In any given year, The New Yorker leads the ranks of consumer titles in nominations for National Magazine Awards. Last year, it was up for nine, this year for 12, including the highest honor, general excellence among magazines with circulations between 1 million and 2 million. Its other nominations include two for reporting and one each for public interest, feature writing, profile writing, essays, columns and commentary, reviews and criticism, photo journalism, fiction and general excellence online. Today, as part of an ongoing series on this year's NMA nominees, Media Life excerpts passages from a few of the New Yorker pieces that earned nominations.

Reporting
One of The New Yorker’s nominations was for reporting, for Jon Lee Anderson’s piece “The Taliban’s Opium War,” which ran on July 9 on 16 of last year. Here’s an excerpt:

A great dust cloud formed as the A.T.V.s hyperkinetically whizzed past us and the trucks kicked up plumes of swirling yellow powder. Picking up speed, Lockyear exclaimed, “This is redneck heaven. You get to run around the desert on A.T.V.s and pickups, shoot guns, and get paid for it. Man, it’s the perfect job!”

When we reached the target area, men on A.T.V.s cut through the fields, dragging metal bars on chains, which knocked down the poppies. Other members of the team whacked at the poppies with shovel handles. Around the edges of the fields and on small hills above them, armed Afghan Interior Ministry policemen stood guard. Wankel had attended a shura, or council of local elders, a few days before, to explain the mission, and a small group of local Pashtun policemen were on hand, but the A.E.F. team consisted mostly of men from other areas of the country. Major Khalil, the deputy commander, was an ethnic Tajik, and didn’t trust the Pashtuns.

Feature Writing
Another of The New Yorker’s nominations came in the feature writing category for “Swingers,” Ian Parker’s tale of the bonobo, a type of African Ape. Here’s an excerpt from the piece, which originally ran on July 30:

The bonobo fell out of the view of scientists at the very moment that the public discovered an interest. In 1991, National Geographic sent Frans Lanting, a Dutch photographer, to photograph bonobos at Wamba. “At the time, there were no pictures of bonobos in the wild,” Lanting recently told me. “Or, at least, no professional documentation.” On his assignment, Lanting contracted cerebral malaria. But he was stirred by his encounter with the bonobos. “I became sure that the boundaries between apes and humans were very fluid,” he said. “You can’t call them animals. I prefer ‘creatures.’ It was haunting, the way they knew as much about you as you knew about them.” It became his task, he later told Frans de Waal, “to show how close we are to bonobos, and they to us.”

Many of his photographs were sexually explicit. “National Geographic found the pictures of sexuality hard to bear,” Lanting said. “That was a place the magazine was not ready to go.” The magazine printed only tame images. Not long after, Lanting contacted de Waal, who had recently taken up a post at Emory, as a professor of primate behavior and a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Agreeing to collaborate, they approached Geo, the German magazine. As de Waal recently told me, laughing, “Naturally, Geo put two copulating bonobos on the cover.” Not long afterward, Scientific American printed an illustrated article. In 1997, the Dutchmen brought out a handsome illustrated book, “Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape.”

Columns and Commentary
In the columns and commentary category The New Yorker was nominated for three pieces by Hendrik Hertzberg, including “Offenses,” an observation of the Sen. Larry Craig scandal. It originally ran on Sept. 17. Here’s an excerpt:

Besides snark, the overriding theme of public discussion of the Craig case has been hypocrisy. “I’m not gay,” the Senator insists, and if gayness is an identity as well as an innate predilection he may be right. He is, however, evidently homosexual. Yet he supports permitting job discrimination against homosexuals, opposes letting them serve in the military, favors a constitutional amendment forbidding them to marry, and voted for an Idaho ballot measure that proscribes gay civil unions. He is like the many politicians who have smoked marijuana themselves but oppose legalizing it even for medical use. Hypocritical? Yes. But, in both cases, the fundamental moral problem is not the inconsistency between private actions and professed beliefs. The problem is the professed beliefs.

If Craig has been (as he once described Bill Clinton) “a nasty, bad, naughty boy,” there is little evidence of it in the police report of his arrest. The report, written in a style somewhere between “The Naked Gun” and “Guy Noir, Private Eye” (“At about 1200 hours, I was working a plain-clothes detail involving lewd conduct in the main men’s public restroom of the Northstar Crossing”), describes a profoundly unshocking sequence of events. After exchanging stares with the seated officer through the crack of the stall door, Craig entered an adjoining stall, sat down, and tapped his foot. In response, the cop wrote, “I moved my foot up and down slowly.” Craig touched the side of his foot to the side of the cop’s. Then he swiped his fingertips three times along the bottom of the stall divider. Then he got arrested.

Disorderly conduct, the misdemeanor to which Craig pleaded guilty, requires proof of “offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous or noisy conduct” or “offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger or resentment.” His real misdemeanor is to be a conflicted, closeted homosexual who is driven to seek furtive (though consensual) sex by sending coded signals in public toilets. The real offense, the real obscenity, is that even a jurisdiction as enlightened as the Twin Cities still feels free to devote police resources to compounding the unhappiness of such people.