"Best of All Possible Worlds": An amazing tale about a public art contest in Evansville, Indiana.

It's quite early in 2014, and yet this piece is an early favorite for most thought-provoking work -- and it's a page turner with one unsurprising ending and another completely unexpected plot twist.

Wow.

BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: A Public Art Contest in Evansville, Indiana, Becomes a Debate over Class, Race, and Good Taste, by Mark Lane (Believer)

DISCUSSED: Awarding Prizes to Art, Portals and Boundary States, Riverboat Gambling, Questioning the Priorities of Urban Renewal, Order as a Healing Mechanism, Productive Mental Disorders, High Levels of Ambient Gayness, Part-Time Artists as Bellwethers of Economic Growth, Vandalism, Art Acting Like Art, Meeting the Neighbors, The Kardashians, A Lost Picasso

In early 2012, Saul Melman came across an ad for an outdoor sculpture contest in Evansville, Indiana, a city about which he knew nothing. Artists were invited to propose a sculpture for one of twelve four-by-four-foot concrete pads in Evansville’s arts district, to be evaluated in part based on the sculpture’s integration into the neighborhood and its connection to the community.