Brain Food

August 4, 2015 7:38 PM

Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism (2014). Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He founded "The Best of Journalism", a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction. This is his list of the best stories from 2014. There are personal essays, business stories, stories of government misbehavior, science stories and more.
posted by storybored (9 comments total)

Previously.
posted by LeLiLo at 8:13 PM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh wrote, this is pretty cool! I wonder if there is a way to download the stories into my kindle? Convert to PDF or something?
posted by rebent at 8:21 PM on August 4, 2015

I predict Instapaper overload...
posted by SisterHavana at 10:33 PM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh geez. So many great summer reading lists on the Blue recently and now this.
posted by notyou at 11:01 PM on August 4, 2015

I've read a number of these and they are indeed great. I've bookmarked some other ones I missed the first time.

Also want to mention that the article "Till Death Do Us Part" in the Post Courier won the Pulitzer Prize and is a staggering read. Of the other ones that I've read, I'd have to say "The Empathy Exams" and "Why Women Aren't Welcome on the Internet" were my favorites.

Finally, along with the "Gender Studies" category, I wish they would have included a "Race Studies" category as there also has been a lot of superlative writing on race. Pretty much anything by Ta Nehisi-Coates (but especially "The Case For Reparations" - kind of surprised that wasn't on the list to begin with, tbh) and "My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything Okay" by Kiese Laymon are two that come immediately to mind.
posted by triggerfinger at 6:44 AM on August 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

OK, I'm a bit too lazy, but this list needs to be cross referenced with the mefi posts on the articles themselves. Just skimming the first two broad-topics, I swear about 25-50% of those articles had a corresponding mefi post (ie the "I've read that before, somewhere" deja vu)
posted by k5.user at 7:24 AM on August 5, 2015

Great collection.

That being said, I'm not super thrilled that the two choices they made for articles about rape were about women making false accusations and men being raped, respectively, especially in light of all of the national attention the subject has had in the past year.
posted by likeatoaster at 1:08 PM on August 5, 2015

Coates isn't on there because he writes for the Atlantic, as Friedersdorf does. He says upfront that he left out anything published in the magazine.

It's a little more surprising that Friedersdorf couldn't find anything about race that interested him in 2014. It was kind of a busy year in race relations.
posted by zompist at 2:00 PM on August 5, 2015

I was delighted to see Michael Bérubé's article about his son Jamie's struggle to find a meaningful work—For Hire: Dedicated Young Man with Down Syndrome. I found it so compelling I hired Jamie at my old job. I've since left that university press, but I'm glad to report that Jamie still works there, and that Michael has since signed a contract with Beacon Press, and is hard at work on a new book titled, Life as Jamie Knows It, a follow-up to his previous book: Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child.
posted by Toekneesan at 2:23 PM on August 5, 2015 [3 favorites]