Sid Holt - The Best American Magazine Writing 2022

THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING

2022

THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING

2022

Edited by Sid Holt for the American Society of Magazine Editors

Columbia University PressNew York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New YorkChichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2022 the American Society of Magazine Editors

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-55768-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISSN 1541-0978

ISBN 978-0-231-20890-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-231-20891-8 (pbk.)

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

Cover image: Shutterstock

1. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief, The Atlantic
2. Sid Holt, chief executive, American Society of Magazine Editors
3. Carina del Valle Schorske
4. Ed Yong
5. Ann Patchett
6. Megan I. Gannon
7. Natalie Wolchover
8. Zachary R. Mider
9. Kristin Canning
10. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
11. Katie Gutierrez
12. E. Alex Jung
13. Dotun Akintoye
14. Jeremy Atherton Lin
15. Rachel Aviv
16. Heidi Blake and Katie J. M. Baker
17. Vivian Gornick
18. J. Drew Lanham
19. Matthieu Aikins
20. Jennifer Senior
21. Nishanth Injam

Jeffrey Goldberg

I n the mid-1990s my wife served as the United Nations human rights officer in Liberia. At the time, I had just started writing for New York magazine, and my editor did not have the Liberian civil war high on his list of most urgent topics. But I was luckymy editor was understanding enough to let me write about the war for the New York Times Magazine, my first legitimate foreign assignment.

Everything about the Liberian civil war was unusual and terrible and fascinating: the malicious warlords, the overwhelmed peacekeepers, the indifferent Western aid workers in their gleaming white Land Cruisers, the resilient but beat-up Liberian civilians. I was especially taken, though, by the Liberian pressa group of reporters, editors, and photographers who were pugnacious, resourceful, and indefatigable. There was not enough food in Monrovia, no clean water, barely any electricity, yet the press somehow found enough ink and paper to produce some stupendous journalism.

The strange thing is that, after all this time, it is an advertisement from these papers that I remember most clearly. It was an ad that helped me understandin a real lightning strike of comprehensionthe best way to approach magazine writing and editing, which I was just then learning.

The ad was for a local butcher shop and read All Parts of the Cow. I dont remember if this was the name of the butcher shop or its marketing slogan or simply a statement of fact, but it doesnt matter. All Parts of the Cow has stayed with me for almost thirty years because it became the way I explain the difference between newspaper writing and magazine writing.

Like many magazine people, I started in newspapers, and I loved the work: the adrenaline, the urgency, the high-wire collaboration. When I was a cub reporter on the night police beat at the Washington Post, I once left the newsroom at four a.m., wandered to the basement pressroom, and grabbed an actually hot-off-the-presses copy of the mornings paper, one with my byline on the front page. Below the fold but whatever. It still felt great.

By then, though, I had really started caring about my sentences, and I was worried about the limitations of newspapering. What Im about to say is not meant to be a knock on newspapers or newspaper people. Obviously, newspapers, especially the big national papers (which is to say, the only newspaper that will undoubtedly survive the Great Cull), are stuffed with creative, brave, and talented people who are also, by the way, helping to save our democracy, which is no small thing.

The problem I had was twofold: First was the ubiquity of clichs. On the police desk, we joked that the city had only two types of streets: quiet, tree-lined streets or trash-strewn, drug-infested streets. I once asked a bedraggled editor if I could describe a particular street as tree-lined yet trash-strewn, but he didnt have time to get the joke.

Clich is everywhere, especially in writing. Clichs are one of the prices we pay in journalism for speed, but vigilance and a brisk pre-edit scrub will eliminate most of them. Im no great sentence maker, but I wantedand still wantto try to be one, and I hoped to work for people who wanted me to try.

The second problem: In newspaper editing it is common to shear away unruly feeling, weird detail, discordant observation, and the unavoidably jangly Heisenbergian moments that occur when writers interact with their subjects and the world. A smart New Yorker editor, the late John Bennet, once told me that the real bias in journalism is toward coherence, and though there are other biasesof coursethis seemed unambiguously true. This unexamined bias causes us to think that stories have beginnings, middles and endings, that all questions must be answered, and that everything that happens in the universe happens for a reason.

Magazine people, generally speaking, have a different understanding, a sideways understanding: Not every story has an ending; not every story even has a beginning. Not everything has to make sense. Not everything is knowable. And the big one, something that always and forever adds confusion and complexity to story making: the presence of writers (and their experiences, beliefs, personalities, histories, and predispositions) inevitably changes the reality of whatever the writers are observing and describing.

I learned, over time, that the best magazine editors dont fear complication but run to it. Put it in, put it all in, is an efficient way to describe this style of editing. Another way to describe it: All parts of the cow.

Last year, when I asked Jennifer Senior, who had just joined the staff of The Atlantic, if she had anything original to say about the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (originality traditionally being scarce on anniversaries of world-historical events), she thought for a minute and then said, Maybe, but its complicated. The story she sketched for me then was something more than complicated. It was mind-bending and exquisitely personal and something beyond fraught, and it featuredas a protagonista 9/11 truther. A good man, Jen said, something never previously said by sane people about 9/11 truthers. We talked and talked and talked. And then I thought, All parts of the cow, and I said, Lets try it. Just put it all in. And then Jen and her editor, Scott Stossel, made something magical happen, and we published her story and it won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and now can be found in this book. Its impossible to describe, except to say that it contains all the mess of life and that it is written like poetry but in prose. Jen, Scott, and I realized, late in the process, that the story didnt even have anything resembling a nut grafa term, borrowed from newspapering, for the paragraph that explains why you, the reader, should continue reading this story. Sometimes a magazine piece is so mesmerizing that the entire thing is its own nut graf, and this was true in Jens case.