Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Read online

  THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING

  2013

  THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING

  2013

  Compiled by 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 © 2013 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-53706-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  ISSN 1541-0978

  ISBN 978-0231-16225-8 (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

  James Bennet, editor in chief,

  The Atlantic

  Acknowledgments

  Sid Holt, chief executive,

  American Society of Magazine Editors

  Fear of a Black President

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  The Atlantic

  WINNER—Essays and Criticism

  Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?

  Frank Rich

  New York

  FINALIST—Columns and Commentary

  It’s Not About the Law, Stupid and The Supreme Court’s Dark Vision of Freedom and Where Is the Liberal Outrage?

  Dahlia Lithwick

  Slate

  WINNER—Columns and Commentary

  The Innocent Man

  Pamela Colloff

  Texas Monthly

  WINNER—Feature Writing Incorporating Profile Writing

  18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio

  Chris Heath

  GQ

  WINNER—Reporting

  Did You Think About the Six People You Executed?

  Robert F. Worth

  New York Times Magazine

  FINALIST—Reporting

  A Life Worth Ending

  Michael Wolff

  New York

  FINALIST—Essays and Criticism

  Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives

  Mimi Swartz

  Texas Monthly

  WINNER—Public Interest

  School of Hate

  Sabrina Rubin Erdely

  Rolling Stone

  FINALIST—Public Interest

  Atonement

  Dexter Filkins

  The New Yorker

  FINALIST—Feature Writing Incorporating Profile Writing

  The Big Book

  Chris Jones

  Esquire

  FINALIST—Magazine of the Year

  Terry Southern: The Art of Screenwriting

  Interview by Maggie Paley

  The Paris Review

  WINNER—General Excellence, Print

  Mega: Ten Days Inside the Mansion—and the Mind—of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Internet

  Charles Graeber

  Wired

  FINALIST—Feature Writing Incorporating Profile Writing

  Portrait of a Lady and Social Animal and We’re All Helmut Newton Now

  Daphne Merkin

  Elle

  FINALIST—Columns and Commentary

  Over the Wall

  Roger Angell

  The New Yorker

  FINALIST—Essays and Criticism

  Batman and Robin Have an Altercation

  Stephen King

  Harper’s

  WINNER—Fiction

  The Living and the Dead

  Brian Mockenhaupt

  Byliner

  FINALIST—Feature Writing Incorporating Profile Writing

  State of the Species

  Charles C. Mann

  Orion

  FINALIST—Essays and Criticism

  Permissions

  List of Contributors

  James Bennet

  Introduction

  I have had it with long-form journalism. By which I mean—don’t get me wrong—I’m fed up with the term long-form itself, a label that the people who create and sell magazines now invariably, and rather solemnly, apply to the work you will find in these pages. Reader, do you feel enticed to read a story by the distinction that it is long? Or does your heart not sink just a little? Would you feel drawn to a movie or a book simply because it is long? (“Oooh—you should really read Moby-Dick—it’s super long.”) Editors presumably care about words as much as anyone, so it is particularly mysterious that they would choose to promote their work by ballyhooing one of its less inherently appealing attributes. Do we call certain desserts “solid-fat-form food” or do we call them cakes and pies? Is baseball a long-form sport? Okay, sure—but would Major League Baseball ever promote it as that?

  This choice of words matters, I think, not only because of the false note it sounds about stories like these but also because of the message it sends to the world about magazines’ ambitions these days. The term long-form has come to stand for magazine journalism during the same period—over the past twenty years, and particularly the past ten—that magazines have had, as the politicians say, some challenges. I think this wrong turn in our taxonomy is a sign of, and may even contribute to, the continuing commercial upheaval and crisis in confidence. The story of the transition from an industry that was within memory so exuberant and ambitious—so grandiose, really, in its conception of its cultural and societal role—that it could declare itself to be inventing a “New Journalism,” to an industry wringing its hands over preserving something called “long-form journalism,” does not sound like a long-form story with a happy ending. It certainly doesn’t sound like one I’d want read, much less live through. “New Journalism” is a stirring promise to the wider world; “long-form” is the mumbled incantation of a decaying priesthood.

  And, in the digital age, making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers. For when you don’t have to print words on pages and then bundle the pages together and stick postage stamps on the result, you slip some of the constraints that have enforced excellence (and provided polite excuses for editors to trim fat) since Johannes Gutenberg began printing books. You no longer have to make that agonizing choice of the best example from among three or four—you can freely use them all. More adjectives? Why not? As a magazine writer, I used to complain that my editors would cut out all my great color, just to make the story fit; as an editor, I now realize that, yes, they had to make my stories fit and, no, that color wasn’t so great. The editors were working to preserve the stuff that would make the story go, to make sure the story earned every incremental word, in service to the reader. Long-form, on the Web, is in danger of meaning merely “a lot of words.”

  This is a particularly ripe moment to rethink our terminology because deeply reported narrative and essayistic journalism is suddenly all the rage. Far from fading away, it shows signs of an energy and imagination not seen since the heyday of New Journalism. This was the year that the sports department of the New York Times pulled off the most digitally ambitious accomplishment in feature journalism, “Snow Fall,” a narrative of skiers buried in an avalanche that was told through the layering of words, video, and graphics. The story brought in countless readers and a
Pulitzer Prize. (Actually, you can count the readers—the Times said “Snowfall” generated 3.5 million page views in one week alone.) This was also the year that digital upstarts like Buzzfeed and The Verge turned to “long-form” editors to create big features, and produced compelling work. Heralding “a coming renaissance of long-form journalism,” the twitchy news site Politico hired away the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine to commission writerly, deeply reported stories. “High-impact, magazine-style journalism is not a throwback to the past,” Politico’s editors declared in a memo that should chasten the hand-wringers. “It is a genre that is even more essential in today’s hyperkinetic news environment. It is a style of reporting and a mindset about illuminating what matters most that has a brilliant future.”

  Is this just a fad, maybe even a fraud? Cynics would say that publishing a few big feature stories is a shortcut to respectability, and they’d be correct. But realists, I’m happy to say, would comment further that such features work: they draw in a lot of readers. As social networks of human beings displace search algorithms, digital editors are discovering that not just headlines but overall quality matters more and more, whether a story is short or long. If you hope to entice a real person to pass your story on to a friend, then reporting matters, writing matters, and design matters. As journalism and its distribution on the Web mature, the most meaningful distinction is turning out to be not short versus long but good versus bad.

  All of which brings me, at last, to the journalistic triumph that is Brian Mockenhaupt’s feature “The Living and the Dead,” which appears in this volume. For a feature story, it is really, really long. But I defy you to find a wasted word among the 22,000 that Mockenhaupt assembled. Length here is not a virtue in itself; it is, like a notebook or a computer or curiosity, a writer’s tool, one that Mockenhaupt deploys, as he does the others, to maximum effect. As we follow a marine platoon on its rounds in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, details accrete, characters deepen, drama builds. We witness, over time, the shocking and more subtle consequences of abrupt twists in the action. (This is why length is so important in baseball, too, by the way). Few magazines these days could afford to devote the many pages that Mockenhaupt’s story would have required. I say “would have” because this story was published by Byliner, a digital platform for what its creators have the wit to call “quick reads.”

  Among the paradoxes of this era, when commercial travails are menacing the most costly forms of reporting, is that we have coincidentally produced maybe the greatest generation of war correspondents in the country’s history. You will encounter the work of several of them in this volume. It is instructive to read Mockenhaupt’s piece against Dexter Filkins’s haunting memoir of war, “Atonement,” for the insights the comparison yields into storytelling technique and into the depth of experience these reporters have gained from so many years covering war. Mockenhaupt, an Iraq War veteran, vanishes into his story. His reporting is so precise, so knowing, that he never uses the first person to describe what he has witnessed. Filkins, by contrast, is central to his tale. Ten years ago he was there, in Baghdad, after Fox Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-Third Marine Regiment accidentally opened fire on a family fleeing a scene of fighting. Filkins chanced to meet the survivors, and he wrote about the family back then for the New York Times. So it was to Filkins, years later, that one of the guilt-wracked marines turned in hopes of finding the family, to explain himself and seek understanding, maybe forgiveness. Filkins ultimately helped arrange a meeting, and then, in The New Yorker, summed the costs of war by telling this story of one veteran’s, and one family’s, braided pain.

  Here’s a taxonomic riddle for you: How is that Stephen King’s tale in this collection, though of comparable length to the “long-form” stories, is known as a “short story”? The King short story justifies its label’s emphasis on relative brevity—and further underscores the obtuseness of that other label—by delivering many of the satisfactions of a novel in a fraction of the length. It is a marvel of compression. In “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” we meet an ordinary, sad man on an ordinary, sad errand—taking his father out of his nursing home for lunch. With just a few brush strokes, King portrays a son feeling abandoned as his father slips away into dementia. And then this seemingly quiet tale takes a shocking turn that affirms the resilience of the father’s love for his child. Too many short stories these days, I think, read like writing exercises. You can admire the craftsmanship without feeling moved; you can respect the psychological insight while wondering why it is that nothing ever seems to happen. King’s story—comic, dramatic, poignant, revelatory—is a reminder of the potential power of this form to entertain and provoke.

  Length is hardly the quality that most meaningfully classifies these stories. Yet there is a legitimate conundrum here: If long-form doesn’t fit, what term is elastic enough to encompass the varied journalism in this anthology, from the war stories to Mimi Swartz’s lacerating examination of the assault on family planning in Texas, for Texas Monthly, to Charles Graeber’s rollicking profile, for Wired, of the digital pioneer and accused criminal Kim Dotcom? How do you link a cinematic narrative, like Chris Heath’s account for GQ of what happened when dozens of animals escaped a private zoo in Ohio, to a crystalline marvel of thinking and writing like Charles C. Mann’s essay, for Orion, on the nature and fate of our own species?

  And how do you account for the blurring of boundaries also evident here, as work from the digital realm energizes and reshapes traditional forms of journalism? For the first time, a purely digital magazine, Slate, won a National Magazine Award in head-to-head competition with print magazines, for the crisp authority of Dahlia Lithwick’s commentary on the Supreme Court. Consider, also, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won the award for one of the oldest forms of magazine writing, the essay. That may have looked like a straightforward old-school triumph, but it wasn’t. The morning after he won, Coates wrote a blog post thanking his commenters for their help over the years as, on our website, he worked through the ideas that ultimately cohered to form the essay. Noting that The Atlantic had also won the National Magazine Award for best website, Coates wrote, “In my mind, these awards are linked. Writing for the Web site has fundamentally changed how I write in print.”

  The magazine industry is moving past lazy dichotomies of print versus digital to a fusion of old values, ambitions, and techniques with new ways and means of reporting and storytelling. This is a hard transition, obviously, but, equally obviously, there’s no going back. As journalists—people whose job it has always been to go out and learn something new every day—we should be on the attack, not in a defensive crouch. We should be talking about what we do in terms that help us look forward as well as back. So what can we call this emerging fusion? It seems to me that one might quite reasonably take a page from the last period of great creative ferment in our business and call it, simply, new journalism. What journalism could be newer? But there’s another perfectly good, honorable name for this kind of work—the one on the cover of this anthology. You might just call it all magazine writing. And get on with it.

  Acknowledgments

  The American Society of Magazine Editors was founded fifty years ago, in September 1963. From the beginning, one of ASME’s goals—really, its main goal—was to establish the National Magazine Awards. It didn’t take long to get things going. ASME and its cosponsor, the Columbia Journalism School, presented the first National Magazine Award to Look magazine in 1966 for work published in 1965 (which is something you may want to remember as you read this book—it’s the 2013 National Magazine Awards for stories published in 2012), along with Certificates of Special Recognition to Ebony, The New Yorker (for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), and Scientific American.

  Since that first award was presented (1966 was the year John Lennon said the Beatles were “more popular then Jesus now”—which presumably had nothing to do with the publication of Time magazine’s “Is God De
ad?” cover one month later), the National Magazine Awards have grown far beyond what the founders of ASME could have expected. There were fewer than one hundred entries in those early years and a handful of judges (based on the photographic evidence, they were generally tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking men except for one or two shirtdress-wearing, cigarette-smoking women).

  Nowadays there are thousands of entries and hundreds of judges—330 this year—and an addiction to tobacco products has been replaced by a fixation on tiny screens. But the quality of the work endures. In fact, as James Bennet suggests in his introduction to this anthology, at a time when the relevance of magazine media is sometimes questioned, magazine journalism has never been better, and the enthusiasm readers show for it has never been greater. That goes not only for the kinds of long-form stories collected in this latest iteration of Best American Magazine Writing but also for the service journalism, celebrity profiles, fashion photography, graphic design, websites, and tablet editions that the members of ASME also celebrate when they gather every year at the National Magazine Awards Dinner in May to find out who won what.

  Months before that happens, though, magazines by the truckload begin to arrive at the ASME offices for eventual distribution to the judges. This year nearly 260 publications entered the National Magazine Awards, submitting 1,636 entries in 24 categories, including 5 categories for digital content. The magazines that enter the awards every year range from literary journals that count their readers in the thousands to mass-market publications with audiences numbering in the tens of millions.

  The judges are an equally diverse lot. Most work in New York for major publishers, but a quarter of the judges live and work outside the metropolitan area, many at smaller regional magazines. The majority are editors, some are writers, but there are also dozens of art directors and photography editors as well as journalism educators from around the country. What they all have in common is patience and dedication, at least when it comes to the National Magazine Awards. They have to, since each judge has to read hundreds of pages in preparation for the judging then sit in sometimes cramped conference rooms in downtown Manhattan for hours of deliberation before choosing finalists and winners.