The Best American Magazine Writing 2017

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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 Harper'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 Odyssey 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 .