The Best American Magazine Writing 2014
Page 50
“Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” by Ariel Levy, originally published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2013 by Ariel Levy. Reprinted by permission of Ariel Levy.
“Shark Week,” by Emily S. Nussbaum, originally published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2013 by Emily S. Nussbaum. Reprinted by permission of Emily S. Nussbaum.
“Difficult Women,” by Emily S. Nussbaum, originally published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2013 by Emily S. Nussbaum. Reprinted by permission of Emily S. Nussbaum.
“Private Practice,” by Emily S. Nussbaum, originally published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2013 by Emily S. Nussbaum. Reprinted by permission of Emily S. Nussbaum.
“Overexposed,” by Witold Rybczynski, originally published in Architect. Copyright © 2013 by Architect. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Radical Revival,” by Witold Rybczynski, originally published in Architect. Copyright © 2013 by Architect. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Behind the Façade,” by Witold Rybczynski, originally published in Architect. Copyright © 2013 by Architect. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Sliver of Sky,” by Barry Lopez, originally published in Harper’s Magazine. Copyright © 2013 by Barry Lopez. Reprinted with the permission of the author and his agent, Sterling Lord Literistic Inc. All rights reserved.
“Bitter Pill,” by Steven Brill, originally published in Time. Copyright © 2013 by Time. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?” by Jean M. Twenge, originally published in The Atlantic. Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building,” by Wright Thompson, originally published in ESPN the Magazine. Copyright © 2013 by ESPN the Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Bret, Unbroken,” by Steve Friedman, originally published in Runner’s World. Copyright © 2013 by Steve Friedman. Reprinted by permission of Steve Friedman.
“Dangerous,” by Joshua Davis, originally published in Wired. Copyright © 2013 by Joshua Davis. Reprinted by permission of Joshua Davis.
“The Sinking of the Bounty,” by Matthew Shaer, originally published in The Atavist. Copyright © 2013 by The Atavist. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Nineteen,” by Kyle Dickman, originally published in Outside. Copyright © 2013 by Outside. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Elegies,” by Kathleen Ossip, originally published in Poetry. Copyright © 2013 by Kathleen Ossip. Reprinted by permission of Kathleen Ossip.
“The Embassy of Cambodia,” by Zadie Smith, originally published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2013 by Zadie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Zadie Smith.
Contributors
STEVEN BRILL is cofounder and CEO of Journalism Online, developer of Press+, an e-commerce platform that offers digital publishers flexible subscription models to collect revenue from their online readers. During thirty years as a media entrepreneur, Brill founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer magazine and ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he has written for The New Yorker, Time, Harpers, and the New York Times Magazine, among other magazines and news sites. Brill is currently expanding his work on “Bitter Pill” with regular columns focusing on the rollout and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The culmination of his reporting will be published later this year in a book by Random House. The author of three books, Brill also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative to help encourage talented young people to consider the journalism profession. The initiative has trained and motivated more than one hundred Yale Journalism Scholars who are employed at some of the world’s most prestigious news organizations.
MAX CHAFKIN is a contributing writer with Fast Company. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, and Inc. He also coproduces The Rewrite, a podcast about writing and journalism. He is a graduate of Yale University and lives with his wife in Jackson Heights, New York.
In 2001, JOSHUA DAVIS became part of the U.S. Arm-Wrestling Team after placing fourth out of four in the lightweight division at the National Arm-Wrestling Finals. As a result, he traveled with the U.S. team to Poland to compete in the World Arm-Wrestling Championship, where he placed 9/2/2014th out of eighteen (the eighteenth guy didn’t show up). Josh has never won a competitive arm-wrestling match. Josh’s memoir, The Underdog, details his journey through a series of increasingly unusual competitions. For a decade he has been a contributing editor at Wired, where he has tracked rumors of genetically modified cocaine behind rebel lines in Colombia, investigated the world’s largest diamond heist in Antwerp, and documented the rise of networked warfare in Iraq in 2003. He is also the cofounder of Epic Magazine (epicmagazine.com).
KYLE DICKMAN is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. He spent five seasons fighting wildland fires, including one with California’s Tahoe Hotshots. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife, Turin.
STEVE FRIEDMAN (stevefriedman.net) is the author of four books and the coauthor of two. A writer at large for Runner’s World and Bicycling magazines, he has also written for Esquire, GQ, Outside, the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York, and many other publications. His stories have been published in The Best American Sports Writing multiple times and The Best American Travel Writing and cited as “notable” in The Best American Essays. He grew up in St. Louis, graduated from Stanford University, and lives in New York City.
TOM JUNOD has been a writer at large for Esquire since 1997. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award eleven times and has won twice. He has also won a James Beard Award for essay writing. On the occasion of Esquire’s seventy-fifth anniversary, his 2003 story, “The Falling Man,” was selected as one of the seven best articles in the history of the magazine. A graduate of the State University of New York at Albany, he lives in Marietta, Georgia, with his wife and daughter and sings in a band called Cousin Billy.
ARIEL LEVY joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. Her profile subjects have included Cindy McCain, the Olympic boxer Claressa Shields, the longtime Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and Nora Ephron. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2008 and The Best American Travel Writing 2011. In 2012, she was a visiting critic at the American Academy in Rome. Levy teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Before joining the magazine, she was a contributing editor at New York magazine for twelve years.
BARRY LOPEZ, an essayist and short story writer, is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction. He is the recipient of numerous literary and cultural awards and honors, including the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams.
LISA MILLER is a staff writer at New York magazine, covering social trends, parenting, and religion, among other topics. She is the former religion columnist for the Washington Post, former senior editor of Newsweek magazine, and author of Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife. She graduated from Oberlin College and lives in Brooklyn.
LUKE MOGELSON lived in Afghanistan between June 2011 and December 2013, writing for the New York Times Magazine. He has also reported from the war in Syria. He currently lives in Mexico, where he is working on a collection of short stories.
EMILY NUSSBAUM is the television critic for The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn.
KATHLEEN OSSIP is the author of The Do-Over, which will be published in 2015; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, the Washington Post, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at the New School in New Y
ork and online for the Poetry School of London. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
JANET REITMAN is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and has been writing for the magazine since 2002. Her work has also appeared in GQ, Men’s Journal, ESPN the Magazine, Marie Claire, and the Los Angeles Times, among other national publications, and has been nominated for numerous awards, including two National Magazine Awards. In 2007, Reitman was a finalist for her investigative feature “Inside Scientology,” an extensive inside look at one of America’s most secretive religions. Her 2011 book, Inside Scientology, based on the original Rolling Stone article, was a New York Times Notable Book and a nationwide best-seller. Reitman specializes in investigative and narrative nonfiction, focusing on national security, terrorism, foreign policy, and youth culture and activism. Based in New York, she is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI is a writer and emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He has contributed to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the New York Time and has been an architecture critic for Saturday Night, Wigwag, and Slate. The recipient of the 2007 Vincent Scully Prize, Rybczynski has written eighteen books, including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize–winning A Clearing in the Distance; Home: A Short History of an Idea; Last Harvest; Makeshift Metropolis; and How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, which was a finalist for the Marfield Prize for writing on the arts. From 2004 to 2012, Rybczynski served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. In 2014 he received the National Design Award for Design Mind from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
MATTHEW SHAER is a staff writer at Smithsonian magazine and a regular contributor to New York. His reporting has appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal, among other publications.
ZADIE SMITH was born in northwest London in 1975 and divides her time between London and New York. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Zadie Smith’s third novel, On Beauty, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasia Section) and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, NW, was published in 2012 and has been short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
WRIGHT THOMPSON is an Emmy-winning senior writer for ESPN. He has been featured in eight editions of The Best American Sports Writing and lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
JEAN M. TWENGE is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant.