The Best American Magazine Writing 2021, edited by Sid Holt (introduction)

Edited by Sid Holt for the American Society of Magazine Editors

e n i t z s a e The B an Mag g c n i i r t i e r m W A

2021

Introduction by Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones Elizabeth Alexander Sam Anderson Anne Applebaum Aura Bogado Susan Choi Ta-Nehisi Coates Barton Gellman

Mitchell S. Jackson Lizzie Presser Farah Peterson Wright Thompson Adam Tooze Jesmyn Ward Lawrence Wright

Clara Jeffery

Introduction

W

ith the benefit of hindsight, which an annual compilation of some of the best magazine writing in America necessarily provides, the historic trash fire that was 2020 seems inevitable, a black hole whose event horizon predated the year itself but propelled us with ever-gathering speed toward a national singularity.

It’s right there in many of the titles: “The Plague Year,” “The Collaborators,” “The Trayvon Generation,” “The Patriot Slave,” “Witness and Respair.”

Our country faced three interlocking crises: a pandemic, a racial reckoning, an accelerating slide toward authoritarianism.

We survived (though not all of us, not by a long shot), battered and depressed, staggering across the annual tape of January 1, only to face an insurrection against democracy that is not yet over, yet another battle in a war for fair representation that may not be won. This was, in other words, a year, more than perhaps any in several generations, where the reporting, the analysis, the perspective of long-form magazine writing helped us make sense of a world gone mad. Or at least crystallized why we felt insane.

And why we were furious.

This anthology is not organized chronologically. Yet in rereading many of these pieces I felt compelled to try to remember: What was happening when this article came out, when it was on press, and when it was written?

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In a year in which Twitter and cable news dispensed nonstop hits of chaos, magazines provided context, the big picture. Playing to that strength, this anthology begins with Lawrence Wright’s masterful distillation of our plague year, a series of chronological postcards from the edge of the pandemic, emblematic incidents we might have otherwise forgotten alongside newly reported accounts that together tell the story of our response to COVID, shambolic and corrupt, heroic and heartbreaking. The New Yorker piece ends with Wright and his wife at the ballot box in Texas: “Across America, people waited in long lines to vote— despite the disease, despite attempts to discredit or invalidate their vote, despite postal delays, despite Russian or Iranian meddling, despite warnings from the White House that the president would not go quietly if he lost. They voted as if their country depended on it.”

A few months earlier, Barton Gellman published “The Election That Could Break America” in The Atlantic. In it, he laid out the case that we were headed for a constitutional crisis: “If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all.” Many of Gellman’s predictions, including the attempt to hijack the January 6 election certification and the malignant mischief of rogue state legislatures, came to pass. This piece was much discussed, of course, and he wasn’t the only journalist sounding the klaxons, but rereading it now, it’s hard not to feel the curse of Cassandra.

Halfway through the year, the murder of George Floyd unleashed a racial reckoning, and this anthology is replete with, yet provides only a small sampling of, writing by Black Americans that gives voice to every manner and method of systemic repression and amplifies demands for change. Jesmyn Ward’s

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Vanity Fair essay conjoins her promise to remember the husband she lost to COVID to Black America’s demands for acknowledgement and equality: When my Beloved died, a doctor told me: The last sense to go is hearing. When someone is dying, they lose sight and smell and taste and touch. They even forget who they are. But in the end, they hear you.

I hear you.

I hear you.

You say: I love you.

We love you.

We ain’t going nowhere.

I hear you say: We here.

Published three weeks after George Floyd was murdered, Mitchell S. Jackson’s “Twelve Minutes and a Life” retells how Ahmaud Arbery was stalked and murdered, even as it reifies everything—from his love of family to his love of McChicken sandwiches and cheese—about him. For the readers of Runner’s World, the piece laid bare how the sport that’s a joy, an obsession, a safe harbor to white runners, is a deadly obstacle course through bigotry for Black Americans: “That Maud’s jogging made him the target of hegemonic white forces is a certain failure of America. Check the books—slave passes, vagrancy laws, Harvard’s Skip Gates arrested outside his own crib—Blacks ain’t never owned the same freedom of movement as whites.” This piece, which Jackson must have begun and probably completed long before Floyd’s murder, may have taken on more resonance to readers because it came out during a national uprising, but is also a clarion call not to reduce the causes of protest to one incident, not to reduce a murdered man to a symbol:

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Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was more than a viral video. He was more than a hashtag or a name on a list of tragic victims.

He was more than an article or an essay or posthumous profile. He was more than a headline or an op-ed or a news package or the news cycle. He was more than a retweet or shared post. He, doubtless, was more than our likes or emoji tears or hearts or praying hands. He was more than an RIP T-shirt or placard. He was more than an autopsy or a transcript or a police report or a live-streamed hearing. He, for damn sure, was more than the latest reason for your liberal white friend’s ephemeral outrage. He was more than a rally or a march. He was more than a symbol, more than a movement, more than a cause. He. Was. Loved.

Of course, magazines must—individually and certainly collectively—provide contrast to big, weighty, public-affairs journalism. In this collection we have some juicy profiles of New York buildings—with all the requisite architectural trivia, co-op board dramas, and oversharing and humble-bragging of the residents. As we were all binge-watching Netflix’s Michael Jordan bio series, The Last Dance, ESPN provided us a view of MJ that he did not executive produce, one in which author Wright Thompson notes that his colorful suits, which “took on an air of sophistication in the glare of Jordan’s fame,” are perhaps better understood as reflecting a country boy dressing up for Sunday service at an AME church. Susan Choi’s short story for Harper’s, “The Whale Mother.” takes the despair of divorce and glazes it ever so delicately with the surreal.

I remember grasping hold of Sam Anderson’s New York Times Magazine profile of Weird Al Yankovic, which came out amid the first lockdown, much as a person lost in the desert might stagger toward an oasis. It was a balm, a salvation, and I did not care if the joy that it gave me might shimmer away in the heat of current events once I was done reading. It was relief, and God knows in 2020, we needed relief.

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And that’s what magazines do: They challenge, they juxtapose, they synthesize, they inspire, they sound a call to action.

And they provide beauty and comfort and succor and, yes, some blessed diversion, when you need them most. The title of Jesmyn Ward’s essay, “Witness and Respair,” distilled 2020. “Witness,” to see, to testify. “Respair,” not a word in common usage, means the return of hope after a period of despair. And we can only hope for that.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 presents outstanding journalism and commentary that reckon with urgent topics, including COVID-19 and entrenched racial inequality. In “The Plague Year,” Lawrence Wright details how responses to the pandemic went astray (New Yorker). Lizzie Presser reports on “The Black American Amputation Epidemic” (ProPublica). In powerful essays, the novelist Jesmyn Ward processes her grief over her husband’s death against the backdrop of the pandemic and antiracist uprisings (Vanity Fair), and the poet Elizabeth Alexander considers “The Trayvon Generation” (New Yorker).

Aymann Ismail delves into how “The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd” dealt with the repercussions of the fatal call (Slate).

Mitchell S. Jackson scrutinizes the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and how running fails Black America (Runner’s World).

The anthology features remarkable reporting, such as explorations of the cases of children who disappeared into the depths of the U.S. immigration system for years (Reveal) and Oakland’s efforts to rethink its approach to gun violence (Mother Jones). It includes selections from a Public Books special issue that investigate what 2020’s overlapping crises reveal about the future of cities. Excerpts from Marie Claire’s guide to online privacy examine topics from algorithmic bias to cyberstalking to employees’ rights. Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s perceptive Paris Review columns explore her family history in Detroit and the toll of a brutal past and present. Sam Anderson reflects on a unique pop figure in “The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic” (New York Times Magazine). The collection concludes with Susan Choi’s striking short story “The Whale Mother” (Harper’s Magazine).

Sid Holt is executive director of the American Society of Magazine Editors and a former editor at Rolling Stone and Adweek magazines.

Clara Jeffery is editor in chief of Mother Jones. $19.95

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