Excellent! I love to read these magazine articles each year and this year’s articles are especially worth reading. They are outstanding. I would recommend this to just about everyone who likes to keep up to date with wonderful authors, interesting topics, and diversified stories.

It starts with The Plague Years, by Lawrence Wright which is chilling because it recaptures Covid from the start. He does such an excellent job here explaining how Covid started, ways to detect the virus, and the low early estimates of deaths in the US would be, perhaps 100,000. I don’t see how anyone could read this and say this Pandemic was handled well. We did not have a Federal Policy. It became a Political Issue that divided our nation.

There were also fantastic articles by Lizzie Presser in The Black American Amputation Epidemic. I was aware this was a problem, but did not know it can often be prevented. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks of all the black Americans shot and killed. He offers hope that Americans may be changing. Megan DiTrolio discusses how important it is to protect yourself on-line. That was enlightening. Last, Susan Choi wrote a fascinating short-story that was such a treat. These were the articles I enjoyed the most, but there are many more.

This is reporting at it’s best and not to be missed. I am glad to be included in gaining more knowledge.

Thank you, NetGalley, Sid Holt, and Columbia Random House for granting me a copy of this collection.

THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING 2021 edited by Sid Holt offers pieces from a diverse set of authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward, and Susan Choi. The articles themselves cover a range of topics, although many deal with current events: "The plague year" by Lawrence Wright; "Global inequality and the corona shock" by Ada Tooze; "The limits of telecommuting" by Margaret O'Mara or "Rebuilding solidarity in a broken world" by Eric Klinenberg. Others, like "The store that called the cops on George Floyd" by Aymann Ismail, "The Trayvon generation" by Elizabeth Alexander or "Michael Jordan: a history of flight" by Wright Thompson, have been read and referenced by our Junior Theme students. THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING 2021 offers a hefty collection with over 540 pages and excellent writing - from investigative reporting to short story - for everyone.

There's a little something here for everyone, I really liked the earlier writings the best. As a subscribe and fan of The Atlantic, I was pleased to find some articles make their way into this collection. It's hard to classify and summarize something like this, although I don't think you should feel compelled to read every article that is in this collection. Nor do you need to do it in order. There's a lot here you can read, put down, and come back to later. Definitely one to soak in and let it bounce around your mind as you think about the implications and effects of the authors' ideas.