61 篇
Sports Writing
Fixed Soccer Matches Cast Shadow Over World Cup (Declan Hill and Jere Longman, The New York Times)
Much digital and literal ink has been spilled around the World Cup this year and the continuing opera of FIFA’s corruption issues, but Hill and Longman masterfully weave the cinema of the off-field mayhem with raw investigative digging in this two-parter. Their reporting not only showed how vulnerable soccer was to match fixing ahead of the sport’s biggest competition, but how easy it was for officials involved to sully the field.
Jerry Football (Don Van Natta Jr., ESPN)死囚看到的最后一张脸
A sensational profile of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones by ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. It’s not just the access he gets—Van Natta finally corners Jones at an Atlanta bar in order to get an interview, and Jones then invites him to drink with him for the next three and a half hours—it’s how deeply he’s able to dig into the relationships in Jones’s professional and personal life, and what keeps Jones from the elusive next Super Bowl trophy.
Essay Writing
Dear Kate (Nancy Comiskey, Indianapolis Monthly)亲爱的凯特：带着悲伤生活
This essay by Nancy Comiskey about losing her daughter ran in the November issue of Indianapolis Monthly, and it just gutted me. It’s not just because I’m a parent, but because I also saw myself in the awkward reactions from Comiskey’s friends when they struggled with how to react to her grief and anger and desire to talk about her daughter—to defiantly not just be “over it.” You lose good friends who don’t know how to react, you gain some friends you never expected. You yearn. She describes this moment with her husband:
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6. Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family (Debie Thomas, River Teeth)
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Thomas shares her story about growing up in a conservative Indian family and reconciling the idea of arranged marriages with the Western world’s version of falling in love.
Essay Writing
How Much My Novel Cost Me (Emily Gould, Medium)打破密西西比河独木舟记录的史诗般的战斗
Emily Gould’s epic essay on Medium, “How Much My Novel Cost Me,” made me want her to write a book about the process of writing a book (or just write another book about anything—I’ll read it). No one tells the truth about money, about ambition and desire and the attendant disappointment like Gould does. Critics love to evoke her “gimlet eye,” which is too restrained a phrase for my taste—too abstract. Emily does not like flowery language. Emily DGAF. Her DGAF-ness challenges us all to be better, to look critically at what parts of us are operating just below the surface. You have to really be ready to read stuff from her, because you know there will be a few lies you’ve been telling yourself that you’ll have to let go of after reading whatever it is she’s aimed her gimlet eye / razor tongue / raised brow / man-eating heart on this time. Gird your delusions, various parts of Emily’s face are coming for you.
Sports Writing
The Ride of Their Lives (Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker)
It feels like a cop-out to choose something from the New Yorker, but Bilger completely teleports readers into the world of youth bull riding, a dangerous pastime that still draws child competitors—and critics. The contrast between the extremes of rodeos and coming of age today in rural America is completely absorbing and invokes classic questions about humans and their relationships with animals and high-risk athletic endeavors. The black and white photography by Jonno Rattman provides a stunning compliment to Bilger’s economical prose of broken bones and rugged dreams.
Essay Writing
The Art of Arrival (Rebecca Solnit, Orion)
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First published in Orion, this essay about friendship, environmental activism, and journeys has all the pleasures that make Rebecca Solnit a favorite: a landscape you want to inhabit; a demand you pay attention to what is disappearing and vulnerable; elegant, wise sentence progressions that reward rereading, like this one: “In a way, everything is traveling: the planet revolving daily, orbiting the sun annually, the blood traveling within our veins, the ideas traveling within our minds. Maybe being still is how you turn your attention from the logistics of your own trajectory to the passage of all the other beings and their shadows. To arrive, then, is not about immobility but something else, perhaps confidence, clarity, satisfaction, attention.” “The Art of Arrival” is also as tender a portrait as I read all year, both of Solnit’s tough, selfless, welcoming friend, Jo Anne Garrett, but also of Solnit herself, someone trying to find her way back to the best kind of journeys.
Business Writing
The Fall of the Sleaze King (Susan Berfield, Bloomberg Businessweek)
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Part-profile, part-dishy tick-tock, Berfield follows American Apparel founder Dov Charney as he scrambles to save his company from bankruptcy and to save his own job. The piece effectively evaluates American Apparel’s idiosyncratic place in our economy and culture—it is at once sleazy, but also, because of its commitment to American manufacturing, totally wholesome—and also captures one of the great characters in American business. You read her piece and think, “Big business can’t really be this nutty, can it?”
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2. The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty (Kiera Feldman, This Land Press)
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He was the heir to the televangelist’s empire, but Richard Roberts soon disappeared from the university that his father founded.
Best of 2014
Crime Reporting
Finding Marlowe (Daniel Miller, Los Angeles Times)寻找马洛：这个人是否启发了两位黑色小说标志性的虚构侦探？
Did Samuel B. Marlowe—Los Angeles’ first licensed black private detective—provide the inspiration for Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, two of noir’s most iconic characters? Louise Ransil, a former Hollywood executive who has spent years researching Marlowe certainly thinks so. But because this is Hollywood she also has a vested interest in being right—she’s peddling a script based on his life. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Daniel Miller digs deep into Marlowe’s life to try and verify her claims. What makes “Finding Marlowe” especially wonderful is Miller’s creative form-follows-function take on the subject matter: the piece itself is a mini-noir, relayed in rich, distinctly Chandleresque prose.
Essay Writing
The Case for Reparations (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)
This is where Ta-Nehisi Coates puts all the pieces together. An incredible history of slavery in America, in all its forms, and a stirring call for “a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal”:
Science Stories
The New Face of Richard Norris (Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ)
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A 22-year-old man named Richard Norris accidentally shoots himself in the face, and becomes one of the first people to successfully received a full face transplant with the help of a Baltimore reconstructive facial surgeon named Eduardo Rodriguez. Rodriguez “likens the medically complex procedure to the Apollo moon landing.” These details alone could make for a very fascinating story, but Jeanne Marie Laskas takes a different approach, telling us about Norris’s life after the procedure and asking the question of whether or not these kinds of “life-enhancing” high-risk surgeries are even worth it.
Best of 2014
Essay Writing
My Vassar College ID Makes Everything Okay (Kiese Laymon, Gawker)
Everything is far from okay, as this devastating, intimate essay about the impact of white racial supremacy makes clear. Had Laymon described only his own experience as a professor at an elite Northeastern college—of racial profiling by white cops, ignorant stereotyping by white students, open hostility from white professors—the essay would be gripping and infuriating. What makes the essay luminous is the way Laymon expands the scope of his critique to include a crescendo of moments experienced by his own minority students that will probably, terribly, never leave them: moments of fear, violence, and willful, consequential misunderstanding. “We are not OK. We are not OK,” Laymon writes, in a style that wavers between a lonely interior dialogue and incisive, withering commentary. But, he suggests, “We are so much better than the sick part of our nation that murders an unarmed black boy like a rabid dog, before prosecuting him for being a nigger.” Better, too, he says, than the “innocent” racism practiced at places like Vassar. This is essential reading.
Business Writing
Schooled (Dale Russakoff, New Yorker)
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This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive.
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8. ‘Mango, Mango!’ A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day (Douglas Haynes, Orion)
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Life—and critical decisions—inside the largest commercial center in Central America. “Fifty-three Walmart Supercenters would fit inside its roughly 225 acres.”
Science Stories
Arrested Development (Virginia Hughes, Mosaic)
“Science is often too slow, and life too fast.” This is an amazing story about girls with Syndrome X, who seem stuck in permanent infancy, and a scientist’s quixotic (and possibly futile) quest to study them. With her characteristic eye for detail and flair for description, Virginia Hughes offers a textbook example of covering uncertain science, with a protagonist who is fascinatingly painted but never glorified as an iconoclast.
Our 10 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year
9. David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact (Josh Roiland, Literary Journalism Studies)
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“David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category.”
Science Stories
My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her. (Veronique Greenwood, New York Times Magazine)
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This story by Veronique Greenwood, about how her great-great-aunt discovered the element francium, is a story that starts off as a tale of tragic heroism but emerges as something far more surprising: It is a salve for our tendency to romanticise self-sacrifice without considering what that sacrifice means. It’s all of that, plus assured writing, and perfect structure.
Our 10 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year
5. Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American? (Russell Cobb, This Land Press)
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“What do Bill Clinton, Miley Cyrus, Johnny Cash, and Elizabeth Warren all have in common? Answer: All of them have claimed to be part Cherokee, but none have been able to prove it.”
Sports Writing
Sea of Crises (Brian Phillips, Grantland)在政治混乱的夏天独自徒步旅行
It was a phenomenal year for sports journalism. If someone were picking a collection of pieces, there’s little doubt that Wright Thompson’s heroic work on the World Cup would win in a landslide. But for a single piece, there’s nothing I enjoyed quite like Brian Phillips’s beautifully subtle “Sea of Crises.”
Essay Writing
‘It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead’ (Diana Athill, The Guardian)
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Diana Athill is 96 and has written so much in her life, but this was the first I’ve read of any of it—and while that now feels like a grave mistake, this essay does seem like an oddly ideal starting point. It’s a miniature memoir of her mortality, from her childhood spent in the long shadow of the mourning-obsessed Victorians (“my mother never went to a funeral if she could help it … and my father vanished from the room if death was mentioned”), through her own brushes with death as a young and less-young adult, and on into the present, when the fickle pendulum of death-acceptance seems to be swinging back towards some saner middle ground. Grappling with death seems to have been a major project of Athill’s life—not one of those things that dawned on her in middle-age after however many decades of careless existence—which is what makes this such a gift for anyone who also first found themselves mucking around in the strangeness of human impermanence when they were very small.
Best of 2014
Science Stories
We Are Entering the Age of Alzheimer’s (Kent Russell, The New Republic)
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It’s a rare story that can issue an arresting call to arms without any actual exhortation. But this one is virtually all show, no tell, and the showing is done with refreshing, welcome, weirdness: it is part-memoir, part-reporting, and, most affectingly, part imagination. To bid us to reckon with Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease likely to touch virtually everyone in coming years, Kent Russell does his best to inhabit his own father’s failing mind. (“Calm. Remaining calm is the thing to do here, the old man concludes, glancing around the jetliner’s cabin.”) The channeling carries an authority earned from Russell’s reporting, the caregiving he performs, not always graciously, for his father, and simply from being his son. It is both harrowing and heart-wrenching. We learn here what is known about the biology of dementia—one longs for more research—and about the debate over how best to care for the expanding population of the afflicted. But most provocatively, Russell asks what a disease that can rob both patients and caregivers of a sense of self means for our very conception of identity. “If you can’t hold onto what makes you you, and if other people can deny it, anyway—what’s left? What was there to begin with?”
Sports Writing
How Self-Appointed Experts Rule the Autograph Industry (Jake Rossen, The Dallas Observer)
I’m a sucker for the off-field sports stories that point the lens to where readers wouldn’t even think to look. Anyone with an ounce of nostalgia for baseball cards, or even a dribble of the hoarder’s gene, would appreciate Rossen’s careful examination of the characters that make the seemingly humdrum third-party autograph authentication business into a fascinating underbelly. As Rossen says, the tale offers “a crash course in the new climate of memorabilia collecting, where letters of authenticity are more valued than the alleged pieces of history to which they’re tethered—even if that history was created yesterday.” You’ll never look at eBay the same again.
Essay Writing
Poor Teeth (Sarah Smarsh, Aeon)
When it comes to narrowing down end-of-the-year favorites, increasingly the only criteria that makes sense to me is, “How profoundly did this change the way I thought about its subject?” And reading this essay on class and poverty and dental care felt like following Sarah Smarsh around as she flipped on light switch after light switch, illuminating not only dark rooms I’d never thought to enter before, but also spaces I thought I knew well but which turned out to be all shadowed corners. It works so well, I think, because Smarsh seems to have sensed that this couldn’t just be a personal essay or a reported story or a piece of pop-culture criticism—to talk about Pennsatucky’s teeth is to talk about her grandmother’s teeth is to talk about her own teeth is to talk about America itself.
The Empathy Exams (Leslie Jamison, The Believer)
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I did not know who Leslie Jamison was before I read her essay “Empathy Exams” late one night at the pie shop that I use as an office when the library is closed. I was hungry, and it was dark out, and I was very pregnant and needed to get home. But I stayed in that uncomfortable chair and read it the whole way through, bursting with excitement. I G-chatted friends in all caps asking them if they’d read it. I Googled her, saw she had a book coming out, and floated home feeling like, “Yes, let’s do this. Let’s write some fucking personal essays, people!” I think Jamison, especially here, convinced or re-convinced a lot of people of the possibilities and the value of writing in the first person. Of course I think it’s horse shit that it takes a white lady with a veneer of intellectualism to make it okay, but I’ll take it where I can get it. Jamison, for her part, rises to the occasion. She certainly reminded me to hang onto the art of the thing, all the while going deeper, letting the problem of whatever you’re trying to do take up its own space.
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7. The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean (Suzanne Snider, Tokion)
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“It was the end of the story of John DeLorean as part of the American Dream—how a humble kid from Detroit could rise to the very top.”
3. Escape from Jonestown (Julia Scheeres)
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15-year-old Tommy Bogue was sent to a promising new church settlement in Guyana—run by a charismatic leader named Jim Jones.
Business Writing
The Dumbest Person in Your Building is Passing Out Keys to Your Front Door! (Jessica Pressler, New York Magazine)
Jessica Pressler’s New York Magazine story, “The Dumbest Person in Your Building is Passing Out Keys to Your Front Door!” is one of those features that does so many great things at once that I get jealous just thinking about it. It’s a sharp explanation of Airbnb’s business, a vivid portrait of the company’s battle with regulators, an essay about the smug attitudes of startup founders and the rough-and-tumble nature of public life in New York—and it’s all just so damn entertaining! Funny sentences like, “If there is one thing we know about the True Spirit of New York, it is that she is a moody bitch,” distracted me from how much ground Pressler was covering, and what rich and detailed reporting underpinned her words. Then I finished and realized I had a whole new appreciation for Airbnb, how its founders think, and how opposed interests battle it out in New York City. Really great stuff.
Science Stories
The End of Night (Rebecca Boyle, Aeon)没有黑暗的世界对健康的影响 – 丽贝卡·博伊尔 – Aeon
Boyle describes an environmental tragedy that most of us never think about: light pollution. Her essay is broad and rich, moving effortlessly from a Chilean desert to newly hatched sea turtles to circadian biology to cell phone screens. It’s an ambitious piece with many parts, but it doesn’t feel heavy. I think that’s partly because of Boyle’s light touch, her sentences that often surprise and delight:
Business Writing
A Toast Story (John Gravois, Pacific Standard)
A story about how toast became an artisanal food craze in San Francisco would, under most circumstances, be considered annoying and twee—which is exactly what John Gravois initially thought when he began reporting the origin story of the fancy toast trend for Pacific Standard, where he is an editor. But then he met Giulietta Carrelli, the 34-year-old proprietor of the Trouble Coffee & Coconut Club, who put toast on her menu long before the $4 version became a symbol of the “shallow, expensive new San Francisco.” Carrelli’s own story about her schizoaffective disorder and how Trouble became “a tool for keeping her alive” shifted this piece into something really stunning. It’s the most surprising story I’ve read all year.
Sports Writing
Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant? (Wells Tower, GQ)谁想射杀大象？
There’s no scoreboard, no clock, no winner, yet it’s impossible to argue that Wells Tower’s account of a single elephant hunt doesn’t play out with the drama and even the pathos of the best sports narratives, with the moral quicksand just a little closer to the surface. This piece could have gone wrong in so many ways, but by avoiding the traps so many manly-man writers spring on themselves—overwriting in a futile flail at getting at “what this all means,” or, conversely, underwriting in a sad Hemingway impersonation—Tower acts as a spiritually faithful stenographer to a moment he accepts he can’t possibly do justice.
Business Writing
No Exit (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Wired)
According to the hundreds of stories published about tech startups in 2014, this was supposed to be the year the bubble popped—if not literally, at least we’d all finally see that Silicon Valley was a sham, that true innovation was dead, and that massive income inequality had turned San Francisco into a homogeneous playground for brogrammers. But these were merely recycled caricatures from the last dotcom boom. And it was Gideon Lewis-Kraus who finally examined the tech industry with deep reporting, empathy, and a sense of humor. (“He’d been around long enough to make over a hundred grand a year, but not long enough to know that carbs were bad signaling.”) Rather than seeing startups as something to mock, he sees the psychological toll on young founders who are lured to town with tales of Zuckerbergian riches, then required to maintain unflagging optimism on the road to near-guaranteed failure:
Best of 2014
Sports Writing
The Undefeated Champions of Defeat City (Kathy Dobie, GQ)
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Kathy Dobie’s “The Undefeated Champions of Defeat City,” is an article about a youth baseball league in Camden, New Jersey. But of course, like any great sports story, that’s not really what it’s all about.
Best of 2014
Our 10 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year
10. The Honey Hunters (Michael Snyder, Lucky Peach)
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The most lucrative of all the forest’s products, and the most dangerous to gather.
Science Stories
How ‘Titanic’ Is Helping a South Pacific Tribe Understand Why Their Island Is Disappearing (Brooke Jarvis, Matter)
It’s hard not to keep reading a story that starts out with human bones brushing against the author’s legs as she wades along the shore of an island in the South Pacific. And Brooke Jarvis’s essay on the effect of climate change on people whose homes are actually sinking as a result of it gets only more intriguing as it goes on. The story is great for how it humanizes a topic often discussed in terms of dry data, but it’s even better for showing how the visit to Papua New Guinea affects Jarvis, a veteran climate reporter, herself. “No amount of climate journalism prepares you to explain the greenhouse effect to people fleeing their sinking homes,” she tweeted when the story came out. I won’t spoil it by revealing the details. You will want to read to the end.
DIY Diagnosis (Ed Yong, Mosaic)
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This is the story of a hero—a woman who’s diagnosed with two rare genetic diseases and becomes tech pioneer. I know what you’re thinking: another genetic disease story? But this one is far more plotty and exciting than most. I love how Yong manages to make the genetics come alive, and he did that with meticulous reporting about his hippie athlete-turned-scientist protagonist. We learn the science by following how she learned it, and get invested in it because we’re invested in her.
Business Writing
The Empire Reboots (Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair)
How could a company that makes $23 billion in a year be in danger? Bethany McLean explains how in “The Empire Reboots,” a clear-eyed analysis of Microsoft that appeared in Vanity Fair’s November issue. I loved how this story paired a sophisticated explanation of Microsoft’s business with in-depth reporting about the personal interplay among Bill Gates, former CEO Steve Ballmer, and newly appointed chief Satya Nadella. Like most of my favorite business writing, the piece became a relationship story. McLean shows how the falling out between lifelong friends Gates and Ballmer has influenced Microsoft’s strategy and its decision to appoint Nadella. As a result, I left the story feeling like I had an insider’s knowledge of the tech giant and its leadership, and I’m now fascinated to see what they try next.
Crime Reporting
By Noon They’d Both Be In Heaven (Hanna Rosin, New York Magazine)杰夫·兰德里推动恢复处决的人力成本 - Bolts
Kelli Stapleton is a Michigan mom who admitted to a particularly heinous crime: trying to kill her 14-year-old autistic daughter, Issy, via carbon monoxide poisoning. In a lesser journalist’s hands, she could have ended up a caricature, but Rosin tells her story solely in shades of gray. One minute your heart breaks for Kelli, and the next you fume at her apparent selfishness. Kelli spent years on an exhausting form of therapy for her daughter in hopes of coaxing out “the Isabelle that was in there.” Instead, Issy grew into a sometimes-violent teenager who repeatedly knocked Kelli unconscious. Kelli blogged about her struggles, ostensibly to raise awareness, but her look-at-me tone convinced her husband’s family she was more interested in fame than mothering. I’ve read the story several times, and I still don’t know what to make of Kelli. But I can’t stop thinking about her.
Sports Writing
Together We Make Football (Louisa Thomas, Grantland)
It’s been a bad year for football: Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, the lingering Jameis Winston saga. And a bad year for football means a big year for think pieces about violence and football—I couldn’t tell you how many of those I read this year. But one of them stood out. In “Together We Make Football,” Louisa Thomas reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between the NFL, masculinity, violence, and women. She takes her time, building a case slowly and methodically, before driving home her point: that violence is inherent to, and integral to, the NFL. That although the vast majority of football players don’t beat their wives, there may be no way to separate the bad violence—the off-field violence—from the on-field violence that we love. Here’s Thomas:
Crime Reporting
Blood in the Sand (Matthew Power, Outside)
[Editor’s Note: Consider donating to NYU’s Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, which was created to remember Power and support promising new writers to bring forward an unreported story of significance.] · 官方页
“Blood in the Sand,” a murder-tale-plus-foreign-dispatch by Matt Power, which ran this past January in Outside magazine, reads like a challenge to true-crime writers tempted by the genre’s easy conventions: Don’t be lazy. The story investigates the murder of Jairo Mora Sandoval, a 26-year-old Costa Rican sea turtle conservationist who was beaten and asphyxiated last year, apparently at the hands of roving turtle-egg poachers. But Power doesn’t stop at the obvious tick-tock reconstruction of the crime. As a result, the story offers a useful model for how to treat a brutal murder not just as an object of meticulous, obsessive inquiry—the way many argue, say, the Serial podcast does—but also as an entry point into tangled social issues we’d otherwise ignore: the effects of profiteering on an endangered species, most notably, and the high-stakes persecution of those who defend said species from extinction. (This persecution occurs not just at the hands of organized crime, but also at the hands of government and business interests worried about scaring off tourism dollars. Power pursues both fearlessly).
Essay Writing
52 Blue (Leslie Jamison, Slate)
Everyone who loves essays is talking about Leslie Jamison’s brilliant The Empathy Exams, published this year by Graywolf Press. I trust that someone else will choose the powerful title essay, also featured on Longreads this year, as a favorite. But I like teasers, too, and reading about the way we try to inhabit the minds of animals, so I’ll pick this Atavist single, excerpted in Slate, which introduces you to the human obsession with a blue whale singing at a frequency beyond communication with his species. Of course once you sample the excerpt you’ll need to read the whole essay—a nineteen-part story as riveting as a good novel.
Best of 2014
Crime Reporting
The Dead Zoo Gang (Charles Homans, The Atavist)
This tale opens with a heist at a university in Portugal; the thieves ignore the stuffed peacock and lion and manatees in a natural-history collection and run off with two rhinoceros horns. Frankly, the phrase “rhinoceros horns” was all I needed to keep reading, but Homans’ deep dive into international horn trafficking grows more twisty and bizarre by the chapter. Authorities blame a handful of itinerant, wealthy Irish families known as the Rathkeale Rovers. (After rhino heads belonging to Ireland’s National Museum are stolen, the bandits earn a second nickname: the Dead Zoo Gang.) In the course of the story, we careen through Vietnam, Colorado, the Hague and several European countries, and learn about poaching, tarmacking (it’s a thing) and class warfare in rural Ireland. It’s one hell of a romp, the literary equivalent of racing through a fun house.
Our 10 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year
1. A Birth Story (Meaghan O’Connell)
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Meaghan O’Connell had a perfect pregnancy and the perfect birth plan—and then she went into labor.
Science Stories
The Aftershocks (David Wolman, Matter)“你不会取代我们”的法国起源
When a catastrophic earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy killed thousands of people, seven of Italy’s top scientists were convicted of manslaughter for failing to communicate the risks to the populace. David Wolman covers the tragedy, the trial, and what this means about our ability to predict—and discuss—the unpredictable.
Sports Writing
Rice Case: Purposeful Misdirection by Team, Scant Investigation by NFL (Don Van Natta Jr. and Kevin Van Valkenburg, ESPN)
Nothing captured the sports world’s attention this year quite like the Ray Rice case. Anyone who saw the gruesome video inside the elevator on TMZ was horrified. That lead to a burning desire for more information. What was the NFL’s role in the case? Who saw the tape and who didn’t? I was in England at the time the tape was released and even there I was asked similar questions over and over. The people, the world over, wanted answers.
Crime Reporting
Gone Girls (Mike Kessler, Los Angeles magazine)“你不会取代我们”的法国起源
Disturbingly (and rivetingly) well-told from six points of view, this piece pulls back the curtain on something most of us don’t want to believe happens here in the First World: the pimping out of children, most of them black or brown, all of them marginalized. “The younger the child, the higher the cost,” explains the story, which is devastating in its portrayal of how poor children are especially vulnerable to being exploited.
Sports Writing
For Jared Remy, Leniency Was the Rule Until One Lethal Night (Eric Moskowitz, Boston Globe)
Jared Remy, son of the Red Sox legend, murdered his girlfriend after a lifetime of second, third, and 14th chances. The Globe’s dive into Remy’s troubled past is infuriating because it never makes the outcome seem inevitable. Were this not a sports story, it might still be the most immaculately reported crime story of the year—but, with overtones of Penn State and FSU, there lurks the sense that Remy was free to do what he did only because of the deference of a sports-crazed city.
Crime Reporting
The Craigslist Killers (Devin Friedman, GQ)
I’ll read anything Devin Friedman writes. He’s the master of so many kinds of long form, from genre-defying celebrity profiles (read him on Jeff Bridges) to sociological analyses that will make you squirm (he once spent 24 hours in a Las Vegas “superclub,” with hilarious and revolting results). This piece, though, about two guys who used a Craigslist ad to lure a certain kind of downtrodden American man into their web of horror, is anything but funny. More than a murder story, it’s an examination of human nature.
Our 10 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year
4. For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S. (Belle Boggs, The New New South)
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“I never figured out why they did that to me.” The story of a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children.
Science Stories
Seeds of Doubt (Michael Specter, The New Yorker)
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If you’re a journalist who wants to speak truth to power, Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist who has been compared to Mother Teresa, called the “Gandhi of grain,’’ and whose opposition to genetically modified crops serves as an inspiration to food activists worldwide might not be the most obvious choice. Yet as Michael Specter shows in this devastating profile, Shiva’s influence and popularity have been built on positions that repeatedly fly in the face of facts, and that stand to have serious consequences for world hunger. I loved this piece particularly because Shiva’s claims are so routinely and sincerely invoked by the anti-GMO activists I have written about: it is precisely because of her reputation as a fierce champion for food justice that the she poses such a danger. Specter handles this by taking each claim seriously and methodically dismantling it. In doing so, he helps to facilitate a more rational debate on the use of biotechnology in agriculture. And more importantly, Shiva’s unraveling suggests that a simple standard—what is the evidence?—be applied to all claims, no matter how seemingly righteous, regarding the science and technology that increasingly shape how we live.
Business Writing
The Visible Man (J.J. McCorvey, Fast Company)特里斯坦·沃克：看得见的人
I’m on contract at Fast Company and so I’m may be biased, but this piece represents, in my mind, the best of what a business profile can be. McCorvey gives us an portrait of Tristan Walker, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who happens to be black, and weaves in critique of racism in Silicon Valley and by extension racism in American society. A lot of folks have tried to get at Silicon Valley’s diversity problem (including me). This is the best take I’ve read yet; it’s intimate and personal and important.
Science Stories
The Itch Nobody Can Scratch (Will Storr, Matter)
· 官方页
I’ve thought about this story (an excerpt from Storr’s book, The Unpersuadables) many, many times since reading it. It’s superficially about Morgellons, a disease in which people think that they’re infected with bugs or fibers. But it’s really about the nature of disease and diagnosis, evidence and belief. It’s creepy, fascinating, and profound. The best part about it is the way Storr describes these patients and their delusions. It would be easy to make them seem stupid or crazy or worse. But Storr’s writing creates empathy and understanding. The not-insignificant downside of this piece: it makes you feel itchy.
Crime Reporting
The Hunt for El Chapo (Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker)
I thought that writing on Mexico’s drug war couldn’t get much more engaging than Patrick Radden Keefe’s treatment of the Sinaloa cartel in The New York Times magazine several years ago. In that piece, “Cocaine Incorporated,” Keefe examined the outsized business success of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, whose leaders—despite the “vaudevillian goofiness” of their nicknames, a la “Fatty” and “Shorty”—constitute some of the world’s richest, savviest corporate figures. Keefe’s secret, simple as it sounds, was taking narco-moguls seriously as intellects, inventers, and transnational entrepreneurs.
Best of 2014
Sports Writing
Dropped (Jason Fagone, Grantland)
Here’s the Holy Grail of sports writing, as I see it: Find an athlete, or a team, or a game, whose story resonates beyond the narrow world of a given sport. Find a story that isn’t just enjoyable to read, and doesn’t just teach us something about that particular sport, but that teaches us something about the world and ourselves. It’s a tall order, and sports writing is full of over-reaches, stories whose writers stretched too far hoping to grasp that greater meaning.