This year's selection includes William Langewiesche's probing investigation in Vanity Fair of the slaughter of twenty-four Iraqis in Haditha; C. J. Chivers's chilling account in Esquire of the 2004 hostage crisis in Beslan, which killed 331 people, 186 of them children; Susan Casey's revelation in Best Life of a virtually unknown, Texas-sized garbage dump resting at the bottom of the Pacific ocean; and Andrew Corsello's harrowing portrait in GQ of Robert Mugabe's mad rule and two men-a white farmer and a fiery black priest-who strive for forgiveness instead of hate.

The collection also includes Vanessa Grigoriadis's hilarious portrait of fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld in New York Magazine; Christopher Hitchens's profile of survivors of Agent Orange in Vanity Fair; Sandra Tsing Loh's coverage of the stay-at-home-mommy debate in the Atlantic Monthly; Paul Theroux's thoughts on the dangers of anthropomorphism and our misconceptions about birds in the Smithsonian; Janet Reitman's unraveling of the mysteries of Scientology in Rolling Stone; and the work of nine other exceptional writers.