by Sid Holt
THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING
2017
THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING
2017
Edited by
Sid Holt for the American Society of Magazine Editors
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54365-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISSN 1541-0978
ISBN 978-0231-18159-4 (pbk.)
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Cover design: Nancy Rouemy
Contents
Introduction
Nicholas Thompson, editor in chief, Wired
Acknowledgments
Sid Holt, chief executive, American Society of Magazine Editors
Delusion Is the Thing with Feathers
Mac McCelland
Audubon
FINALIST—Feature Writing
Worlds Apart
Nikole Hannah-Jones
New York Times Magazine
WINNER—Public Interest
The Revenge of Roger’s Angels
Gabriel Sherman
New York
FINALIST—Reporting
The List
Sarah Stillman
The New Yorker
FINALIST—Public Interest
The Improvisational Oncologist
Siddhartha Mukherjee
New York Times Magazine
FINALIST—Reporting
Trump Days
George Saunders
The New Yorker
FINALIST—Feature Writing
President Trump, Seriously and “Appetite for Destruction” and The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
FINALIST—Columns and Commentary
Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic
Andrew Sullivan
New York
FINALIST—Essays and Criticism
The Obama Doctrine
Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
FINALIST—Reporting
Yellowstone: Wild Heart of a Continent
David Quammen
National Geographic
FINALIST—Single-Topic Issue
My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard
Shane Bauer
Mother Jones
WINNER—Reporting
Bird in a Cage and The Ideology of Isolation and Giantess
Rebecca Solnit
Harper’s Magazine
WINNER—Columns and Commentary
Ladies in Waiting
Becca Rothfeld
The Hedgehog Review
FINALIST—Essays and Criticism
The Reckoning
Pamela Colloff
Texas Monthly
FINALIST—Columns and Commentary
Listening for the Country
Zandria F. Robinson
Oxford American
FINALIST—Essays and Criticism
Permissions
List of Contributors
Nicholas Thompson
Introduction
The protagonists of Mac McClelland’s essay, “Delusion Is the Thing with Feathers,” about the hunt for an ivory-billed woodpecker in Cuba, are two ornithologists, Tim Gallagher and Martjan Lammertink. They’ve traveled far past the place where the road ends; they’ve exhausted themselves going up and down mountain ridges. The car they came in gave up long ago, even after two oxen helped pull it from a ditch. They’ve looked everywhere they wanted to look and talked to everyone they came to talk to. But they haven’t found the darn bird. Their journey is at its end, and it’s time to give up and head to the airport to go home.
Then they realize there’s one last person who might be able to help, one more person who might have seen the bird. And so they sneak away from the rest of their group to head back into the jungle. As McLelland writes: “There’s hope! Gallagher thinks, perking up out of his dire exhaustion, in which he barely staggered out of the woods just yesterday. We can still do this!”
I won’t tell you what they learn or if they find the bird. McClelland, who accompanied the ornithologists on the quest, risked her health for the story in a hundred ways, and her essay is a marvel of storytelling. It would be a shame to spoil any of the drama. But I tell the beginning of the anecdote because it’s a way to illustrate the type of reporting that you’ll find in this collection and that you always find in the best magazine writing. The journalists here are like Gallagher and Lammertink: they’re obsessed. They keep calling and writing and revising and talking. There’s always one more person to talk to or one more thing to try to do better. There’s always a chance that they’ll find the unseen bird or uncover the secret document or maybe just craft the perfect line.
Think about Gabriel Sherman, the author “The Revenge of Roger’s Angels.” Through dedication and years of diligent reporting, he exposed secrets at Fox News that no one expected would come out—or, certainly, secrets that no one at Fox wanted to come out. The company compiled a 400-page opposition research file on Sherman as he worked. But because of his tenacity, and his reputation for probity and accuracy, sources kept calling him. Roger Ailes, the most powerful man at perhaps the most powerful news organization in the country, lost his job because of the persistence of a magazine reporter.
Or think about Shane Bauer. He spent four months working as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, in Louisiana, and then fourteen more months reporting on what he learned. Life inside a private prison is violent and often unjust, but it’s also mostly kept hidden. To explain it, you need to commit. You need to be there at the training session where the employees are told that when two inmates start to stab each other, the guards should just holler, “Stop,” and then lean back and watch.
The writers in this collection, of course, weren’t all trying to shine flashlights in dark corners. Becca Rothfeld, in her marvelous essay about what it means to wait for someone, is working to explain a state of mind. “Waiting is consuming. At times it is terrible, a wound that cannot be mitigated but must instead be mutely survived,” she writes. “And sometimes waiting is an insult, an indignity, as pointlessly pathetic as refusing to take off the wedding dress in which you were abandoned years ago by someone who no longer cares and probably doesn’t remember.”
This kind of storytelling is deeply satisfying, but I sometimes ponder why we, as humans, are so attached to it. Writing, of course, has clear evolutionary value. The societies that first learned to write kept better records and planned smarter expeditions. But it’s not immediately apparent that the forces of natural selection would favor people who sit around telling tales about one another. If one village was filled with farmers and the other with storytellers, wouldn’t Darwin predict that the farmers would thrive while the raconteurs would get eaten by tigers? We know that didn’t happen, though, and surely part of the reason is instruction. Read about the mistakes of others, and you won’t make the same mistakes yourself. Or, maybe more pertinently, learn when to plant your crops and why to keep your children out of the river where the alligators live. But the virtues of storytelling are much deeper than that: they help us forge social identities; they let our imaginations develop; they give us pleasure; they let us connect with one another. They make us feel good. And they
make us feel outraged at things that are wrong.
All of that is true today. Storytelling, particularly when combined with great journalism and thinking, helps us to understand and to make decisions for society. Read Sarah Stillman’s piece in this collection, “The List,” and try not to boil with outrage at the lives our nation throws away when it classifies children as sex offenders. Reading Nikole Hannah-Jones on the intense complexities of school choice in Brooklyn will surely change the way you think about how we educate our kids.
• • •
Of course, as you’ve surely heard, the craft is under threat. It’s hard to go a day without encountering the argument that our attention spans are shortening. We’re too distracted by Instagram or Facebook, by texts and by sexts. The entire Internet will have turned into short-form videos by the time the sun rises tomorrow. If that wasn’t enough, the decline of advertising revenue has been starving the journalism business for at least the last decade. And it surely doesn’t help to have the president of the United States hate-tweeting against the free press every morning when the rooster crows.
But, actually, if you examine all these issues, one by one, it’s possible to be hopeful about the future of great magazine writing. As someone with inside information from my previous job at The New Yorker, I can assure you that the two essays from that publication in this collection were read, beginning to end, by an astonishing number of people. The same is true at Wired, where I work now. A good rule of thumb, the editors of the website Longform once told me, is that roughly 90 percent of readers on their site who get through the first 15 percent of the best long stories reach the end. (The founders of that site also told me that they get traffic referrals form OK Cupid, meaning people were trying to get dates by touting their love of long-form journalism.)
If that doesn’t persuade you, look at other fields, like television. The shows we watch today are infinitely more complex than even the best of what people watched twenty years ago. Compare, say, Game of Thrones to M*A*S*H. And then remember, too, that the series is based upon a series of books, written by George R. R. Martin, that cumulatively run about 4,500 pages. If we can get through all of that, our attention spans are surely not shrinking.
That’s not to say, of course, that business models aren’t truly threatened. But the question of whether great magazine writing survives is quite different from the question of whether every magazine survives. Advertising is shifting, and the newsstand business is declining. As this happens, however, new sources of support arise. The Atlantic, which published Jeffrey Goldberg’s extraordinary essay on Obama’s foreign policy, now supports itself in no small part through conferences. The New Yorker, in the last few years, built a successful digital subscription model. It’s hard to make a business work now just packaging information, but you can definitely make a business work by presenting knowledge.
And last, of course, there is the question of our president, the subject of quite a few essays in this collection—and perhaps an incorrect prediction or two as well. He does pose a threat to magazine writing in ways that we will no doubt understand far better when the historians start to look back. By riling up his supporters against the press, he can do damage to the institutions that critique him or, in the darkest scenarios, to the whole notion of a free press—though, for the moment, his attacks serve mainly to launch subscription drives.
Even leaving aside politics, Donald Trump stands against many of the values that the work in this collection stands for: rigorous thinking, attention to detail, craft, and prose. The day after the election, I remember talking to a group of colleagues about how to respond to Trump. The best way, we decided, was just to do our jobs well. To report fairly and accurately, to fact-check everything, to make sentences beautiful. Presidents serve four-year terms, and great writing lasts much longer.
There’s another moment in McClelland’s essay where she and the photographer sit at the side of the path, watching as their travel companions whack the oxen trying to pull their jeep out of a ditch. The journey seems both miserable and futile. “Do you ever wonder if this is all worth it? For a bird?” the photographer asks. The subtext is clear: is obsession worth it? Is it worth making all those extra calls and traveling to ever-more-absurd locales for one’s craft?
The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.
Acknowledgments
In mid-January hundreds of journalists meet on the campus of Columbia University in New York City to judge the National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media. After two days of reading magazines, exploring websites, and watching videos, the judges make their decisions and send the results to the National Magazine Awards Board for approval. Two weeks later the finalists are announced on Twitter. Four weeks later the winners are honored at the National Magazine Awards Gala (this year hosted by Lester Holt). Less than a year later you buy this book.
Best American Magazine Writing gathers together the most notable stories from the current year’s National Magazine Awards. The American Society of Magazine Editors partnered with the Columbia School of Journalism to establish the awards in the early 1960s. The first award was presented to Look in 1966; the first award for digital journalism was presented to Money in 1997. Known as the Ellies for the elephant-shaped statuette presented to each winner, the awards now include twenty categories, ranging from Reporting and Feature Writing to Photography and Design.
This year, 280 publications participated in the Ellies, submitting 1,376 entries. The awards were judged by 282 journalists and educators, who chose 5 to 7 finalists in each category. Sixty-four media organizations were nominated for National Magazine Awards. Nineteen titles received multiple nominations, led by New York with ten, the New York Times Magazine with seven, and The New Yorker with five. New York and the New York Times Magazine also won the most awards, both with three. Complete lists of the judges, finalists and winners are posted on the ASME website at http://www.magazine.org/asme/national-magazine-awards/winners-finalists.
Many of the writers included in Best American Magazine Writing 2017 are repeat finalists. The nomination in Feature Writing of George Saunders’s “Trump Days” for The New Yorker marked the seventh time Saunders’s work has been honored with an Ellie nomination or award. His short stories won awards for Harper’s Magazine in 1994 and 1996, The New Yorker in 2000, and Esquire in 2004. His fiction was also nominated for awards for The New Yorker in 1999 and 2010.
One of the most honored reporters in the history of the Ellie Awards, Pamela Colloff, was nominated in Feature Writing for her story “The Reckoning” for Texas Monthly. Her work for Texas Monthly was previously nominated in Public Interest in 2001 and 2011; in two separate categories, Reporting and Feature Writing, in 2013; and again in Feature Writing in 2015. Her two-part series “The Innocent Man”—about Anthony Graves, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering his family and freed from prison only after the publication of Colloff’s story—won the award for Feature Writing in 2013.
The nomination of Sarah Stillman’s story “The List” for The New Yorker was her fourth in Public Interest in the last six years. Her story “The Invisible Army” for The New Yorker won the award for Public Interest in 2012. The nomination of Mac McClelland’s story “Delusion Is the Thing With Feathers” for Audubon was her third in Feature Writing in the last seven years. She was previously nominated for her work for Mother Jones in 2011 and 2013.
Other repeat Ellie finalists included Jeffrey Goldberg (finalist this year in Reporting for The Atlantic), who won Reporting for The New Yorker in 2003; Andrew Sullivan (finalist in Essays and Criticism for New York), who as the editor of The New Republic won the award for Public Interest in 1995; and Rebecca Traister (finalist in Feature Writing for New York), who was nominated in Columns and Commentary for The New Republic in 2015. Matt Taibbi, who won the award for Columns and Commentary for Rolling Stone in 2008, was nominated in the same category for the same magazine this year.
David Quammen, whose essay for National G
eographic’s “Yellowstone: Wild Heart of a Continent” was nominated this year in the Single-Topic Issue category, has won three National Magazine Awards: in 1987 for Essays and Criticism for Outside; in 1994 for Special Interests, again for Outside; and in 2005 for Essays for National Geographic.
Two 2017 award winners were also repeat honorees. Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose story “Worlds Apart” for the New York Times Magazine won Public Interest this year, was nominated for her story “Segregation Now” for The Atlantic, also in Public Interest, in 2015. Rebecca Solnit won Columns and Commentary for Harper’s Magazine after her work was nominated in the same category in 2016.
The members of ASME want to thank these and the other writers whose work is included here—Shane Bauer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Zandria F. Robinson, Becca Rothfeld, and Gabriel Sherman—for making this edition of Best American Magazine Writing possible. Also to be thanked are the many editors and judges who participate in the National Magazine Awards every year. The Ellie Awards were established to advance the practice of journalism by honoring excellence, enterprise, and innovation. Only with the support of dedicated editors and writers can this goal be achieved.
Each of the sixteen members of the ASME board of directors is responsible for overseeing the administration, judging, and presentation of the Ellie Awards but especially deserving of thanks is Dana Points, who as president of the board in 2016–2017 brought the same passion to the awards that she showed during her distinguished tenure as editor in chief of Parents. In addition to Dana, I also want to thank Lester Holt, anchor of NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and Dateline NBC, for hosting this year’s awards presentation.
ASME has cosponsored the awards with the Columbia Journalism School for more than half a century. The members of ASME thank Steve Coll, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who now serves as the dean of the journalism school, for his continuing support of the National Magazine Awards. ASME would also like to thank Abi Wright, the executive director of professional prizes at Columbia for her help in organizing the Ellies judging every year and for her valuable service as a member of the National Magazine Awards Board.