Jealousy List 2017

A story about education and 19th century laws that contains zero narrative—for me, that’s like a hat trick of skippability. And yet this essay has stayed with me as much as anything else I’ve read all year. It argues that the U.S. is committing one of the great unforced errors of history: the slow de-financing and destruction of the state university system, which has been one of the main ingredients of American economic success. For anyone in the U.S. concerned about the future of the country, this is a persuasive and infuriating read.

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a jury trial, but at least 94 percent of American criminal defendants take a plea bargain instead. Emily Yoffe chronicles the workaday cruelty at the heart of our criminal justice system: A district attorney threatens a broke defendant with every charge under the sun if they go to trial; an overworked public defender trades a guilty plea for a quick and relatively lenient resolution; and the accused may stay out of jail but are definitely branded with a conviction that restricts their employment and housing options. 2017 was a banner year for upsetting articles, but Yoffe’s is essential.

Adam Davidson dived into the Trump Organization’s deeply murky ties to a hotel project in Azerbaijan and how the company may well have run afoul of U.S. anticorruption laws. This reporting conquest takes us from Baku to New York to Iran and offers readers one of the few peeks inside the president’s business dealings. It’s a master class in following the legal trail with, naturally, money at the center of the tale.

Ever looked at a modern building touted as a masterpiece and thought “ugh”? Writing in Current Affairs, Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson decry the tyranny of contemporary architecture in which a disdain for ornament, embrace of asymmetry, and love of the monumental make public spaces unfriendly to, well, the public. You may not always agree with what they’re saying, but you will be entertained.

Ronan Farrow, that sure was 10 months well spent. Farrow’s investigative story was impeccably reported, judiciously presented, and devastatingly effective in showing how powerful men have been permitted to behave terribly—sometimes illegally—without consequence. Boards of directors, if there were any, looked the other way. Colleagues kept quiet. Lawyers offered hush money. Until now, of course, when it seems like at least once a week we’re presented with credible allegations of predatory actions and bullying in the workplace. And often, poof! The men are gone. If their ignominious departures lead to real change in the office, on air, and behind the scenes, it will be the biggest boost to productivity I can imagine.

Julie Zerbo’s site isn’t a typical fluff-filled fashion blog. The Fashion Law dissects the conflicts plaguing the industry, such as rampant counterfeiting and dramatic trademark spats, with admirable tenacity and precision. Her extensive coverage of ongoing fights over Gucci’s family name, fast-fashion copycats, and the eternal legal war between Nike and Adidas is fascinating. But my single favorite story she wrote this year was a brief but enlightening historical look at the House of Fabergé–you know, those fancy eggs–and how the intellectual property has bounced around over the years. Spoiler: The company that now owns Fabergé is registered in the Cayman Islands and backed by private equity.

First, go read Evan Osnos on North Korea; Adam Serwer on what happened in 2016; ProPublica and John Lanchester on Facebook; the New York Times on the uncounted civilian death toll in the war on terror; read up on Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Roy Moore, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and the rest of them. Then take a short walk outside. Then read this masterful story by Baxter Holmes about how the Golden State Warriors went from good to great. And remember: “If you’re open, shoot it. If not, pass it. But don’t be stationary. Move!”

The Washington Post has developed a wonderful style for controversial stories, carefully explaining every step of the reporting process as part of the narrative. It’s the perfect treatment for this article, which exposes the right-wing activist James O’Keefe’s sloppy attempt to trick the paper into reporting a fake story of sexual misconduct by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. The Post’s line of reporting on Moore has been impressive enough. But it’s grim and you don’t really come away from those stories feeling pleasure of any sort. The emotions inspired by watching O’Keefe fail publicly are much less complicated. And as a bonus, this story also inspired the best Onion article of the year.

The story of the year for me was the extent to which algorithms controlled by a handful of Silicon Valley companies have been manipulated or misused by bad actors. I particularly admired Julia Angwin and Hannes Grassegger’s look at the policies Facebook uses to train its “content reviewers.” As they report, in attempting to develop rules to deal with hate speech on the platform, Mark Zuckerberg and his team seem not to have bothered to consider what, exactly, hate speech is. Angwin and Grassegger’s story is narrowly focused, but, as an assessment of the moral failures of Facebook and its peers, it is devastating.

American Affairs is a fresh new voice on the right. In the founding issue last spring, Editor Julius Krein channeled the late James Burnham—a onetime Trotskyite who later helped found National Review—to argue that conservatives’ proper foe is the managerial elite. By aiming at the wrong targets, Krein wrote, mainstream conservatism “has ossified over time into an unwitting and ultimately untenable combination of corporate boosterism and Wilsonian moralism, successful only in the promotion of managerialism.”

$6 for bread!

Ground-level struggles of the people running abortion clinics in vast isolation. Their voices shape the piece, while the author and supporting data are there only as guideposts.

If most people spend their days feeling like there’s just too much world out there to explore, travel editors have the opposite problem, often feeling like we’ve already scratched at all the globe’s surfaces. Maybe that’s why Saveur’s joyful exploration of Baku this January swept me off my feet. In it, the epically talented food writer Anya von Bremzen painted an improbable fever dream of spices and textures set against the city’s better-known architectural glitz and its lesser-known historical intrigue. Considering the buzz that’s developed around Silk Road travel in 2017, von Bremzen proved herself ever the visionary, able to dig up a real-life ultima Thule that evaded the rest of us.

For the American Prospect, Rachel M. Cohen traces the two decades of conflict that have followed Connecticut’s landmark 1996 state Supreme Court ruling that racially segregated schools were violating the constitutional rights of Hartford students. Cohen’s exhaustive reporting illuminates how the decision, now a blueprint for recent efforts elsewhere, spurred virtually unprecedented progress toward integration even as it racked up ample antagonists among state and local lawmakers and Hartford parents.

As the internet’s most reliable conspiracy-theory-debunking website increasingly finds itself assailed from all sides—economic, legal, political—this little gem is the one I’d put in a time capsule for the 2017 archives. See also: “Snopes and the Search for Facts in a Post-Fact World” (Wired).

All losers are plucky, and all winners are unbearable.

One of the most astute analyses of the forces that led to President Donald Trump.

This story is so good. So disturbing.

It’s important that we hold ourselves accountable not only for what we get right or wrong in our coverage, or even for what we choose or choose not to cover, but also how we choose to cover it. Rebecca Traister’s piece shows how easy it is for gendered stereotypes to taint our national dialogue when journalists aren’t vigilant about received opinions. The tactic she describes is just one example of an age-old phenomenon that’s played out again and again in American culture. Call it sexism or unconscious bias or whatever you want, but it’s damaging to a free society and it has to end.

In this brief but powerful commentary, Masha Gessen warns there’s a risk of infantilizing women in the name of protecting them from harassment. She herself risks being misread as an apologist for the harassers. She shouldn’t be. Invoking the anthropologist and feminist Gayle Rubin, who studied the effects of sexual upheavals on society, Gessen notes that “the conversation we are having about sex began with incidents that involved clear coercion, intimidation, and violence” and cautions against lumping consensual and nonconsensual acts together. If we do, she writes, “we may be willingly transporting ourselves back to a more sexually restrictive era, one that denied agency to women.” You might not agree with Gessen’s examples of consent, but her bold argument is likely to hold an outsize place in #MeToo coverage when we look back at it as history.

Is there a bigger question right now? I don’t think so. And Evan Osnos actually got the North Koreans to let him go visit and talk to policymakers there, a feat of persuasion and finesse.

A journalist with a wonderful sense of the absurd and an eye for detail, James Meek goes in search of a Cadbury chocolate factory that the company closed in England in 2007 and moved to Poland. It’s a tale of how globalization has impacted his country and Poland, which he argues, is luring companies from places like England with the promise of low taxes and cheap labor, while the ruling Law and Justice party thumbs its nose at the European Union’s insistence on more enlightened human-rights practices by its members. Nobody seems pleased with the arrangement. Dispossessed British factory workers supported Brexit; meanwhile, Meeks writes, Law and Justice’s leader “doesn’t want to leave the EU: he wants the EU to leave the EU.”

This year, a lot of smart people attempted to explain how our country has arrived at this particular historical moment. Many have missed the mark by skirting some glaring but painful realities, Adam Serwer explains. This opinion piece is more than an accurate analysis: It’s a diagnosis of a deep sickness that, as a nation, we’ve repeatedly failed to reckon with.

This story about “Hurricane Ella,” one of the first and now arguably most notable women in the restaurant business (who happened to invent Bananas Foster), left me feeling green. Tracing Brennan’s rise through the food world, her continuing influence, and unique family life allows for a great window into how New Orleans became a foodie capital on par with New York and San Francisco.

In a year packed with strong stories, Eric Lipton’s close look at the defanging of the Environmental Protection Agency stands out. He’s smart to keep a tight focus on a retiring career EPA official and her longtime nemesis, a chemical industry lobbyist who became a top deputy in the agency’s toxic chemical unit this spring. Their separate and shared personal histories help Lipton tell the broader story of human consequences while laying to rest the scientific doubts the lobbyist worked so hard to sow.

I’ve come to disdain the word “artisanal” with local, handcrafted rage. So it was with pleasure (and envy) to see Elizabeth Dunn shine a light on the cynical, cash-grab heart of current foodie culture. It further proves in this Instagram era we just can’t have nice things.

Forty years ago, the British sandwich industry didn’t exist. Today it’s worth £8 billion ($10.7 billion) a year and has completely changed how the nation eats breakfast and lunch (and it’s coming for dinner as well). As Sam Knight tells it, the story of the prepackaged sandwich is a triumph of food science, manufacturing, and marketing.

I am jealous of pretty much everything the New York Times and the Washington Post have written over the past 10 months having anything to do with the Russia investigation. That includes breaking news, like the memo that fired FBI Director James Comey wrote about how Trump had asked him to end the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Or the story of how Donald Trump Jr. accepted a meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Or an inside look at how Robert Mueller’s investigators are going about their business, pulled from accounts of people who have been in the room with the special counsel.

Turn up your speakers and set aside some time to experience this masterpiece from the Arts section. The Times put their best design, interaction, audio, video, and photo skills to work to show us how women are making the best rock music today. More like this, please.

The one-two punch of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s bombshell New York Times report on Harvey Weinstein followed by Ronan Farrow’s extremely in-depth New Yorker feature toppled a powerful Hollywood producer and set off a domino effect. Since the story was published, we’ve seen women come forward about sexual harassment going back decades and actual consequences for the men they accused. It’s the story of the year, a triumph for investigative journalism, and, hopefully, the catalyst for real change around how sexual misconduct is treated in the workplace. This is why we need journalists.

The U.S. health-care system is a war between providers and insurers, and the casualties are Americans’ bodies and bank accounts. Former New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal, M.D., has spent the last several years documenting the upside-down rules of U.S. health economics, summarized in this Medium post and explored at length in her new book, An American Sickness.

Zainab Ahmad was deputized by special counsel Robert Mueller to assist in his criminal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and potential collusion by the Trump campaign. Back in May, though, William Finnegan showed how this thirtysomething child of Pakistani parents became one of America’s top terrorism prosecutors while also exploring what New York legal journalists have long known—that the Brooklyn office where she earned her unbeaten record has arguably supplanted its sister office in Manhattan as the premier venue for international terrorism indictments. More important, rereading Finnegan’s description of Ahmad’s byzantine investigations, involving dangerous evidence-gathering forays deep inside failed African states and the complicated overlay of military, diplomatic, and intelligence agency priorities, one can’t help but think that the possible targets of her current prosecutorial assignment are thoroughly overmatched.

3D maps, small multiples, interactive form! There were a lot of Great American Eclipse graphics out there ahead of Aug. 21, but none was a match for the one by Denise Lu and the WaPo graphics desk, depicting all the future eclipses in a rotatable, spherical web-based Earth and geographic extravaganza. Yes, the eclipse might’ve been the most predictable “news event” of the year (and not one to move markets), but I nonetheless admire the heavy data processing, the team’s expertise at working with geographic information, and the overall mastery in the execution.

Call it proof of the vogue for criminal-justice diversion programs run amok, or call it the logical merging of American-style capitalism with American-style law and order. Either way, the world of state-sanctioned unpaid work camps—ostensible drug rehabs—depicted in this Reveal investigation is a hellscape: Defendants, including some who don’t even use drugs, dodge prison only by toiling, unpaid, in slaughterhouses. Once they’re maimed there and no longer useful, they’re sent to prison anyway and, in pain, become addicted—for real this time.

A warts-and-all look at a strange, new sandy-toed breed of entrepreneur. At one and the same time, a deft sendup of the overly curated life and a detailed map of the shadowy economy cobbled together on the back of social networks and free Wi-Fi. Takeaway: Living in a van isn’t nearly as fun as it looks—even if it’s a really cool van and someone else is paying for it.

It turns out there is such a thing as a free mattress, David Zax reveals in Fast Company magazine. But behind every online discount for comfortable bedding is a shadowy subculture of cutthroat startups, shady dealers, and dueling lawsuits. It’s an entertaining story that pressed my envy button when “Kenny,” the seemingly random mattress dealer who draws Zax into this zany world, makes an unexpected reappearance at the end.

When President Obama was first elected, he told his staff that he wanted to read 10 letters from Americans every day. The 10LADs, as they were called, became a part of his daily briefing book. He took them home (well, technically upstairs to the White House’s private residence) every night. In January, a few days before President Trump took office, the New York Times Magazine ran an article about Obama’s daily letters and the staff of people who read, sorted, and selected them. It wasn’t the most important story this year. It wasn’t even the 100th most important. But it reminded me just how vast and varied America really is and what an honor it is—or should be—to be able to make the lives of 300 million people better, even if just a little bit.

A 10 out of 10 on the reporting difficulty scale, this piece significantly adds to what we know about the Navy SEALs’ most elite unit and the night they killed Osama bin Laden. It’s smoothly told, with some nifty source formatting that keeps the narrative moving, and is an essential corrective to some of the more preposterous claims made about that operation by other publications.

The challenge for journalists in Europe is how to explain Brexit’s insanity to people around the world who aren’t following the daily details of this small island’s decline. This piece has it all: vivid characters, true suffering, and a Big Thought—Brexit is killing British health care.

After reading this essay, I’m never going to eat octopus again. Amia Srinivasan glides through a very brief history of humanity’s interactions with octopuses, and then dives into a legible, affective series of anecdotes about what makes them so remarkable. We have an alien life form on Earth, it turns out. The twist is it doesn’t want to be taken to our leader. It just wants to be left alone.

It’s not every day you see two news organizations team up on a series, but when they do, you know it’s an incredibly important story that needs to be told exceptionally well. This NPR and ProPublica investigation on maternal mortality is both terrifying and tragic, but it shines a light on a shameful and surprising failing of the U.S. health-care system while telling deeply personal stories of real families. (Here’s the NPR link.)

This story was a shocking, heartbreaking look at how, in states such as Nevada, people are able to get themselves declared a “private guardian” for elderly people they do not know, and then hijack those people’s lives and finances. The details in the narrative brought home just how vulnerable this huge portion of American society is today, and pointed to a grim future for pockets of the aging American population. It is depressing, but awesome.

A beautiful way to show climate change, and I have always wanted to be able to photograph seed banks and coral farms. I am so jealous I did not commission these wonderful photos.