Some stories are so good they make me feel bad about my own journalism. The ones that are even better, like this account of a letter to writer Emily Bazelon from Yutico Briley in a Louisiana prison, leave me not bitter but inspired.

Dan Zegart weaves a gripping narrative with frequently overlooked data to show the dark side of carbon capture. We’ve seen and reported on the occasional dangers of living close to petrochemical plants or refineries, but Zegart exposed how the burgeoning business of CO2 transport brings its own unique threats. As Republicans and Democrats alike tout carbon capture as a way to mitigate climate change, this story showed how safety considerations are being ignored, and communities such as Satartia, Miss., are being sacrificed.

America’s system of mass incarceration is brutal and traumatic. And it's not just adults who are run through it. This story focuses on Judge Donna Scott Davenport’s juvenile court in a Tennessee county, where an estimated 1,500 children have been jailed improperly, some as young as 7 and 8 years old. It's powerful accountability work.

While we’re all praying Covid will go away before we run out of Greek letters, let us praise some unusually clearheaded science writing. My grand jury prize for superb explanatory prose that counteracts the alarmist/denialist herds of click-seeking hacks: Ingu Yun’s concise, reassuringly numerate rundown of the Provincetown delta-variant outbreak.

Just when we thought there had been so much deep reporting about Facebook and its impact on our world, the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster series of articles giving us new insight into how the company's products harm users. The Facebook Files project is based on a trove of internal documents that show the company is aware of how much harm it causes and how little it does to solve those problems. For any reporter, it showed how there's always so much more we have yet to unearth and fully understand.

This was a fascinating story about how the World Health Organization failed to heed warnings from scientists about how Covid-19 was being spread through airborne particles that could travel more than six feet. This misunderstanding cost countless lives early on in the pandemic, until the WHO was finally convinced otherwise. It's a terrific piece of explanatory science writing, melded with a deep exploration of how public health decisions are often made with bad information.

I can hardly handle one job, so I don't see how these people manage, but it's a fascinating development in our new remote work lifestyles. This story touches on some predominant themes this year: how we relate to our jobs and find fulfillment from them (or not), how we spend the limited time in our days, and how we manage our financial futures in a rapidly changing world.

The headline suggests, perhaps, that in the case of Dawn Dorland v. Sonya Larson, only one party to the dispute about creative license at the heart of this story is worthy of blame. But everyone is awful? And that's what makes it so rich? I went in assuming I'd take sides and wound up disliking everyone.

Lizzie Presser tells the story of the life and death of JaMarcus Crews in intimate, beautiful, heart-wrenching detail. In doing so, she also tells the sorry tale of diabetes and for-profit dialysis clinics, of kidney disease and transplants and failures, and of how Black Americans often receive inferior care and advice at every turn. “Tethered to the Machine” is masterful and devastating but somehow ends with a surprising glimmer of hope.

In a year when I began discovering my own family history, this by reporter Julian Borger stopped me in my tracks. Borger unearths the desperate classified ads placed in 1938-39 asking Manchester Guardian readers to take in young Jewish children from Vienna. In the process he uncovers his own father’s story—and the tales of other lives saved by newspaper ads.

Leah Sottile draws a memorable portrait about how even something as seemingly unobjectionable as a rail-to-trail project in Oregon wine country becomes a subject of America’s partisan culture wars. Rather than merely holding it up as a wacky example, she shows how far-right forces use the trail controversy as a political wedge in service of truly extreme ideologies.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked with/for Hugo when we crossed paths at New York Magazine and here at Bloomberg Businessweek, but that didn’t stop my jealousy over his piece about the margins of professional basketball, which, as the story reveals, have a lot in common with the margins of society.

I really wish it had occurred to me that there are conventions for the funeral industry, and then to attend it in the year of the pandemic. This story was weirdly fun for such a macabre topic!

Given the dwindling resources at my hometown paper, it was inspiring to see it produce something as important and astonishing as this report about the near-daily car chases in a tragic part of metropolitan Cleveland. The statistics are all devastating, and the last scene is unbelievable.

In May, Bloomberg broke the mergers and acquisitions news of the year: AT&T was merging WarnerMedia with Discovery. Vanity Fair’s subsequent profile of David Zaslav chronicles the Discovery CEO's ascension to Hollywood moguldom with typical dash: Zoom calls from the Beverly Hills Hotel, Oprah quotes, and chardonnay on a private jet.

This was a really interesting and surprising take on the ivermectin controversy and a window into the monetization of disinformation. I shouldn't be surprised, though, as it was written by a former colleague with great writing and reporting chops.

I write about the tech industry, where hyperbolized, if not altogether fake, founder stories are common. But Sam Dean’s Los Angeles Times investigation into the supposed inventor of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is a reminder that origin myths are everywhere in business—and that countless people and brands benefit from these kinds of false-yet-marketable narratives.

It was easy to dismiss QAnon as a conspiracy cult for loonies and lost souls. I did. Then its followers stormed the seat of American government. Listening to Nicky Woolf’s remarkable podcast series is like falling down a very dark hole and emerging, blinking and dumbfounded, into a new reality.

Look, it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but this review of Gettr, the social network led by a former Trump spokesman, belongs right up there with Pete Wells on Guy Fieri. What I admire about this piece isn’t the ruthless mockery, which is hilarious, but the way Miller takes seriously Gettr’s premise—that there is such a thing as a “free speech” social network—and then persuasively demolishes it. Gettr faces “the same banal challenge that every neckbeard site admin and anxiety-riddled Zoomer slaving away at the dystopian Facebook content-moderation farm has confronted,” he argues. “The problem is the users.”

I’ve spent a good part of the pandemic at my late father’s house in glorious Down East Maine. There’s just one thing I absolutely hate about the place: all the damn ticks! This piece filled with me with that sweet combination of rage and hope. (And it made me jealous of my now-vaxxed dog, too.)

Josh Dzieza’s story is a richly reported and gripping portrait of how New York City’s gig-delivery bikers, whose bosses claim they’re contractors excluded from workplace protections, have banded together to protect each other: riding together to deter muggings on a poorly lit path, lobbying lawmakers for basic protections, and collectively tracking down and confronting the man who stole one of their bikes.

This was a fascinating meditation on the U.S. Constitution, the concept of personhood, and morality. By telling the story of a zoo-bound elephant, the author wrote with compassion about living in “an age of mass extinction and climate catastrophe” and “the relationship between humans, animals, and the natural world.”

Ignore the glib title. This piece captured the zeitgeist as those of us who’d worked from home for a year came to terms with returning to the office—or didn't. That choice, made by millions of people, is changing the face of work for years to come.

As a fan of ’80s and ’90s action movies, I always fall for the low-budget thrillers on Netflix that promise lots of Jean Claude Van Damme or Al Pacino but then only deliver a cameo. Josh Hunt went deep on the man behind these “geezer teasers” to show how even the worst schlock can make a clever producer rich.

Threading together two seemingly unrelated stories, Damon Krukowski makes a convincing case that widespread fraud is manipulating streaming counts on Spotify. This results in “inflated numbers boosting false demand for a limited range of music which is profiting wildly from the arrangement.” In short: Drake wins, everyone else loses.

Jeet Heer is always brilliant, whether writing about politics, books, movies, or social issues. His writing is sharp, thoughtful, and incisive. He grasps the subtleties in controversial issues. While it’s hard to pick one column, I nominate his take on the uproar surrounding Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth in the Nation.

Marian Liu, Youjin Shin, and Shelly Tan explain in vivid detail how this genre keeps cranking out bangers with dances everyone and their mother seem to know. It’s an informative and entertaining read. And the design? Dynamite.

While ostensibly about the migrant situation in Belarus, my favorite parts of this interview are when Rosenberg asks pointed questions, holding “Europe’s last dictator” accountable for the human rights violations exacted during mass protests following his dubious presidential victory. Favorite line: “We’ll massacre all the scum you’ve been financing.” He gets fired up!

Every parent of a child with sniffles has probably embarked on a fruitless hunt for a rapid at-home Covid test only to discovered that they’re harder to find than Cabbage Patch dolls at Christmas in 1985. This ProPublica investigation unravels the mystery behind the infuriating scarcity—a federal health apparatus so sclerotic, overcautious, and dysfunctional that Anthony Fauci himself has been driven to distraction.

I’ve always wanted to coin a term, so I was supremely jealous of Anna Codrea-Rado when she wrote about a phenomenon she calls “productivity dysmorphia.” But I was also grateful, because I suffer from this affliction. PM is the inability to recognize your own accomplishments and only see your failings instead. What, you don't constantly feel that way, too?

I recently cracked open The Lathe of Heaven for a distraction from Covid-19. But what I found was a dark-humored story of a man with dreams powerful enough to cause a global pandemic. As it turns out, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 sci-fi novel wasn’t far off the mark. A pandemic, Brook Jarvis reports, can cause powerful dreams. And lots of them.

Judd Legum makes no secret of his progressive leanings, and his Popular Information newsletter can get a little too exercised about the latest corporate outrage of the week. But when he follows the money, he puts the rest of the business press to shame, especially when it comes to campaign contributions. The index is a simple idea: Check in on the companies that foreswore donations to election deniers and see if they kept their promise. A lot have. Some went back on their word. Good for Legum for naming names. 

There was no doubt that news outlets would want to mark the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, where white residents attacked their Black neighbors who had created the vibrant Greenwood neighborhood, or “Black Wall Street.” The Wall Street Journal met the moment. Its series of stories dove deep to explain how the violence both robbed families of generational wealth and inspired a new generation of Black entrepreneurs. This team of reporters pulled the curtain back to give a better view of the world we’re living in today.

Months after reading this story, I could still picture the assistant principal driving around California’s Coachella Valley, searching for his students who dropped out and disappeared during Covid. Eli Saslow brings the reader along with him on the ground; it's an overwhelming pandemic issue told on an intimate scale.

Anand Gopal foregrounds the life and losses of a woman named Shakira in his sweeping account of Afghanistan's power struggles, illustrating why many rural Afghans greeted the return of the Taliban with relief. “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers,” one woman told him.

Chris Gilliard is an interesting and original scholar of Silicon Valley, privacy, surveillance, and the policing of Blackness. In this fascinating story, he dives into the history of home surveillance and how “smart” doorbell cameras encode and enforce power structures in ways even their creators might not expect.

When Jon Boone landed in Kabul to report on the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he admits to not realizing, like many others, how close the capital was to falling to the Taliban. The result is a mournful tour of the city and an absorbing portrayal of its besieged residents who were set to lose many of the economic and liberal gains made over the past two decades.

Read with white-hot fury Sarah Stillman’s exposé on skeezy companies that exploit migrant laborers who rebuild communities struck by climate disaster. The story conveys a double tragedy—first, that increasingly intense storms and wildfires have forced this industry to exist, and second, that it has been marked by abuse.

In the 1990s, satellite television introduced my British father to baseball, and the Internet introduced him to Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post. Boswell just retired after 52 years and did so via a wonderful love letter to sports and journalism in which he admitted having “a sinfully good time.” We should all be so lucky.

Jesse Barron dove into one of this year's least consequential but most fun financial mysteries of the year: Who or what was behind a publicly traded deli in Paulsboro, N.J., that was soaring in valuation, despite peanuts for revenue. Was it part of the meme stock craze? Did it explain the SPAC phenomenon? Was it a scam? Were the sandwiches any good? Plenty of outlets covered the story, but Barron's was the most satisfying paper trail to follow.

In perhaps the world’s longest “vacation,” a woman got stranded in Tonga for 18 months, living a Covid-free existence while her loved ones were locked down back home. It wasn’t all bliss; she lived through a cyclone that wiped away half of her possessions. I look forward to the film.

How did I miss pork rinds as an all-important culinary signifier? Once labeled a trashy snack, they have been embraced by keto diet enthusiasts and bourgeois snackers who want to come off as rule breakers. Makalintal tracks the evolution of the packaging, from gaudy to pastoral-evoking sketches, in bags now found on the shelves at Erewhon and Whole Foods. “No matter what draws people to pork rinds, the niche is growing; it’s just bifurcating as it expands—with upscale purveyors finding new names to describe … fried pork skin,” she writes.

This fun piece hit right at a time in the pandemic when people were starting to interact IRL again. For an essay on how going to big real-life events is actually miserable (“The doing sucks!”), I came away uplifted, and surprisingly emotional, by Jamie Allen’s observation that the anticipation around these gatherings is what makes them worthwhile.

This piece totally surprised me: I thought I knew a thing or two about food, but somehow had no idea that sushi was popularized by Japanese members of Reverend Moon's organization. The digital presentation was absolutely delightful as well. (Check out the rows of bobble-headed faithful.)

“A virus knows no borders,” and Zeit Online visualized the thesis in an animated map of Europe by dividing each country into its administrative regions (more than 600 regions) and showing, with data provided by the World Health Organization, the spread of the pandemic in each region within a time frame of one year. You can clearly see how in the summer of 2020 Europe was almost able to contain the virus before the second wave hit: a data visualization time-lapse so simple, yet so powerful.

Every twist and turn of this long read about the rise and fall of beloved Brooklyn ice cream brand, Ample Hills, was (I am sorry for the pun) absolutely delicious. Love the brilliant in-depth reporting about a niche market.

I don’t cover dining or museums (if only!), but I went bananas for this story about Sweden’s Disgusting Food Museum. Jiayang Fan describes the ins and outs of creating a “collection” designed to turn stomachs, while illustrating how disgust over certain foods often reflects cultural power imbalances. Chef’s kiss.

In the year of the “Great Resignation,” Lindsay Crouse reminded us that it’s okay to quit. She linked worker pandemic burnout with Olympic athletes who stepped away—and taught us a lot by doing so. This line jumped out at me: “Olympians, as the canaries for the rest of us in our professional coal mines, are alerting us to the problems of an overly goal-oriented society.” Lesson learned.

I’ve never read a George R.R. Martin book and am among the disenchanted who stuck by the HBO series until the end. This listicle about the unfinished source material for Game of Thrones combines research and amusing analysis to explore the traps of success and what motivates us to procrastinate.

Saying I’m jealous of Ann Patchett’s writing is a little like saying I’m jealous of Tom Hanks’s acting skills; Ann and I, while mostly sharing a first name, aren't even in the same universe when it comes to storytelling. In case her previous novels and memoirs weren’t proof enough, this unexpected, moving, first-person essay makes her talent abundantly clear. More a meditation on friendship than an article, this story chronicles Patchett’s budding relationship with the assistant for Tom Hanks (yes, that same Tom Hanks, whom I’ve now mentioned twice), from mere acquaintance to practically family—Covid and cancer be damned.

In the era of spike proteins and masks, it can be easy to forget that even before Covid, millions of Americans didn’t get to breathe fresh air. ProPublica’s groundbreaking, devastating analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency both connects the dots from pollution to cancer and shows, in minute detail, just how much worse things tend to be for residents of predominantly Black areas. Kudos to the writers for speaking extraordinarily plainly about the culprits and the answers.

Reading (listening to?) this piece was the closest I got to international travel this year. There's something unexpectedly very fun about pondering a mundane detail from the other side of the world.

A case study in poor management and white victimhood at a fashion media company during the racial reckoning of 2020. It's raw, messy, and personal in an uncomfortably familiar way. My wife Christine turned me onto it, and we'll be talking about it for years.

In this essay, Canadian novelist and poet Ian Williams writes about growing up Black in Canada. It was discomfiting, beautiful, and urgent—vital to the conversation about race that tends to be overwhelmingly U.S.-centric. Buried in the piece may be the pithiest lesson I've ever come across in grasping privilege. It's one he assigns his university writing students to increase their capacity for empathy. Go someplace you feel deeply insecure. Linger. Be uncomfortable. Don't rush away from that feeling. It's a lesson many will undergo to some degree in reading Williams's unflinching essay. To me, that's great writing—a memoir that transcends its deeply personal material to illuminate the world we live in and to prompt us to think more keenly.

I was covered in sawdust and had the controversy swirling all around me by the time I finished this piece. Terrific reporting.

After a four-year hiatus, Rusty Foster resurrected his Today in Tabs newsletter on Jan. 2, 2021, a bright spot in an otherwise still pretty lousy year. Pretty much every weekday, Foster, a writer and software developer, synthesizes the whole internet with equal parts intelligence and dark humor. My seething envy is only tempered by my gratitude. I wish I could read so widely and so much, but until I can, Today in Tabs helps me fake it.

This investigation into Coca-Cola’s failing plastic recycling pledges is a model for exposing corporate green washing. Not only does the reportage show that the environmental efforts in Coke’s “World Without Waste” campaign fall short of the company’s promises, but it reveals how the drinks giant’s plastic products—and the informal recycling economies that have sprung up around them—exacerbate poverty, toxic pollution, child labor, and other social ills in the marginalized Global South.

What does it take to protect a sixth of the planet from the coronavirus? The vaccines arrive at a remote corner of India, traveling by planes, trains, and trucks, traversing hundreds of miles of hostile terrain and landing in the the heart of guerrilla insurgency. That's the easy part, goes the story. Health workers then persuade frightened citizens in the face of word-of-mouth rumors and social media misinformation. The text and brilliant photographs illustrate the staggering scale of India's vaccination program in a way that no other piece of journalism did. Tragically, the talented photographer Danish Siddiqui was killed this summer in Afghanistan while covering a clash between the Afghan forces and the Taliban.

Nothing I’ve read serves as a more perfectly painful elegy of America's longest war than this first-person mini memoir by a soldier-turned-journalist. The jealousy is toward the courage on display by the author, James LaPorta—both on the ground in Afghanistan and in the gut-wrenching self-reflection that’s haunted him ever since.

This WSJ piece zooms in on one smallish city in a not-so-rich province that China Evergrande helped build into a ghost town. We see so much detail—the amusement park, the pre-sales, the IOUs to suppliers, the local government’s eagerness – that we can extrapolate and fully understand the financial distress around the world's most indebted developer.

A Seattleite takes his first post-lockdown trip to a minor league baseball game. Amid wildfire smoke and maskless strangers “bellowing explosive consonants,” a journey into America’s nostalgic past becomes a meditation on the fractured place its children will inherit.

Writer Matt Welch captures the exquisite anarchy that engulfed Eastern Europe in the few short years after the Soviets decamped but before the homogenizing bulldozer that is global capitalism had a chance to really make its mark.

It's often hard to put your finger on just when the tide has turned against a cultural phenomenon like SoulCycle, low-fat foods, or the actress Anne Hathaway. Because these shifts are so slow and inexorable, one day you wake up and look at Twitter and think, “Well, I guess I always thought this thing was bad.” Even if, at one time, you loved it. And in our world of a million news outlets and social channels, it’s even harder to suss out the reasons the change all started. But in this story, Abad-Santos not only explains why the wealthy fitness world turned its back on the cult-cycling empire SoulCycle; he also weaves a tale that shows how, maybe, it was rotten in the core all along. It's a great yarn that propels forward fueled by on gossip, finances, and statistics—all twisted around a bike that goes nowhere at all.

Stella Bugbee’s romp through the strange and nostalgic merch landscape of New York City pulled all the strings. Putting such a peculiar and pitch-perfect name on it—Zizmorcore, a reference only subway-riding New Yorkers would get—captured the intimate texture of the city and its ridiculous trends at a moment when we could all use a little joy. A zeitgeisty story hiding in plain sight, executed to perfection.

The New York Times often publishes beautiful and informative interactive features, but this one stood out to me as a particularly masterful and heartbreaking way to illustrate the extent to which the Tulsa massacre erased years of Black prosperity.

We spend a lot of time writing about how streaming has changed the way regular people consume music and video. This story captures how streaming has changed the way the art itself is being made, and it does so with graphics and visuals that make it easy for anyone to understand. 

In the ever-burgeoning landscape of newsletters, the legendary UK label took inspiration from the The Whole Earth Catalogue and offers readers a curated selection (“mixtape”) of music, videos, and texts. Its purpose: “to inspire, inform, enable and energize creativity and positivity in a time of global disruption and uncertainty.”

This story stopped me in my tracks. We knew the economy in Brazil was spiraling, but this reporting cast the crisis in chilling terms. Further photo essays and reporting made clear this wasn't an isolated incident but a phenomenon. As journalists, we can’t be everywhere—especially not during a pandemic—but reading this made me wish we were.

Jackson pored over more than 60 hours of archival footage to tell a story that I thought I already knew. Let It Be was their final album. There was a rooftop concert. Then they broke up. Turns out, I didn’t know their story at all. There’s a scene early on when John Lennon and Paul McCartney riff on what ultimately becomes the song Get Back, tossing potential lyrics back and forth. They’re so musically in sync that for a brief moment they almost become a singular entity. I’ve never seen their magic captured on camera like that. Get Back is a reminder that even the most familiar tales are worth reexamining. On a related note, I’m also jealous of the Beatles. Then again, aren’t we all?

This mini documentary from Alexander Stockton and Lucy King at The New York Times poignantly explores vaccine hesitancy in one community in the Ozarks. The film snapped me out of a numbness that had come over me as I’d spent more than a year reporting on the pandemic, and is a powerful reminder that behind each statistic is a life.

In the Making Gay History podcast’s superb ninth season, host Eric Marcus tells his own story, as a twentysomething living through the early years of the AIDS crisis. He vividly describes the fear, confusion, controversies, and tragedies that unfolded while science stumbled toward understanding a new disease.

The unprecedented spigot of free money unleashed by stimulus efforts will almost certainly be fodder for journalists for years to come; how wise of ProPublica to start with its least-deserving recipients.

The details in this story are incredible. Come for the assassination plot, stay for the car-crash planning. 

Tyler Mahan Coe delivered Season 2 of his country music podcast. It's supposed to be about George Jones, but it's kind of about everything. Coe's indulgent storytelling has tangents romancing other tangents, and that's its beauty. His meticulous research and unique voice transport you into so many different worlds that you never knew existed.

A shocking revelation of how a 75-year-old, once-grassroots housing advocate in San Francisco parlayed rent increases at eight “affordable” apartment buildings his nonprofit owns into raw political power by pumping more than $1.3 million of cash into successful city ballot initiatives to support low-income renters and the homeless.

Following the news frenzy of the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files, no one wanted to read another story about toxic content less than I did. That’s what made this one so completely delightful. This deep dive into the hazards of social networking, even for normies, is smart, hilarious, and important.

The academic Paul Tooze weaves what is ostensibly a review of Paul Krugman’s latest essay collection into an intellectual biography of the economist, dexterously—and densely—tracing how the Nobel Prize winner’s evolving beliefs came to underpin the Biden White House’s enthusiasm for fiscal stimulus. Tooze’s own views inveigle their way in surreptitiously enough that you may find yourself agreeing with them.

The week that GameStop became a meme stock last January was dizzying. While the internet gifted us so much delightful content during that frenzied stretch—“The Tendieman” sea shanty was a favorite—the real prize was the Wall Street Journal’s exclusive with Keith Gill of WallStreetBets fame.

There’s a lot of brilliant boxing writing out there: Norman Mailer, David Remnick, Gay Talese. This story by the Atlantic’s Jacob Stern belongs in all the anthologies. It’s a moving, exquisitely detailed account of how the boxer Charles Conwell came to terms with having unintentionally killed an opponent in the ring.

A story on climate change, land development, and history in Florida, told through a tree. Wish I had worked on this!