Presenting the best of Just Well Mixed, 2013 Edition

Posted on January 16, 2014

Oh look, it’s 2014, which means it’s time to round up the best posts made to this blog in 2013. As usual, “best” is determined by the standard JWM method, which involves calculating the post’s number of hits, the quality of comment threads it spawned here and elsewhere, and the phase of the moon when the post was posted, and then throwing all that shit out and picking the ones I liked best. It’s not scientific, but it feels good.

So, without further ado, here’s the list:

Rick Reilly’s Lance Armstrong problem is all of journalism’s problem (January 22, 2013)
The style of reporting usually called “access journalism” is neither: neither access, nor journalism

I kind of hate Twitter (February 1, 2013)
Taken together, all of these factors create an environment where even reasonable, thoughful people behave like douchebags. They don’t do so because they are douchebags, necessarily. They do so because Twitter as a medium is optimized for douchebaggery

Stephen A. Douglas, the politician who was too smart for his own good (March 6, 2013)
Intelligence, in and of itself, is no guarantee of wisdom. Smart people tend to fall into different types of snares than stupid people; but fall into snares they do, and with distressing frequency. Self-destruction is not the exclusive province of the dumb

How winners win: John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations (March 14, 2013)
A culture focused on a particular set of essential principles, Boyd believed, would give the organization that followed it an edge when confronting any organization that did not. He called this set of principles the “organizational climate for operational success”

WordPress is secure, until you combine it with people (May 9, 2013)
WordPress suffers from a problem that many software products do: it expects its users to be something they are not

The free coffee test, or Lefkowitz’s Law of Corporate Financial Health (May 22, 2013)
The financial health of a company can be inferred from the quality, variety and cost to the employee of the snacks and beverages it offers its employees

SLIDESHOW: 20 Cats Who Suck At Reducing Tensions In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (July 10, 2013)
Screw blogging! It’s about time I made a play for some of those sweet, sweet BuzzFeed/HuffPo pageviews. So here’s a slideshow

STOVL, the F-35, and how we’re even more f’ed than David Axe suggests (August 15, 2013)
The F-35 is an extremely troubled program. But its troubles are just the tip of the iceberg

Native advertising: you can’t rent your credibility, you can only sell it (September 17, 2013)
The reason native advertising works is because readers don’t understand that it is advertising

BREAKING: Everything Hacked (October 30, 2013)
Everything. The whole enchirito. All of it