Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain

Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

Conor Friedersdorf

Exceptional nonfiction stories from 2014 that are still worth encountering today

Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I send out once or twice a week. This is my annual attempt to bring some of those stories to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article that was published last calendar year and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement.

Art of the Personal Essay

BUZZFEED / Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500 by Drew Philp

"After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken city by building my own home in the middle of it."

The U.S. Governor Who Forgot How to Veto a Bill

Russell Berman

The strange saga of Paul LePage, who’s going to court to see if 65 bills he rejected have accidentally become law.

“I’m finally learning how to play the game of a politician,” Maine Governor Paul LePage told reporters in late May, moments after he declared, in a fit of pique over a stalled proposal to cut income taxes, that he would veto every single bill written by a Democrat that passed the state legislature.

LePage may have learned the art of politics in the four-and-a-half years since Maine voters first elected him to the governorship, but it seems he hasn’t yet mastered state law. In a turn of events as incomprehensible as it sounds, the combative conservative apparently muffed the vetoes of 65 bills at the end of the annual legislative session. He is now asking the state’s highest court to rule on whether he successfully rejected the measures, or whether they have in fact become law—as the House and Senate contend—because LePage missed the 10-day window he had to veto them.

Does the Bounty-Hunting Industry Need Reform?

Katie Bo Williams

How the wildly underregulated bounty-hunting industry polices itself—and why that isn’t changing

On June 9, Jackie Shell, a Tennessee bounty hunter, killed the country musician Randy Howard during a shootout. When John Doyle, a bail-recovery agent, heard the news, his first thought was: If the bounty hunter went in alone, he’s an idiot.

The singer had failed to appear in court on a litany of rural-route charges: a handful of DUIs, possession of a firearm while intoxicated, and driving on a revoked license. When Howard failed to appear at a court hearing, the judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest. What happened next was straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel: His neighbor, Terry Dotson, told reporters that when he offered to drive Howard to his appearance, Howard told him he wasn’t going back to jail. Shell approached Howard’s Marion County residence—apparently alone—and Howard opened fire. Shell fired back and both men were shot. Shell was expected to live. Howard died on the scene.

Taylor Swift and the Silencing of Nicki Minaj

Spencer Kornhaber

One star uses the pretext of female solidarity to try and shut down another’s frustration with the music industry.

The most important word in the Twitter drama that unfolded last night between Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift, and their respective fan armies was “Huh.” As in Minaj’s only direct reply to Swift: “Huh? U must not be reading my tweets. Didn't say a word about u.”

Minaj had been arguing on social media that the MTV Video Music Awards hadn’t properly recognized her clips for “Anaconda” and “Feeling Myself” in its nominations. Most relevantly, Minaj said that because “Anaconda” created a viral phenomenon that spread from red carpets to cathedral steps, it seemed strange it wasn’t up for Video of the Year. “When the ‘other’ girls drop a video that breaks records and impacts culture they get that nomination,” she wrote. “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year.” Then she posted a bunch of smiley faces.

America Is Even Less Socially Mobile Than Previously Thought

Joe Pinsker

And as a result, the policies that would address the situation are even more extreme—and more politically unfeasible.

Sociologists and economists are probably psyched that the work they’ve been doing on inequality and social mobility for decades has finally gotten attention from the average American. But one downside of having your message saturate the media is that people might start to take your findings for granted, which can obscure something that’s true of any data-based endeavor: Researchers are always learning new things, always trying to better map the extent of a phenomenon.

In this spirit, a Pew report out today tells us things about American social mobility that are new—and at the same time all too familiar. Scads of reports have documented how parents’ income dictates how financially successful someone will go on to be. But this report suggests the effects are at the high end of previous estimates. “One might think we’d have nailed it by now, but there was some uncertainty,” says David Grusky, the director of Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality and an author of the report.

Amy Schumer and the Promise of the Ladyjerk

Megan Garber

The most progressive thing about Trainwreck isn’t the sex stuff. It’s the fact that its central character is lovable and awful at the same time.

“Jerk,” as an epithet, is generally understood to describe guys. As are—apologies for the language, but it’s part of the point—“asshole” and “douchebag” and “dick” and “prick.” While these insults may often owe their etymologies to the features of the male undercarriage, their histories are, at this point, almost irrelevant: Their value, as we use them today, is their elegant ability to consider the deeper, bigger question of human goodness. Is he nice, or not? A decent guy, or no?

Their value, as well, is that their subtle variations suggest the nuances that lurk within the storied spectrum of human not-niceness. There’s aggressive entitlement (“asshole”), sure, but also more comical entitlement (“assclown”) and also blithe privilege (“douchebag”) and mean smugness (“prick”) and general self-absorption (“dick”). There’s failure both personal and social. As Aaron James, a philosophy professor and the author of Assholes: A Theory, summed it up: “The asshole is the guy who systematically helps himself to special advantages in cooperative life, out [of] an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.”

The Secret Agents Who Stake Out the Ugliest Corners of the Internet

Josephine Wolff

A team tasked with protecting the president of the United States is constantly sifting through hateful online comments to find would-be assassins or terrorists.

When President Obama launched his Twitter account in May, people noticed his rapid accumulation of followers, a silly back-and-forth with President Clinton, but also something more serious: the number of hostile and threatening messages directed at the president.

Sifting through those messages to determine which, if any, need to be taken seriously is the responsibility of the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk, a group of agents tasked with identifying and assessing online threats to the president and his family. The first part of this mission—finding threats—is in many ways made easier by the Internet: all you have to do is search! Pulling up every tweet which uses the words “Obama” and “assassinate” takes mere seconds, and the Secret Service has tried to make it easier for people to draw threats to its attention by setting up its own Twitter handle, @secretservice, for users to report threatening messages to.

The Gaping Hole in the Iran Debate

Peter Beinart

In most discussions of the nuclear deal, the word "Iraq" never comes up. That’s insane.

I have a fantasy. It’s that every politician and pundit who goes on TV to discuss the Iran deal is asked this question first: “Did you support the Iraq War, and how has that experience informed your position?”

For me, it would be a painful question. I supported the Iraq War enthusiastically. I supported it because my formative foreign-policy experiences had been the Gulf War and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, all of which led me to exaggerate the efficacy of military force and downplay its risks. As Iraq spiraled into disaster, I felt intellectually unmoored. When my sister-in-law was deployed there for a year, leaving her young daughter behind, I was consumed with guilt that I had contributed to their hardship. To this day, when I walk down the street and see a homeless veteran, I feel nauseous. I give some money and a word of thanks, and think about offering an apology. But I don’t, because there’s no apology big enough. The best I can do is learn from my mistake. These days, that means supporting the diplomatic deal with Iran.

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Martin O’Malley’s Link Between Climate Change and ISIS Isn’t Crazy

David A. Graham

Conservatives mocked the Democratic presidential candidate, but there’s evidence of a connection between drought and the Syrian civil war.

It’s the dog days of summer for U.S. presidential candidates, when Donald Trump is dominating the airwaves and candidates who seem to be losing their purchase at the polls are doing whatever they can to capture some attention—whether that’s taking a chainsaw to the tax code, like Rand Paul, or claiming there’s a connection between ISIS and climate change, like Martin O’Malley.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria and the rise of ISIS was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the symptoms—or rather, the conditions—of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” the Democratic candidate told Bloomberg on Monday.