.1 percent black unemployment rate for July, nearly twice the rate of whites.

  White America grows exasperated by the insistence that race still matters, but these facts are a neon sign pointing not at post-racialism but to an entrenched underclass. In Akron, Ohio, hometown of LeBron James, the black poverty rate is 28 percent, 12 points higher than the state average. To James, the numbers are not just a topic, ammunition for winning an argument, but statistical recognition of his life before fame. Days after the anniversary protests marking Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, James partnered with the University of Akron and countered the numbers with other numbers, pledging $41 million to send as many as 2,000 at-risk Akron kids to college.

  It was a massive initiative, a reminder that, in addition to protest and pressure, the rhetoric of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps means nothing without boots. It was also something else: proof that James is the signature socially conscious athlete of his time. By this measure he need not aspire to be Michael Jordan. He’s already run right past him.

  James and Dwyane Wade organized the first athlete protest of the killing of Trayvon Martin. James used his power to rally players and challenge the NBA to be decisive on Donald Sterling. James wore an I CAN’T BREATHE shirt in warm-ups to show solidarity with young black men disposable to society because they lack his talent. Instead of blaming hip-hop or admonishing the less fortunate, he confronted the “dead or in jail” narrative that permeates black male life with a real program backed by real money. He wrote an enormous check as part of staring down a bitter truth: If “dead or in jail” is as good as it gets for black boys who don’t have a blinding forty-yard dash time or a bull’s-eye jumper, then at this late date in the American story, integration has been a colossal failure.

  James does not live independent of his environment, and neither did Jordan. James is in the prime of his youth and earning power amid national protest and Black Lives Matter. His generation is not a new target of police brutality; it is the latest edition of the same old target. He grew up witnessing the collision between the progress of some and the dead ends for most of the kids who look like him, at a time when the term “postracial” sounds not only ridiculous but naive. America could not be more racial than it is right now.

  Jordan, meanwhile, came of age during the most comprehensive wave of conservatism in the twentieth century, a political retrenchment that followed the sweeping social ambition of Lyndon Johnson. Jordan was fifteen when the Supreme Court struck down minority set-asides in the landmark Bakke case, limiting affirmative action, and eighteen when President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. Jordan’s 1980s were a market correction of the 1960s, not a time of protest or challenge but one of accumulating individual wealth while Great Society, labor union, and New Deal gains and attitudes were being scaled back. Jordan’s time was when money was celebrated as the only measure. Greed is good.

  The similarities between James and Jordan end when their shared no. 23 jersey rests on a hanger, for Jordan has never been known for a single courageous social act. While James attempts to bridge the powerless to a future, Jordan sued a defunct supermarket chain and won $8.9 million over an advertisement that reportedly yielded all of $4. (Jordan said he planned to donate the money to charity.)

  James has accepted a challenge of his times so foreign to the 1980s, making him an heir not to Jordan but to the civil rights movement, to Jim Brown and Bill Russell, to the idea of the athlete as activist. Every day of his career has existed under the shadow of Jordan, but as citizen, LeBron does not look up to Michael. It should be the other way around.

  The Power of Sight

  A week after Flavia Pennetta engineered the Great Mic Drop of 2015 by winning a U.S. Open title that had been prematurely promised to Serena Williams, actress Viola Davis underscored the significance of what has been the Year of Serena, hoisting an Emmy for her role in the ABC series How to Get Away with Murder.

  The Emmys were first presented in 1949, the year Jackie Robinson won the National League MVP. Nearly seven decades later, after years of African Americans enduring insulting phrases such as “I don’t see color,” Davis finally became the first black woman to win an Emmy for best actress in a drama. Williams failed to reach the U.S. Open final, of course, losing in a seismic semifinal upset to Roberta Vinci, but Davis, in her historic moment, echoed the themes and grievances that the highly decorated Williams symbolized for women—and especially women of color—all summer. “In my mind,” Davis said, quoting Harriet Tubman in her acceptance speech, “I see a line. And over that line I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line. But I can’t seem to get there nohow. I can’t seem to get over that line…. The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”

  The vitriol and passive aggressiveness directed at Williams for much of the year—whether on social media, from the Wimbledon crowd, or even from some peers (American Jamie Hampton looked small when she tweeted out “#forza #italiansonly” after Vinci beat Williams to set up an all-Italian final)—was often explained as a mere byproduct of the familiar favorite-underdog narrative, or of Williams’s personality. Neither explanation felt honest, not at those decibel levels, especially at Wimbledon, when Williams’s physique was critiqued so crudely that author J. K. Rowling took to social media in her defense.

  Davis’s rare victory might seem unrelated to Williams, who has won virtually every title her sport offers. The connection lies beneath the surface. Williams is no underdog, but so many of her most devoted followers certainly are. For them, her tennis is not about sport but about her existing as a counter to nonexistence, to the sixty-seven years of invisibility Davis’s victory highlighted, to the invisibility that the visible—those who look the part and get the opportunities—often have the luxury of ignoring or dismissing. Serena exemplifies the black excellence that, as Davis pointed out, rarely receives an audition. African American women channel through her.

  Williams was not only fighting Garbine Muguruza in the Wimbledon final and Maria Sharapova in the Australian Open final. She was also fighting for a feeling on the part of many of her supporters—the feeling that her victories, her presence, help stem the daily erasing, the smothering reality that black women really don’t matter, cannot win, do not count in American culture. “You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there,” Davis said. She could have been speaking of black female sports writers, whose voices were virtually nonexistent this summer, even though the season belonged to a black woman champion.

  Serena always, and with particular urgency this year, represents actually counting, such a small yet critical thing.

  The conversation of race in the United States has never been so much between black and white as between white and white, for the black demand of full citizenship has remained unchanged. For African Americans, Charleston and Sandra Bland connect to Serena Williams’s being ridiculed for her muscular frame and to her making less endorsement money than Sharapova. They connect to Harvard-educated James Blake’s being rousted in front of the Grand Hyatt by an undercover cop, and to a sixty-seven-year wait for a black woman to win a trophy for a TV drama.

  Always convinced of their objectivity, too many white Americans denied the existence of the connective tissue, angry at the black response and uninterested in exploring its causes. They miss the significance of Serena. For her fans, often the unchosen, Serena’s quest was deeply rooted in these themes of invisibility, of yearning to be attractive without ridicule, of the fight just to be seen. She ultimatel
y did not lift the trophy, but across the country, in another industry, Davis did it for her.

  Esquire

  WINNER—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  This is what it was like for Matthew Teague after his wife, Nicole, was driven mad by the cancer that was killing her: “I watched, speechless, as she pulled off the last of the gauze and made her way to the shower, dribbling stool and acid onto the floor.” There to help him was his friend Dane Faucheux. “I had married into this situation, but how had he gotten here?” writes Teague. “Love is not a big-enough word. He stood and faced the reality of death for my sake.” The Ellie judges used words like “brutal” and “graphic” for “The Friend” but also described it as “beautifully rendered.” The Ellie won by “The Friend” was the seventeenth for Esquire editor David Granger, who announced his departure from the magazine shortly before accepting the award for this extraordinary story.

  Matthew Teague

  The Friend

  Most of September 17, 2012, has evaporated from my mind. I still have a few memories. I have the way the surgeon’s voice shook. I remember my wife calling my name while she was still under sedation. And I have an image of the hospital floor, up close. I remember white tile and a hope: Maybe I will never have to get up. Maybe they will just let me die here.