Sidney Holt
And they say magazines are dead. Here, in the 2023 edition of The Best American Magazine Writing, you will find abundant evidence that despite the unarguable decline of print and the equally incontestable rise of digital media, magazine storytelling is not only thriving but increasingly coming to define the way writers, editors, and readers share news and information in the twenty-first century. Whether the medium is a traditional magazine or the newest website, a newspaper or a podcast, the way news is reported and stories are told is now shaped by the model pioneered by American magazines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In her introduction to this anthology, Glamour’s Natasha Pearlman explains what makes magazine storytelling unique—and uniquely exciting. If you haven’t read it already, I urge to stop now and turn back to Pearlman’s piece. Nothing I can say—nothing, really, anybody can say—can better Pearlman’s description of the power of magazine journalism.
Nothing, that is, except the stories included in this volume.
The twenty-two articles in this year’s edition of The Best American Magazine Writing range from opinion pieces and “as told to” vignettes to celebrity profiles and deeply reported feature stories. Each is an example of the best journalism published in print or online last year, and each was a National Magazine Award finalist or winner. Several of the stories included here also received other awards, most notably “We Need to Take Away Children,” by Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
The American Society of Magazine Editors was founded in 1963 with the express purpose of establishing the program that became the National Magazine Awards. From the beginning—the first award was presented to Look magazine in 1966 “for its skillful editing, imagination and editorial integrity, all of which were reflected particularly in its treatment of the racial issue during 1965”—the awards have been sponsored by ASME in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The National Magazine Awards are now presented in seventeen categories, ranging from Reporting and Feature Writing to Video and Podcasting. Several of the publications nominated this year for the most prestigious award—the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, which is presented in four separate categories based on content and audience—are represented in the 2023 edition of The Best American Magazine Writing. They include The Atlantic, ESPN Digital, New York, the New York Times Magazine, Stat, Mother Jones, and Stranger’s Guide. Another General Excellence finalist represented here—the Paris Review—won the ASME Award for Fiction, which is judged and presented alongside the National Magazine Awards.
A complete list of the National Magazine Awards 2023 finalists and winners is posted at https://
Nearly 250 media organizations entered the National Magazine Awards in 2023, submitting close to 1,100 entries, of which more than half were originally published online (that includes, of course, podcasts and videos). Some 300 editors, writers, art directors, and photo editors participated in the judging of National Magazine Awards and the ASME Award for Fiction, as well as the ASME Awards for Design, Photography, and Illustration and the ASME NEXT Awards for Journalists Under 30, which are judged at the same time.
The judging was conducted both in person—at Columbia University on New York’s Morningside Heights—and on Zoom, but the presentation of the awards was very and exclusively live. More than 350 editors and publishers gathered at a music venue, also in New York, called Terminal 5 in early April 2023 to honor the ninety-five National Magazine Award finalists and winners.
Fifty-seven media organizations were nominated for National Magazine Awards in 2023, led by New York with ten, the New Yorker with seven, the New York Times Magazine with six, and The Atlantic with five. Each of those publications also won awards—New York for Single-Topic Issue and Lifestyle Journalism; the New Yorker for Columns and Essays; the New York Times Magazine for Reporting and Profile Writing; and The Atlantic for General Excellence.
The 2023 winners also included Cook’s Illustrated, Grist, and the Marshall Project, all in General Excellence; Gimlet Media for Spotify in Podcasting; Glamour in Public Interest; GQ in Design; Mother Jones in Video; the New York Review of Books in Reviews and Criticism; ProPublica and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in Feature Writing; Romper in Service Journalism; and Smithsonian in Photography.
Long before the judges ever see a single entry—they first receive virtual bundles of entries several weeks before they meet at Columbia—hundreds of magazine journalists are already at work on the National Magazine Awards, preparing submissions and writing the statements that accompany each entry. It is they—the editors who choose to enter the awards and the staff members who organize the submissions—who are largely responsible for the success of the National Magazine Awards.
The journalists and educators who lead the judging are charged with guiding their fellow judges toward the selection of finalists and winners that exemplify contemporary standards of editorial excellence. The judging this year was led by a distinguished group of editorial leaders, which included:
• Sudip Bose, editor, American Scholar
• Joe Brown, editor, one5c
• Maile Carpenter, editorial director, Warner Bros. Discovery Partnership Magazines, Hearst Magazines
• Ben Goldberger, executive editor, Time
• D. D. Guttenplan, editor, The Nation
• Clara Jeffery, editor in chief, Mother Jones
• Radhika Jones, editor in chief, Vanity Fair
• Lauren Kern, editor in chief, Apple News
• Lindsey B. King, editor, 5280
• Amanda Kludt, group publisher, Lifestyle, Vox Media
• Cindi Leive, cofounder and chief executive officer, The Meteor
• Stephanie Mehta, chief executive officer and chief content officer, Mansueto Ventures
• Mary Melton, editorial director, Godfrey Dadich Partners
• Janice Min, chief executive officer, The Ankler
• Puja Patel, editor in chief, Pitchfork
• Kyle Pope, editor and publisher, Columbia Journalism Review
• Paul Reyes, editor, Virginia Quarterly Review
• Debra Adams Simmons, executive editor, history and culture, National Geographic
• Bill Strickland, editorial director, Enthusiast and Consumer Group, Hearst Magazines
• Duy Linh Tu, professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
• Julia Turner, deputy managing editor, Los Angeles Times
• Liz Vaccariello, editorial director, Dotdash Meredith
• Geoff Van Dyke, editorial director, 5280
• Charles Whitaker, dean, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
The results of the judging are sanctioned by the National Magazine Awards Board. The members of the 2023 board were:
• Dan Goodgame, editor in chief, Texas Monthly
• Anna Holmes, executive vice president, Higher Ground Productions
• Mark Jannot, story editor, New York Times Magazine
• Clara Jeffery, editor in chief, Mother Jones
• Radhika Jones, editor in chief, Vanity Fair
• Lucy Kaylin, vice president, print content, Hearst Magazines
• Cindi Leive, cofounder and chief executive officer, The Meteor
• Janice Min, chief executive officer, The Ankler
• Alison Overholt, adjunct professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and founder, Good People LLC
• Liz Vaccariello, editorial director, Dotdash Meredith
• Charles Whitaker, dean, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
• Abi Wright, executive director, professional prizes, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
• Sidney Holt, executive director, American Society of Magazine Editors, ex officio
Inclusion in a mere list does little to reward the journalists who, without any recompense save the pleasure of reading the best magazine stories published in the previous year, devote so many hours to the judging. That said, a complete list of the National Magazine Awards 2023 judges is posted at https://
The ASME board of directors is responsible for overseeing the administration, judging, and presentation of the National Magazine Awards. The members of the 2022–2023 board—all of whom are journalism educators or the leaders of well-known media organizations—are listed at https://
As director of operations at ASME, Nina Fortuna is responsible for the day-to-day management of the National Magazine Awards. Her patience and efficiency are now close to legendary. ASME’s literary agent, David McCormick, and the editors of The Best American Magazine Writing at Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal and Michael Haskell, also deserve more thanks than I can express for their contributions to the success of this series. I also want to repeat my appreciation for the work of Natasha Pearlman, the executive editor of Glamour, who wrote the introduction to this year’s edition of BAMW.
On behalf of ASME, I want to thank the leadership of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism—especially Jelani Cobb, the dean and Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism, and Abi Wright, the executive director of professional prizes, who also serves as a National Magazine Awards judge—for their continuing support of the National Magazine Awards. Finally, I want to thank the writers who let ASME use their work in this anthology. At the risk of committing an act of self-plagiarism, all I can say is that without them, there would be no The Best American Magazine Writing—in fact, there would be no magazines, period.