We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in investigative reporting. Villarosa’s unflinching examination of giving birth while black in America has stayed with me.
https://longreads.com/2018/12/14/longreads-best-of-2018-investigative-reporting/
Chris Bourdain is searching for a word that he cannot quite find. We’re sitting together in a small café in Grand Central Terminal, drinking table wine and talking about his late older brother, Anthony.
https://www.gq.com/story/anthony-bourdain-men-of-the-year-tribute
Waking up on a Sunday morning, I received a text about what happened after I left the previous night’s party. “Everyone got high and we played truth or dare. Ted and Ivan docked.” “Are you serious?” I replied. “I thought that only happened in porn.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/pornhub-and-the-american-sexual-imagination.html
The biggest and perhaps best source of data about what people like to watch on the internet and what they would pay for doesn’t come from streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Hulu. It comes from porn.
How the financial crisis precipitated a mass exodus of Western investment from Central Europe—and paved the way for oligarchic takeovers of media.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/11/30/when-oligarchs-buy-media-a-central-european-tale/
When it comes to hunkering down with at the bar, New York has long been a standard-bearer. Wait, wait, shiver, delight.
Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In a basement three floors underground, next to The New York Times’s headquarters, steel filing cabinets hold about six million photographs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/reader-center/past-tense-photos-history-morgue.html
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In the final months of 2018, Rockstar Games has absorbed the full force of video game culture’s radicalization. It’s an awesome force. It’s an awful force. It’s modern politics.
https://www.theringer.com/2018/11/20/18104335/red-dead-redemption-2-reviews-politics-discourse
Quartz AfricaThe important stories of innovation across the continent’s wide-ranging economies
From tip to tail, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a profound, glorious downer. It is the rare blockbuster video game that seeks to move players not through empowering gameplay and jubilant heroics, but by relentlessly forcing them to confront decay and despair.
https://kotaku.com/red-dead-redemption-2-the-kotaku-review-1829984369
