The Best American Magazine Writing 2022 edited by Sid Holt(introduction)

Jeffrey Goldberg Introduction

In 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 lucky—my 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 press—a 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 understand—in a real lightning strike of comprehension—the 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 don’t remember if this was the name of the butcher shop or its marketing slogan or simply a statement of fact, but it doesn’t

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-thepresses copy of the morning’s 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 I’m 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 clichés. 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 didn’t have time to get the joke.

Cliché is everywhere, especially in writing. Clichés are one of the prices we pay in journalism for speed, but vigilance and a brisk pre-edit scrub will eliminate most of them. I’m no great sentence maker, but I wanted—and still want—to 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 biases—of course—this 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 don’t 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 it’s 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 featured—as a protagonist—a 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, “Let’s 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. It’s 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 didn’t even have anything resembling a nut graf—a 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 Jen’s case.

I understand that I shouldn’t use the opportunity of this introduction to praise stories that appeared in the magazine I edit, though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Ed Yong, one of the world’s great science writers and also an Atlantic staff writer, has a story in this book, “We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic” and that it is stupendous.

But back to the cow.

Many of the brilliant stories collected in this book are written by people rushing to complexity, writers who are unafraid to introduce readers to their intricate, jumbled, knotty thoughts and contradictory experiences. Their whole selves saturate their work. Such is the case with the article “What Do We Do About John James Audubon,” from, remarkably, Audubon magazine. The piece, by the Black birdwatcher and academic J. Drew Lanham, is an astonishment, and only in part because the editors had the nerve necessary to commission a piece dismantling their namesake and, until publication of this piece, patron saint. A patron saint, Lanham notes, who was a slaveholder and may have been mixed-race himself.

“Deconstructing holiness is hard work,” Lanham writes. “As I made the speaking circuits . . . talking bird science but also trying to connect dots between conservation and culture, I began to float the idea of Audubon’s questionable heritage. ‘What about holding him up as a multiracial role model?’ I asked. After all, there was a Black POTUS (half-white) and a ‘Cablinasian’ (Tiger Woods’s contrived name for Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian heritage) golfer who found widespread acceptance and acclaim. There seemed to be a different standard for John James, though. The first time I posed the question at a meeting in Arizona, I could almost hear squirms. There were plenty of other issues to dredge up that dealt more immediately with making birding more colorful; why this?”

Self-distancing, of the sort we see to good effect in professional newspaper reporters, has its place—restraint and detachment often aid the cause of believability. But ferocious honesty builds

credibility as well. The sort of frankness modeled by Lanham is one reason I read magazines.

Another reason I read magazines can be found in Matthieu Aikins’s article for the New York Times Magazine, “The Collapse,” about the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan. Aikins’s piece is a concise 20,000 words. I do not state that mockingly. When people complain about the length of certain magazine pieces, I ask them to do a bit of mental reframing: think of the article in question as an exceedingly short and wildly cheap book rather than a long-winded act of journalism.

Every word Aikins and his editors chose for this story belongs in this story. It is brilliant and, yes, (cliché alert) magisterial, but it is its intimacy and human scale that make it so noteworthy. Here is a short passage I appreciated because the magazine allows Aikins to become a character in his own story:

I didn’t understand how quickly things were falling apart; maybe I was in denial, too. I went to Hamid Karzai International Airport . . . on the morning of August 11. It was busier than I had ever seen it, a crush of passengers headed for the international terminal. The domestic side was quiet and tense. There were flights to the main cities of Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, where, like Kandahar, battles were raging as the Taliban laid siege.

I went through security and sat in the boarding lounge, but I couldn’t get in touch with the fixer who was supposed to pick me up in Kandahar. I couldn’t get in touch with anyone there, in fact. Finally, a journalist friend called using the internet at the military base at the airport there. The Taliban had shut down the mobile networks in preparation for an all-out assault.

I got up and walked back out through security. The airline staff chased me down.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “My trip has been canceled.” . . .

“He’s the third person to cancel like this,” one woman whispered anxiously.

When I got my documents back, I walked out against the flow of Afghans leaving their country. In the parking lot, there

were groups of families, some crying and some silent, people in their Western outfits for travel, suits and T-shirts, girls with big up-dos and painted faces, matrons taking photos, men in turbans and karakul hats and prayer caps, the families embracing and then dividing, one part walking away, the others left watching. The next day, Kandahar City fell.

I read Aikins’s piece in one sitting when it was first published. I did the same when Ann Patchett’s “These Precious Days” appeared in Harper’s. Patchett’s piece, which also appears in this volume, is a work of genius, entrancing and uncategorizable, and you’ll have to read it to understand why.

The two pieces have virtually nothing in common and everything in common. The writers are present in full; they are completely human—no Olympian detachment here. They wander; they pause over putatively unimportant things; they unassumingly saturate their narratives with profound observation. They do things, in short, that are only possible in magazines. And Patchett does something else, too: she lets us know that she has no ending. This is one of the most beautiful and truest ways to bring a story to a temporary conclusion:

Tell me how the story ends.

It doesn’t. It will. It hasn’t yet.

Nothing in this volume is finished. The stories—rich, messy, and complicated—all go on.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2022 presents a range of outstanding writing on timely topics, from in-depth reporting to incisive criticism: Kristin Canning calls for a change in how we talk about abortion (Women’s Health), and Ed Yong warns us about the next pandemic (The Atlantic). Matthieu Aikins provides a gripping eyewitness account of the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul (New York Times Magazine). Heidi Blake and Katie J. M. Baker’s “Beyond Britney” examines how people placed under legal guardianship are deprived of their autonomy (BuzzFeed News). Rachel Aviv profiles a psychologist who studies the fallibility of memory—and has testified for defendants including Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby (The New Yorker).

The anthology includes dispatches from the frontiers of science, exploring why Venus turned out so hellishly unlike Earth (Popular Science) and detailing the potential of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (Quanta). It features celebrated writers, including Harper’s magazine pieces by Ann Patchett, whose “These Precious Days” is a powerful story of friendship during the pandemic, and Vivian Gornick, who offers “notes on humiliation.” Carina del Valle Schorske depicts the power of public dance after pandemic isolation (New York Times Magazine). And the NBA icon Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lauds the Black athletes who fought for social justice (AARP the Magazine). Amid the continuing reckoning with racism, authors reconsider tarnished figures. The Black ornithologist and birder J. Drew Lanham assesses the legacy of John James Audubon in the magazine that bears his name, and Jeremy Atherton Lin questions his youthful enthusiasm for Morrissey (Yale Review). Jennifer Senior writes about memory and the lingering grief felt for a friend killed on 9/11 (The Atlantic). The collection concludes with Nishanth Injam’s story of queer first love across religious boundaries, “Come with Me” (Georgia Review).

Cover design: Julia KushnirskyCover image: Shutterstock

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