This being Christmas week I pretty much skipped keeping up with news and politics.  I did however review the articles I flagged a significant over the past year and identified which ones seem to have held up best over time.   Here, in no particular order, is my top reads of 2014:

• Thomas Kochan, In Market Basket Protests, Three Lessons For Corporate America
• The Boston Globe, 2014 Bostonians of the Year:  Market Basket employees
• Clara Jeffrey’s interview with Matt Taibbi, The Man Behind the Vampire Squid: An Interview with Matt Taibbi
• Ray Pierrehumbert, Climate Science Is Settled Enough
• Naomi Oreskes, A “Green” Bridge to Hell
• Zadie Smith, Elegy for a Country’s Seasons
• Alyssa Battistoni, Alive in the Sunshine
• Robert Kuttner, Obama’s Obama:  The contradictions of Cass Sunstein
• Mike Konczal, The [University of North Carolina] Coup and the Second Limit of Economic Liberalism
• Jim Tankersley, Why America’s middle class is lost
• Tom Ricks, Why Am I Moving Left?
• Bill Moyers interviewing John R. MacArthur, Democrats Bow Down to Wall Street
• Dougald Hine, What do you do, after you stop pretending?
• Eric Chandler, Running vs Running Away

From Hine’s essay:

There’s a big difference between the task of trying to sustain “civilisation” in its current form … and the task of holding open a space for the things which make life worth living. I’d suggest that it’s this second task, in its many forms, which remains, after we’ve given up on false hopes.

That is the aspect of life that I find most challenging and which I expect I will wrestle with until they plant me.

I cut the list above off at fourteen because if you make the list too long it dilutes the significance of the items on in.  (And fourteen items already constitutes pretty long list.)   With that in mind, there are quite a few other pieces which didn’t quite make the cut.

Humor

• Popehat, Fear And Loathing In Falls Church

Environment

• Eli Rabett, The [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] and Resilience
• Elizabeth Farnsworth, Is “New Conservation” Still Conservation?
• John Smelser, A Personal View on Sustainable Gardening and Going Green

“Free Trade”

• Dean Baker, “Trade” Deals Have Little to Do With Trade
• Robert Kuttner, T-TIPping Point: Rise of Corporate Right Greater Menace than Rise of Far Right
• Harold Meyerson, The trade clause that overrules governments

Economics

• Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker, Full employment: The recovery’s missing ingredient
• Steve Randy Waldman, Depression is a Choice
• Jared Bernstein, Wages should be growing faster, but they’re not. Here’s why.
• Jared Bernstein, It’s Not a Skills Gap That’s Holding Wages Down: It’s the Weak Economy, Among Other Things

Politics

• Christina Breitbeil, Rethinking the Social Contract
• Joseph Stiglitz, The Myth of America’s Golden Age:  What growing up in Gary, Indiana, taught me about inequality
• Bill Moyers interviewing Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders on Breaking Big Money’s Grip on Elections
• C-SPAN, Senators McCain and Rockefeller on CIA Interrogations
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Enough Is Enough: The President’s Latest Wall Street Nominee [Antonio Weiss to serve as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the Treasury Department]
• Eric Lipton (NYT), Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General
• Bill Greider, How the Democratic Party Lost Its Soul
• Doug Henwood, Stop Hillary!

Culture

• Jim Tankersley, A black hole for our best and brightest
• Matt Taibbi, The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate
• Atul Gawande, Modern Medicine Changed the Way We Die, and Not Always for the Better
• Nancy Carlsson-Paige, How Ed Policy is Hurting Early Childhood Education
• Sarah Scoville, Reflection:  Visions of Home

[1/20/2015:  Comments closed due to relentless submissions by spambots.]