The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

2014 The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) is the principal

tors and a former editor at Rolling Stone and Adweek Magazines.

Mark Jannot is vice president for content at the National Audubon Society and president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. $17.95 Cover design: Catherine Casalino Columbia University Press / New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.

the best american magazine writing

Edited by Sid holt for

Sid Holt is chief executive of the American Society of Magazine Edi-

Columbia

the american society of magazine editors

organization for magazine journalists in the United States. ASME sponsors the National Magazine Awards in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Edited by Sid Holt for the American Society of Magazine Editors

2014

Our annual anthology of finalists and winners of the 2014 National Magazine Awards includes Max Chafkin’s oral history of Apple from Fast Company; Joshua Davis’s intimate portrait of the tech pioneer John McAfee’s personal and public breakdown from Wired; Kyle Dickman’s haunting investigation into the preventable death of nineteen firemen battling an Arizona wildfire; and Ariel Levy’s emotional account of extreme travel to a remote land—while pregnant—from The New Yorker.

Other essays include Wright Thompson’s bittersweet profile of Michael Jordan’s fifty-something second act (ESPN the Magazine); Jean M. Twenge’s revealing look at fertility myths and baby politics (The Atlantic); Janet Reitman’s controversial study of the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Rolling Stone); Luke Mogelson’s harrowing experience accompanying asylum seekers on a potentially deadly sea voyage to Australia (New York Times Magazine); Lisa Miller’s poignant report from Newtown, Connecticut, as the town tries to cope with the aftermath of one of the nation’s worst mass shootings (New York); Emily Nussbaum’s critiques of gender and politics on television (New Yorker); and Witold Rybczynski’s poetic engagement with modern architecture (Architect). The collection concludes with the award-winning poem “Elegies” by Kathleen Ossip (Poetry) and “The Embassy of Cambodia,” a short story by Zadie Smith (The New Yorker).

the best american magazine writing

Tom Junod Max Chafkin Janet Reitman Emily Nussbaum Witold Rybczynski Barry Lopez Steven Brill Jean M. Twenge Wright Thompson Kathleen Ossip Zadie Smith

2 014 introduction by

Mark Jannot president of ASME

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Mark Jannot

Introduction

W

ell, this is an odd little exercise, isn’t it?

I mean, you’ve bought (or are considering buying—in which case, what the hell? Pull the trigger!) a collection of great writing that is defined, in the very title of this book, by its relation to the aggregated, issue-based format for which it was commissioned and in which it was originally published.

It’s magazine writing!

Which is . . . what, exactly?

Magazine writing is, I guess we can all agree, writing that is published between the covers of a magazine. But. But when you remove it from the magazine, and from the magazine context— to present it between different covers, in the pages of a Best American anthology, for instance—is it still magazine writing?

And if so, how so?

It’s not an idle question for those of us who are involved in the commissioning and publication of this fine work because more and more—and ever more into the future—magazine writing does appear outside the covers of a “magazine,” that wood-pulpbased product that until two decades ago was its sole repository, not to mention the source of its particular identity and appeal.

Please excuse this belaboring of the obvious, but today magazine writing can be found also on all manner of screen—computer,

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tablet, e-reader, smartphone—and in an ever-kudzu-fying range of formats and packages. Does the concept of “magazine writing” lose meaning in such a chaotic universe? Or is there something essential in this sort of work that transcends the physical form itself?

Let’s find out, shall we? Here’s a fun game, though it probably works best if you haven’t already thoroughly consumed the table of contents or so eagerly thumbed through this book that you’ve committed the lineup to memory and mapped out a plan for how you’re going to devour these bonbons. (But of course if you were a devotee of that intensity, you wouldn’t be wasting your time reading these words. So I think we’re on pretty safe ground.)

When you turn to each new story, take care somehow to avoid casting your eyes over the spot where the name of the originating magazine is proudly displayed—put your hand over that side of the page (or screen), or, if the layout allows, just flip swiftly past.

And, for Pete’s sake, don’t read the italicized intro! (You can save that for later.) Then, as you’re reading the piece, or once you’ve finished it, see if you can guess its provenance. (Or at least whittle the candidate magazines down to a “most likely” two or three.)

Ready? Go! Everybody back? OK, how’d we do? I’m willing to bet that, if you have any sort of magazine awareness to draw upon—and you do—your performance on this mag-identity test was strong, better than you’d have thought. (Or it would have been, if you’d actually gone and tried it.) That was my experience, anyway: It’s striking, the extent to which these stories, taken in isolation, as a mere shard of a magazine’s DNA, can in fact still be used to reverse-engineer the entire organism.

Tom Junod’s celeb profi le of Matt Damon, which kicks off this collection, is, for instance, a true exemplar of a particular form, and as the particulars pile up it becomes a form that could plausibly have been published in no more than a handful of magazines. The story gives the reader exactly what the reader

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always wants out of this sort of story—insider detail, delicious tales told by the celebrity about other celebrities while said celebrity is drinking large beers in the chummy company of your interlocutor and thus you. But the adjacent-barstool nature of this particular narrative and voice certainly narrows the presumptive audience. And the story also meta-stasizes its pleasures by making the reader uncomfortably aware of the dark heart of his want and of its insalubrious effect on all who are touched by it. (By the end, you feel you do know Damon better, but you’re less sure that you have any right to and almost painfully aware of the gap that exists between you and his celebrity Elysium, though you’ve enjoyed spending a good chunk of time bathing in its ambrosial waters.) It’s smart as hell. Could be New York? But no, the discussion of Damon’s decamping from New York to L.A. doesn’t carry the requisite NY-centric knowingness; gotta be a true national mag. Did I mention that there is much drinking of alcohol? Also smoking of cigars. Cigar Aficionado! But no, it has a different kind of ambition—and besides, there aren’t that many cigars, and the alcohol is beer. Could be GQ, but it feels a bit older than that, a bit more self-conscious. The hed, the title, seals it: “The Second Biggest Star in a Remote Little Burg Somewhere in Germany.” Gotta be Esquire.

BingBingBingBingBing!

Isn’t this fun?

We can get a different spin on a similar outcome by considering whether the two “Columns and Commentary” exemplars here—Emily Nussbaum’s TV criticism from The New Yorker and Witold Rybczynski’s architecture reconsiderations from Architect—could have swapped publications intact. (Well, from a voice/tone/erudition standpoint, anyway; we can assume that Nussbaum’s small-screen meditations would be beyond-scope for Architect.) Nussbaum’s criticism is bracing, crisp, and straightforward. She beats around no bushes, she comes across as a relatable passionista, yet, however relatable her enthusiasm might

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be (she made me feel good about liking Scandal better than House of Cards!), she always delivers a perspective that is clearly her own, entirely fresh, and hard (or at least enjoyably challenging) to refute. Rybczynski is cool and analytical but also personal and passionate and engaged. And quite wry, with that breed of orotund in-the-fullness-of-time wit that I personally prize: “Although the librarians who showed me around boasted of their building’s popularity, it’s unclear that the experience of using a public library is actually enhanced when it doubles as a tourist attraction.” (Oh, snap.)

Yeah, from a tone standpoint, it’s possible to imagine either of these writers contributing to the other’s rag (and, indeed, a search of the Web reveals that Rybczynski did toss a few bones Eustace Tilly’s way back around the time the Web itself was being created; Architect, however, has apparently yet to fi nd a way to snare Nussbaum’s talents). But it’s not possible to imagine these particular essays being published in each other’s magazines—or any other magazine, for that matter. Rybczynski could write architecture criticism for The New Yorker, perhaps—but not this architecture criticism, which is too specific, too catering to the concerns and predilections of a relatively narrower audience, to reside comfortably anywhere but where it was created to reside.

This is the core reason that magazine writing retains its particular ATCG encoding even outside of its activating environment.

(Which is an even more impressive achievement when you consider also that these pieces were originally published, both in print and online, in beautifully illuminated visual environments, accompanied by powerful photography, extraordinary illustration, etc.—yet here, where you consume them only and entirely in their textual essence, they don’t feel diminished at all.) This is one thing that defines magazine writing and that creates and conditions its essence: It’s commissioned; it’s assigned.

The longstanding custom at the National Magazine Awards, whence these selections spring, is that every award, even the

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ones given to honor an individual article crafted by a lone writer, is accepted by the editor in chief of the magazine that published the work. This may sound like a glory grab perpetrated under the auspices of an organization that is, after all, called the American Society of Magazine Editors, but there is a logic to the practice based on the fact that editors assign (or, much more rarely, acquire) these stories and work with writers to shape them, all with an eye to ensuring that they’re right for the magazine, will appeal to its particular audience, and will weave nicely into a tapestry of many other stories that, presented together, have an even greater positive effect on its readers.

Th is is presumably the reason book excerpts, though commonly published in magazines, often after a good deal of additional collaborative massaging between writer and editor, are not eligible for the NMAs: A book excerpt is not, at heart, magazine writing, it’s book writing that happened to find itself in a magazine. This is also the reason that I’m personally a bit dubious about the inclusion here of Kathleen Ossip’s poetry and Zadie Smith’s fiction. I understand the impulse to showcase the full range of writing that gets published (at least occasionally) in magazines, and I celebrate the artistic virtuosity of Ossip and Smith—I sure loved reading and being tortured by every word— but, ultimately, this isn’t magazine writing, made possible only through the agency of a magazine and bearing its particular genetic imprint.

Here’s another game to play while reading these things (for best results, I’d recommend trying it the second time through, so the story can wash over you on first read). This one is called “Where did that detail come from?” What sort of reporting delivered that information? Kyle Dickman’s “Nineteen,” published in Outside, is a chilling account of the wildfire that menaced the town of Yarnell, Arizona, and of the nineteen firefighters from the Granite Mountain Hotshots who perished in the blaze. Think of it: These people are dead. How do you wrestle a rich, detailed,

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and psychologically acute narrative from ghosts? How did Sebastian Junger dramatize the plight of the fishermen on the doomed Andrea Gail in The Perfect Storm (which was once, in its original incarnation in Outside, “The Storm”) when there were no survivors? Pay attention to how Dickman builds his story from knowable facts woven through highly informed speculation on what was happening, and what was seen by and might possibly have passed through the minds of the men who would ultimately die.

You don’t actually have to wonder where the details came from in Luke Mogelson’s “The Dream Boat” (New York Times Magazine), but it does inspire tremendous wonder at the empathy, commitment, and courage required for Mogelson to accompany a rickety boat’s worth of Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers on their desperate attempted passage across 200 miles of tempestuous sea from Indonesia to an Australian territory named (perversely enough) Christmas Island. So many heroic acts of reporting are featured in this volume, in fact, that it provides a handy excuse for me to make the inarguable assertion that there is no great magazine writing without great reporting.

And sometimes the best way to write it is to lay out the reporting as cleanly as possible and simply ensure that its implications speak clearly—as they most assuredly do in “Bitter Pill,” Steven Brill’s infuriating 24,000-word reportorial masterpiece on the debilitating costs of medical care, which was published as an entire issue of Time. It was a bold decision by the magazine’s editors, one that, it seems to me, serves as a reminder and celebration of one thing that magazines can do uniquely well, which is to deliver investigations of such depth, nuance, and power that they can transform the debate around an essential issue.

I do have a small quibble, however, about a decision Time made when it archived this opus online. It resides behind a paywall, accessible only to those willing to pony up for a subscription to the magazine—with no provision for simply buying the single

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article. While I support in principle the practice of using such powerful stories as an inducement to subscribe, to experience the report and future reports in situ, I worry that adopting such a blanket proscription is a willful denial of the future. Contrary to popular digital dogma, content doesn’t want to be free, but neither does it want to be housed behind a high wall surmounted by coils of razor wire.

Bottom line, while the essence of “magazine” writing arises out of and is still most satisfyingly expressed in its curated, packaged, issue-based, defined, and confi ned-between-the-covers form, the insistence on constraining its consumption only to that form is distressingly backward-leaning and missing of the point. As the volume you hold in your hands (whether in print or through the magical screen of your smartphone, tablet, or e-reader) and the stories here robustly demonstrate, the best magazine writing retains both its power and its magazine-ness, even when there’s no physical magazine in evidence.