The Best American Magazine Writing 2014 Read online

  The stories in Best American Magazine Writing are drawn from publications nominated for National Magazine Awards—yet another reason this anthology can only be said to represent the best of magazine journalism. Hundreds of magazines enter the awards every year; hundreds more do not (the competition is fierce). Only a few dozen are nominated; still fewer win.

  This year only seventeen publications received National Magazine Awards. Most of those magazines are represented (there’s that word again) in this anthology. Others such as Glamour, National Geographic, and W won awards for work—websites, tablets, video series, entire print issues—uncontainable between the covers of any book. To find that work, you can visit the websites or download the apps listed with the rest of the winners and finalists at http://www.magazine.org/asme/national-magazine-awards and on the Wikipedia entry for the National Magazine Awards.

  Those winners and finalists are chosen by judges—magazine journalists and educators—who gather in New York every spring to read thousands of entries. This year there were 333 judges and 1,586 entries submitted by 251 magazines in 24 categories. In some categories—General Excellence, Design, Photography, Magazine of the Year—the judges read entire print and digital issues of dozens of magazines. In other categories—such as Public Interest, Personal Service, Leisure Interests, Feature Writing—the judges read hundreds of stories, some as long as 30,000 words, all in the matter of a day or two, then pick the finalists and eventually the winners.

  Then the judges go home—many live and work in New York, where many magazines are headquartered, but more than a quarter of the judges live and work elsewhere—only to return later in the spring for the presentation of the awards at a sometimes raucous dinner, which this year was hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The winners get copper statuettes modeled on Alexander Calder’s stabile Elephant. The finalists receive certificates of recognition. Everyone else gets a story to tell until the next deadline comes along.

  Hundreds of people work on the National Magazine Awards in one way or another. The judges, of course, deserve our thanks not only for the days they spend sequestered in utterly charmless conference rooms reading and discussing magazines but also for the time they spend preparing for the judging (each judge is assigned several entries to read before they arrive). A list of the judges is posted at http://www.magazine.org/asme. But even before the judging begins, editors up and down mastheads, especially editorial assistants and assistant editors, devote hours to preparing their entries. For this they deserve our thanks as well.

  The National Magazine Awards are overseen by the board of the directors of the American Society of Magazine Editors. Board members juggle their ever-growing responsibilities, managing the sprawling operations magazines have become, with planning and supervising the awards. Their dedication and impartiality ensure that a wide range of magazines, from large general interest magazines to less well known special interest titles, receive National Magazine Award honors. Each board member deserves our gratitude, but special recognition is due the irrepressible Lucy Schulte Danziger, who served as president of ASME the last two years.

  The National Magazine Awards are sponsored by ASME in association with the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. ASME is thankful for the support Columbia has given to the awards since their founding a half century ago. On behalf of ASME, I want to thank Steve Coll, the dean of the school and Henry R. Luce Professor, and Abi Wright, who not only worked on the administration of the awards but also served as a judge.

  The members of ASME are thankful to our literary agent, David McCormick of McCormick & Williams, for his skillful representation of our interests. I especially want to thank the editors of this book at the Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal and Michael Haskell, who are not only talented craftsmen and patient friends but together are a constant reminder that even editors need editors.

  ASME also thanks our associates at MPA—the Association of Magazine Media, especially the president and CEO, Mary G. Berner. In addition, I want to thank Hendley Badcock, Patty Bogie, John DeFrancesco, Sarah Hansen, and Meredith Wagner, as well as the longtime producers of the National Magazine Awards annual dinner, Leane Romeo and Michael Scarna of the Overland Entertainment Company. And a very loud shout-out goes to Nina Fortuna, who makes sure ASME members and award judges have what they need before they know they need it.

  I also want to acknowledge the work of Mark Jannot, vice president, content, of the National Audubon Society and the current president of ASME, who wrote the introduction to this year’s anthology. His steady leadership ensures the continuing success of the National Magazine Awards. And finally, on behalf of ASME, I want to thank the writers, editors, and magazines that permitted their stories and poems to be published in Best American Magazine Writing 2014. Their work guarantees the future of magazine media.

  Esquire

  FINALIST—MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR

  For many readers, the celebrity profile defines the modern magazine; few consumer titles are published without at least one inside. Yet no matter how well crafted, these stories are often dismissed as the magazine equivalent of a loss leader. But many magazines—and many writers—not only take profiles seriously but also use them to tell us something about the way we live now. Esquire is one of those magazines, and Tom Junod—whose stories have won two National Magazine Awards and have been nominated for nine more—is one of those writers. This is the third year in a row Esquire has been nominated for Magazine of the Year, and this profile of Matt Damon by Tom Junod was one of the cover stories that earned Esquire that honor.

  Tom Junod

  The Second Biggest Star in a Remote Little Burg Somewhere in Germany

  Let’s face it, the guy is ridiculous.

  He’s ridiculously handsome. He’s ridiculously accomplished. He’s ridiculously smart. He’s ridiculously kind to those in need of his kindness. He’s ridiculously funny. He’s ridiculously magnetic, with a ridiculously white movie-star smile and a ridiculously resonant voice-talent voice. Despite his ridiculous sense of ease and casual aplomb, he cannot go anywhere without making an entrance for the simple reason that people who feel ridiculous staring at him feel even more ridiculous not staring at him. All he has to do is smile and open his mouth and he switches on an inner light that turns every head, even Matt Damon’s.

  Now, just to be clear, Matt Damon is also ridiculous. Indeed, Damon is so ridiculous—so ridiculously handsome, accomplished, smart, funny, etc.—that he has been holding forth on the subject of German Holocaust awareness while drinking beer and eating steak on the patio of a hotel restaurant in Germany without sounding ridiculous himself. Damon does this a lot. He holds forth. He drinks beer. He holds forth while drinking beer, often with members of the crew of the movie he happens to be making, which in this case is The Monuments Men, the story of the American soldiers charged with recovering the vast stashes of priceless art stolen by the Nazis. Damon’s the most social of movie stars, the most easily conversant, and so he holds forth lightly, his knowledge of history just as much a social lubricant as the beer he keeps ordering for the table. He’s sitting with a young actor, a military consultant, a script supervisor, and me, and with a ridiculous lack of anything resembling effort he keeps all eyes trained upon him until—

  “Ah, he’s back!”

  It’s Clooney It’s the boss. It’s the guy who’s directing The Monuments Men as well as starring in it, and it’s the guy whose unabashed incandescence makes Damon’s feel suddenly like the light from a sustainable bulb. Did I say Clooney’s ridiculous? Clooney’s ridiculous. He’s back from a weekend in Berlin, nearly three hours away, and he looks as though he just stepped out of the shower. He’s skinny, almost gaunt in a T-shirt and baggy belted jeans, but with the elemental sheen of his swept-back gray hair and his gray mustache, he looks like Clark Gable, circa The Misfits, which is to say a movie star in any era, America’s gift to the world. There’s a small lake next to the hotel pati
o; earlier, Damon had changed places and put his back to it, because on the other side there gathered a host of photographers and German townspeople—civilians. Now Clooney walks over to him and says, “Hey, you folks are the entertainment.”

  “There are photographers,” Damon says, because in the world he shares with Clooney, starstruck civilians are symptoms of a disease; photographers are active agents of infection.

  “Yeah, I know,” Clooney says. “I saw ’em all. One guy’s got a lens like this.” He spreads his hands around an imaginary object the size of a beach ball.

  “They’re all back because you’re back,” Damon tells him. “Today, I literally walked out the back door and walked up the street. Nobody was there.”

  “They don’t follow you, but they follow him?” I ask.

  Clooney leans over slightly and put his hand on Damon’s shoulder. His smile is like the cleaver that chefs use in Japanese steakhouses—it looks too big and too sharp to handle, but he’s tossing it around for fun. “You have to get your second Sexiest Man Alive,” he says to Damon. “You get your second Sexiest, they follow you like crazy.”

  • • •

  In the forthcoming movie Elysium (out August 9), the boy who plays Matt Damon’s character as a little boy looks a lot like Matt Damon must have looked when he was a child. “When I first saw the photos, I thought someone Photoshopped Matt’s face on them,” says director Neill Blomkamp. “When Matt saw them, he said, ‘Jesus, that looks like me.’”

  In the movie, the boy spends most of his time on earth—which is, of course, hellishly “postapocalyptic”—staring into the sky at the enormous wheel of a satellite that provides refuge for the rich, who have abandoned the planet. The satellite is called Elysium, and when the little boy who grows up to become Matt Damon stares at the sky, he vows to get there. He winds up with a shaved head, a shitload of tattoos, a flash drive jacked into his brain stem, and an exoskeleton of body armor screwed into his very bones. He also winds up engaging in the kind of expertly choreographed yet relatively realistic fights Damon mastered in the Bourne series but that the presence of the exoskeleton made challenging—but get there he does, fomenting revolution in the process.

  Blomkamp wrote the movie after his District 9 turned into one of the surprise hits of 2009. Let Damon tell his story because Damon likes to tell stories: “When I first met him, Neill said, ‘I grew up in South Africa. I grew up in a nice neighborhood in Johannesburg, but we’d drive a few miles and see poverty as abject as any place on earth. Then, when I was eighteen, we moved to Canada and the experience of moving to the First World so shocked me that all my life, everything I do, all my work, is a rumination on that incredible difference.’”

  Now let Blomkamp: “I wanted to make a film that separated rich and poor in a science-fiction way. And I thought it would be really interesting to take a corn-fed American white boy and put him in a Third World environment—to take someone that America knows well and put him in an America as run-down as possible. And Matt was the right guy for that, not only as an actor but as a persona.”

  He did not film Elysium in the run-down parts of America. He filmed it, as he says, in the “most poverty-stricken parts of Mexico City. I very specifically scouted the areas because I wanted them to be as run-down as possible. That was Matt’s only trepidation—the security in Mexico City. He’s very game, but the whole thing there is kidnapping, and it’s different with him than it is with you or me. He’s internationally recognized. People know he’s in the country. We had to hire a security firm. Our security guys would run different routes to the set in the morning, do reconnaissance, make sure there were in-and-out routes everyplace we went.”

  Elysium is an interesting movie. But one of the most interesting things about it is that in order for it to exist, it had to be made by people from Elysium. Elysium is not just a metaphor for apartheid or for the growing divide between rich and poor in this country. It is a metaphor for celebrity and the privileges it bestows. Matt Damon plays a man who is willing to sacrifice everything in order to get there, and his portrayal is complicated by the fact that he lives there already.

  • • •

  “Would you like a small beer?” a waitress asks.

  “No,” Matt Damon says. “A big beer.”

  We are sitting at a table in a hotel lobby two and a half hours outside of Berlin. The table is small and round and high, the chairs tall and wobbly. We are meeting in the lobby because we’re supposed to go out on a journalistic version of a date, Matt and I. We’re supposed to go for a hike and then have a conversation over dinner. But then a waitress comes by and asks the persistent German question: “Would you like a beer?” She is very short, under five feet tall, with jet-black hair and sharp, dark features inked on very white skin. She is wearing the traditional folk costume that every waitress in Germany who works outside a major city has to wear in disconcerting ubiquity. It’s just after five o’clock. Dinner is scheduled for eight. There’s plenty of time for each of us to drink a beer before the hike, even a big beer.

  “The thing that I like about Germany is that Germans are so much like us,” he says when the beer arrives in tall clear glasses. “It’s not like going to some other countries, where the differences are overwhelming and you walk around in a fog. Germans are so similar to Americans. They’re, like, only 5 percent different—but then that difference makes all the difference. It makes everything that much stranger. You think that everything is going to be exactly the same, and when it’s not it seems much stranger to you, and you realize that you must seem stranger to them. It’s clarifying, man.”

  Damon is forty-two years old, married, father of four. Along with unfaded jeans, he is wearing black—a black V-neck T-shirt, big black punk-rock boots, a black-ball cap imprinted with a pattern of four black stars. He has short brown hair haunted by a blond ghost. He is a shade under six feet tall, in shape but not in action-movie shape, not in ass-kicking Elysium shape. He has what Neill Blomkamp saw in him, what everybody sees in him: a broad, friendly American face, not so much youthful as still boyish, interesting primarily for what can be imprinted upon it—the tabula rasa of its blue eyes, turned-up nose, and perfectly even white teeth. In the movies, he has the most useful smile since Tom Cruise’s, but whereas Cruise uses his smile to overpower, to silence doubters, and to get out of trouble, Damon uses his to express nuance, as both beacon and shadow. In person, he does the same thing. He smiles a lot, but he has a smile that can operate at cross-purposes with his eyes. Hell, he can smile while turning down the corners of his mouth; more precisely, he can turn down the corners of his mouth and still smile, without appearing to smirk or frown. It’s either a trick or a talent, but in any case it’s nearly impossible to do, and it shows why, when Blomkamp says “He’s almost like a regular guy who’s a global celebrity,” almost is the operative word.

  He is not a regular guy. He is to regular guys as he says Germans are to Americans—about 5 percent different. For comparison’s sake, let’s say George Clooney is about 15 percent different. Brad Pitt is about 12.5 percent different, and Leonardo DiCaprio has never been a regular guy, so he offers no basis for calculation. But Damon is so close to being a regular guy that he can pass as a regular guy onscreen and off-. He can be the same guy onscreen and off-, and so he offers audiences the rarest of combinations—the satisfaction of reliability and surprise. It was a surprise when he was able to both write and star in Good Will Hunting. It was a surprise when he was able to pull off the Bourne series. It was a surprise when he was so funny on Jimmy Kimmel and 30 Rock. It was a surprise when he wore a thong for Michael Douglas in Behind the Candelabra. (“Though I’ve seen Matt’s ass quite a lot, it was nice to get an update,” says his friend Ben Affleck.) But he can be continually surprising in his performances because he is so reliably unsurprising in his life—because he fulfills expectations instead of confounding them. Matt Damon is a movie star because he always delivers on being Matt Damon. He is a movie star not o
nly because he makes us want to have a beer with him but also because he makes us think that, alone among movie stars, he might actually want to have a beer with us …

  And then he orders his second big beer ten minutes after his first.

  • • •

  We never go on the hike. We never go out to dinner. We never even stand up, except for the necessities. As soon as we start drinking, members of the crew and cast of The Monuments Men start stopping by. The hotel is a refuge, with tall, black iron gates and security guards with walkie-talkies. Our table is not. When the actor Bob Balaban walks by, Damon says, “Hey, man!” When the lead gaffer walks by, Damon says, “Hey, man!” When a military advisor named Billy Budd walks by, Damon says, “Hey, man!” And he says the same thing to a young actor named Diarmaid Murtagh. Budd is a Brit, a former marine in the service of the queen, with a silver brush cut, a big hawk nose that casts a shadow on his scorched face, and arms scrawled with fiendish tattoos. Murtagh is an Irishman, with an explosive laugh and an Irish thirst. They’re both first-class storytellers, and when they sit with us, they sit with us for the next seven hours. I never get the chance to do a long interview with Matt Damon because Matt Damon is never alone. But that’s okay. I’ve talked to movie stars before. I’ve never had a chance to hear what movie stars talk about, inside the gates of Elysium.

  • • •

  Here’s a story. Matt Damon told it. But it’s not about Matt Damon. It’s about Bono. But it’s not really about Bono, either; it’s about Paul McCartney. But Damon heard it from Bono. One day, Bono flew into Liverpool. Paul was supposed to pick him up at the airport, and Bono was shocked when Paul picked him up at the airport alone, behind the wheel of his car. “Would you like to go on a little tour?” Paul said. Sure, Bono said, because Bono, you see, is a fan of Paul’s, in the same way that Damon is a fan of Bono’s. “Bono’s obsessed with the Beatles,” Damon said at the table in the lobby of the gated hotel in the little town in Germany. “He’s, like, a student of the Beatles. He’s read every book on the Beatles. He’s seen every bit of film. There’s nothing he doesn’t know. So when Paul stops and says ‘That’s where it happened,’ Bono’s like, ‘That’s where what happened?’ because he thinks he knows everything. And Paul says, ‘That’s where the Beatles started. That’s where John gave me half his chocolate bar.’ And now Bono’s like, ‘What chocolate bar? I’ve never heard of any chocolate bar.’ And Paul says, ‘John had a chocolate bar, and he shared it with me. And he didn’t give me some of his chocolate bar. He didn’t give me a square of his chocolate bar. He didn’t give me a quarter of his chocolate bar. He gave me half of his chocolate bar. And that’s why the Beatles started right there.’ Isn’t that fantastic? It’s the most important story about the Beatles, and it’s in none of the books! And Paul tells it to Bono. Because he knows how much Bono loves the Beatles.”