The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

<P>Our annual anthology of finalists and winners of the National Magazine Awards 2014 includes Max Chafkin's oral history of Apple from <i>Fast Company</i>, Joshua Davis's intimate portrait of tech pioneer John McAfee's personal and public breakdown from <i>Wired</i>; Kyle Dickman's haunting investigation into the preventable death of nineteen firemen battling an Arizona wildfire; and Ariel Levy's emotional account of extreme travel to a remote landۥwhile pregnantۥfrom <i>The New Yorker</i>.</P><P>Other essays include Wright Thompson's bittersweet profile of Michael Jordan's fifty-something second act (<i>ESPN the Magazine</i>); Jean M. Twenge's revealing look at fertility myths and baby politics (The Atlantic); Janet Reitman's controversial study of the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (<i>Rolling Stone</i>); Luke Mogelson's harrowing experience accompanying asylum seekers on a potentially deadly sea voyage to Australia (<i>New York Times Magazine</i>); Lisa Miller's poignant report from Newtown, Connecticut, as the town tries to cope with the aftermath of one of the nation's worst mass shootings (<i>New York</i>); Emily Nussbaum's critiques of gender and politics on television (<i>The New Yorker</i>); and Witold Rybczynski's poetic engagement with modern architecture (<i>Architect</i>). The collection concludes with the award-winning poem "Elegies" by Kathleen Ossip (<i>Poetry</i>) and "The Embassy of Cambodia," a short story by Zadie Smith (<i>The New Yorker</i>).</P>