Every December, I’m like Santa Claus. I eat any cookies left out for me. And I also make a list, checking it twice.
The cookies are for me, but the list is for you.
It features links to my favorite longform writing—naughty or nice—from the previous 12 months. This year, I’ve whittled my list down to 25 articles and essays.
Most of them deal with my cherished subjects—music, books, and various creative endeavors. But I also include other articles that caught my attention.
If the writing is good enough, I’ll read about almost anything.
So my picks this year deal with everything from MAD magazine to ventriloquism to Scrabble. You will find tales of TV psychics and wandering minstrels and parking lot stripers. I’ve also included several essays by survivors of various calamities—because that describes all of us, sooner or later.
This is also a good time to encourage you to support quality journalism. The writers and periodicals showcased here all rely on readers like you. So when you compile your list of new year’s resolutions, consider making a commitment to a periodical or journalist who is making a difference.
Happy reading!
If you want to support my work, consider taking out a premium subscription—for just $6 per month (even less if you sign up for a year).
The Best Online Articles of 2024
“From Goldman Sachs Trader to Parking Lot Striper” by Isaiah Baker
Freedom Is Something You Take, August 12, 2024
90 days ago I was a vice president in Goldman Sachs’ Equity Division in NYC. Running a derivatives trading book of over $20bn dollars in notional value that had made Goldman hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
Yesterday, I installed 90 parking stalls and 7 directional arrows in an industrial lot for a roofing company in South Florida….
“How I Got Booted as a Grammy Voter” by James Barber
Stars After Stars After Stars, February 4, 2024
There was a longstanding rumor about one particular LA-based label executive who oversaw the nominating committees. Allegedly, this executive would freely adjust the nomination lists to better reflect which people were in his favor each year. I don’t know if this story is true, but people in the business certainly believed it was true….
“From Vexing Uncertainty to Intellectual Humility” by Michael Dickson
Schizophrenia Bulletin, January 11, 2024
I am a 55-year-old husband, father, friend, and professional philosopher. In 1992, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, a porter found me amongst the cows in the meadows of King’s College, after being there for 2 or 3 days. I was in bad physical shape, having eaten nothing, and apparently getting water from the river. He asked what I was doing. I replied: “I’m solving a problem about stochastic calculus….”
“Planet Puppet: A Weekend at the Ventriloquist’s Convention” by Mina Tavakoli
N+1, December 16, 2024
“I cut a hole in a tennis ball, put googly eyes on it, and it took me all over the world. I’ve been to fifty-nine countries with it. Get this into your head and get out there — it’s not the puppet!…”
“No One Buys Books” by Elle Griffin
The Elysian, April 22, 2024
The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
“How I Learned to Live with Haunting Visions” by Daniel Handler
Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2024
A year or so into this, while walking across campus, I saw one of these naked, ghostly white figures staring right at me. No one else seemed to see what I was seeing, and I fell unconscious on the grass. I was very, very frightened, not just because of what I saw, but because I realized, there on the lawn, that these weren’t just dreams after all. This was something worse.
“For Three Weeks I Was a Phone Psychic for Miss Cleo” by Heidi Diehl
Electric Lit, July 25, 2024
For the first few nights, I knelt on the floor with the phone, hunched over my list of tarot card names, which I’d printed at the nonprofit’s office. I listened and scribbled key details. Pamela, 37, Missouri. Wants to know about love life. “I just pulled The Lovers card for you,” I’d say, heart pounding as I scrambled for meaning. “This is incredibly lucky….”
“Did Frank Sinatra Really Perform at My Grandma's High School?” by Chris Dalla Riva
Can’t Get Much Higher, September 6, 2024
Her niece had never heard about Frank Sinatra performing at Nutley High School, let alone the fact that her aunt was the reason it happened. When I reach out to both Nutley High School and the Nutley Historical Society, they confirm as much. They’ve never heard about Sinatra performing at the high school…..
“Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” by Kate Dwyer
Esquire, May 30, 2024
The agent at the talent firm describes a “one strike and you’re out” mentality, with some authors getting dropped by their agents if their debut doesn’t sell well. With second novels, the agent explains, those writers are “starting at square one but worse,” because “they’re back to querying and they have the burden of a bad sales track.”
“The Joy of Clutter” by Matt Alt
Aeon, October 11, 2024
To the Japanese, there was nothing unusual about their empty rooms. Who needs chairs when you can sit on the floor? Why leave futons out when they can be folded up and put away each morning? Why wouldn’t an unused room be empty?
“How Gothic Architecture Became Spooky” by Katherine McLaughlin
Architectural Digest, October 24, 2024
Throughout the room were pictures of Cologne Cathedral, an 1880 church in Germany and one of Dr. Bork’s favorite buildings. The images, seemingly, caught the student’s attention. “Dr. Bork,” he said. “Why does it look so evil?”
“The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s Plot Against Musicians” by Liz Pelly
Harper’s, December 19, 2024
What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.
“On Knowing Who He Was” by Christopher Harding
Aeon, January 26, 2024
To his detractors, [Alan] Watts was an unlettered dilettante—he lacked an undergraduate degree—guilty of peddling a mash-up of Zen, Taoism and Vedānta to the unwary, throwing in psychotherapy, psychedelics and quantum physics for good measure. He lacked moral seriousness, too, preferring forms of religion that emphasized insight over conduct as a path to the divine. The result was a bleak contrast between Watts’s high talk of compassion and love and a series of affairs that, combined with his low view of fatherhood – ‘mow the lawn, play baseball with the children’—helped to destroy his family.
“Image Without Metaphor” by Vicky Osterweil
All Cats Are Beautiful, March 17, 2024
The truly huge films of the last two or three years have had even less space for self-reflection or individual analysis. There seems to be an allergy to ambiguity, a desire for orderly storytelling and image making that leaves little to the imagination or debate….
“The Last Crimes of Caravaggio” by Michael Prodger
The New Statesmen, March 20, 2024
Although he was indeed invested as a knight, he could not outrun his brawling nature. He got into an altercation with a more senior Hospitaller and wounded him with a pistol. He was incarcerated in a castle rock-cell above a 200-foot drop but, barely plausibly, somehow managed to escape. With the help of an unknown accomplice he scaled the precipice and clambered down to a boat waiting beneath.
“The MAD Files” by David Mikics
Tablet, September 2, 2024
By 1960 MAD had conquered the teenage market. According to some estimates, it was read by most American college students and almost half the country’s high school students (at least the male ones). Believe it or not, MAD would become even more popular in the next dozen years.
“I Was a Best-Selling Novelist. Then I Went Back to School” By Tom Rachman
New York Times, October 7, 2024
Certain professors seemed mistrustful of a student my age. Certain classmates clammed up before someone as old as their parents. I’d forget myself, debating and bantering with young faces, only to glimpse a mirror: gray stubble, incipient jowls. What I am doing here?
“On the Grid: How Surveillance Became a Love Language” by Zoë Hitzig
The Drift, December 11, 2024
The normalization of mass spying could go further than surveillance did in skewing our relationships. The devices cozied up in our homes—Ring cameras capturing every neighborhood drama, Alexa politely ignoring our off-key singing — are already quietly recording and transmitting data every moment of the day.
“I Almost Died. Surviving Has Made Life Look Different” by Sebastian Junger
Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2024
I found myself beset with a terrible and irrational fear that maybe I hadn’t survived. That I was a ghost, and my family had no idea I was there. When I asked Barbara to confirm that I existed, she said yes, but that was just the sort of thing a hallucination would say.
“Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion” by Greg Epstein
The MIT Press Reader, November 22, 2024
Take, for example, Way of the Future, an official AI-worshipping religion created by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google AI engineer who earned hundreds of millions of dollars as a leader in the development of autonomous vehicle technology. Levandowski went as far as filing all the requisite paperwork to register as a church with the IRS, telling the agency that the faith would focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”
“The Great Abandonment: What Happens to the Natural World When People Disappear?” by Tess McClure
The Guardian, November 28, 2024
Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.
Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world….
“Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet” by Kyle Chayka
The New Yorker, January 13, 2024
Like so many millennials, I entered the online world through AOL Instant Messenger. I created an account one unremarkable day in the late nineteen-nineties, sitting in the basement of my childhood home at our chunky white desktop computer, which connected to the Internet via a patchy dial-up modem. I picked a username, “Silk,” based on a character from my favorite series of fantasy novels…
“Scrabble, Anonymous” by Brad Phillips
The Paris Review, May 15, 2024
This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day….
“Pimps and Prodigals by Irina Dumitrescu
London Review of Books, May 23, 2024
Minstrels did more than merely play songs. Some worked as bearwards, who cared for and trained dancing bears, or waferers, who were employed by large households to bake sweet wafers and distribute them at the end of banquets, possibly with some amusing patter. They were natural messengers, spies, diplomats and propagandists.
“Playing for Survival: The Blind Japanese Women Keeping a Music Tradition Alive” by Justin McCurry
The Guardian, July 18, 2024
Barely a decade has passed since Hirosawa started learning goze uta (blind women’s songs) – a prodigious genre of music spanning four centuries that most Japanese people have probably never heard.
That she now plays with the composure of a veteran is remarkable for two reasons: not a single goze uta musical score exists, and even if the chords and notes had been written down, Hirosawa would not be able to read them.
dammit Ted - how long is it gonna take me to red all of these? which i now have no choice about…
Thank you so much for publishing the link to the MAD piece. That was excellent.