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.

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..."

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)