Natasha Pearlman
In 2007, I was a fledgling newspaper feature writer in London. And as so many twenty-five-year-olds are, I was as wildly, naively hopeful as I was ambitious. I worked fourteen-hour days. I never said no to an assignment. It wasn’t unusual for me to go thirteen days without a break. Whatever it took to “make it,” I did it. I devoured every feature story in every rival publication to make sure I wasn’t being beaten at the game I was mainly playing against myself. I dreamt big. And as is so often the case for young professionals around the world, I dreamt of New York City.
It was everything to me. The busyness. The life spilling out of bars and restaurants and shops and parks onto the teeming streets. The people literally stacked on top of one another, squeezing themselves into the smallest of living spaces in pursuit of the limitless expansion of their opportunities. The city seemed to burst with possibilities. And as impossible as it quite literally was to move here (work visas are no small feat to come by for us foreigners), it was the place deep down I wanted to belong in. Whenever I came to visit, which wasn’t often because of that fledgling British journalist’s salary, I ate up every second—on the go, exploring, partying, never stopping.
Until one day in May 2007, I did.
Memory is an extraordinary, unpredictable thing. It can blur when you need to forget, discard details it deems irrelevant with no identifiable pattern, yet can also transport you back to a specific moment in time with absolute, unnerving clarity.
There’s so much about that May day I remember and so much I don’t. I know I was in a clothes shop in Manhattan, but I couldn’t tell you which one or in what part of town. Was it hot? Maybe. Was I alone? I have no idea.
But what I do remember is the pile of magazines on a table for customers to browse through. I remember picking up a copy of the New Yorker—because here I was in New York—and flipping through idly until I saw a story that stopped me in my tracks. One that I had to read from start to finish standing in the middle of a clothes shop, not looking at any clothes, no matter the strange looks I got (because, well, we all know how long a good New Yorker article can take to read). One that even sixteen years later I can still recall words and scenes from.
I’d love to tell you it was a groundbreaking investigation that had brought down a government. It wasn’t. It was a story about American commuters: “There and Back Again: The Soul of the Commuter,” by Nick Paumgarten. On the surface it was, well, deeply niche—a long and winding written journey, inspired by the equally long and winding seven-hour daily commute of an employer at Cisco Systems, recently honored by his employers for his unmatched dedication. But that belied the truth of it. The piece, in which Paumgarten observed in glorious detail the minutiae of his subjects’ travels (sometimes more than six hours a day), also documented humanity in its purest form. The loves and losses and dreams that lead people to make what might seem like truly unfathomable choices—in this instance, belief-beggaring, labor-intensive, multi-hour, cross-state traverses.
Paumgarten’s prose made the everyday, the mundanity of something so many of us undertake, extraordinary. It brought to life the question, which was posed directly to his subjects and more figuratively to his readers: How far, literally, would you travel to make your dreams come true? How far would I go? And through answering this question the piece became not just a story I read but in a strange way a part of my own history.
Despite the immense volume of writing I have consumed in the course of my nearly two decades as a journalist, it was to that piece and the extraordinary sacrifices and dreams of those commuters I kept returning. It tugged at me for more than a decade as I at times tried to make my move to the city of my dreams, failed, met my partner, got married, tried and failed again, had children, gave up fully, and then when I least expected it, made it happen, becoming one of those commuters in my own roundabout, cross-Atlantic way: “There and Back Again.”
That’s the thing about great magazine journalism. No matter the size and scope of an article, no matter whether its goal is to expose deep wrongdoing, hold perpetrators to account, upend a patriarchal system, or simply tell a beautiful and unexpected story, tell it well and it can change people’s worlds. It can make indelible memories, imprint itself into the fabric of your being, shape you, become you—or your fighting purpose.
But how do you define this kind of writing? Can it be taught as a formula? Start with an anecdote, add in a news hook, plug in interviews and secondaries, conclude. That’s too simple. For me, as an editor, it’s about having purpose. An ambition to tell a story that makes you gasp or laugh or that shakes you to your core. It doesn’t have to be told with words you need to look up in a dictionary, although those pieces can be as thrilling as those told more sparsely. What it should be is a story told with imagination.
I think about this part of magazine writing often. Magazine journalists are the closest to novelists—in often the lengths of the stories they are telling, and the exposition. But unlike our great fiction authors who are free to create expansive imaginary worlds, magazine writers are grounded in the hard reality of facts. And yet, they are free to tell those facts with the creativity of an unexpected literary structure, through the eyes of an unexpected witness, via years of detailed investigations and research, or through bringing their own story and experiences to bear within it too. There’s no formula save originality. Like New York, magazine journalism is bursting with limitless possibilities—no sentence, no story the same.
And in this extraordinary collection of articles, you will find true stories that read like novels, such is the originality of the approach. The story of an international crime syndicate that robs the author’s family in The Believer for “Aristocrat Inc.,” by Natalie So, is enthralling, interweaving and piecing together both a personal history and the jaw-dropping audacity of opportunists who were eventually outrun by the development of the technology they were thieving.
And “Acid Church,” by Courtney Desiree Morris, from Stranger’s Guide, is a deeply powerful personal journey through grief, queer love, and psychedelics that jumps off the page so vividly it is almost like watching the story on a big screen:
My heart is beating in time with the song, and before I know it, I am rocking and bouncing on the balls of my feet and singing, “Oh I, I want to be with you everywhere.” I spin and see Alix dancing alongside me out of the corner of my eye. People flock to the dance floor, and soon, I am enveloped in a crush of vibrating flesh. The molly is pulsing through me in waves, and I can feel the heat of the high spreading from my scalp down my back through my arms and into my feet. I realize the feeling is joy.
I could equally get lost in Jazmine Hughes’s sentences in all the pieces she writes, but particularly her National Magazine Award–winning profile of the actor Viola Davis, “Viola Davis, Inside Out,” for the New York Times Magazine:
To watch Davis act is to witness a deep-sea plunge into a feeling: even when her characters are opaque, you can sense her under the surface, empathetic and searching.… Davis grew up to be the sort of actor whose range feels best measured by her steady command of pressure: maintaining it, raising it, letting it go. She sets the tone of every scene, the eyes of her castmates flicking toward her as soon as she appears, as if reacting to her is a crucial part of the job. She often plays characters who cry only in the moments she’s inhabiting, weeping as if it were a rare, almost undignified departure from their norm.
Magazine writers are also unique in the journalism world because they are boundlessly free. Not for us the restriction of a limited news story word count or the adherence to a daily news agenda where the relevance window can be a matter of a few hours in our new world of the endless, pauseless scroll. Magazine writers can take a statistic, an event, a person, something historic and forgotten, a society-altering ruling, and create stories that are so powerful they become the agenda. Take, for example, Jia Tolentino’s breathtaking triptych on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It is the commentary I, like so many others in the United States, devoured both before and in the ruling’s aftermath. Her writing for the New Yorker in “A Post-Roe Threat,” “The Post-Roe Era,” and “Is Abortion Sacred?” is at once excoriating (of all sides), brave, and deeply personal. They became, too, the foundational pieces many of us all turned to when asked to explain the depths of our emotions in the fallout. Jia said it best. Read this. Oh god, THIS. Just some of the messages that flew around my own chat groups. One passage in particular, from “Is Abortion Sacred?” will stay with me forever:
Even within the course of the same pregnancy, a person and the fetus she carries can shift between the roles of lover and beloved, host and parasite, vessel and divinity, victim and murderer; each body is capable of extinguishing the other, although one cannot survive alone. There is no human relationship more complex, more morally unstable than this …
The idea that a fetus is not just a full human but a superior and kinglike one—a being whose survival is so paramount that another person can be legally compelled to accept harm, ruin, or death to insure it—is a recent invention.
It was without doubt a year that demanded a vital examination of the standards women are held to versus those of men. And two further pieces in this book that deserve a call out are Samantha Michaels’s piece from Mother Jones, “She Never Hurt Her Kids. So Why Is a Mother Serving More Time Than the Man Who Abused Her Daughter?” and “The Landlord and the Tenant,” by Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica. Both extensively reported and uniquely heartbreaking, they tell the stories of women failed not just by circumstance but also society.
I, too, found myself in the unique position this last year of being able to report on a decades-long failure that most profoundly impacts women—the lack of paid family or medical leave in America. I tried to approach it anew, reporting on both the urgent need to pass the country’s first paid family leave policy and also following eight women through the first twenty-eight days of their postpartum period to show the impact of having no paid time to care for your newborn or yourself. You can find my reported piece “The Time to Pass Paid Leave Is Now” alongside two of the stories from the women I followed. And you can find our interactive “28 Days” piece on Glamour.com (where you can hear directly from the women during one of the most vulnerable times in their lives). I hope the pieces speak for themselves.
Interestingly, in the course of reporting and writing these pieces, I had to confront a tenet of journalism that for more than a decade I thought needed to define me: impartiality. It had been drilled into me in my newspaper reporting days. Report the facts, not the feelings. But then here I was, working on a story that I cared about, perhaps more than I had ever cared about a story in my life. It felt discombobulating.
Then, in the course of working on this introduction, a colleague directed to me to a note she had found in Glamour archives from Glamour’s longtime and legendary editor in chief, Ruth Whitney, who helmed the magazine from 1967 to 1999. In 1991, after the second Women of the Year awards (which now, in their thirty-fourth year, have come to define the publication), she had written herself a personal memo: “My own epiphany: This ceremony brought it home to me that I really belong in the part of the journalism world that allows me to be an advocate for women. Spare me the ‘impartial news’ end of the business.”
This approach could well sum up Caitlin Dickerson’s peerless, years-long investigation for The Atlantic, “We Need to Take Away Children,” an examination of the Trump-era border policies that ripped apart families and separated children from their parents—sometimes for years. Meticulously reported and rightly deserving of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, it is both devastatingly dispassionate in the assessment of the mountains of evidence she uncovered and unshakably emotional, too. You feel Dickerson’s disgust at the officials who perpetrated the separations and the deliberate obfuscations and prolongation:
Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Yet a mountain of evidence shows that this is explicitly false: separating children was not just a side effect but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer.
While this year was undoubtedly marked by an extraordinary set of hard-hitting investigations and discoveries—many more of which you will also find in this book—there is also joy and wonder and, yes, great magazine writing to be found in the niche. Who knew that in 2023 we would all lose our collective minds to New York magazine’s deliciously biting treatise on celebrity offspring, “The Year of the Nepo Baby,” with an introduction by Nate Jones? It didn’t just capture a moment and a conversation, it created it. It was the moment. It was everything we were talking about, even the so-called Nepo Babies themselves.
And Allison P. Davis’s “Tinder Hearted,” also for New York, became in its writing not just a piece about a dating app or even a piece about how an app reshaped dating for a generation; it captured a cultural shift in our lives that might even come to be defined by the article itself.
As an editor who has worked on so-called popular publications for large portions of my career, it delights me that this tome of the year’s great magazine writing is also celebrating those articles so skillfully written that they take on a life of their own: viral hits, for want of a better word. That elusive goal chased by every publication and writer—because who doesn’t want the world to read their work? But too often these pop-culture hits aren’t lauded enough. It’s an art and a skill to create a story that jumps right into cultural zeitgeist and then rewrites what that culture is.
This all raises the question, once again, of what the definition of great magazine writing is. How do you pull together a category that is so vast in its span and its execution? You can’t. But perhaps that’s really the heart of it. Great magazine journalism defies definition, much like it defies boundaries. It is limitless in its possibilities. It can take you on the most unexpected journey of your life. It can break your heart, and it can make you laugh until your sides split. It can be dispassionate, or it can be impassioned. It can be devastating. It can be meticulous. It can be beautiful. It can spur you into action. It can reshape the way you think of your world. Or the whole world.
But what does unite the best of writing, what it must have, is ambition. And you will find it on every page, and in every piece, of this book. Read, and learn.