Best American Magazine Writing 2007

The Half King Presents Finalists and Winners of the
World’s Most Prestigious Magazine Awards, the ASMEs.

Andrew Corsello “The Other Side of Hate”

Andrew Corsello offers a harrowing portrait of a country, Zimbabwe, torn apart by a madman, and of two men—a white farmer and a fiery black priest—who resist the hatred around them. Transformed by their faith, they overcome their own prejudices and achieve a forgiveness that is a model of goodness.

Andrew’s first feature for the GQ, which he joined as a correspondent in 1995, “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a chronicle of his near death by liver failure, for which he was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Also nominate were his essay “The Vulgarian in the Choir Loft,” which was included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2004 (HarperCollins), and his feature “The Wronged Man,” the story of a man wrongfully convicted of raping a child and exonerated by DNA evidence twenty-two years later. Two of his GQ articles have been optioned for motion pictures. Before coming to GQ, Corsello was a staff writer for three years at Philadelphia magazine. His last story there, “Murky Waters,” won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Best Magazine Story.

Janet Reitman “Inside Scientology”

Through a nine-month investigation highlighted by interviews with both embittered former Scientologists and current high- ranking church members, Janet Reitman provides a balanced—if ultimately damning—look at an organization that not only has never before opened its doors to the press but has typically used intimidation and coercion to keep its practices hidden from scrutiny, yielding a rare, uncensored view into one of the world’s most secretive faiths.

Janet is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Her previous work includes coverage of the wars in Sudan and Sierra Leone, the crisis in Zimbabwe, and the Iraq war, which she reported on extensively for Rolling Stone in 2004. She has written for GQ, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, ESPN the Magazine, and Marie Claire, among other publications, and is currently working on a book.

Bruno Maddox “Blinded by Science: When First We Clicked”

With humor and a keen sense of history, Bruno Maddox tackles the old, the new, and the odd in science and technology. His gracefully written “Blinded by Science” columns provoke and educate, dislocating preconceptions and helping readers make sense of challenging ideas even while making them laugh out loud.

Bruno has enjoyed a long and tangential relationship with the world of science. As the son of former Nature editor Sir John Maddox, young Bruno sat through dinners with such éminences grises as James Watson and Sir Fred Hoyle and once accepted the charges on a collect call from a hysterical Russian scientist who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. Maddox retreated to the humanities during his school days in London and eventually fled to New York to edit Spy magazine and write a critically acclaimed novel, My Little Blue Dress. He currently writes Discover magazine’s monthly humor column, “Blinded by Science.”

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