Yes, there was Aurora and there was Newtown, and there may have been a striking lack of coverage on Afghanistan and the drone war, but there was a handful of news events that seemed to make for the most striking photography.
After another year of big ups, a few downs, and the same old viral hits, YouTube is still the undisputed king of Internet video. Can Google keep you surfing long enough to transform YouTube without breaking it?
The people who work at The Onion are some of the smartest, and most essential, people in the "news" world right now, and they went through a tough year. So we thought it would be a good idea to share our favorite stories.
In the real world, there were escalating political nightmares and merciless superstorms and terrible shootings. But on TV and on the radio, at the movies and all across the Internet, there was revitalization and renewal, invention and good old-fashioned fun.
Books — staid and intellectual cultural artifacts that they so often are — were not all just staid or intellectual this year. Not nearly. There were, in fact, publishing scandals, dramas, and plot twists galore. Oh, and Philip Roth.
As part of The Atlantic Wire's Year in Review, we've gathered our favorites from among all the ridiculous, kernel-of-truth in a popcorn-bowl-of-pleasure stories reported by the Times and beyond, and bestowed them with their own special awards.
Maybe you got a new smartphone or tablet for Christmas, or maybe you're just re-stocking your device. Either way, these are the new essentials for your iPad, Android device, and, in all cases, your iPhone.
They are news stories and they are the people behind them, they are photos and videos and GIFs. They are, quite simply and in chronological order, the good things.
Saturday Night Live isn't important because it's a weekly funny show. It's important because it's the only weekly funny show that can help us remember what the heck happened this year.
As schedules lighten and plane trips loom, we've compiled some of our favorite pieces of long-form non-fiction journalism from an excellent year for the so-called long read.
The most noxious, wrongheaded, misleading, silly, and downright awful pieces of punditry to somehow end up in print or online this year.
Time can have its real person of the year, but not-real people can influence us, too, and in 2012, fake characters mattered. From Katniss to Bane and Zero Dark Thirty's Maya, here's our alternative list.
There is no better way for a semantic-minded person to remember the year than with those words we'd just as soon never write or see or hear spoken again. From "artisanal" to "curate," "gaffe" to "legitimate rape," and "meggings" to "ugh," here's our list.
From Gifts to Pages — and, oh yeah, Instagram — the year Facebook went public was the year Facebook proved it could make money, mostly through advertising, and even on your phone. Here's how, month by month.
Adult fiction and nonfiction were pretty phenomenal this year. Here, we celebrate 34 of our favorite reads from the last 12 months — with superlatives!
Many people made a big splash this year in movies, music, media, etc. Because these people can never get enough attention, here are our ten favorite debuts and/or breakout humans from the American culture.
With apologies to Lindsay Lohan (sort of), we've attempted to dwell not so much on the horribly depressing and negative stories that flood the tabloids every day (read: Amanda Bynes) and instead focused on the tales of hope and redemption — in so far as one hopes Chris Brown can really be redeemed (he can't) or one really hopes for Rob and Kristen.
Which were the best—most amusing, most mortifying, funniest, most cringeworthy, and most interesting—mistakes of the year? Herewith, our favorites.
A lot of the big viral things this year had shorter life expectancies than usual, thanks to the cool-hunters who singlehandedly ended them. Here's our interactive guide to the last 12 months in Internet obituaries.
That it was an uneven year at the movies does not mean it was without its definite bright spots. To that end, and in continuing with The Atlantic Wire's Year in Review, we've chosen our ten favorite films of 2012. And a few that were not so much.
We honor the 33 books that mattered to us in this year's breakout literary genre, with a little help from some writerly and book-loving folks, including authors Eliot Schrefer, Ally Condie, Ruta Supetys, Andrea Cremer, R.L. Stine, and others.
Maybe there can be such a thing as too much of the oral history — especially this year, when the form seemed to reach its peak. We've picked a few favorites.
For readers who don't obsessively comb through dozens of music blogs every day, we put together a guide to this year's musical micro trends. None were nominated for Grammys.
From the youngs of Brooklyn to old-timey Jersey, the White Walkers to the regular old zombie walkers, here's our list of the 10 best television shows of the year ... and two that were not so much.
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