The Best American Magazine Writing 2023
offers a selection of outstanding journalism on timely topics, including inequalities and injustices pressuring families, especially mothers. Rozina Ali tells the story of a U.S. marine who unlawfully adopted an Afghan girl and her family’s efforts to bring her home (
New York Times Magazine
). A
Mother Jones
exposé confronts the imprisonment of women for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners. “The Landlord and the Tenant” juxtaposes the lives of a poor single mother convicted for her children’s deaths in a fire and the man who owned the fatal property (
ProPublica
with
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
). Caitlin Dickerson investigates the history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy (
The Atlantic
). Jia Tolentino’s
New Yorker
commentary considers abortion in a post-
Roe
world.
The anthology features pieces on a wide range of subjects, such as Nate Jones on the “Nepo Baby” and Allison P. Davis’s essay about a decade on Tinder (
New York
). Natalie So recounts how her mother’s small computer chip company became the target of a Silicon Valley crime ring (
The Believer
). Clint Smith asks what Holocaust memorials in Germany can teach the United States about our reckoning with slavery (
).
Esquire
’s Chris Heath examines the FBI’s involvement in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Courtney Desiree Morris takes a queer psychedelic ramble through New Orleans (
Stranger’s Guide
). Namwali Serpell reflects on representations of sex workers (
New York Review of Books
). An ESPN Digital investigation uncovers Penn State’s other serial sexual predator before Jerry Sandusky. Profiles of the acclaimed actress Viola Davis (
) and the self-taught artist Matthew Wong (
), as well as Michelle de Kretser’s short story “Winter Term” (
Paris Review
), round out the volume.