“Two strangers dragged me from bed in the middle of the night and drove me into the woods. But this wasn’t a random abduction — just my first step into the world of controversial boot camps for troubled teens.” Kenneth Rosen in Narratively: The Night My Parents Had Me Kidnapped.

+ “They are signing up to spend years talking about something nobody else wants to talk about.” Katie Heaney: Can The Next Generation Of Morticians Breathe Life Into The Death Industry?

+ Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker: Inside the Collapse of The New Republic.

+ From PRI: Shaggy dogs, sexy sharks, boozy birds — it’s the top animal stories of 2014.