December 25, 2014

The Top 14 MoJo Longreads of 2014

A selection of 14 fascinating features from the past 12 months.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


While conventional wisdom suggests that people won’t read lengthy magazine stories online, MoJo readers have regularly proven otherwise. Many of our top traffic-generating stories are heavily researched investigations and deeply reported narratives—stories which our readers stick to till the bitter end. So here, for your holiday enjoyment, is a selection of 14 of our best-loved longreads from 2014.  (Click here for last year’s list, here for our 2012 list, and finally here for our 2011 list). 

Are you racist?

The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men
And how to reform our bigoted brains.
By Chris Mooney

 

 

Seal Team Six

The Making of the Warrior Cop: Inside the Billion-Dollar Industry that Turned Local Cops into SEAL Team Six
Do police really need grenade launchers?
By Shane Bauer

The great frack forward

The Great Frack Forward: A Journey to the Heart of China’s Gas Boom

US Companies are salivating over the biggest shale gas resources in the world. What could go wrong?
By Jaeah Lee and James West

NRA

The NRA’s Murder Mystery
Was the NRA’s top lawyer railroaded—or a “bad guy with a gun”?
By Dave Gilson

 

bail industry

Inside the Wild, Shadowy, and Highly Lucrative Bail Industry
How $550 and a five-day class gets you the right to stalk, arrest, and shoot people.
By Shane Bauer

 

Coding

We Can Code it: Why Computer Literacy is Key to Winning the 21st Century
Why American schools need to train a generation of hackers.
By Tasneem Raja

 

Children on the boarder

70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?
Officials have been stunned by a “surge” of unaccompanied children crossing into the US.
By Ian Gordon

 

Koch

Koch vs. Koch: The Brutal Battle That Tore Apart America’s Most Powerful Family
Before the brothers went to war against Obama, they almost destroyed each other.
By Daniel Schulman

Palin

Is New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez the Next Sarah Palin?
Petty. Vindictive. Weak on policy. And yet she is being hailed as the Republican Party’s great new hope.
By Andy Kroll

 

Newsweek

Who’s Behind Newsweek?
The magazine’s owners are anxious to hide their ties to an enigmatic religious figure. Why?
By Ben Dooley

 

Iran

Kidnapped By Iran: 780 Days of Isolation, Two Dozen Interrogations, One Marriage Proposal
How we survived two years of hell as hostages in Tehran.
By Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal, and Sarah Shourd

 

BPA

The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics
And the Big Tobacco-style campaign to bury it.
By Mariah Blake

 

 

Common Core

Inside the Mammoth Backlash to Common Core
How a bipartisan education reform effort became the biggest conservative bogeyman since Obamacare.
By Tim Murphy

 

sudan

This American Refused to Become an FBI Informant. Then the Government Made His Family’s Life Hell.
Plus, secret recordings reveal FBI threats.
By Nick Baumann

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate