The Best Online Articles of 2021

Below are links to my favorite articles and essays of the year. These are mostly about music and culture, but if a piece of writing captured my interest, I included it, no matter what the subject.

Happy reading!

---

Consider giving a gift subscription to The Honest Broker this holiday season.

---

The Best Articles and Essays of 2021

“A Legend in Her Own Right': Carolyn Franklin, Aretha's Forgotten Sister” by Fraser Morris, The Guardian, January 7, 2021

“Ghosts—I Didn’t Know How to Write About My Sister’s Death So I Had AI Do It for Me” by Vauhini Vara, Believer, August 9, 2021

“The Intelligence of Bodies: The Philosophical and Musical Failings of ‘Beethoven X: The AI Project’” by Jan Swafford, VAN, October 7, 2021

“The Case for Opsimaths. Maybe Late Bloomers Aren't So Late” by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader, February 15, 2021

“How Louis Armstrong Shaped the Sound of Ghana” by Laura Kiniry, Atlas Obscura, December 7, 2021

“The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias” by David Jacob Kramer, GQ, September 9, 20210

“On João Gilberto” by Fred Thomas, Aquarium Drunkard, March 2, 2021

“How to Work Hard” by Paul Graham, PaulGraham.com, June 2021

“Meet the Mystery Woman Who Mastered IBM’s 5,400-Character Chinese Typewriter” by Thomas S. Mullaney, Fast Company, May 17, 2021

Is a Long-Dismissed Forgery Actually the Oldest Known Biblical Manuscript?” by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times, March 13, 2021

“Soul Supreme: The Massive Life and Tragic Death of King Curtis” by Michael A. Gonzales, Wax Poetics, March 2, 2021

“Genre is Disappearing. What Comes Next?” by Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, March 8, 2021

“The Short Story Priesthood: George Saunders and the Religion of Literary Craft” by Kyle Paoletta, The Baffler, March 8, 2021

“Bandcamp: The Chaos Bazaar” by Chris Golinski, Components One, March 23, 2021

“Jacques Barzun and Friend” by Arthur Krystal, The American Scholar, March 23, 2021

“The Gradual Extinction of Softness” by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green, Hippocampus, November 8, 2021

“Earl King: Poet Laureate of New Orleans” by Geoffrey Himes, Bitter Southerner, February 2, 2021

“Shades of Jazz (Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Dewey Redman)” by Ethan Iverson, Do the M@th, January 21, 2021

“The Spine Collector” by Reeves Wiedeman with Lily Shapiro, Vulture, August 17, 2021

“Mary, Queen of Scots, Sealed Her Final Missive with an Intricate Spiral Letterlock” by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, December 10, 2021

“Family Record: A Richmonder Rediscovers His Family’s Musical Legacy Through a Lost Nat King Cole Song” by Davy Jones, Style Weekly, March 9, 2021

“Edgar Allan Poe Needs a Friend” by Matthew Redmond, Lapham’s Quarterly, September 7, 2021

“Drugs, Robots, and the Pursuit of Pleasure: Why Experts Are Worried About AIs Becoming Addicts” by Thomas Moynihan and Anders Sandberg, Singularity Hub, September 17, 2021

“But Who Tells Them What to Sing?” by Adrian Daub, Longreads, September 2021