Anthony Davis/Photo © Natursports/Shutterstock

Good-bye Old Man 2014, welcome Little Baby New Year 2015. Out with the old, in with the new. Or, perhaps best fitting for Biographile, time to turn the page. Without further ado, here are our ten picks for who to watch this upcoming year.

Anthony Davis may have a regular everyman’s name, but don’t let that belie his one-in-a-billion game. He might not yet be a household moniker, but NBA aficionados know he’s the next huge super-duper star. Only twenty-one years old, Davis is already averaging twenty-five points, ten rebounds, and three blocks a game. More importantly, he looks the part with a massive wingspan and a penchant for throwing down sick dunks, as the kids like to say. Known as “The Brow” for a glorious unibrow that rivals only Bert from Sesame Street, Davis plies his trade for the unsung New Orleans Pelicans. (Yep, that’s really their name.) They’re a young team with a blossoming MVP candidate, one who will be fighting to make the playoffs, so hop on the birdwagon now, and enjoy watching other NBA teams take a Brow beating.

Basketball has a checkered history in NOLA, they lost their ABA franchise to Salt Lake City (because nothing says “Jazz” like Utah), and then lost a couple of seasons to Katrina. Still, there is one local legend who outshined it all, the boy wizard Pete Maravich. His electric career and sad aftermath comes to life in Pistol by Mark Kriegel.

For calling out Bill Cosby from a stage in Philadelphia, stand-up Hannibal Buress is having a major media moment, but he should be known for so much more. First and foremost, he’s hilarious. Buress has a killer delivery and spins great rambling shaggy-dog yarns. He was a writer on "SNL" and "30 Rock," but with a recurring role on "Broad City" and a part in the 2015 Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg movie "Daddy’s Home," he’s on the verge of big-time stardom. Buress deserves some type of comedy activist medal for taking on the Cos, but like so many of his peers, he’ll just have to settle with his recent book deal. If he ever gets around to finishing his “homework” that is.

Fearless is the best single word to sum up journalist Mac McClelland. Formerly a human rights reporter for Mother Jones, she’s written dispatches from all over the globe, including a violent crime-ridden tent city in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, among the persecuted gays in Uganda, or in her economically ravaged home state of Ohio. The horrors McClelland witnessed caused her to suffer from PTSD, which she dealt with through violent sex, staging her own rape to be precise. Her provocative memoir about the experience, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story, comes out in February.

If, like me, you plan on wasting a lot of time on the internet in 2015, might as well learn something in the process. Retro Report is one of the most informative news sites out there, but it isn’t interested in breaking stories. At Retro Report, the journalists go back and revisit old stories that often turn out to be vastly different than the narrative we all think we know. Remember the Australian woman who claimed “a dingo’s got my baby”? She was convicted of murder and went to prison, and later, the line became a Seinfeld gag. Were you aware her conviction was overturned and that a coroner confirmed her two-year-old daughter was killed by a dingo? I wasn’t until November when Retro Report did a piece on Lindy Chamberlain, a tragic figure if there ever was one. The McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, Ruby Ridge, fear of power lines, Napster, Terri Schiavo, Dolly the Sheep ... There’s an endless number of topics where the conventional wisdom doesn’t match up with the facts and Retro Report is on it.

Related, if you’re into books that set the record straight, pick up Columbine by Dave Cullen. His thorough look into the terrifying 1999 school shooting dispels all kinds of myths. Three examples: The killers were never in the Trench Coat Mafia, they weren’t bullied at school, and they didn’t go bowling on the day of the massacre.

In the movie "Appropriate Behavior," writer/director/star Desiree Akhavan plays Shirin, an underemployed Iranian-American bisexual Brooklynite trying to put the pieces back together after breaking up with her girlfriend. If you think that sounds a little like something a certain other someone might write, you won't be surprised to learn that you’ll be seeing Akhavan on "Girls" this coming season as well. A daughter of Iranian immigrants who fled following the 1979 revolution, Akhavan’s first feature played Sundance last year and will be available on DVD in February. Akhavan herself has referred to the film as “a gay Annie Hall.” Sold.

Democrats got an ass-whooping in November (among the thirty-six percent of eligible voters who turned out for the midterms anyway), but they do have one fascinating new House member. Meet Seth Moulton, a freshman who will be representing Massachusetts's sixth district. A former Marine, Moulton opposed the Iraq War, but still served four tours of duty. A Harvard grad and a self-described “progressive Democrat,” Moulton is one of the few young veterans in Congress and should be a refreshing realistic voice on military matters. He believes ISIS needs to be defeated, but not with American combat troops, which stands in stark contrast to the never-served-a-day Congressional chickenhawks. Moulton might be just the guy to breathe new life into the moribund Democratic party.

Oh, if you’re curious as to how we ended up with such a polarized red-blue stalemate America, it’s time to start reading Rick Perlstein. In Before the Storm, Nixonland, and 2014's The Invisible Bridge, he tells that story better than any historian going.

Novelist T. Geronimo Johnson’s second book, Welcome to Braggsville, comes out on February 17. It’s the story of a group of University of California, Berkeley, students who go to a Georgia town to interrupt a Civil War re-enactment. By staging the hanging of a slave. It all goes terribly wrong. This book sounds amazing, challenging, and deliriously dark, a postmodern accompaniment to 2014 Civil Rights era look-backs like Selma and Clay Risen’s The Bill of the Century.

The second half of 2014's news was dominated by the killings-without-indictments in Ferguson and Staten Island, and the larger pattern of deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hands of police officers. The backbeat for the protests that roiled across the country came correct from Run the Jewels, a rap duo whose second album, RTJ2, is on all kinds of top ten lists and was named album of the year by Bitter Southerner for being the record we need “Right Now.” Run the Jewels is a fire-spitting collaboration between Killer Mike, a black Atlantan, and El-P, a white Brooklynite, and although hip-hop tends to be a young man’s game, both turn forty in 2015. They’re wise old men in this world, which is why Killer Mike’s impassioned plea, on behalf of his children, after the Ferguson grand jury decision is so powerful. RTJ2 is an urgent must-read book unto itself. Here’s to whatever they have to say next.

Cops don’t get more New York City than Steve Osborne, a former lieutenant in the NYPD Detective Bureau who patrolled the much-meaner streets of the 1980s and '90s. His voice sounds of Serpico, of cabbies, wiseguys, regulars at the track, and corner boys hanging outside the deli with Greek coffee cups. Osborne has great stories and even greater storytelling skills, which is how he became a Moth favorite. “Takedown Day,” about how he abandoned a large-scale well-orchestrated raid so he could get downtown on a fateful September morning, is a doozy. He brings his crazy, absurd, scary, touching stories to page in his first book, The Job, which comes out April 21. What always comes through is Osborne’s humanity, the best weapon of all.

The state of American tennis leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, Serena Williams is still ranked number number one, and Venus is hanging around at number eighteen, but after that it drops off into the thirties. (And that’s way better than the men. Egads.) There’s hope for the future in Victoria Duval, a nineteen-year-old Haitian-American from Miami. She pulled off a major upset in the 2013 U.S. Open beating 2011 champion Sam Stosur. Last June, at Wimbledon, Duval was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After a few months of treatment, Duval announced she’s cancer free and is back on the court.

Duval's life story is already memoir worthy, but until it comes why not take in John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, his masterpiece about a 1968 match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. It’ll be a nice warmup to Duval’s 2015 because she’s definitely one to watch. And root for. Your country needs you.