The most powerful woman in the world may also be the most effective leader in the world. We kick off the second volley of the year’s best magazine essays by giving a Sidney Award to George Packer’s “The Quiet German,” a superb profile of Angela Merkel, which appeared in The New Yorker. (For Part 1 of the Sidney Awards, click here.)

Packer traces the psychological development of this slow, steady, but relentless political operator. As a girl, Packer writes, “Angela was physically clumsy — she later called herself ‘a little movement idiot.’ At the age of five, she could barely walk downhill without falling. ‘What a normal person knows automatically I had to first figure out mentally, followed by exhausting exercise,’ she has said.”

She also grew up in East Germany, under Communist rule, where the truth could not be shouted; it had to be whispered. Once the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was unified, this kind of Ossi might have a certain profile: As one of Packer’s sources tells him, “The whisperer might find it easier to learn in this new life, to wait and see, and not just burst out at once — to think things over before speaking. The whisperer thinks, How can I say this without damaging myself?”

She also had the advantages of a scientific background: “Trained to see the invisible world in terms of particles and waves, Merkel learned to approach problems methodically, drawing comparisons, running scenarios, weighing risks, anticipating reactions, and then, even after making a decision, letting it sit for a while before acting. She once told a story from her childhood of standing on a diving board for the full hour of a swimming lesson until, at the bell, she finally jumped.”