Conor Friedersdorf, the man behind The Best of Journalism e-newsletter, shares his list of “102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012,” many of which we’ve linked to from Boing Boing and plenty that we missed! I was delighted that Cory’s Boing Boing feature “Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing,” made the list. Below are a few others to give you a ease of Conor’s taste. Time to load up ye olde e-reader.
No. 31
The Heretic
by Tim Doody
For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting.The Morning News Jul 2012
No. 43
Trigger
by Michael Hall
The life of a guitar.
Texas Monthly Dec 2012No. 66
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
by Kathleen McAuliffe
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s discovering now will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? Inside the emerging science of mind-controlling parasites.
The Atlantic Mar 2012
“102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012“