For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic has won the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards.
Below is a list of the stories that received recognition from the American Society of Magazine Editors:
Winner: Profile Writing
“Inside the Meltdown at CNN”
Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic
By Tim Alberta
CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism.

As spring takes hold, the days arrive with a freshness that makes people want to linger outside; the balmy days almost feel wasted indoors. While you’re taking in the warm air, you might as well also be reading. Enjoying a book at a park, a beach, or an open-air café encourages a particular leisurely frame of mind. It allows a reader to let their thoughts wander, reflecting on matters that for once aren’t workaday or practical.

When Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle, the reaction was different from what he’d imagined. He had hoped to expose the deplorable working conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, but most readers, instead of championing the workers, came away flinching at the depictions of all the unsanitary ways meat was produced. Of his readers’ response, Upton famously said, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

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Within the next couple of decades, a new generation of contraceptives could hit the American market. One, a pill that blocks certain cells from accessing vitamin A, might be able to limit fertility without flooding the body with hormones; another is an injection that temporarily blocks up the reproductive plumbing.

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious category in the annual honors from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

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My personal foray into college-basketball fandom comes at a transformational time for the sport, as players accept major promotional deals and gambling reshapes the economics of the game.

Around the year 1300, the Huhugam great chief Siwani ruled over a mighty city near what is now Phoenix, Arizona. His domain included adobe-and-stone pyramids that towered several stories above the desert; an irrigation system that watered 15,000 acres of crops; and a large castle. The O’odham descendants of the Huhugam tell in their oral history that Siwani “reaped very large harvests with his two servants, the Wind and the Storm-cloud.

Seven people working for a humanitarian aid group led by the chef José Andrés were killed in an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip today. The strike is a black mark for the Israel Defense Forces, and likely to turn world opinion further against the Gaza campaign. But more than its geopolitical significance, the strike is a horrifying moment on a human level. Innocent people, doing good work to feed a starving population, have died for no reason at all.