Coal is your goal

Underworld: "In a powerfully understated narrative, Jeanne Marie Laskas offers a window into the lives of coal miners in Southeastern Ohio, transporting readers deep into a claustrophobic subterranean world. The men -- who go by such nicknames as Smitty, Pap, Hook, Duke, and Ragu -- slowly reveal themselves to be tough but nuanced characters, veritable diamonds in the dust, portrayed by Laskas with humor, grace, and compassion."

Finalist, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2008. (Jeanne Marie Laska, GQ)

To do two things at once is to do neither.*

The Autumn of the Multitaskers: "The rise of personalized technology was supposed to give us time and freedom. Instead, argues Walter Kirn, it has imprisoned us. With self-deprecating wit, Kirn takes us along on a bruising ride through multitasking hell, and explains why 'parallel processing' threatens both the brain and the GNP."

Finalist, essays, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2008. (Walter Kirn, The Atlantic)

*--Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C.

The Boy Who Loved Transit

How the system failed an obsession: "An uncommonly seamless blend of fluid writing and fastidious reporting, "The Boy Who Loved Transit" tells the story of Darius McCollum, a thirty-seven-year-old New Yorker who has spent much of his life in jail for impersonating a transit officer. Writer Jeff Tietz outlines the numerous ways in which the court system has failed McCollum, the the piece is much more than a sermon against injustice; it's a complex portrait of an inscrutable character who, in Tietz's hands, comes alive."

Finalist, profile writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. (Jeff Tietz, Harper's, May 2002.)

Also: a Wikipedia entry on McCollum; "The Ballad of Darius McCollum" by a band called the Dare Dukes.

Terminal Ice

"...at the heart of the mystery, like broken shards of a colder climate, float the icebergs, ghost-white messengers trying to tell us something we can't quite fathom."

Finalist, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. (Ian Frazier, Outside)

Lying in wait

"Thanks to profoundly deep reporting and riveting prose, the reader spirals downward right along with George O'Leary in his fall from grace as Notre Dame's head coach. In "Lying in Wait," Gary Smith renders his subject as the King Lear of the sports world with such pathos that even a reader with no interest in sports can feel his anguish. This is Smith, a master profiler, at the top of his game."

Winner, profile writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. (Gary Smith, Sports Illustrated)

Glory, Grief, and Secretariat's race for the Triple Crown

"Horseman, Pass By" was the winner in the feature writing category of the American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. It was written by John Jeremiah Sullivan, and appeared in Harper's.

"Sham led the field going into the first turn. He was flying. Everyone watching the race knew that he was going too fast. The strategy for Secretariat, for any horse, would have been to hang back and let Sham destroy himself, but [Secretariat's jockey] Ronnie Turcotte decided to contest the pace. It was, to all appearances, an insane strategy. William Nack writes that up in the press box, turfwriters were hollering, "They're going too fast!"

"Secretariat caught him just after the first turn, and for the first half of the race it was a duel between the two rivals. Then, around the sixth furlong, Sham began to fall apart. [Jockey] Laffit Pincay pulled him off in distress, and Secretariat was alone. Turcotte had done nothing but cluck to his horse.

"This is when it happened, the thing, the unbelievable thing. Secretariat started going faster. At the first mile, he had shattered the record for the Belmont Stakes, and at a mile and an eighth he had tied the world record (remember that he was only three years old; horses get faster as they age, up to a point). Everyone -- in the crowd, in the press box, in the box where the colt's owner and trainer were sitting -- was waiting for something to go wrong, because this was madness..."

Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt.

'Ring Tossed: "A Visit to the Nurburgring -- once the world's most treacherous racetrack, now a pedal-to-the-metal public playground -- provides a crash course in German automania."

Finalist, leisure interests, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2002 (Steve Rushin, Sports Illustrated)

After you read the story, have a gander at this:

For all of them to live, one of them had to die

Gone: "What's it like to be kidnapped and held for ransom, not as a political prisoner but as an economic one? What's it like to live in the Ecuadoran jungle for 141 days? What's it like not to sleep, to be bound in chains, to have your body invaded by living things, to waste away to the point of death? What's it like to have one of your fellow hostages killed when the negotiators fail at negotiation? What's it like? This is what it's like."

Finalist, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2002 (Tom Junod, Esquire magazine)

One of the great musical mysteries of all time

In the Jungle: how American music legends made millions off the work of a Zulu tribesman who died a pauper.

Finalist, reporting, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2001. (Rian Malan, Rolling Stone)

An eradicated killer

The Demon in the Freezer: How smallpox, a disease of officially eradicated twenty years ago, became the biggest bioterrorist threat we now face.

Winner, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2000. (Richard Preston, The New Yorker)

Was Darwin Wrong?

Almost half of Americans don't buy evolution, but genetic data, antibiotic-resistant germs, and the anklebone of a fossil whale help build the case.

Winner, essays, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2005. (David Quammen, National Geographic)

What matters, what separates you from home, is time

"Two astronauts trapped on the International Space Station as a result of the shuttle Columbia disaster literally had only one chance to make it back to Earth safely. 'Home' is a dramatic and revealing story about one of the longest stays in space, the mourning for lost colleagues, and the tortured and nearly deadly journey back."

Winner, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2005 (Chris Jones, Esquire magazine)

Genome Tome

Twenty-three ways of looking at our ancestors.

Winner, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2006 (Priscilla Long, American Scholar)

A Matter Of Life and Death

"It was cancer -- a brutally sudden death sentence: the doctors told the author she had probably less than six months. For a woman with two young children and a full life, that prognosis was devastating, but also, in some ways, oddly liberating. And so began more than three years of horror, hope, and grace, as she learned to live, and even laugh, on borrowed time."

Winner, Essays, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2006 (Marjorie Williams, Vanity Fair)

Upon This Rock

"Rock music used to be a safe haven for degenerates and rebels. Until it found Jesus..."

Finalist, feature writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2006 (John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ)

Some of us fly, all of us fall

The Last Outlaw: "Waylon's gone, Cash has been laid to rest. But Merle Haggard stands as country's remaining black-hat rebel, the last man singing for the underdog."

Finalist, profile writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2006. (Chris Heath, GQ)

Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Death of a Mountain: "Instead of excavating the contour of a ridge side, as strip miners did throughout the 1960s and '70s, now entire mountaintops are blasted off, and almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below.... I have come to Lost Mountain because in February Leslie Resources Inc. was granted a state permit to mine this ridgeline. I came here to see what an eastern mountain looks like before, during, and after its transformation into a western desert."

Finalist, reporting, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2006. (Erik Reece, Harper's Magazine)

Inside Scientology

Inside Scientology: Unlocking the complex code of America's most mysterious religion. Finalist, reporting, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2007. (Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone)

He knew how the bombs worked

The School: "On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages."

Winner, reporting, American Society of Mag. Editors' "Best American Magazine Writing, 2007." (C.J. Chivers, Esquire magazine)