In his characteristically freewheeling intro, novelist David Foster Wallace describes his duties as editor of this annual installment of The Best American Essays. "My job," he writes, "is to choose the twenty-odd so-called Best from roughly 100 finalists the series editor sends me. Mr. Atwan, though, has distilled these finalists from a vast pool of '06 nonfiction—every issue of hundreds of periodicals, plus submissions from his network of contacts all over the U.S.—meaning that he's really the one doing the full-time reading that you and I can't do." Knowing that, you and I can enjoy our good fortune and settle back to enjoy another year of this peerless anthology.