Best Business Writing 2014

Dean Starkman is based in New York and covers Wall Street as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. A reporter for two decades, he worked for eight years as a Wall Street Journal staff writer and was chief of the Providence Journal's investigative unit. He has won numerous national and regional journalism awards and helped lead the Providence Journal to the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigations. He is the author of The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism. Martha M. Hamilton is a contributor to the Washington Post's "Get There," a new section on money and its power to change lives. She is also the author, along with former Post colleague Warren Brown, of Black and White and Red All Over. Ryan Chittum is a senior writer at the Columbia Journalism Review and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He has written for numerous other publications, including the New York Times. He is also a contributor to Bad News: How America's Business Press Missed the Story of the Century. His recent work can be seen at www.cjr.org/author/ryan-chittum-1/.

• Introduction Acknowledgments Part I. Silicon Culture 1. Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley, by Evgeny Morozov 2. Diary: Google Invades, by Rebecca Solnit 3. Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not, by Susan Faludi 4. Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht's Big Fail, by David Kushner Part II. Brave New Economic World 5. A Tale of Two Londons, by Nicholas Shaxson 6. London's Laundry Business, by Ben Judah 7. How Technology and Hefty Subsidies Make U.S. Cotton King, by Robert Smith 8. Invisible Child: Girl in the Shadows: Dasani's Homeless Life, by Andrea Eliot 9. Russell Brand and the GQ Awards: "It's Amazing How Absurd It Seems", by Russell Brand 10. Maximizing Shareholder Value: The Goal That Changed Corporate America, by Jia Lynn Yang Part III. Frenzied Finance 11. One Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society, by Kevin Roose 12. Here's Why Wall Street Has a Hard Time Being Ethical, by Chris Arnade 13. How the Fed Let the World Blow Up in 2008, by Matthew O'Brien 14. Gross vs. El-Erian: Inside the Showdown Atop the World's Biggest Bond Firm, by Gregory Zuckerman amd Kirsten Grind 15. Secret Currency Traders' Club Devised Biggest Market's Rates, by Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch, and Bob Ivry 16. Lunch with the FT: Meredith Whitney, by Lucy Kellaway 17. A Pivotal Financial Crisis Case, Ending with a Whimper, by Jesse Eisinger Part IV. Unhealthy Business 18. Use Only as Directed, by Jeff Gerth and T. Christian Miller 19. Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business, by Jonah Engle 20. The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, by Michael Moss 21. League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis, by Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser, Steve Fainaru, and Mark Fainaru-Wada Part V. Creative Destruction 22. How Jenna Lyons Transformed J.Crew Into a Cult Brand, by Danielle Sacks 23. The Mysterious Story of the Battery Startup That Promised GM a 200-Mile Electric Car, by Steve LeVine 24. The Death of the Funeral Business, by Sandy Hingston 25. Declara Co-Founder Ramona Pierson's Comeback Odyssey, by Ashlee Vance 26. A Toast Story, by John Gravois Part VI. The Politics of Business 27. Washington's Robust Market for Attacks, Half-Truths, by Michael Kranish 28. He Who Makes the Rules, by Haley Sweetland Edwards 29. A Word from Our Sponsor, by Jane Mayer 30. Amazon's (Not So) Secret War on Taxes, by Peter Elkind with Doris Burke 31. How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers, by Gregg Easterbrook List of Contributors Permissions