It’s that time of year when bloggers schedule their year-end wrap ups to post while they are off drinking egg nog and ‘gramming pictures of their childhood bedrooms. The result is a plethora of end-of-the-year round-ups.
So in the interest of publishing even more lists on the Internet, the Observer has complied a list of end-of-year lists. It isn’t comprehensive (because nobody should have to read every year-end list). Instead, it is a fairly random sampling of 14 year-end lists that have caught our eye, for whatever reason. Enjoy. And remember, by next week, it will be the beginning of a new year. We will never have to talk or think about 2014 again.
Notable Opinion Art of 2014The New York Times ‘ Opinion Pages got self-referential.
Great TV 2014: Not a List, Not in Order New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum finally succumbed and wrote about the shows she watched and liked over the past year, proving that even The New Yorker isn’t immune.
The media’s volatile year, Politico’s media reporter Hadas Gold reminded us of what a crazy year it has been for media news, “for better or worse,” as the subhead explained.
The worst journalism of 2014 CJR gave us a more depressing take on the year in media.
The 10 Worst Civil Liberties Violations of 2014 “It’s been an exceptionally awful year,” Slate unequivocally explained.
31 Moments That Restored Our Faith in Humanity in 2014 Juxtapose that with BuzzFeed’s uplifting take on the past year. After all, how bad can a year be when there were multiple spontaneous dance parties on public transportation?
The 15 worst Internet hoaxes of 2014—and where the pranksters are now Never mind. The girl who somehow pranked Internet writers into believing that she had gotten a plastic surgeon to give her a third boob in order to score a reality show is now trying to be a pop star. Whatever faith in humanity was restored by BuzzFeed has been ruined by The Washington Post.
An Unquenchable Year: The Jezebel Thirsty 100 The Gawker media site staff made a list of the people and things that exhibited the most “thirst,” which is defined as “unseemly striving for an unrealistic goal, or an unnecessary amount of praise.” They named themselves the thirstiest.
Bests, Worsts and Other Superlatives From 2014 in Entertainment Vulture covered all the bases.
The 9 Robots That Might Have Enslaved Us in 2014 Fast Company won for the headline alone.
In Memoriam: Remembering All the Content That Didn’t Go Viral This Year Speaking of things that could have happened but didn’t, Clickhole’s parody is spot-on.
Stars strip down: The year in nude celebrity photos There isn’t much we can count on, but at least there is The New York Post.
The 14 Most Scandalous Instagram Posts of 2014 (NSFW) Cosmo also came through in the dependable category.
Check Out What Opened on the Upper West Side in 2014 Of course, if it’s hyper-local you want, DNAinfo has you covered.
Note: We left out publication’s list of their own most popular/best stories (we aren’t doing publicity). We didn’t include writer’s recaps of their own year (Medium took care of that). And even though the Observer has written some end-of-year lists ourselves, we didn’t include them because even we have limits to how Meta (META) we can get.
