Our 9 Favorite Feature Stories This Week: A Sex Tape, Beyond Meat, And Big Mother

This week for BuzzFeed News, Anne Helen Petersen unpacks the imminent self-tracking revolution. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

1. Big Mother Is Watching You — BuzzFeed News

Photograph by Jon Premosch for BuzzFeed

If you keep your fitness-related New Year’s resolutions in 2015, it’ll likely be thanks to the new wave of devices and apps that have taken monitoring things like newborn sleep patterns and blood oxygenation from geek hobby to mass-market juggernaut. But what happens when companies have access to the most mundane details about our bodies? Read it at BuzzFeed News.

2. The Tragedy of the American Military — The Atlantic

Adam Voorhes for the Atlantic

In this tremendous piece, James Fallows argues how as fewer Americans participate in the military, the rhetoric and prodigal spending that fuels it have only increased — to tragic ends. "Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win." Read it at The Atlantic.

3. Bernie Sanders for President? Why Not. — New York

Photograph by Nigel Parry for New York

Mark Jacobson profiles the senator from Vermont, whose radical politics are a reflection of the increasingly blue state he represents. "Unlike almost every other modern pol, he hasn’t had to change with the times. The times came to him." Read it at New York.

4. The 1988 Murder Of A Cop Changed New York. Will It Happen Again? — BuzzFeed News

NY Daily News via Getty Images New York Daily News Archive

Police fear a new wave of violence against officers; activists fear an end to efforts to hold cops accountable when they cross the line. Albert Samaha looks at what history can teach us about the present. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

5. How Could a Woman Just Disappear? — Boston Globe Magazine

Photograph by Candace Kuchinski

Eighteen months ago, a hiker named Geraldine Largay disappeared in the Maine woods on the Appalachian trail. As Kathryn Miles reports, investigators still have no clues as to what happened to her. Read it at the Boston Globe Magazine.

6. Confessions of a Fixer — The Chronicle of Higher Education

chronicle.com

Brad Wolverton speaks with a 42-year-old Maryland father and basketball coach, who for 14 years helped student athletes cheat in order to obtain scholarships. "Mr. White may be an extreme example, but his breaches illustrate the ease with which intercollegiate athletics can be exploited, its rules manipulated, and the inability of colleges and regulators to control it." Read it at the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

7. The Top-Secret Food That Will Change the Way You Eat — Outside

Photograph by Misha Gravenor for Outside

A California company called Beyond Meat claims to have invented a viable, plant-based substitute for beef. But Rowan Jacobsen asks: can it really replace the real thing? Read it at Outside.

8. The King of Clickbait — New Yorker

Illustration by Oliver Munday

Andrew Marantz introduces Emerson Spartz, the 27-year-old behind the website Dose, and others. "Spartz calls himself an aggregator, but he is more like a day trader, investing in pieces of content that seem poised to go viral." Read it at the New Yorker.

9. Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Sex Tape — Rolling Stone

S. Granitz / WireImage / Via rollingstone.com

A fun story by Amanda Chicago Lewis about the disgruntled electrician who stole the couple's safe, only to find inside the sex tape of all sex tapes. "Before Kim Kardashian, before TMZ, before RedTube, before the Fappening, there was Pam and Tommy." Read it at Rolling Stone.

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