The Best Business Writing 2015

Corporate monopolies, gross mismanagement, retail delivery drones, the growing app economy--2015 was a year of profound changes in the world of business and finance. Offering clear-eyed assessments of these developments along with compelling profiles and muckraking reports, the incisive articles in this volume provide an essential guide for understanding business’s influence on economics, politics, and culture.

Selections include Sarah Maslin Nir’s explosive exposé of the nail-salon industry in the New York Times and the Associated Press’s disheartening investigation into slave-labor practices abroad. The stories in this volume explore new frontiers in the way we do chores, eat takeout, order online, and dumpster-dive, showcasing business’s rapid evolution under the influence of new technologies. Profiles include the amusing portrait of a young investor who made a fortune betting on penny stocks; the inspiring and cautionary story of an undocumented immigrant who became a star trader at Goldman Sachs; and the shocking account of a troubled financial prodigy who defrauded his inner circle of millions. Claire Suddath adds her take on corporate America’s broken maternity-leave system (Businessweek), and Charles Levinson reminds us of Wall Street’s close ties to Washington in a probing look at the making (and unmaking) of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act (Reuters).

Dean Starkman is based in New York and covers Wall Street as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. He is also a fellow with the Center for Media, Data, and Society at Central European University’s School of Public Policy in Budapest, Hungary. He has won numerous national and regional journalism awards and helped lead the Providence Journal to the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigations.

Martha M. Hamilton is a former writer, editor, and columnist for the Washington Post who now works for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Ryan Chittum is a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He has written for numerous other publications, including the New York Times.