The Best American Magazine Writing 2017

With the work of reporters under fire worldwide, this year’s anthology of National Magazine Award finalists and winners is a timely reminder of the power of journalism. The pieces included here explore the fault lines in American society. Shane Bauer’s visceral “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard” ( ) and Sarah Stillman’s depiction of the havoc wreaked on young people’s lives when they are put on sex-offender registries ( ) examine controversial criminal-justice practices. And responses to the shocks of the recent election include Matt Taibbi’s irreverent dispatches from the campaign trail ( ), George Saunders’s transfixing account of Trump’s rallies ( ), and Andrew Sullivan’s fears for the future of democracy ( ). In other considerations of the political scene, Jeffrey Goldberg talks through Obama’s foreign-policy legacy with the former president ( ), and Gabriel Sherman analyzes how Roger Ailes’s fall sheds light on conservative media ( ). Linking personal stories to the course of history, Nikole Hannah-Jones looks for a school for her daughter in a rapidly changing, racially divided Brooklyn ( ), and Pamela Colloff explores how the 1966 University of Texas Tower mass shooting changed the course of one survivor’s life ( ). A selection of Rebecca Solnit’s commentary ranges from a writer on death row to the isolation at the heart of conservatism. Becca Rothfeld ponders women waiting on love from the to Tinder ( ). Siddhartha Mukherjee depicts the art and agony of oncology ( ). David Quammen ventures to Yellowstone to consider the future of wild places ( ), and Mac McClelland follows a deranged expedition to Cuba in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker ( ). The collection concludes with Zandria Robinson’s eloquent portrait of her father as reflected in the music he loved (