If you're staring down a couple of days off this afternoon, have a look at Longform.org's picks for the best (long form) pieces of the year. The lists are helpfully broken down by topic: crime, money, politics -- and topics of interest to the On The Media devotee, media and technology.

Here's a great graph from Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's piece about a remote Romanian town known as 'Hackerville.'

"No one really knows how or why those kids started scamming people on the Internet. “If you find out, you let us know,” says Codruţ Olaru, head of Romania’s Directorate for Investigation on Organized Crime and Terrorism. Whatever the reason, online crime was widespread by 2002. Cybercafés offered cheap Internet access, and crooks in Râmnicu Vâlcea got busy posting fake ads on eBay and other auction sites to lure victims into remitting payments by wire transfer. Eventually, FBI agents in the US and Bucharest started to get interested."