Hidden Gems from 2015

We all remember the biggest stories of 2015, El Chapo’s escape, Ronda Rousey’s KO, and who can forget The Dress? In the spirit of discovery, we at SmartNews would like to highlight the stories that you might have missed. Following on the hidden gems theme, I took a look at each of the SmartNews categories and looked for the outliers. My somewhat unscientific methodology looked for stories from sources that would not normally appear in the category but were picked up and featured based on a topic analysis, hopefully introducing a source to a new audience that would not normally be exposed to that publication.

GQ describes itself as a men’s fashion and style magazine. When Marshall Sella tests the Bitcoin waters, SmartNews puts his piece in front of the Business readers. Marshall describes his time with Charlie Shrem, an early Bitcoin entrepreneur (bitrepreneur?) whose LinkedIn profile now shows him cooling his heels at Lewisburg Federal Prison.

It’s not often that Scientific American shows up in the Entertainment section. Cindi May’s The Problem with Female Superheroes took a look at how characters such as Storm and Dazzler in the recent X-Men films may be adversely affecting the young audiences who watch them. “Saving the world in spiked heels” may not be giving young girls a realistic expectation of their abilities. We hope the upcoming Dawn of Justice does a better job.

We all cringed when we saw the video of the 12-year-old boy who tripped and punched a hole in the 350-year-old painting valued at $1.5 million. Oliver Holms of The Guardian covers the restoration effort (thankfully it was insured) and points to other mishaps such as when a pair of Qing dynasty Chinese vases and a Picasso did not fare as well. SmartNews placed this one in the Lifestyle section which is where our Art & Culture are featured.

“I thought it was a CIA surveillance device,” said Brett McBay in Modesto, California after instructing his son to shoot his neighbor’s drone from out of the sky with a 12-gauge shotgun. Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica brought up a number of issues including the right to privacy (the skies around your home) and the respect for private property, (Eric Joe’s homemade hexacopter drone), and of course the right to fire off buckshot into the sky. SmartNews to placed this story into the US category where much of our gun violence stories have been running. Inquiring minds want to know if this Brett McBay of Modesto is the same Brett McBay whose twitter profile states he is the District Representative for a California State Assemblymember.

SB Nation covers sports and, yes, there is a basketball in this bit but it’s used to explain the Magnus Effect from physics and, for that reason, this article showed up in Science.

The Nation likes to dig (and sometimes poke) which usually lands them in the US section for political coverage. Back in May, Dave Zirin asked why mainstream sports sites were not covering the case of NBA player Thabo Sefolosha, who was tackled by NYPD outside a nightclub, injured, and subsequently missed the playoffs with his team. This story introduced Sports readers to The Nation style of media inquiry. Seven months later ESPN published an in-depth investigative piece on this same story.

Finally, in Technology, there’s this fun piece blowing the cover on arcade claw machines. Did you know that they were rigged? Phil Edwards at Vox posts PDFs from the operator manuals to prove his point and caused great consternation in the gaming industry.

We hope you had a great 2015 and learned something new. Stay curious and see you in 2016.

@iankennedy