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” (
Mother Jones
) and Sarah Stillman’s depiction of the havoc wreaked on young people’s lives when they are put on sex-offender registries (
The
New Yorker
) examine controversial criminal-justice practices. And responses to the shocks of the recent election include Matt Taibbi’s irreverent dispatches from the campaign trail (
Rolling Stone
), George Saunders’s transfixing account of Trump’s rallies (
), and Andrew Sullivan’s fears for the future of democracy (
New York
).
In other considerations of the political scene, Jeffrey Goldberg talks through Obama’s foreign-policy legacy with the former president (
The Atlantic
), 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 (
New York Times Magazine
), and Pamela Colloff explores how the 1966 University of Texas Tower mass shooting changed the course of one survivor’s life (
Texas Monthly
). 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 (
Hedgehog Review
). Siddhartha Mukherjee depicts the art and agony of oncology (
). David Quammen ventures to Yellowstone to consider the future of wild places (
National Geographic
), and Mac McClelland follows a deranged expedition to Cuba in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker (
Audubon
). The collection concludes with Zandria Robinson’s eloquent portrait of her father as reflected in the music he loved (
Oxford American