The Best Columns of 2014

The Daily Beast picks the top offerings by the nation’s columnists, from Charles Blow’s first-rate prose to Roger Cohen’s elegiac tones to Mary Schmich’s artful misdirection. Every year, we catalogue the best columns of the year here at The Daily Beast. Amid a sea of year-end Best Ofs in songs, movies, and books, the column is still a strangely neglected American art form, despite the democratic proliferation of online opinion.