Best American Magazine Writing 2017

EDITED BY

FOR THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGAZINE EDITORS

SHANE BAUER • PAMELA COLLOFF • JEFFREY GOLDBERG NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES • MAC M CCLELLAND SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE • DAVID QUAMMEN ZANDRIA F. ROBINSON • BECCA ROTHFELD GEORGE SAUNDERS • GABRIEL SHERMAN • REBECCA SOLNIT SARAH STILLMAN • ANDREW SULLIVAN • MATT TAIBBI

Introduction by Nicholas Thompson, EDITOR IN CHIEF of WIRED

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Nicholas Thompson

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T

he protagonists of Mac McClelland’s essay, “Delusion Is the Thing with Feathers,” about the hunt for an ivory-billed woodpecker in Cuba, are two ornithologists, Tim Gallagher and Martjan Lammertink. They’ve traveled far past the place where the road ends; they’ve exhausted themselves going up and down mountain ridges. The car they came in gave up long ago, even after two oxen helped pull it from a ditch. They’ve looked everywhere they wanted to look and talked to everyone they came to talk to. But they haven’t found the darn bird. Their journey is at its end, and it’s time to give up and head to the airport to go home.

Then they realize there’s one last person who might be able to help, one more person who might have seen the bird. And so they sneak away from the rest of their group to head back into the jungle. As McLelland writes: “There’s hope! Gallagher thinks, perking up out of his dire exhaustion, in which he barely staggered out of the woods just yesterday. We can still do this!”

I won’t tell you what they learn or if they find the bird. McClelland, who accompanied the ornithologists on the quest, risked her health for the story in a hundred ways, and her essay is a marvel of storytelling. It would be a shame to spoil any of the drama. But I tell the beginning of the anecdote because it’s a way to illustrate the type of reporting that you’ll find in this collection

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and that you always find in the best magazine writing. The journalists here are like Gallagher and Lammertink: they’re obsessed. They keep calling and writing and revising and talking.

There’s always one more person to talk to or one more thing to try to do better. There’s always a chance that they’ll find the unseen bird or uncover the secret document or maybe just craft the perfect line.

Think about Gabriel Sherman, the author “The Revenge of Roger’s Angels.” Through dedication and years of diligent reporting, he exposed secrets at Fox News that no one expected would come out—or, certainly, secrets that no one at Fox wanted to come out. The company compiled a 400-page opposition research file on Sherman as he worked. But because of his tenacity, and his reputation for probity and accuracy, sources kept calling him. Roger Ailes, the most powerful man at perhaps the most powerful news organization in the country, lost his job because of the persistence of a magazine reporter.

Or think about Shane Bauer. He spent four months working as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, in Louisiana, and then fourteen more months reporting on what he learned. Life inside a private prison is violent and often unjust, but it’s also mostly kept hidden. To explain it, you need to commit. You need to be there at the training session where the employees are told that when two inmates start to stab each other, the guards should just holler, “Stop,” and then lean back and watch.

The writers in this collection, of course, weren’t all trying to shine flashlights in dark corners. Becca Rothfeld, in her marvelous essay about what it means to wait for someone, is working to explain a state of mind. “Waiting is consuming. At times it is terrible, a wound that cannot be mitigated but must instead be mutely survived,” she writes. “And sometimes waiting is an insult, an indignity, as pointlessly pathetic as refusing to take off the wedding dress in which you were abandoned years ago by someone who no longer cares and probably doesn’t remember.”

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This kind of storytelling is deeply satisfying, but I sometimes ponder why we, as humans, are so attached to it. Writing, of course, has clear evolutionary value. The societies that first learned to write kept better records and planned smarter expeditions. But it’s not immediately apparent that the forces of natural selection would favor people who sit around telling tales about one another. If one village was filled with farmers and the other with storytellers, wouldn’t Darwin predict that the farmers would thrive while the raconteurs would get eaten by tigers? We know that didn’t happen, though, and surely part of the reason is instruction. Read about the mistakes of others, and you won’t make the same mistakes yourself. Or, maybe more pertinently, learn when to plant your crops and why to keep your children out of the river where the alligators live. But the virtues of storytelling are much deeper than that: they help us forge social identities; they let our imaginations develop; they give us pleasure; they let us connect with one another. They make us feel good.

And they make us feel outraged at things that are wrong.

All of that is true today. Storytelling, particularly when combined with great journalism and thinking, helps us to understand and to make decisions for society. Read Sarah Stillman’s piece in this collection, “The List,” and try not to boil with outrage at the lives our nation throws away when it classifies children as sex offenders. Reading Nikole Hannah-Jones on the intense complexities of school choice in Brooklyn will surely change the way you think about how we educate our kids.

• • •

Of course, as you’ve surely heard, the craft is under threat. It’s hard to go a day without encountering the argument that our attention spans are shortening. We’re too distracted by Instagram or Facebook, by texts and by sexts. The entire Internet will have turned into short-form videos by the time the sun rises

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tomorrow. If that wasn’t enough, the decline of advertising revenue has been starving the journalism business for at least the last decade. And it surely doesn’t help to have the president of the United States hate-tweeting against the free press every morning when the rooster crows.

But, actually, if you examine all these issues, one by one, it’s possible to be hopeful about the future of great magazine writing. As someone with inside information from my previous job at The New Yorker, I can assure you that the two essays from that publication in this collection were read, beginning to end, by an astonishing number of people. The same is true at Wired, where I work now. A good rule of thumb, the editors of the website Longform once told me, is that roughly 90 percent of readers on their site who get through the first 15 percent of the best long stories reach the end. (The founders of that site also told me that they get traffic referrals form OK Cupid, meaning people were trying to get dates by touting their love of long-form journalism.)

If that doesn’t persuade you, look at other fields, like television. The shows we watch today are infinitely more complex than even the best of what people watched twenty years ago.

Compare, say, Game of Thrones to M*A*S*H. And then remember, too, that the series is based upon a series of books, written

by George R. R. Martin, that cumulatively run about 4,500 pages.

If we can get through all of that, our attention spans are surely not shrinking.

That’s not to say, of course, that business models aren’t truly threatened. But the question of whether great magazine writing survives is quite different from the question of whether every magazine survives. Advertising is shifting, and the newsstand business is declining. As this happens, however, new sources of support arise. The Atlantic, which published Jeffrey Goldberg’s extraordinary essay on Obama’s foreign policy, now supports itself in no small part through conferences. The New Yorker, in

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the last few years, built a successful digital subscription model.

It’s hard to make a business work now just packaging information, but you can definitely make a business work by presenting knowledge.

And last, of course, there is the question of our president, the subject of quite a few essays in this collection—and perhaps an incorrect prediction or two as well. He does pose a threat to magazine writing in ways that we will no doubt understand far better when the historians start to look back. By riling up his supporters against the press, he can do damage to the institutions that critique him or, in the darkest scenarios, to the whole notion of a free press—though, for the moment, his attacks serve mainly to launch subscription drives.

Even leaving aside politics, Donald Trump stands against many of the values that the work in this collection stands for: rigorous thinking, attention to detail, craft, and prose. The day after the election, I remember talking to a group of colleagues about how to respond to Trump. The best way, we decided, was just to do our jobs well. To report fairly and accurately, to factcheck everything, to make sentences beautiful. Presidents serve four-year terms, and great writing lasts much longer.

There’s another moment in McClelland’s essay where she and the photographer sit at the side of the path, watching as their travel companions whack the oxen trying to pull their jeep out of a ditch. The journey seems both miserable and futile. “Do you ever wonder if this is all worth it? For a bird?” the photographer asks. The subtext is clear: is obsession worth it? Is it worth making all those extra calls and traveling to ever-more-absurd locales for one’s craft?

The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.