The 8 best online articles I read in 2024

My favourite longform writing + one short story & an interview.

Three reasons to like this list.

First, all the pieces linked are accessible—no paywalls or buyer journeys.

Second, they embody the sort of lucidity and resonance that mark true brilliance. I thought so at the time of reading, and I still think so now. In that regard, they’ve already stood the test of time.

And third, sharing what I read is my love language. Now that so much of what we consume is driven by algorithms and favours, I think recommendations based on genuine human enthusiasm count for something. In that regard, thank you for your trust.

Some of the articles were published in the past year, others were not. There are no predominant themes or subjects. All are exemplary of writing as art, which is mostly what I care for as a reader. Someone once told me they'd rather read something poorly written but interesting than something beautifully written and boring. Unthinkable.

Remarkably, no Substack newsletters made the cut (though I think everyone should read

Hamilton Nolan

). One reason for this might be that the finesse professional editors – the kind employed by most of the publications on my list – bring to a piece remains invaluable. “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil," Truman Capote said.

Finally, you'll notice two of the stories – Scocca's and Preston's – are tied to the precarity of being a writer today. In few other fields is work that's worth so much rewarded so little. Please do consider paying for writing you find valuable. It might require a shift from thinking about what you will get for your money to what your money will provide. For what it's worth, my new year's resolution is to put more stock in the latter.

Wishing you happy reading and a safe return to linear time.

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1. Forty-One False Starts, by Janet Malcolm

The incomparably clear-eyed Janet Malcolm profiles the "acutely intelligent, reserved, and depressed” artist David Salle, "an unhappy moth helplessly singeing itself on a lightbulb,” through 41 distinct intros. An endlessly quotable piece.

“Sometimes it almost seems as if he were provoking the interviewer to put him on the spot, so that he can display his ingenuity in getting off it.”

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2. My Unraveling: The Year My Body Fell Apart, by Tom Scocca

I’ve admired Scocca’s writing for over a decade, ever since he called out recipe writers for deliberately understating how long it takes to caramelize onions (great read).

Heather Havrilesky

once said about him that "he always has the smartest, most reasonable analysis of issues that make everyone else sound idiotic,” and I agree.

In 'My Unraveling', Scocca’s struggle with a mystery illness brings to life the well-documented reality that most Americans are just one health crisis away from ruin. A gorgeously written nightmare.

“The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.”

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3. The Anxiety of Influencers, by Barrett Swanson

A great but bleak read. I could die happy if I ever wrote something of this calibre.

"…if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. It is a logic that extends from the retailer’s smile to the professor’s easy A to the politician’s capitulation to the co-worker’s calculated post to the journalist’s virtue-signaling tweet to the influencer’s scripted photo. The angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.”

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4. Human Fallback, by Laura Preston

Are we training bots to think like us or are bots training us to think like them?

"...he told me he had a bad feeling about the way the world was going and that I would be wise to buy a firearm."

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5. Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, by Fargo Tbakhi

A manifesto for writers reckoning with the futility of their craft, the linguistic sanitizer that “keeps us polite while the boot is on our neck or on somebody else’s.”

“…what Palestine requires, is an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement.”

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6. Ben Ditto Interview: Internet Ethics, Taste, and Making Art Online

A case for chaos as the ultimate creative force.

“I think all of us have a natural thing that we should be doing and some of us spend our whole lives in denial about that.”

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7. We Need to Rewild the Internet, by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

Applying ecological principles to the digital realm.

“Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.”

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8. The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones

At 47, Jones was working the graveyard shift as a high school janitor, a job he had held for 11 years. Battling alcoholism and an addiction to prescription drugs, he wrote ‘The Pugilist at Rest’, a fictionalized story about the Vietnam War, in a single sitting. Then he mailed it, unsolicited, to The New Yorker. “Reading Thom Jones is like watching magnesium foil burn,” according to one fan. “It's just spectacular.”

“I know that my buddy Jorgeson was a real American hero. I wish that he had lived to be something else, if not a painter of pictures then even some kind of fuckup with a factory job and four divorces, bankruptcy petitions, in and out of jail. I wish he had been that. I wish he had been anything rather than a real American hero.”

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Ok, your turn: What was the best article you read this year? Share the wealth by linking it in the comments.