The Best American Magazine Writing 2020
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THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING 2020
THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING 2020
Edited by Sid Holt for the American Society of Magazine Editors
Columbia University Press New York
publication supported by a grant from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as part of the Urban Haven Project
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2020 the American Society of Magazine Editors
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-55244-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISSN 1541-0978
ISBN 978-0-231-19801-1 (pbk.)
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky
Contents
Introduction
Jonathan Dorn, president, American Society of Magazine Editors
Acknowledgments
Sid Holt, executive director, American Society of Magazine Editors
False Witness
Pamela Colloff
New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica
WINNER—Reporting
We’ve Normalized Prison
Piper Kerman
Washington Post Magazine
WINNER—Single-Topic Issue
Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?
Keri Blakinger
Washington Post Magazine
WINNER—Single-Topic Issue
Epidemic of Fear
Erika Fry
Fortune
FINALIST—Reporting
Las Marthas
Jordan Kisner
The Believer
FINALIST—Feature Writing
The Schoolteacher and the Genocide
Sarah A. Topol
New York Times Magazine
WINNER—Feature Writing
Unlike Any Other
Nick Paumgarten
New Yorker
FINALIST—Feature Writing
Jerry’s Dirt
Jacob Baynham
Georgia Review
WINNER—Profile Writing
Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy
Rebecca Traister
New York
FINALIST—Profile Writing
Tactile Art
John Lee Clark
Poetry
WINNER—Essays and Criticism
India: Intimations of an Ending
Arundhati Roy
The Nation in partnership with Type Media Center
FINALIST—Essays and Criticism
When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy and The Ugly Beautiful and Other Failings of Disability Representation and What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health and Medication
s.e. smith
Catapult
WINNER—Columns and Commentary
Kanye West’s Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion and Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You and E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the Bar
Jia Tolentino
New Yorker
FINALIST—Columns and Commentary
Nothing Sacred and An Assault on the Tongue and Interlopers
Ligaya Mishan
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
FINALIST—Columns and Commentary
Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.
Nikole Hannah-Jones
New York Times Magazine
WINNER—Public Interest
Fight the Ship
T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi
ProPublica
FINALIST—Public Interest
Under the Ackee Tree
Jonathan Escoffery
Paris Review
WINNER—ASME Award for Fiction
Permissions
List of Contributors
Jonathan Dorn
Introduction
Greetings from the Before Time. It’s spring 2020, and the specter of 7 million virus-plagued Americans remains distant and incomprehensible. The West Coast isn’t burning, RGB is hanging in there, and there’s little worry about a peaceful transition of presidential power. The days are getting warmer, and hope is growing that a few weeks of mask wearing will bring the economy roaring back. And somewhere in Minneapolis, there’s a forty-six-year-old guy shooting hoops on a cracked blacktop court, unknown to the world, and still breathing.
From our vantage point in these early days of May, we couldn’t possibly predict the calamities that will make this year unlike any we’ve experienced. Not the Second Surge, not 50 million unemployed, not the murder of a young EMT in Louisville, not the hellfire that will permanently eliminate any reasonable doubt about global warming. And certainly not the shaky street-corner video that is going to ignite antiracism protests from coast to coast.
Or maybe, sitting here in May, we could predict it all. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. An economy in shambles. Thousands upon thousands of lonely deaths cutting short robust lives without respect to age or station.
After all, we’ve had ample warning in the stories featured in this compilation of 2019’s best magazine writing. No matter that they’ll be a year old by the time this book reaches you, or that their lighter moments will seem a bit quaint (in-person interviews, how precious! mask-free socializing—was that a thing?). No matter that they lack the underlying bewilderment so pervasive in the journalism we’ll read months from now. The writing in this collection is shockingly prescient for a Before Time collection.
Take Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tour-de-force essay from “The 1619 Project,” a special issue of the New York Times Magazine. A previous National Magazine Award winner, Hannah-Jones incisively crystallizes the modern-day relevance of a 400-year legacy of racial injustice in her introduction to this issue. Like the rest of the issue, a towering work of journalism that spurred (and advanced) national debate, she’s looking back while looking forward. It’s impossible to read her words and not recognize that a national reckoning on race is right around the corner.
Similarly, three stories reporting on deep inequities in America’s prison system are threaded with meaningful insights about the pernicious impact of a bent judicial process on marginalized communities. Piper Kerman and Keri Blakinger in separate articles in the Washington Post Magazine and Pamela in a ProPublica / New York Times joint investigation, each in their own way call our attention to the daily effects of institutional racism on incarcerated people of color.
And don’t forget Erika Fry’s timely telling of another virus story in “Epidemic of Fear.” This Fortune feature and National Magazine Award finalist is a disconcerting tale of vaccine blunders and misinformation that should serve as a pressing reminder of how complex your challenge will be this fall in trusting the word of pharmaceutical companies racing for a cure in a heated political environment.
Together, these powerful stories and the others in this collection remind us why magazine journalism matters so much. The medium is uniquely equipped to synthesize current events and historical realities into thoughtful outlooks on the road ahead. It enables writers to make the past present and to warn us, directly or indirectly, of the challenges we will face as individuals and as a nation. And magazines provide an important and nuanced counterbalance to the attention-deprived blurb economy of
Twitter and Facebook.
Read these stories, relish their insights and relevance, and let’s hope that next year’s volume of Best American Magazine Writing is all about the After Time.
Sid Holt
Acknowledgments
This edition of Best American Magazine Writing is unique—it was compiled and edited in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic—but in every other way, BAMW 2020 does what every other entry in the series has done since it began in 2000: reflect the concerns and sometimes fears of the present moment in ways that will endure long after newspaper headlines and cable-news chyrons have faded from memory. Here are stories on mass incarceration at home; illiberal governments abroad; questions of gender, ethnicity, and difference; little-known manifestations of popular culture; tragic failures; spirit-lifting triumphs; and, of course, golf.
Each story in BAMW 2020 speaks both to the past and to the future, but two of the articles included here seem especially pertinent as 2020 gives way to 2021. In “Epidemic of Fear,” Erika Fry describes the consequences for public health—and rational self-governance—when a distrustful people are asked to embrace a new vaccine, and in “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True”—the introduction to “The 1619 Project”—Nikole Hannah-Jones shows how Black Americans’ continuing struggle for real freedom fulfills the promise of America for all its people.
Many of the writers here will be familiar to readers of past installments of Best American Magazine Writing: stories by Pamela Colloff, Hannah-Jones, T. Christian Miller, and Rebecca Traister have appeared in recent editions. So, too, magazines and websites like New York, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, Poetry, and ProPublica. But others are new to these pages—Catapult, the Georgia Review, the Washington Post Magazine, John Lee Clark, Jordan Kisner, s.e. smith, Sarah A. Topol—and all the more exciting for it. And many of the writes here are young: Jonathan Escoffery and Jia Tolentino are little more than thirty.
Each of the stories in BAMW 2020 was published in 2019 and was either nominated for a National Magazine Award or received an Ellie—the copper statuette modeled on Alexander Calder’s 1942 stabile Elephant Walking that is given to the winners. The only exception is Ecoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree,” which was one of three stories that earned the Paris Review the ASME Award for Fiction, a special honor established in 2018 to recognize the historic link between literary fiction and magazine journalism. There were, of course, dozens of other finalists and winners; a complete list with links can be found at https://www.asme.media.
First presented in 1966—the sole winner that year was Look “for its skillful editing, imagination and editorial integrity, all of which were reflected particularly in its treatment of the racial issue during 1965”—the National Magazine Awards honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise, and imaginative design. Originally limited to print magazines, the awards now recognize magazine-quality journalism published in any medium. Since their founding, the awards have been sponsored and administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia Journalism School.
The Ellie Awards also provide support for the Osborn Elliott Scholarship at the Columbia Journalism School. Named in honor of the former editor in chief of Newsweek, who also served as president of ASME and dean of the Columbia Journalism School, the Osborn Elliott Scholarship is awarded to students who intend to pursue careers in magazine journalism.
This year the editors of more than 250 publications submitted nearly 1,300 entries to the National Magazine Awards. Many were large-circulation publications whose names are familiar to every reader. Others were city or regional magazines or publications inspired by the passionate interests of their readers—fishing, bicycling, cooking, gardening, literature, music, photography—but each demonstrated a dedication to the craft of magazine making, though of course magazine journalism today takes forms unimaginable to the founders of the awards a half century ago: not only the printed word but also websites, podcasts, and videos.
More than 300 writers, editors, art directors, and photo editors participated in the judging of the awards this year. The judges received preliminary reading in mid-December then met at Columbia University in mid-January to choose five finalists in each of the twenty-two categories (seven in the most popular category, Feature Writing). The judges then chose the winner in each category. After the judges finished their work, the National Magazine Awards Board, composed of current and former ASME officers, veteran judges, and representatives of the Columbia Journalism School, reviewed and sanctioned the results.
Sixty-two media organizations received Ellie Award nominations in 2020, led by the New York Times Magazine with ten. The Times Magazine also won five awards, including three—in General Excellence, Podcasting, and Public Interest—that in some way honored “The 1619 Project.” The other top finalists were New York, with nine nominations; National Geographic with eight; Bon Appétit and the New Yorker, both with six; and Self and Texas Monthly with four.
Twenty publications were nominated for the most prestigious honor, General Excellence. Nominees included large-circulation titles such as Cosmopolitan (which also received its seventh-consecutive nomination in Personal Service), regional titles like Atlanta, special-interest magazines like National Parks, literary journals like Oxford American, and digital-first publications like The Trace. The General Excellence winners were the New York Times Magazine, Bon Appétit, the Hollywood Reporter, and Quanta.
Originally scheduled for early March, the presentation of the awards was delayed by the outbreak of COVID-19. As a result, the awards were presented virtually in late May. The Ellies show is now posted on the ASME YouTube channel. Watch if only for the presentation of the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame Award to David Granger, the longtime editor in chief of Esquire.
Hundreds of magazine journalists make the Ellies possible. Among them are the editors in chief who choose to enter the awards; the many editorial staff members who organize the submissions; and the judges, who receive dozens of stories to read the week before the year-end holidays begin then gather in New York in the dead of winter to spend two days reading, debating, and voting in usually cramped, sometimes overheated classrooms. All of them deserve our thanks.
The ASME board of directors is responsible for overseeing the administration of the Ellies, which include not only the National Magazine Awards and the ASME Award for Fiction but also the ASME Next Awards for Journalists Under 30. The sixteen members of the 2019–2020 board—all of whom are journalism educators or the editors in chief of well-known publications—are listed, along with the judges, at https://www.asme.media/. The success of the 2019 Ellies was especially attributable to the work of the president of ASME, Jonathan Dorn, who also hosted the virtual presentation of the awards and wrote the introduction for this book.
As director of operations at ASME, Nina Fortuna is largely responsible for the day-to-day management of the Ellies. Her constant cheerfulness and easy efficiency come as a surprise only to first-time award entrants. Also deserving of gratitude are Overland Entertainment’s Leane Romeo and Michael Scarna, the longtime producers of the Ellie Awards show.
On behalf of ASME, I want to thank Steve Coll, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who now serves as the dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School, and Abi Wright, the executive director of professional prizes at Columbia, for their continuing support of the National Magazine Awards.
Thanks are also owed to David McCormick for his tenacious representation of ASME’s interests and the editors of Best American Magazine Writing at the Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal and Michael Haskell. Their enthusiasm for the BAMW series—and their patience during the prolonged preparation of this edition of the series—is truly appreciated.
But most deserving of
thanks are the writers who graciously consented to the publication of their work in the 2020 edition of Best American Magazine Writing. Their continuing dedication to their craft, even as traditional forms of support for magazine journalism grow ever more uncertain, is always cause for celebration.
Pamela Colloff
False Witness
New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica
WINNER—REPORTING
This is how the ASME judges explained their decision to give “False Witness” the 2020 National Magazine Award for Reporting: “Pamela Colloff tracked one jailhouse informant through the criminal system to shine a light on a devastating national problem—the widespread use of unreliable jailhouse informants to send innocent defendants to prison and sometimes Death Row. Reporting for nearly a year, Colloff reconstructed the 43-year journey of Paul Skalnik, a known liar, con man and sexual predator, who may be the most prolific jailhouse informant on record.” Colloff is one of the most recognized writers in the more-than-fifty-year history of the National Magazine Awards. The nomination of “False Witness” was her seventh; the award, her second (her story “The Innocent Man”—which depicted the ordeal of a Texan wrongfully convicted for the murder of his wife—won the award for Feature Writing for Texas Monthly in 2013).
When detective John Halliday paid a visit to the Pinellas County Jail on December 4, 1986, his highest-profile murder case was in trouble. Halliday, who was thirty-five and investigated homicides for the local sheriff’s office, had spent more than a decade policing Pinellas County, a peninsula edged by white-sugar-sand beaches on Florida’s Gulf Coast, west of Tampa. It is a place that outpaces virtually all other counties in the nation in the number of defendants it has sentenced to death. Prosecutors who pursued the biggest cases there in the 1980s relied on Halliday, who embodied the county’s law-and-order ethos. Powerfully built and six-foot-four, with a mane of dirty blond hair and a tan mustache, he was skilled at marshaling the facts that prosecutors needed to win convictions.