This past week, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced that The New Yorker had been nominated for a record-breaking fourteen National Magazine Awards, including in the category of General Excellence. The nominations recognize the many ways that the magazine and its Web site have told the story of pandemic and political upheaval in the past year, from reporting, feature writing, and criticism to photography, video, and social media. Here are the nominees:
Feature Photography
Isaac Scott
A Photographer on the Front Lines of Philadelphia’s Protests
Twenty-nine-year-old Isaac Scott captured the early days of intense confrontation—including clashes with the police—and stayed for the more peaceful days that followed.
Karen Cunningham
A City Nurse
At the peak of New York’s crisis, a health-care worker brought her camera to the I.C.U.
Social Media
Video
Eléonore Hamelin
“Quiet No More” Shows How Grief Can Become Activism
A new documentary follows the Reverend Sharon Risher, who lost three relatives in the shooting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, as she mourns, seeks justice, and begins working for gun safety.
Reporting
Lawrence Wright
Three features by Peter Hessler
Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic
There’s no other country where the pandemic’s effects have been so concentrated in a single city.
Feature Writing
Ben Taub
Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea
The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.
Profile Writing
Emily Nussbaum
Fiona Apple’s Art of Radical Sensitivity
For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world?
Jennifer Gonnerman
Essays and Criticism
Hilton Als
My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children
She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.
Elizabeth Alexander
Columns and Commentary
Three columns by Jelani Cobb
Our Long, Forgotten History of Election-Related Violence
President Trump has sparked dangerous lawlessness, but killing and destruction linked to political antagonisms are nothing new for this country.
Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom
Emancipation is a marker of progress for white Americans, not black ones.
The Death of George Floyd, in Context
It’s both necessary and, at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated by race.
Public Interest
Rachel Aviv
Punishment by Pandemic
In a penitentiary with one of the U.S.’s largest coronavirus outbreaks, prison terms become death sentences.
