THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING
2015
THE BEST
AMERICAN
MAGAZINE
WRITING
2015
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 © 2015 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54071-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISSN 1541-0978
ISBN 978-0231-16959-2 (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: CATHERINE CASALINO
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Contents
Introduction
Evan Ratliff, editor, The Atavist
Acknowledgments
Sid Holt, chief executive, American Society of Magazine Editors
The Case for Reparations
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Atlantic
FINALIST—Essays and Criticism
Women Aren’t Welcome Here
Amanda Hess
Pacific Standard
WINNER—Public Interest
The College Rape Overcorrection
Emily Yoffe
Slate
FINALIST—Public Interest
When Michael Dunn Compared Himself to a Rape Victim, He Was Following an Old, Racist Script and I Don’t Care If You Like It and The Slenderman Stabbing Shows Girls Will Be Girls, Too
Rebecca Traister
The New Republic
FINALIST—Columns and Commentary
Shame and Survival
Monica Lewinsky
Vanity Fair
FINALIST—Essays and Criticism
Inside the Iron Closet: What It’s Like to Be Gay in Putin’s Russia
Jeff Sharlet
GQ
WINNER—Reporting
Love and Ruin
James Verini
The Atavist
WINNER—Feature Writing
The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie
John Jeremiah Sullivan
New York Times Magazine
FINALIST—Feature Writing
The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates
David Bernstein and Noah Isackson
Chicago
FINALIST—Reporting
The Sea of Crises
Brian Phillips
Grantland
FINALIST—Feature Writing
Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same? and Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds and Post-Macho God: Matisse’s Cut-Outs Are World-Historically Gorgeous
Jerry Saltz
New York
WINNER—Columns and Commentary
Follow Me: Kate Upton Leads the Charge of Models Who’ve Gone Crazy for Social Media
Jonathan Van Meter
Vogue
WINNER—Magazine of the Year
Jackie’s Goodbye
Tiffany Stanley
National Journal
FINALIST—Public Interest
This Old Man
Roger Angell
The New Yorker
WINNER—Essays and Criticism
The Emerald Light in the Air
Donald Antrim
The New Yorker
WINNER—Fiction
Permissions
List of Contributors
Evan Ratliff
Introduction
Before you delve into what will no doubt be the final edition of The Best American Magazine Writing,1 let us all pause to memorialize the demise of the great magazine story. Indeed, you may have purchased this volume as a kind of collectors’ edition, one to pull down from the shelf one day and regale your kids with tales of a time when quality magazines thrived. Perhaps you hope to later pawn it off on eBay to some Brooklyn hotel proprietor, seeking a touch of classy nostalgia for his lobby.
It’s been a good run for magazine writing—at least 150 years, by most calculations. But I’ve been reading up on the state of the business, and I can report back that the future is dire. The enemy, it turns out, is you and I. Or rather, it is what the demon Internet has done to us, through the Web and the smartphones upon which it is consumed. Always in the pocket, always bleeping its siren call of apps and games, Twitter and Snapchat, and every other flashing distraction—or, as we magazine lovers might say, affliction. Always conspiring to eliminate our desire for prose longer than a brunch-photo caption.
So we’ve been told, at least, in countless articles built on the indelible strength of anecdotal reflections. A few years ago, on that same Web, I chanced upon an infographic from a company called Killian Branding that purported to capture the stark nature of this decline. It purported to chart attention span over time, from 1860 to the present day. Points along the logarithmically sinking line were marked by the famous attention-holding names of the appropriate moments, from the height of Dickens through Hemingway, sixty- and thirty-second TV commercials, YouTube, then Vine, before continuing on an apparently infinite regression toward zero. It perfectly captured modern thinking on the topic of attention spans. Upon closer inspection, it was based upon no actual data.
I don’t think data get any clearer than that! In the late nineteenth century, our massive attention spans were primed for serialized Dickens. And now, as it stands, by the year 2020 our attention will hold to little more than five single-syllable words in a sitting. Farewell, Best American Magazine Writing; greetings, Best American Sequences of Five Monosyllabic Words.
It may comfort you to know, however, that we are not the first generation to witness the death of great magazine writing. That bell began tolling, some would say, as far back as 1911, when a run of unprofitability forced Samuel S. McClure to sell off McClure’s—founded in 1893, and the birthplace of the muckracking narrative journalism of Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens—to creditors who slowly bled it to death. Sure, the nineteenth century also produced long-running magazines like National Geographic, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly. But as avid readers watched the likes of Munsey’s and the Century follow McClure’s down the hole, the stench of death was already upon us.
The 1920s brought some hope, with the advent of Time and The New Yorker, which, alongside The New Republic, Fortune, and Esquire, were harbingers of a great century ahead. But when Vanity Fair came (in 1913) and went (in 1936), it was only a hint of the carnage that the era of radio would bring. We lost the titanic trio of Scribner’s, Forum, and Liberty—you remember them, of course—not to mention Living Age. When the Delineator went from more than two million subscribers in 1929 to suddenly ceasing publication in 1937, the writing was on the wall.
Wait, you say, what of the famed New Journalism of mid-century? Wonderful, inventive work it was, its novelistic style and immersive reporting coursing through the likes of Esquire, Rolling Stone, and New York. But the 1950s and 1960s also cost us Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post Magazine, and in the 1970s so went the agenda-setting Life and Look. New Journalism swashbuckler Scanlan’s lasted only a year.
By 1985, then Harper’s editor L
ewis Lapham acknowledged the approaching end of great magazine writing in a Christian Science Monitor story delineating how television had finally replaced “the durable word as the lingua franca of American thought.” “You’ve got to work with what you’ve got,” Lapham said of America’s remaining readers, and what we had, he observed, was a generation raised on “MTV and ‘The A-Team.’” It had come time, the Monitor concluded, “to kiss long-form journalism goodbye.” (Yet the 1980s saw the return of Vanity Fair, and the 1990s spawned both Wired and Spy, the magazine lover’s magazine, which burned as brightly as any publication ever has before extinguishing in 1998.)
Now, of course, the Internet has decimated the tattered remains of our attention span. Worse, we’re told that it has paradoxically fostered a new scourge for great magazine writing: more of it. In just the last five years, websites and magazines new and old—from Nautilus to BuzzFeed to Grantland to The Atavist, which I edit—have engaged in an ambitious resurgence in long, serious magazine writing. While this might seem like a sign of life, critics have explained that in fact such efforts are diminishing this great craft. Terms like “long-form” and hashtags like #longreads—through which readers recommend work they appreciate to other potential readers—only serve to dilute what was once the purview of discriminating enthusiasts alone. “The problem,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in the New York Times in 2014, “is that long-form stories are too often celebrated simply because they exist.” It was bad enough when our capacity to produce and read great stories collapsed. Now it seems we’ve turned around and loved magazine writing to death.
I don’t mean to make light of the real financial and even existential conundrums facing magazines today, of course. I only mean to observe that they have existed as long as magazines themselves. (Except that last one; complaints about too much magazine writing, and what we label it, seem to be this century’s peculiar, philistines-in-the-country-club anxiety.) In truth, I have my share of worries about the future of serious long-form journalism—who wouldn’t, knowing its history? But when it comes to explanations, I’m partial to one from the great Ian Frazier. It appeared in a 2002 essay introducing The Fish’s Eye, a collection of his writing on fishing, with pieces dating back to the 1970s. In those days, Frazier wrote:
Magazines regularly ran long nonfiction pieces, ambitious in style and content, that originated in the thoughts of individual writers, in their experiences and sensibilities, and in what they believed was important to say.… I’m not sure why this emphasis on writers took hold. Maybe it had to do with the fact that in those years America had recently and unexpectedly come unglued; perhaps people suspected that a writer out walking around in the midst of it would know more of what was going on than an editor behind a desk in New York. Neither do I know why that writers’ era should disappear. But it pretty much has, in magazines at any rate.
Frazier’s speculation—that perhaps the role of writers changes in relation to how often a chaotic world forces itself onto editors’ desks—strikes me as more believable than most. I would argue that the trend is not linear, however, but cyclical. Just as great magazines have always come and gone, so, too, have the periods where editors were more or less willing and able to assign ambitious stories.
Great magazine pieces, after all, grow out of a simple transaction: an editor saying yes to an idea and, in turn, to a writer. Yes to a writer who will risk her time and even safety to venture into the world and return with a story that makes sense of it. Yes to a writer brave enough to lay bare her own past as a window into an important issue. Yes to a writer who invests her intellect and humor into a fresh perspective on art or culture. (Of course, great magazine writing involves more than just saying yes. It involves the editor eventually saying no: no to lazy phrasing, no to shaky facts, no to reporting shortcuts. When long-form writing fails—as it did dangerously in widely discussed incidents in Grantland and Rolling Stone this past year, it is not because of the names we give it, the hashtags we apply to it, or its word-count ambitions. It fails because an editor declined to say no to facts that weren’t checked or to a piece whose ambition had overstepped its humanity.)
Therein lies the explanation for the volume in your hands, filled with work that stands in defiance of the latest doomsaying. What distinguishes the stories in this collection is not just their dedication to in-depth reporting and stylish storytelling. It is the decision of the editors behind them to assume the best of not just their writers but of their readers, in whatever medium those readers would encounter them. Indeed, anyone who takes the time to look at what’s behind the online thumbs-upping and recommending finds an audience craving depth and context precisely because they are awash in information, an audience begging to be moved because of the soulless content we bathe in daily.
This collection also reflects a time when America has, in Frazier’s words, “recently and unexpectedly come unglued.” A country still blinded to its failure to grapple with its history of racism and oppression requires a writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates in “The Case for Reparations.” The pitch to his editor at The Atlantic, Coates told me on the Longform Podcast last year, was simple: an argument could be made for reparations not through statistics and nineteenth-century history but through the narrative of those still suffering today from redlining in Chicago. “We really don’t even have to go back to slavery,” Coates said. “This wouldn’t have to be this old, musty thing.” An editor trusted him and said yes. And when Coates handed that editor a draftof some 13,000 words, “they came back to me and said: ‘We need more.’”
Similarly, the cauldron of hate for women that has erupted on the Internet requires a writer like Amanda Hess, deftly weaving together her personal experience with searing reporting in “Women Aren’t Welcome Here.” A culture seamlessly blending politics and celebrity is an occasion for Monica Lewinsky to tell her own, forgotten story in Vanity Fair. A generation of college students confronting the looming threat of rape on campus demands the thoughtful reflection of Emily Yoffe in Slate.
Fourteen years of perpetual war in Afghanistan call for James Verini’s “Love and Ruin,” a story examining decades of interventions into that country’s history through the story of one woman. A nation celebrating its Olympic medal hoard while ignoring the host country’s homophobic laws requires the work of a reporter like Jeff Sharlet, who ventured to Moscow and St. Petersburg for GQ and returned with a deeply human portrait of the targets of those laws.
America’s tendency to ignore and discard its elderly—even as it faces a wave of aging baby boomers—demands Tiffany Stanley’s wrenching story, “Jackie’s Goodbye,” of caring for her aunt with Alzheimer’s. And it can do no better than the magical prose of New Yorker legend Roger Angell, laying bare the comedy and tragedy of aging, alongside the joy of a life well lived, in “This Old Man.”
It’s a reality that all of these stories and the institutions behind them—whether renowned ones like The New Yorker or upstarts like Pacific Standard and The Atavist—must now compete in a world saturated with information and distraction. It’s true that even the definition of a magazine has been stretched and twisted by a digital world that blows apart tables of contents and deposits them, story by story, on screens the size of a pack of cigarettes. With apologies to the collectors out there, however, this won’t be the final edition of The Best American Magazine Writing. Great writers will keep finding the wherewithal to chase the bold ideas, and great editors will keep finding ways to say yes.
Even better, the next era of magazine work can be one that is more diverse in the character of its writers and in the form of its work. It can be one in which ambitious experimentation is celebrated alongside tradition, one which encompasses the live shows of Pop Up Magazine on the West Coast, the evolving tradition of National Geographic, the design serenity of Nautilus, the raucous reporting of Vice. Perhaps magazines have to die every once in a while so that they may be born again for a new age. “I know people who say they don’t have a television,” Roge
r Angell told an interviewer, a few years back. “You better belong to the times you’re in.”
1. Full disclosure: This is untrue. The American Society of Magazine Editors would like me to state officially, on the likely chance that you do not read to the end of this introduction, that there will in fact be an edition next year and for the foreseeable years after that.
Sid Holt
Acknowledgments
This edition of The Best American Magazine Writing brings together winners and finalists of the 2015 National Magazine Awards. Not all the winners, of course, or even most of the finalists—a book like this could hardly contain finalists from categories like General Excellence, which honors three entire print issues, much less categories like Multimedia and Video. What BAMW does do is collect fifteen examples of the best literary journalism published in the United States in the last year.
This year these stories are primarily drawn from the finalists in six Ellie categories: Public Interest, Reporting, Feature Writing, Essays and Criticism, Columns and Commentary, and Fiction. (The National Magazines Awards, it should be noted, are called the Ellies because the trophy presented to winners is modeled on an Alexander Calder stabile called Elephant.) The only exception is Jonathan Van Meter’s profile of Kate Upton, taken from one of the issues that won Vogue the 2015 award for Magazine of the Year.
Most of the magazines represented in this edition of BAMW are familiar to aficionados, if such there are, of long-form journalism—magazines like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, New York, and The New Yorker. The smaller magazines (smaller, that is, in audience, not ambition) included here are also well known to admirers of dogged reporting and graceful writing: Pacific Standard, The New Republic, Chicago, and National Journal.
What is new to this volume is the solid presence of digital-only publications, among them Slate, The Atavist, and Grantland. Just two years ago, Slate became the first online-only magazine to win an Ellie in a traditionally “print” category, Columns and Commentary. This year it was The Atavist’s turn when it won one of the most prestigious of the twenty-four National Magazine Awards, the Ellie for Feature Writing.
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