Journalism Bucket List

A tobacco scientist blows the whistle on his industry and 60 Minutes decides whether to air it.

The women who brought down Roger Ailes at Fox News, told from inside the newsroom.

The Washington Post decides whether to print the Pentagon Papers, with Streep as the publisher who says yes.

Welles at 25: deep focus, a fractured biography and the word 'Rosebud'.

The Air Corps officers who believed precision bombing could win a war humanely, and Curtis LeMay burning Tokyo instead.

Nineteen New Yorker pieces, from Cesar Millan reading dogs to why there are dozens of mustards and only one ketchup.

Why we misread people we do not know, built around the traffic stop that ended with Sandra Bland dead in a cell.

Ankh-Morpork gets a newspaper, and the news gets a price.

Joe Sacco in Gaza and the West Bank in 1991; comics journalism begins.

Lawrence Wright on al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11; the Pulitzer.

Isabel Wilkerson follows three people in the Great Migration of six million Black Americans north.

Michael Herr's Vietnam, in the language the soldiers used; the best book about that war.

Sacco in a Bosnian enclave during the war; the second reportage comic.

John Hersey follows six survivors through the day of the bomb; the New Yorker gave it a whole issue.

Michael Pollan follows four meals from field to plate, starting with corn.

Tracy Kidder inside Data General building a computer in 1979; the first great tech book.

The Osage murders of the 1920s and the birth of the FBI; Grann before Scorsese.

Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter Thompson of the future, against the City; Warren Ellis.

Jason Schreier on how ten games got made, from Stardew Valley to The Witcher 3.

Tom Wolfe on the test pilots and the Mercury Seven.

A mother of ten disappeared in Belfast in 1972 and what the Troubles did; Patrick Radden Keefe.

The Sackler family and OxyContin; Keefe's dynasty of the opioid crisis.

Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes and the blood test that never worked; Carreyrou's reporting.

The murder of a Kansas farm family and the two men who did it; Capote's non-fiction novel.

The handful who bet against the housing bubble; Michael Lewis makes CDOs a story.

The fall of the Iranian monarchy in 1979 through photographs and fragments; Kapuscinski.

Kapuscinski's first assignments abroad with the first historian in his pocket.

The leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1988; the deal book.

Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.

Haile Selassie's court told by its servants; Kapuscinski on power anywhere.