121 篇
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Jumpin’ Joe</span>
Robert Silverman · Victory Journal · 官方页
Much of sports discourse this year has centered on Colin Kaepernick. Thousands of words and hours of conversation have been unspooled on the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, his stance on athletes’ rights, and why the NFL has seemingly blacklisted the QB who nearly won a Super Bowl four years ago. But to understand the present, it helps to look to the past, and Silverman’s profile of Jumpin’ Joe Caldwell, a star forward with the ABA in the 1970s, is timely and worth highlighting. Caldwell was vice president of the league’s players union, and after a contentious episode with the management of the St. Louis Spirits, who believed Caldwell convinced Marvin Barnes, the team’s best player, to jettison to the NBA, Caldwell couldn’t land another contract in either league. Caldwell’s story is truly one of the first in which athletes sought the control they deserved from their employer, and though Silverman doesn’t overtly connect Caldwell’s situation to Kaepernick’s, the parallels are more than evident.
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Most Hated Poet in Portland</span>
A story is rarely an objective narrative, readers bring something to it that shapes our experience. Laura Yan's story found me sleep-deprived from raising an infant, and my outlook on life darkened by the toxic newsfeed. Yan tells the story of Collin Andrew Yost, a white, tattooed, and bearded poet who posts his poems on Instagram in a typeset font decorated with cigarettes. This is a story of how artists use social media to promote ourselves, and how the internet provides enough anonymity to encourage trolling and hostility toward people we don't like.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Why We Must Believe Women: My Family’s Legacy of Violence and Murder</span>弹射器|弹射器|为什么我们必须相信女性：我家族的遗产
This piece by Chelsea Bieker takes all of the swirling pain and fear and rage of the #MeToo moment and brings it back down to earth into one family's heartbreaking story, which was marred, over and over, by male violence, and by society's refusal to believe it.
Food Writing
Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks亲爱的橄榄园，永不改变
I love all the writing Eater has been publishing about the lives of chain restaurants, places designed to be the same all over (or carefully calibrated by a central committee to flick at local tastes) that still end up being the sites for personal experiences. But Helen’s Rosner’s essay on Olive Garden is particularly great. It reminds me of George Orwell’s description of his perfect pub in his essay “The Moon Under Water.” Rosner has an ideal “personal Olive Garden,” but she’s also a student of Olive Gardens, and therefore of America. And what is not to love about an essay about cheap Italian food that begins with a long lede about Gauguin?
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Age of Rudeness</span>
Last February feels like centuries ago. There were still so many terrible things for us to endure in a year that had just started. Yet 10 months and 10,000 news cycles later, Rachel Cusk’s essay remains fresh and unsettling, like a prophecy in which the worst parts may or may not have already come true. Cusk looks at airport agents and shop assistants, Sophocles and Jesus, and yes, Trump makes an appearance too. Through this tangle of anecdotes, she channels something many of us have been feeling yet have failed to articulate: The sense that all previous protocols of basic social decency are broken, and that we’re still not sure how to handle the shards.
Sports Writing
A Team of Their Own送货工人的反抗
Luther’s feature on an all-girls baseball team is a great read — but the reaction to the story was just as important. To the surprise of nobody in sports media, it included flurries of tweets demanding the young women go back to softball, or hell, all the way back to the kitchen. Thankfully that nonsense isn’t stopping girls travel baseball, but it’s a reminder why stories like this need to be told.
Is This the NFL’s First Female Player?
I’m a sucker for high school sports stories, but Anderson’s examination of Becca Longo isn’t just a showcase of a plucky talent, it also challenges long-held assumptions about the league’s recruitment pipeline. Longo is the first woman to earn a football scholarship to a Division I or Division II school, and Anderson offers a fascinating window into the training and psyche required to become be an ace-level kicker. In lesser hands, the story could have been mawkish or puffy, but Anderson’s prose is sharp, layered, and will likely be reread when we see Longo in the Super Bowl one day.
Crime Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Unusual Suspect: The Rise and Fall of Owen Hanson, Former USC Athlete and Alleged Drug Kingpin</span>
I like this piece because it tells the rollicking story of a USC football player turned international drug kingpin, complete with a strange cast of characters (just wait until R.J. Cipriani shows up.) It also captures something universal: that pretty much anyone is capable of turning to the dark side.
Sports Writing
The Search For Aaron Rodgers
Mina Kimes · ESPN Magazine · 官方页
Every living sportswriter wanted a good Aaron Rodgers story. I got pitches for at least three during my time at Esquire, always with a long list of caveats about the topics his reps considered out of bounds (the most interesting ones, of course). So when he finally agreed to a profile without restrictions, and insisted the interview be conducted in the writer's home, it should have been a recipe for the type of bland mush that makes up so many athlete profiles. Except the writer was Mina Kimes, so the story was filled with so much insight that I had to read it twice to catch all the perfect, tiny details. After describing Rodgers examining her bookshelf and her berries, she turns the odd circumstances to her advantage in a single line: “As he studies his surroundings, it occurs to me that when I write about this, I'll have to describe my things instead of his things, and I realize that's probably why we're here.” She deftly avoids every cliche about one of the most cliche-saddled dudes in sports, making us understand far more than just what makes Aaron Rodgers tick.
Investigative Reporting
Public-Radio Icon John Hockenberry Accused of Harassing Female Colleagues
When Suki Kim appeared as a guest on WNYC's The Takeaway, she spent eight minutes in discussion with the host, John Hockenberry. Afterward, he began to email her, “to brainstorm” and kept trying to get in touch for dates, even though she stopped returning his emails. Kim would eventually report her experience to the station's HR, and after the Weinstein reporting broke, she began to contact producers who had worked with Hockenberry to see if they had similar experiences.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Detective of Northern Oddities</span>
(Christopher Solomon · Outside · 官方页
As someone who earns her living seated indoors, laptop in hand, I’m endlessly curious about people whose jobs are very different from mine. At Outside, Christopher Solomon profiles Kathy Burek, a veterinary pathologist who examines unusual deaths in the Alaskan animal kingdom. Elbow deep in bodily fluids, Burek works on everything from sea otters to polar bears, and her necropsies are revealing stunning evidence of climate change in the North that will soon find its way South. The fascinating science in Solomon’s beautiful prose made this a satisfying read.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Rise of the Valkyries </span>
Seyward Darby · Harper’s · 官方页
The public face of the alt-right has been overwhelmingly male, trading in the masculine for its displays of power. But the women of the alt-right have been hard at work in their own way, gathering power in a system that would be considered deeply misogynist by most. Darby confronts these women head on, but also considers what kinds of confrontation are useful when reporting on these kinds of hate groups. This is a fascinating portrait of a subversion of femininity and power that stretches back to the origins of the KKK, where women were a driving influence in the spread of white supremacy.
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
Something Is Wrong on The Internet
James Bridle · Medium · 官方页
I discovered Maheshwari's story through James Bridle's meditation on it in his wonderfully titled Medium essay “Something is Wrong on the Internet.” His meandering, hand-wringing post linked a number of articles on the topic of disturbing videos targeted at kids and captured the anxiety many of us feel about an attention-weaponized internet being pointed at young, developing minds.
Crime Reporting
The Tragic Story of a Texas Teen and the Marines Who Killed Him for No Reason
Sarah MarshallContributor to Buzzfeed, The New Republic, and the Life of the Law podcast.
Best of 2017
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Thousands of Criminal Cases in New York Relied on Disputed DNA Testing Techniques </span>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？
Kirchner’s investigation shows that not all DNA evidence is equal, incisively illustrating the challenges of using forensic technology for prosecution. It demonstrates how these closed technologies are leveraged against defendants who have no way to challenge the accusations being made using their DNA. It's also a fantastic example of how journalism can hold governments accountable for their uses of closed technologies: Kirchner's reporting led to the release of the source code for New York City’s Forensic Statistical Tool.
Best of 2017
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Julian Eastman’s Guerrilla Minimalism</span>朱利叶斯·伊士曼的游击极简主义
How does one write about culture when culture seems to be ending? The question plagued 2017, when each day brought its own small apocalypse. What I appreciated most this year was cultural criticism that turned into acts of construction rather than deconstruction, helping us to better understand our collective predicament. A line from John Kelsey's “Halftime Vibes” in Texte zur Kunst stuck in my head: “Strange new forms are being tested every minute as news and advertising metabolize the very image of global precarity.” (Evan Osnos's New Yorker feature “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” uncovered some of the aesthetics of this forever-incipient apocalypse.)
Profile Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Gerhard Steidl is Making Books an Art Form </span>
I goddamn love a profile, and I've spent the past twelve months happily drowning in some magnificent specimens. There were elevations of under-appreciated celebrities (Reggie Ugwu on transgender soul icon Jackie Shane for The New York Times), pull-back-the-curtains on unknowns with staggering influence (Peter Maass on Steve Bannon deputy Julia Hahn for The Intercept), and clever structural riffs on the tired old cover-star puff piece (Anna Peele’s inspired oral history of Jeff Goldblum for GQ).
Sports Writing
In Jerry Jones v. Roger Goodell, NFL Owners Should Choose Sides Wisely
Sally Jenkins · Washington Post · 官方页
Sally Jenkins is America’s best sports columnist. Her analysis of the modern-day NFL is whip-smart, unsparing, and often prescient. This piece, about the civil war between Jerry Jones and Roger Goodell, perfectly captures what the feud means for the embattled commissioner and his embattled league.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay</span>
Women writers of color aren’t given enough opportunities, and too often when they are, the opportunity is limited. They’re asked, again and again, to write about aspects of their identity, and are rarely afforded chances to write about anything else. Writing in the second person, Porochista Khakpour helps the reader to imagine being an artist hemmed in by such limitations. She takes us through the arc of her career thus far: from deciding early on that she didn't want to “write what you know,” as a mentor suggested; to becoming the Iranian-American essayist of choice every time certain publications wanted an opinion from that particular demographic; to deciding she was no longer willing to be limited in that way, but feeling conflicted nonetheless. As a fan of Kahkpour’s writing, I certainly hope this isn't her last essay but instead marks the beginning of a new chapter in which she feels free to write about whatever she chooses.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Painful Truth About Teeth</span>
Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan · The Washington Post · 官方页
Local Reporting
Dignity In Danger
In February, the Staten Island Advance published a multimedia package focused on the borough's developmentally-disabled adults. “Dignity in Danger” is a well-reported piece of advocacy journalism, featuring the stories of those struggling, as well as the response of the city and state. It was compassionate journalism that held officials accountable for their lack of support.
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
The Mother of All Swipes
Marie Hicks · Logic Magazine · 官方页
Hicks busts up the prevailing folklore that attributes the origins of computerized dating to Operation Match — the brainchild of a troika of Harvard undergrads in the 1960s. Running parallel is the story of Joan Ball, working-class woman from East London who launched her punch card-driven Eros Friendship Bureau close to a year before the technology appeared in the US. It's an awesome lens for thinking about how the aspirations that lead to computational power have been used as a salve to loneliness.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">So What If We’re Doomed?</span>
Brian Calvert · High Country News · 官方页
Large sections of Calvert’s lushly written, deeply personal essay thinking through the ecocide may not seem like science writing, and if that bugs you I can only encourage you to keep going. A non-exhaustive list of the topics covered includes the poet Robinson Jeffers, the value of natural beauty, Calvert’s family history in both the 20th and 17th centuries, a retreat in the Spanish Pyrenees, and photographic art documenting the trauma climate scientists endure. At the outset it may seem as if Calvert is suggesting that the right response to climate science is a kind of quietism, but the way in which he grapples with what we as a species have done to this planet is far more complex.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How Eclipse Chasers Are Putting a Small Kentucky Town on the Map</span>
Anyone willing to write about syzygy in the shadow of Annie Dillard’s classic 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” has balls for miles. Reilly’s decision to focus on the logistics faced by tiny towns preparing to be inundated by thousands of eclipse watchers was inspired. It brilliantly conveyed the shared enthusiasms that celestial events animate in us. Between these two essays, I’m convinced a total eclipse would be a psychic event so overwhelming I might not survive it. I’ve got 2037 in Antarctica on my bucket list — if it's still there in twenty years.
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Two Voices of Whitney Houston </span>
Doreen St. Félix's review essay on the speech patterns of the Greatest American Celebrity thrilled me. She traces the practiced debutante Whitney, the “Bobby!”-screeching Whitney, the angelic singing voice. Together, St. Félix shows, these voices sing a polyphonous (and discordantly raced) public identity. Part of the joy of this piece is its formalism. St Félix takes one cultural artifact — the documentary Can I Be Me? — and one aspect of Whitney — the voice — and does something very unexpected with both. The observations (“Her evident pain made her eccentric”) build gradually until St Félix hits an earned, solid summary: “Houston code-switched: between black vernacular and white English, palatable pop and searching R. & B., between producer’s plaything and autonomous composer, between haughty grace and extreme vulnerability, between alertness and breakdowns—and she did so tremendously, tragically.” A perfect piece.
Crime Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof</span>
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah intended to report on the lives of the nine people Roof killed at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. But as the trial dragged on, she couldn't get Roof out of her head. Reading this now, it is impossible to put any distance between Roof, the white supremacist groups on the march in American cities this year, and the reporting that sometimes made spectacles of their violence. Without it appearing exceptional or unimaginable, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah tells Roof's story through the racist ideas of those who said they never even took Roof seriously.
Local Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Overlooked</span>
Cary Aspinwall · The Dallas Morning News · 官方页
Praise for journalism has a standard repertoire. The old chestnuts include “shine a light” and “give voice to the voiceless.” Cary Aspinwall’s investigation for The Dallas Morning News truly earned such appraisal. Aspinwall looked where no one else was looking and showed her readers the human face of a problem that wasn’t being considered. Her investigation revealed that more mothers are going to jail in Texas, and that no one pays attention to what happens to their children when they do.
Crime Reporting
Name of the Father
Tim Struby · Victory Journal · 官方页
Jarrod Tillinghast was one of the top boxers in the Northeast, launching left-handed cannons that decimated other would-be contenders in the 156-pound division. But Tillinghast wasn’t just known in Providence or Boston for his skill on the canvas — he was also the son of Jerry Tillinghast, a notorious enforcer for mob boss Raymond Patriarca and a suspect in a handful of murders. Boxing was supposed to be the younger Tillinghast's out, and Struby masterfully weaves the drama of a life caught between the streets, the ring, and his father’s shadow.
Sports Writing
Pushing the Limit
Sexual misconduct scandals have recently ousted powerful men in Hollywood, media, and politics, but Starr’s story reminds us there has long been a legacy of sex abuse in youth athletics, where the “extreme power imbalance between coach and athlete” has created conditions where “secrets are kept” and “perpetrators are protected.” Institutions like the U.S. Olympic Committee say it’s impossible to investigate all claims of misconduct due to the number of private club teams and gyms that oversee youth sports. (A coach fired for misconduct at one gym can resurface at a new gym, re-starting the cycle of abuse.)
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Danger of President Pence</span>十三年前，NFL 接球手 Rae - 09.17.12 - SI Vault
A classic piece of deep reporting, including insightful, damning stuff from Pence's relatives, plus a useful pocket history of the big money conservative world that spawned the vice president, and how he opportunistically became a Koch brothers tool when his political career was hitting a dead end.
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bodega Isn’t Just Bad Branding, It’s Bad Business</span>
Silicon Valley has a tendency to invent things that already exist: blenders, buses, the snack machine. Helen Rosner is sick of it. Not simply because of the hubris and waste, though there’s plenty of that, but because it exemplifies the tech industry’s obsession with the “last hundred feet.” It’s a failure not of imagination, but of logistics.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Selfie Monkey Goes to the Ninth Circuit</span>
Humor never really felt like an option in such a serious year, but Jeong’s simian legal saga reminded me that humor shouldn't be so disposable. Her story isn't really about the monkey; it's about who can rightfully be considered the “next friend” of an Internet-famous crested macaque. It's about whether or not we can fight the good fight and giggle our way through it and still make a case for justice when it really matters. Bonkers things happened in 2017 — absurd, hilarious things — and not all of them were life-threatening or world-ending or rights-violating. (Unless monkeys have standing to sue under the Copyright Act. Then yeah, some violations went down.)
Sports Writing
Colin Kaepernick Is Called A Distraction, But From What?
Bomani Jones · The Undefeated · 官方页
After Jones’s piece was published in March, thousands of words would be parsed about Kaepernick’s protest, the reaction to the protest, the players who joined in, and Kaepernick’s sudden inability to find a job. Some pieces are long, some pieces are very long, but none cut to the heart of the matter like this piece did. Every sentence is a dagger in the insidious heart of the favorite wiggle word of NFL leadership — distraction — and why its use to avoid Kaepernick is a load of crap. “Stop hiding behind code,” Jones tells NFL owners. It’s advice that leaders in many walks of American life should heed right now.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Immortal Life of John Tesh’s NBA Anthem “Roundball Rock”</span>
The first time I heard John Tesh’s voice was in the passenger seat of my dad’s Mazda, driving through upstate New York as part of a road trip to visit colleges. Tesh was hosting his daily radio show and he was telling an interminable story with no point, but I ate that shit up. It was only later that I’d see the famous Red Rocks video David Roth mentions in his wonderful story about Tesh’s NBA on NBC anthem, or learn anything about that part of Tesh’s life. But through the story of that instrumental anthem — which remains a banger — and his conversation with Tesh, Roth manages to tease out the easygoing, very slightly anodyne, successful-yet-anonymous nature of Tesh’s work and life, as well as what makes him so bizarrely charming.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Going It Alone</span>在政治混乱的夏天独自徒步旅行
Haile starts her essay out in Damascus, Virginia, very close to where I grew up and where my grandfather lives now. This piece really forced me to think about how a space that feels so much like home can feel to a person of color. It also illustrates something that's important to me, which is that writing doesn't have to be horse race analysis to be political.
Sports Writing
Can Baseball Turn a 27-Year-Old Into the Perfect Manager?
An irresistible profile of a prodigal baseball manager named Justin Jirschele of the Kannapolis (N.C.) Intimidators. This isn’t just a story about the White Sox organization’s trust in a 27-year-old manager with “great baseball blood.” It’s about a son attempting to live up to his father’s expectations, a manager balancing his players’ hopes with his own, and about finding fresh ways to recover from baseball’s daily heartbreaks. Like everything Chris Jones writes, it’s a perfect gemstone of a story.
Local Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Where the Small Town American Dream Lives On</span>
Larissa MacFarquhar · The New Yorker · 官方页
After the presidential election, there was a sudden vogue for profiles of small towns in the grips of despair. So it was a pleasure to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s feature about Orange City, Iowa, and its “pure, hermetic culture.” MacFarquhar’s article is a delight for many reasons, not least its depiction of the endearing eccentricities of the town’s Dutch heritage. The author clearly grasps the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, driving some townspeople away and luring others back. But what makes the article profound is the way it describes Orange City’s sense of place, which inspires a loyalty among the residents critical to the town’s continued success.
Sports Writing
Colin Kaepernick Has a Job
Rembert Browne · B/R Mag · 官方页
Introspective, observational, heartbreaking, and absolutely scathing in its conclusion about racism in America, the best sports feature this year featured zero access to its subject. In a year where every aspect of our culture felt connected in ways that were either hard to understand or felt like a stretch, Browne got to the bottom of it all.
Local Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The #MeToo Movement in Kansas </span>性骚扰不仅发生在堪萨斯州议会大厦，而且“这是经常发生的事情”
While the spotlight falls on sexual-misconduct allegations in the nation's centers of power — Washington, New York, Hollywood — reporters across the country localized the revolutionary #MeToo moment on their own turf, including often overlooked and unglamorous places like my home state of Kansas. When I opened my morning newspaper to this lengthy feature on alleged sexual misconduct at the Kansas State Capitol, I was struck by the tenacity of the reporting in a digital-media era rife with emotional, partisan opinion pieces. Kansas City Star reporters Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry spared neither side of the aisle as they hounded male legislators and gave voice to women who were previously silenced.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Wrongful Birth</span>
My favorite longread this year was one that came in toward the end of the year, but it's a stunner. Jen Gann's New York Magazine cover story weaves reporting and personal essay together in a form that is pure, moving, informative, and true. Gann's son has cystic fibrosis. The disease should have been caught by her doctors before she gave birth — and in fact, it was — but the information was never passed on to her. Instead, a child she would have aborted is deeply beloved no less for his illness. Because of the disease, she must fight for him daily, which along with caring for his needs also means filing a “wrongful birth” lawsuit to help pay exorbitant medical expenses.
Sports Writing
Nick Kyrgios, the Reluctant Rising Star of Tennis
Louisa Thomas · The New Yorker · 官方页
Sports profiles are loaded with sepia-toned tropes about ambition: Most athletes are striving to be “the best,” “give it their all,” or “make the podium.” But in this profile of tennis prodigy Nick Kyrgios, Thomas shatters those conventions to explore the quirky and complicated relationship Kyrgios has with achievement. The piece is tied together with pearly quotes like, “I’d rather be doing that than working at Chipotle or something.”
Crime Reporting
Dirty John
Christopher Goffard · The Los Angeles Times · 官方页
I love a good villain, and my baddie of the year was John Meehan, a hazel-eyed Casanova who hid his murky past behind fake surgeon’s scrubs and a kaleidoscope of lies. This wannabe mobster lured a moneyed Orange County divorcée into a toxic relationship, creating an elevated psychodrama that recalled Gone Girl. Delivered as a six-part narrative on the web, Dirty John was also accompanied by a six-part podcast. Both were irresistible. Goffard’s spare prose kept this thriller racing towards its bloody end — the kind of murderous climax we were promised at the start of S-Town but never received — one that made an unlikely hero of a seemingly meek fan of The Walking Dead. Bravo to Goffard for divining this epic yarn from local news to national attention, and for his terrifying portrait of Meehan told through the eyes of his victims. This is the genius of the domestic horror genre: The monster is no longer under the bed but between the sheets.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">What Do We Do With The Art of Monstrous Men?</span>
Claire Dederer · The Paris Review · 官方页
In this nuanced, challenging essay, Claire Dederer crystallizes a particular dilemma that has arisen from this #MeToo moment: Can we continue to enjoy or appreciate the art of men who have turned out to be sexual predators or harassers or discriminators? It’s a question she ponders both morally, and aesthetically. I relate. I will never forgive Woody Allen for, as Ronan Farrow calls it, becoming his brother-in-law, nor for the sexual abuse Dylan Farrow has accused him of. And I will also never forgive Woody Allen for ruining Woody Allen for me. Dederer doesn’t stop there. She also interrogates the harsh boundaries artists and writers must erect, and the others they must trespass, in order to do the work they do — and how women artists are afforded less understanding and forgiveness for becoming such “art monsters.” (A week or so after this was published, Lorin Stein, editor in chief of The Paris Review, resigned amid an investigation into his inappropriate sexual behavior there.)
Best of 2017
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Democratic House Candidates Were Also Targets of Russian Hacking </span>
I'm sneaking in this report from December 2016 because it has colored my understanding of the Trump-Russia scandal for all of 2017. The Times revealed that the D.C.C.C. had also been hacked by Guccifer 2.0, and that the hackers had reached out to local journalists and bloggers in some of the most competitive House races in the country, hoping to damage the Democrats.
Food Writing
An Elegy for Dallas Strip Mall Restaurants一名未来的轰炸机如何重建他的生活海象
America takes more than it gives. The Indian restaurants Rao used to go to, the ones located in overlooked strip malls on the outskirts of big Texas cities, serve as an example of this. Once a tie to her community and culture, they either became fetishized by culinary explorers or are forgotten by the younger generation who are, “opening restaurants using Texas flavors and American marketing — no sudden phulkas or honor payments,” like the Indian restaurants she grew up sneaking into. Those were the places where, “To eat was to fantasize, as if watching a movie about teens in India; we tapped the live heart of a country where we looked like everyone else, where we could be part of instead of standing outside.”
Local Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Behind a $13 shirt, a $6-an-hour worker </span>
Natalie Kitroteff and Victoria Kim · The Los Angeles Times · 官方页
Natalie Kitroeff and Victoria Kim's damning exposé nails how fast fashion giants like Forever 21 avoid liability for wage theft violations at the factories where their clothes are made. The piece, which explains how the retailer “avoids paying factory workers’ wage claims through a tangled labyrinth of middlemen,” has national and international implications. It is also very much a local story.
Food Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Why We Fell for Clean Eating</span>
Bee Wilson · The Guardian · 官方页
I’ll admit to a special fondness for manifestos, rationalist disenchantments, and topplings of golden calves. Wilson’s exploration of “clean eating,” the latest in a long line of semi-religious food fads, quietly but devastatingly exposes the flaws in the movement. Often lithe blondes with an instinct for self-promotion and disdain for evidence-based science, clean eating gurus vilify processed food, meat, dairy, carbohydrates, refined sugar, caffeine, even tomatoes and eggplants. (If you can’t fathom regretting that appetizer of baba ghanoush, someone is ready to teach you how for a price.) At stake is not only one’s girth, or the management of allergies and sensitivities, but morality itself. “We are so unmoored,” writes Wilson, “that we will put our faith in any master who promises that we, too, can become pure and good.” At best, this puritanical diet leads to snide remarks at the gym; at worst, it develops into anorexia and orthorexia.
Crime Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Day Domestic Violence Came To Church</span>
Melissa Jeltsen has one of the most heartbreaking beats imaginable: domestic violence. Because of that, she's had a front-row seat this year to the overlap among perpetrators of mass shootings and men who commit daily, habitual violence against those closest to them. She has the invaluable skill of writing beautifully about a difficult subject without sacrificing a crime reporter’s adherence to facts.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Border Wars</span>
It's strange when one of the best essayists in the world keeps getting, not just better, but more ambitious, clearer, productively ambiguous, and loving. That's exactly what Robinson pulls off in this essay. She doesn't just prove that the deep black south is the center of many of our musical worlds, she accepts it. That acceptance becomes a cause for celebration, a painful reckoning, and a real meditation on what literary and literal gumption can create and sustain in essayistic forms.
Local Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">A Washington County That Went for Trump Is Shaken as Immigrant Neighbors Start Disappearing </span>
Nina Shapiro · The Seattle Times · 官方页
Voting has consequences, as story after story in the wake of last November’s surprising electoral outcome has endeavored to show. Yet to my mind, few if any of the attempts to explain the Trump voter have landed. This one does. That’s because Nina Shapiro doesn't let her sources off the hook. The people in this story say they didn’t know they were voting so cruelly, but their friends and neighbors — arrested or deported or both — nevertheless paid the price. Shapiro, to her credit, is able to find the humanity amid the folly.
Sports Writing
The Awakening of Colin Kaepernick
There were many thousands of words published this past year on the NFL quarterback's swift transformation into social activism icon, but Branch's thorough, probing exploration into Kaepernick's formative years in Northern California represented, for my money, the most illuminating of the lot. By focusing his narrative eye largely on the time before Kaepernick's silent protests propelled into the national spotlight, Branch's story produces not just a deeper appreciation of the player's fascinating backstory but a realization that this moment in history has, in many ways, been years in the making. Like Muhammad Ali, much of the visceral divisiveness surrounding Kaepernick will wane and we'll look back at this time with a clearer perspective. When that time comes, this story should be required reading. (In truth, it already is.)
Profile Writing
Pet Project
Megan Greenwell (Esquire · 官方页
What has the internet done to keep you sane in 2017? The sweet whisper of ASMR? Calming slime and glitter videos? For me, it's been the heckin' pupperinos of We Rate Dogs, served up on Instagram and Twitter daily, speaking the language only we know: of fluffers and boopers, of the affirmation that 15/10 we would pet these dogs forever.
Sports Writing
Best of 2017
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The First White President</span>
Ta-Nehisi Coates · The Atlantic · 官方页
Say one thing for the news media’s endless parade of feature stories about Trump voters: Publish enough of them and the truth will finally reveal itself. In The New York Times‘s March 2016 roundup, “This Is Trump Country,” we heard stories of economic uncertainty and jobs disappearing:
Best of 2017
Sports Writing
‘He Needs to Be a Kid’
Jesse Dougherty · Washington Post · 官方页
These two features tackled the rapid expansion and changing nature of recruiting in amateur athletics. Ballard tracks Nico Mannion, a high school freshman whose dunks have rippled through social media, attracting countless followers and college coaches who believe the guard might be the missing piece for a Final Four run. Dougherty profiles an even younger prospect, Neiko Primus, the nation’s top-ranked nine-year-old, and examines whether that classification actually means anything to Primus and, more importantly, his mother. Ballard and Dougherty successfully cover recruiting on both the macro and micro levels, leaving the reader with a nuanced portrait of the mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion that hundreds of teenagers endure year after year.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Eve Ewing: Other Means to Liberation</span>
Kiese Laymon · Guernica · 官方页
This conversation between Laymon and poet and sociologist Eve Ewing on the publication of her well-received collection of poems Electric Arches, is spirited and wide-ranging. They talk through the policies that shaped the conditions of Chicago’s public schools, the migratory patterns of black Americans in the 20th century, and the case of Assata Shakur. What has stayed with me is how the sense of comfort and warmth between Ewing and Laymon makes space for them, and by extension, their audience, to imagine new ways of thinking, talking, and doing creative work.
Best of 2017
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">My Father Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out</span>
Ashley C. Ford writes about the joys and frustrations of being reunited with her father, who spent most of her life in prison. She does so with an astonishing blend of candor and compassion that makes it so you can’t help but feel for both of them. Ford’s father has missed so much of his daughter’s life, but that’s not all he has to catch up on. Having been incarcerated since the late 1980s, he is way behind the times, technologically speaking. He’s new to the whole world of cell phones, not to mention texting. (If you think helping your aging parents with their technology is frustrating, imagine if they’d never owned even a computer.) While her father is trying to learn new ways to connect with his daughter, Ford is also trying to learn how to set healthy boundaries with him, which makes for complications, and tremendous poignancy.
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">What Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Depiction of Mental Illness Has Meant to Me This Season </span>杰夫·特鲁斯戴尔每次拜访尼尔森时，都会找到他所爱的人 - Nelson Star
I wanted to pick something that Angelica Jade Bastién wrote this year, as she has been one of the most exciting new critical voices of 2017. I vacillated between selecting her incisive piece on race and The Handmaid's Tale, or her sharp deconstruction of The Beguiled, or her essay on how dystopian fiction rarely tackles racial prejudice. But right at the end of the year she wrote this essay on mental illness and television that really knocked me out. She manages to seamlessly interweave the personal (her own struggles with depression and hospitalization) with the cultural (an examination of Rachel Bloom's musical comedy about a manic-depressive who is herself struggling to get a handle on her mental health), and it combines to form one of the more poignant pieces of writing I have read this year. What I love so much in Bastien's work is that she is undeniably a rigorous critic — her writing on classic films like Now, Voyager reveal her deep background — but she also is unafraid to draw on her own experiences to flesh out and heighten the understanding of the art. In a time when the personal has never been more political, I am really inspired by her work.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Filling the Gap</span>
John Stanton · Buzzfeed · 官方页
It’s almost hard to believe that the life and death battle over health care dominated the first half of this year, as stories about Medicare, Medicaid, pre-existing conditions, and outrageously expensive medications helped defeat the bill in Congress.
Crime Reporting
Best of 2017
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Judge’s Code</span>
Sarah Jeong · The Verge · 官方页
Among many other things, Sarah Jeong’s profile of Judge William H. Alsup should be commended for putting to rest the question of whether or not Alsup knows how to code in Java (he doesn’t, he just learned a little during the first Oracle v. Google trial). Having taken care of that in the first few paragraphs, Jeong goes on to deliver a fascinating and complex profile of a judge who has and continues to preside over some of the most important tech-related cases of the present day, including Waymo v. Uber, which is currently on Alsup’s docket. She also weaves in questions and arguments about how judges, the press, and the public ought to approach cases where things get technical, without sacrificing any of Alsup’s humanity or charm.
Best of 2017
Sports Writing
The Fairy Tale and the Nightmare
Brazilian soccer player Helio Nampier Neto’s had a premonition of a plane crash followed by his own inexplicable survival. Then a plane ferrying the player and his teammates to a storybook final match goes completely silent 11 miles from the runway before crashing. Seventy-one people on board die, including nearly all the members of the Chapecoense team. Neto is one of only six survivors.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Kate’s Still Here</span>
Libby Copeland · Esquire · 官方页
I’ve reached an age where death — of friends, family, colleagues — has become a more regular occurrence. I’ve become slightly obsessed with it, but at the same time, remain afraid to discuss it and plan for it. It was refreshing and moving for me to read this feature by Libby Copeland about a couple who embraced the inevitable so boldly and lovingly. Copeland spends time with Kate and Deloy Oberlin as they consciously prepare for Kate's death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife's wishes that once she's gone, a gathering will be held where family and friends can visit with her body, chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles. Afterward, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in green burial. I believe it might be impossible to get to the end of this piece without feeling warmed and shedding some tears.
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence</span>
Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen · Distill · 官方页
The field of computing has often been characterized as a struggle between Doug Englebart's vision of machines as a tool for intelligence augmentation and the full automation contemplated by artificial intelligence. Carter and Nielsen make an argument for a new emerging path: artificial intelligence augmentation (AIA), the use of AI systems to help develop new methods for intelligence augmentation. It's a journey that starts with a simple demo and accelerates into a fractally fascinating and complex discussion.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">In the Land of Vendettas That Go on Forever </span>在永远持续的仇杀之地|在线VQR
Amanda Petrusich she traveled to Northern Albania to write about the culture of vengeance that guides the region's sense of justice. Her story takes readers along rocky roads to mountain villages, but the real journey takes place inside the minds of the local people, whose ideas about justice require a vigilante, not the law, to kill a person who was involved in a murder. His eye-for-an-eye approach harkens back to early tribal times in the country. Perfectly mixing narration with analysis, the story ultimately asks philosophical questions: Does revenge really make up for a loss? What is justice? In a year when many of us eagerly watch special counsel Robert Mueller investigate a president who flaunts his disregard for the law, justice is on the forefront of our minds, except some of us want it to arrive through legal channels.
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber</span>
Before Roy Moore and Al Franken, before Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, before #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein and the ever-unfurling list of politicos, media men, and Hollywood elites stood accused of sexual misconduct, there was an essay published in February by a former Uber engineer detailing allegations of sexual harassment she experienced during her two years working at the popular ride-sharing company. Fowler's bombshell post set off a reaction that not only led to the eventual downfall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, but prompted a number of tech companies to examine their own workplace cultures — and in some cases, fire or suspend their own executives.
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent</span>
This year, I wrote rarely. Every time I put pen to paper or started to type, I began and ended in the same place, full of dread. Writing, which used to be a way to work through my fear, seemed only to reinforce it. And so I looked for writers who could say what I could not. Laura Turner was one of those writers. Her column at Catapult, “A Cure for Fear,” made me feel less alone. Every entry was poignant and true, in an eerie get-out-of-my-brain sort of way.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How a Pearland Mom Changed Her Life to Save Her Transgender Child</span>
Roxanna Asgarian · Houstonia Magazine · 官方页
It may seem strange to deem a story tweeted by the ACLU of Texas “under-recognized,” but Roxanna Asgarian’s feature on a devoutly religious, long-conservative Texas woman’s decision to give up her entire life — losing friends, family and community — and reconfigure her own identity to save her young transgender daughter’s life didn’t seem to generate the attention and discussion it deserved. Maybe it was because it came out in Houstonia’s December issue, maybe because the mother and daughter featured in it had also been written about by national outlets. But Asgarian did the crucial thing that local outlets do, after the national media parachutes in and back out again: She stayed on the story. Her account of Kimberly Shappley’s awakening and devotion to her daughter Kai spans years and is excruciating in its heartbreaking detail. I still wince and shudder thinking about the time Kimberly discovered Kai’s legs were cold while tucking her into bed, only to find her daughter — still called Joseph then — had taken too-small underpants from a toy doll and worn them herself, cutting off her own circulation. While national outlets heralded Kimberly’s heroism, Asgarian showed that their story, and their struggle, is far from over.
Best of 2017
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Touch of Madness</span>疯狂之触
A beautifully rendered exploration of the slow, relentless creep of schizophrenia into the life of a brilliant graduate student, her slow recognition of the fact, and the failure of her academic community to recognize the issue or to support her. Dobbs' piece functions both as an inquiry into our faltering understanding of mental illness and our cultural failure to respond to it with integrity. It's the kind of compassionate and morally-centered journalism we should all aspire to.
Profile Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Dwayne Johnson for President!</span>
Caity Weaver’s May cover story on The Rock is the main reason I will miss net neutrality. It’s the one profile I can drunk-read aloud to my mom with abandon, the only one that can make her laugh so hard she forgets to ask me how audiences develop again. (By getting The Rock to quote tweet us, Mom). Weaver’s the only author who appears twice in all of Our No. 1 Story Picks this year, and once all the political math is done, I'm confident that profiling The Rock will have counted as a public service. If Johnson runs in 2020, I think Weaver’s name should be on the ticket.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming From Inside the White House </span>明尼苏达女凶手 - 《返祖》杂志
Lewis strays from the daily fray and digs deep into the Department of Energy to explore how dangerous Trumpism is to a functional government — not just now, but for decades to come. As this compellingly readable and horrifying story shows, Trump is on the verge of crippling America's next generation of scientists and increasing the risk we'll lose track of our nuclear weapons.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">A Pet Tortoise Who Will Outlive Us All </span>
Hanya Yanagihara · The New York Times Magazine · 官方页
The essay that stayed with me throughout the year was a profile of a sulcata tortoise named Fred who spends his days wandering the backyard of Yanagihara's parents' house in Honolulu. Whatever we demand from our pets — love, affection, the mere acknowledgment of our presence — is lost on Fred. But tortoises are present in a way few animals can be. “To be in the company of a tortoise is to be reminded — instantly, inarticulably — of the oldness of the world and the newness of us.” writes Yanagihara “To be around them is to be reminded, incessantly, of our own vulnerability — and our own imminent deaths.” In a year where everything in the world seemed to be moving so quickly, Fred reminded me of what lasts — and what will outlast — the petty troubles of the day.
Profile Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Old Woods and Deep</span>明尼苏达女凶手 - 《返祖》杂志
The notoriously press-avoidant Cormac McCarthy is usually mapped onto the American West, but his Appalachian childhood deeply informs his earlier works. Shannon explores the Appalachian McCarthy and his connection to Knoxville, Tenessee in a profile that’s as much about a McCarthy-obsessed psychology professor and the cult of McCarthy as it is about the grizzled, mythic, overblown novelist himself.
Crime Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer</span>
Alice Gregory · The New Yorker · 官方页
Alice Gregory’s story about the psychological, social, and sometimes legal consequences of accidental killings is sometimes digressive but unrelenting. Gregory takes the time to lay out what it’s like for those who’ve accidentally killed someone to live with what they’ve done. The piece is fascinating not just for the stories its subjects tell, or its wide-ranging consideration of the moral problems involved with accidental killings, but for its willingness to forego clean resolutions.
Best of 2017
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till </span>
Coco Fusco · Hyperallergic · 官方页
In a year where we’ve seen tension over who gets to speak for whom, Coco Fusco’s essay on the controversy around Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennial brought welcome context, history, and measure to the discussion. She argues not that the painting shouldn’t be critiqued, protested, and debated fiercely, but that—whatever one might feel about the degree of care (or lack thereof) that Schutz took with a painful, charged image—those who called for its censorship, even its destruction, were walking us towards a slippery slope that better suited to the tactics of the far right than the political left.
Crime Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Carl Ichan’s Failed Raid on Washington</span>
While it may not have been the juiciest crime story this year, Patrick Radden Keefe’s precise and damning piece on Carl Icahn’s stint in the Trump Administration chilled me more than I could have imagined. This is how the world works: We’re being taken for fools while the Masters of the Universe move from private to public positions. I can only hope to read about more financial crimes in 2018 that get appropriately punished.
Best of 2017
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Female Gaze: Lana Del Rey, I Love Dick, and the Love Witch</span>
Meaghan Garvey · MTV News · 官方页
So many outlets for beautiful longform writing went under this year, not the least of which was the most recent incarnation of MTV News, which in its short blaze of glory published some of the most exciting cultural criticism on the internet. Perhaps my favorite essay on the site was Meghan Garvey's “The Female Gaze,” which weaves together three threads — the new Lana Del Rey record, the novel I Love Dick and the Amazon show that grew out of it, and Anna Biller's campy, retro-inspired indie flick The Love Witch — as a way to talk about women who stare into the void and address what they see. Garvey effortlessly slides back and forth between these topics, jamming in about 100 other cultural references, from Hamlet to Eve Babitz to Laura Mulvey , and in doing so, creates a mesmerizing piece of criticism that I keep returning to over and over at the end of the year.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Down the Breitbart Hole </span>
Hylton's feature has both stylish writing and great access to a world that doesn't often open itself up to mainstream media. Bonus points for timing, though I'm still not sure if it was great or terrible: The story was published days before Steve Bannon was fired as Trump’s chief political strategist … and went straight back to Breitbart.
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Get Real </span>
Once every decade Europe's two most important exhibitions of contemporary art coincide: the Venice Biennale and Documenta. Years that end in 7, therefore, often end up serving as mileposts in art history. But Venice this year was a bland, hippieish nonevent, while Documenta descended into a self-righteous muddle.
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The New MacBook Keyboard is Ruining My Life</span>
It’s satisfying to read good writing about hardware, especially when it’s good writing about bad hardware. When our myriad devices function properly it can be easy to forget that they are one design flaw away from an enormous headache. The problem only gets more severe as some hardware producers, especially Apple, try to offer lighter computers and close off their product ecosystems, often by building computers or phones for which seemingly small fixes require maintenance that Casey Johnston rightly calls “major surgery.” This can mean going without your computer or smartphone for a while, something which, depending on your job or lifestyle, can be costly or even untenable.
Sports Writing
‘You Can’t Give In’: Monty Williams on Life After Tragedy
Former NBA Coach Monty Williams, now the head of basketball operations for the San Antonio Spurs, tries to cope with the loss of his wife, Ingrid, who died in a head-on car crash in February 2016 in Oklahoma City. Ballard has given us an unforgettable piece about the power of forgiveness and love.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">What Putin Really Wants </span>
Julia Ioffe · The Atlantic · 官方页
Trump / Russia has been 2017's biggest political story, and while Ioffe has broken news on Don Jr. and Wikileaks this year, she has also made sense of the big picture, as she does here. Her background in Russian politics is invaluable and her writing always clear, no matter how complicated the games and players she's explaining.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Resegregation of Jefferson County</span>
Hannah-Jones was prescient in highlighting some of the issues that would come into play in the Roy Moore-Doug Jones Senate race, detailing tensions and policies that are fueling racial and economic divisions across the country.
Food Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">My No Good, Very Bad Dinner Party</span>
Every single detail in this story about a dinner party gone awry is too perfectly absurd to be believed, yet too good to be invented. It builds with amazing, appalling momentum towards its conclusion, which left me breathless and teary-eyed with laughter on the Metro North, which troubled my fellow commuters. It made me think of Laurie Colwin's famous catalog of kitchen disasters, but it's also its own thing, a classic to be admired and emulated. I will revisit it every time I cringe while remembering an overplanned social endeavor of my own youth because this story is worse. God, it's so much worse than anything.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Donald Trump’s Worst Deal </span>
In a year when headlines were dominated by soap opera-like entrances and exits within the Trump administration — so long, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Omarosa, and the Mooch — I was grateful when reporters like Adam Davidson took the time to dive deep into President Trump's business background, revealing the way he operates and has always operated.
Local Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Orange County’s Informant Scandal Yields Evidence of Forensic Science Deception in Murder Trials</span>
My former colleague at OC Weekly, R. Scott Moxley, is the most underrated investigative reporter in the United States. His work at the paper over the past 21 years has resulted in a six-year prison sentence for our former sheriff, the end of congressional and state assemblymen's careers, and the freeing of at least three people wrongfully convicted of crimes. Last year alone, six murder convictions covered by Moxley were overturned.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Alt-White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate</span>
Back in the naive days of 2010, when James O’Keefe posed as a pimp to disgrace community group ACORN, I thought I’d write a story about the new wave of post-collegiate conservatives. A friend put me in contact with Andrew Breitbart, and I met him at his modern home in Los Angeles, next to the freeway, with the Big Government offices in the basement. He was gracious but told me he did not have any leads; it was clear that he preferred that I write about him. As I left, I expressed some libtard sentiment, and I suddenly saw the real Breitbart, yelling and balling his fists and turning bright red.
Profile Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Kelela Is Ready For You Now</span>
The drama and tension in celebrity profiles often feels manufactured. That’s because journalists have the difficult job of revealing something extraordinary in the performance of the mundane, often within a rigid framework approved by gatekeepers. We get details about dinner plates and Target carts that ultimately reveal very little. Like the best stories in any genre, the most meaningful profiles occur when real life peeks through and everyone involved shows some vulnerability, including the reporter.
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us’</span>“你不会取代我们”的法国起源
Anyone wanting to understand the forces that propelled Donald Trump to power needs to read Thomas Chatterton Williams's fascinating profile of the French racial theorist Renaud Camus. Camus — no relation to Albert — popularized the alt-right theory that Muslim immigrants are reverse colonizing “white” Western Europe through mass migration. He is an unlikely progenitor of a political movement built around closing borders and preserving traditional culture. Camus works out of a 14th-century chateau and once wrote a travel book that describes itself as “a sexual odyssey — man-to-man.” Allan Ginsberg once said, “Camus's world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” While Williams doesn't shy away from shining a light on the ugly racism that underpins Camus's writings, he challenges liberals to reckon with the social and cultural effects of immigration in an increasingly globalized world.
Food Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts</span>末日已至，我在塔吉特
Vigneron combines the best of both worlds — food writing and crime — to tell the incredible tale of one serious nut job. Law enforcement officials, private eyes, trucking industry insiders, and cargo-theft fraud investigators find themselves needing to amp up their game upon discovering that “the bad guys [have] learned that food is a great category.” Now the baddies have managed to pull off an incredible, almost totally untraceable series of massive nut heists in California, in which entire tractor-trailers disappear and millions of dollars' worth of nuts go missing. Vigneron follows the impossibly cinematic trail behind all these logistical feats back to one set of truly nutty culprits: a criminal group linked to a Russian organized-crime network.
Profile Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Princess Myth</span>
Hilary Mantel · The Guardian · 官方页
It's hard to pick just one great profile, made only slightly easier by the fact that I wasn't allowed to pick one from my places of employment, which is good because that excluded GQ (where it would be impossible to pick between any of Caity Weaver‘s alone) and The New York Times Magazine (where I am glad I don't have to choose between Jazmine Hughes' Elaine Welteroth profile or Matthew Shaer on Sean Hannity). But I still had to pick between incredible profiles from Emily Nussbaum and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (yes, Dylann Roof, but oh my god Missy Elliot) and Jessica Pressler and Jia Tolentino and Alexander Chee and Jada Yuan (x10) and Tom Junod (his story of Muhammad Ali's funeral felt like a profile to me) and Olivia Nuzzi and Elizabeth Weil and Wright Thompson and the general career barn-storming of Allison P. Davis (whose Cardi B feature got a lot of attention, yes, but I'm thinking more of her encounter with DJ Khaled's baby, because how did I never think to profile a baby?)
Crime Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Portrait Of An American Mass Shooting</span>
Melissa Jeltsen · HuffPost · 官方页
Best of 2017
Crime Reporting
The Mystery of Leslie Arnold
Most of my favorite crime stories of 2017 featured bylines that I've no doubt will appear elsewhere on this list, so I wanted to look beyond the national magazine landscape and find a more regional story. I specialize in mid-century crimes, so I was already game for Henry Cordes' three-part Omaha World-Herald feature on Leslie Arnold, a 16-year-old boy who killed his parents in 1958, buried them in the backyard, started his prison sentence — and then escaped a decade later, never to be seen again. This terrible crime turns into something more haunting, the nexus of family tragedy and correctional malfeasance. Cordes' reporting is methodical and dogged, understated and humane, as one would expect of someone who has lived with a story for two-and-a-half decades. I wonder if we'll ever know what happened to Leslie, but more pressing are the people he left behind to grapple with his crimes and his flight.
Best of 2017
Political Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway</span>约翰斯敦从不相信特朗普会帮忙。无论如何，他们仍然爱他。
Plenty of bigots and sexists voted for Trump — so did a lot of people with real problems. It was delusional to think Trump would fix them, of course, but what's more important to try to comprehend is why sane but hopeless voters back Trump anyway. Kruse does a great job of getting at the Pennsylvania version of this phenomenon.
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How the Sandwich Consumed Britain</span>
Sam Knight · The Guardian · 官方页
It’s hard to imagine anything more British than this hilarious and brilliant tour through the history of the sandwich and its market dominance. Knight delights in the simple excellence of this innovation, which could only really have taken off in Thatcherite Britain — the traditional triangular tea sandwich is somehow droll, buttoned up, and expedient like the Iron Lady. He also enjoys the absurdity of corporate strategy and jargon when it finds its way into something as seemingly inconsequential as two slices of bread, a few prawns, and some mayo. In this time of global doom and gloom, it’s a relief to consider the humble sandwich.
Local Reporting
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire</span>
Andrew Granato · Stanford Politics · 官方页
Campus politics is local politics par excellence, and while Peter Thiel may be mediocre at his secondary pursuits, like investing and vampirism, he is by all accounts an excellent right-wing campus political operative. Thiel has spent nearly three decades trying to trigger libs at his alma mater, Stanford, not least by continuing to support the Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded as an undergraduate in the late ‘80s. Andrew Granato really got the goods in his smart, even-handed account of how Thiel has cultivated the Review as both a source for hires and business associates and a way to try and keep his own, largely contrarianism-based sense of politics alive at a liberal university. It also serves as a reminder that Silicon Valley is very much a place and not just a metonymic device.
Crime Reporting
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters</span>
When I think back on the best stories of a year, I am usually drawn to the ones I wish I had written myself. This year it was Sapna Maheshwari's dive into the disturbing videos served up to kids on YouTube. It has all the best elements of great technology reporting: algorithms gone wrong, victims suffering harm, and shocking screenshots. It also resulted in action, with YouTube announcing plans to increase its video-reviewing moderation team to over 10,000 people, a staggering number that still pales in comparison to the millions of hours of video uploaded each year.
Sports Writing
Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women
This Deadspin tale is nothing short of bonkers. (The site is owning the sports-catfishing beat.) Adler reports that at age 13, Becca Schultz assumed the false online identity of Ryan Schultz, a married father of two — and an aspiring White Sox blogger — who was studying to become a pharmacist. While masquerading as Ryan, Schultz trolled women online, inflicting real pain on some, and was cradled by the “exploitative ecosystem of online sportswriting, which created the conditions for her to get her enviable opportunities without much interrogation from editors…” Adler’s tale illustrates the changing dynamics of sports journalism and online fandom, as well as the increasingly strange and odd ways in which sports communities develop. One of the reasons Schultz held onto her fake online identity so long was simply because “it worked.”
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men From Hate Speech But Not Black Children</span>
Everything in ProPublica’s Machine Bias series is a must read, in my opinion. They're doing an incredible job opening up the algorithmic black boxes tech companies hide behind, revealing how they are all biased in their own ways. This particular piece helps us understand how Facebook is parsing hate speech. Considering that Facebook is a powerful platform for news and information, it's worth taking a hard look at who they're choosing to protect. Follow up this feature with another smart bit of reporting in which the team at ProPublica bought ads targeting anti-Semitic phrases like “Jew hater.”
Food Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Learning to Love Dill, Russia’s Ubiquitous Herb</span>
The way some people get excited when they smell freshly baked cookies or pies is how I get when there's some vegetable or herb others might consider stinky floating in the air. Garlic in the oven, onions frying, but especially dill; I love dill. I love pickles, I love a few sprigs on top of a bowl of chicken soup, and I love potato chips flavored with it. Talia Lavin paid my favorite herb tribute leading up to the Jewish High Holidays earlier this year, and I've been trying to get people to read it if they haven't ever since. Stretching from Eastern Europe to New York City, it's about dill as much as it is about connecting to the past. After visiting the birthplace of the Ba’al Shem Tov, then the small Ukrainian village her grandfather came from. ” For the long, rutted road back, I bought a goose-meat loaf shot through with dill, and too much salt.”
Under-Recognized Stories
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Series on Children and Gun Violence </span>
John Woodrow Cox · The Washington Post · 官方页
Whenever someone asked me for a story recommendation this year, I asked them if they were reading Cox's Washington Post series on how children are being affected by gun violence in the U.S. They would either say “no” or would tell me, “Oh, I've seen that but haven't gotten around to it yet.” Well, now is the time to read this stellar series that might have been overshadowed by so many other stellar reporting done this year.
Arts & Culture Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Of Women, Men, and Ballet in the 21st Century </span>
This piece came out in the early weeks of 2017, and it’s worth revisiting now, after a year of so many reckonings. “Can ballet express a modern view of the sexes?” Macaulay begins his essay with a question that goes round and round. If it can’t, then what does it express? And what does any partnering express in dance? Ballet is largely about the male gaze, and many roles cannot be reversed, “We inhabit a world where many women are enslaved, demeaned, abused. Should ballet be an art that reflects only their glorification?” Macaulay’s essay is one of the most masterful discussions of power and gender in dance in the 21st century, and a reminder of how important it is to ask these questions of culture, especially in a space where tradition holds sway.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Obama’s Parting Gift: Not to Fear White Racism</span>
I tiptoed into 2017 filled with dread and despair thanks to the political atmosphere, but it just so happened this New Yorker essay came out early in the year, and it was one I returned to many times. It reminded me of what power means and how it can come again, even under the most menacing racist climates in history. It moved me so much that I taught it and then read everything else the writer had written; a couple months later I felt compelled to message him to tell him I greatly appreciated his work. It turned out he knew and loved my work too, and flash forward some months, he became my boyfriend. It might be awkward to nominate a loved one, but Wallace’s work is indispensable to me — he’s one of our most essential essayists. (He managed to turn his GQ cover story on Mahershala Ali into a beautiful essay too, without being indulgent or steering off course.) I know I’m lucky to have him; I know we all are lucky to have him.
Science, Technology, and Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">A Very Old Man for a Wolf</span>
Emma Marris · Outside · 官方页
The story of the wolf in question, called OR4, hits on every fascinating, murky, and difficult piece of our human interactions with our wild predators. We want to be close, but not too close. We want to admire and preserve them, but only as long as they follow our rules. Marris does an incredible job of teasing out how humans and wolves both try to survive while at odds with one another.
Profile Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Gloria Allred’s Crusade</span>
In her first print feature for The New Yorker, Tolentino perfectly captures iconic anti-discrimination lawyer Gloria Allred, who is currently litigating major cases against Bill Cosby and President Donald Trump, and who has played a key role in changing attitudes and legislation regarding rape and sexual assault. Tolentino lends insight into Allred’s passion, showing how she came by her conviction for her work very personally, after being raped in the early 1970s, surviving an illegal abortion, and learning that other women she met at the hospital had died there.
Sports Writing
Why President Trump Ignites Gregg Popovich
Popovich, the NBA’s curmudgeonly genius, as tactician, teacher, policy wonk ... and commander in chief? One of the most interesting profiles on the NBA’s most interesting coach features anecdotes and insights that really give you a lens into his personality.