The Top 14 MoJo Longreads of 2014

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

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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

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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