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from Newsweek Excerpts of pieces up for National Magazine Awards Apr 23, 2009
Single-topic issue The newsmagazine has won three Ellies for single-topic issues over the years, most recently for an issue devtoed to the 2004 presidential elections. This year Newsweek is again up for an issue devoted to a presidential race, its Nov. 17 issue, “How He Did It,” which looks at Barack Obama’s journey to the White House. From “How He Did It”: “Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself. Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, ‘Greg has just fallen in love.’” Public interest This category recognizes journalism that sheds new light on an issue of public importance and has the potential to affect national or local debate or policy. In "We Fought Cancer. . .and Cancer Won," writer Sharon Begley rethinks the war on cancer. From “Cancer”: “But we are going to tell you instead about Robert Mayberry. In 2002 a routine physical found a lesion on his lung, which turned out to be cancer. Surgeons removed the malignancy, which had not spread, and told Mayberry he was cured. "That's how it works with lung cancer," says oncologist Edward Kim of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who treated Mayberry. "We take it out and say, 'You're all set, enjoy the rest of your life,' because really, what else can we do until it comes back?" Two years later it did. The cancerous cells in Mayberry's lung had metastasized to his brain—either after the surgery, since such operations rarely excise every single microscopic cancer cell, or long before, since in some cancers rogue cells break away from the primary tumor as soon as it forms and make their insidious way to distant organs. It's impossible to know. Radiation therapy shrank but did not eliminate the brain tumors. "With that level of metastasis," says Kim, "it's not about cure. It's about just controlling the disease." When new tumors showed up in Mayberry's bones, Kim prescribed Tarceva, one of the new targeted therapies that block a molecule called epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) that acts like the antenna from hell: it grabs growth-promoting signals out of the goop surrounding a cancer cell and uses them to stimulate proliferation. Within six months—it was now the autumn of 2005—the tumors receded, and Mayberry, who had been unable to walk when the cancer infiltrated his brainstem and bones, was playing golf again. "I have no idea why Tarceva worked on him," says Kim. "We've given the same drug to patients in the same boat, and had no luck." But the luck ran out. The cancer came back, spreading to Mayberry's bones and liver. He lost his battle last summer.” Magazine Section This category looks at the voice, originality and design of a regular magazine section. Newsweek is nominated for its Periscope section. From “As Bad As It Gets, Until It Gets Worse” by writer Rod Nordland: “When you hear the brutal details about Zimbabwe, it's hard to imagine how it can get any worse without the government collapsing, or Robert Mugabe resigning. The hyperinflation, the millions going hungry, the canceled anti-AIDS programs, the 3 million (out of a total 11 million) who have fled the country. Then you go there, as I did in June, and the most striking thing is the normalcy amid all that hardship. There's the group of nine high-school graduates meeting with the American ambassador before they head to the United States for college; at night they hide from marauding enforcers looking for opposition voters. Young men with clubs chant as they trot along a road after dark, looking for victims, but a white woman pushing a child in a stroller crosses just in front of them, unmolested. Mugabe is an Anglophile, and so are many Zimbabweans. Everyone's talking about the forthcoming elections—which Mugabe was clearly going to steal (and did)—and the vanishing or murdered opposition politicians, but they also crowd around TVs to watch Britain's Andy Murray advance to the semifinals at Wimbledon, and debate loudly whether he's too obnoxious to deserve victory.”
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