Since late 2014, we’ve highlighted roughly 10,000 pieces of journalism that taught us something, took us somewhere, or made us rethink what we thought we knew. So picking just 10—one from each year since we launched—that stood out above the rest… it’s a fool’s errand. But these stories (all of which appeared near the top of our annual Best Of lists, and a few of which were first picked by one of our esteemed guest editors) changed our understanding of what in-depth reporting and narrative storytelling could accomplish.
Enjoy,
Don and Jacob
2015
The Untold Story of Silk Road
By Joshuah Bearman for WIRED
This epic story has it all: hackers, the War on Drugs, organized crime, massive bureaucracy, jam circles, even a data center named after a Norse god and a climactic scene in a public library.
For the uninitiated, Silk Road was an online black market that operated on the so-called Dark web for over two years. It’s founder and heralded leader? An Austin-based former used book salesman with a libertarian bent. Over 20,000 words, Joshuah Bearman meticulously tracks that man’s transformation into criminal mastermind and the several federal agents who somehow broke through to discover his true identity. As Bearman writes, this story “is the dark mirror of The Social Network, a wild technological success story taken to its logically extreme conclusion.” It’s the story of every startup, except with a lot more drugs. But what makes it our favorite is the way Bearman treats his characters.
Everyone is small in this story. There are no geniuses, no heroes, and no Death Stars. Everyone, from the website’s ringleader to the men who took him down are merely men, though they are not always who they seem to be, as Bearman’s last-minute twist proves.
2016
The Long Fall of Phoebe Jonchuck
By Lane DeGregory for Tampa Bay Times
At the end of every week, we send each other our favorite stories. When this story came out, Lane DeGregory earned both of our top spots, and deservingly so, with her opus on a Florida father who killed his 5-year-old daughter in horrific fashion. Warning signs surrounded the killer nearly from his birth, and yet he never got the help he needed, despite efforts from friends, family, and bystanders. And now, after the system failed to protect Phoebe, those acquaintances are forced to wonder: Could I have done more? If I had acted differently, would an innocent child still be alive?
DeGregory brings the emotional narrative to life with pitch-perfect prose and gripping detail, arousing sadness and anger in equal parts—from both of us.
For more great crime & justice storytelling, check out our monthly True Crime newsletter.
2017
Why We Fell For Clean Eating
By Bee Wilson for The Guardian
Joe Posnanski: This story is ostensibly about the sham of the clean-eating movement, but really it is about our hunger for finding something pure and authentic in a world that increasingly feels less so. The reason I love Bee’s story so much is that even after it becomes clear that “clean eating” is really not very different from all the other quack diets of all time, many people absolutely refuse to back off it. They want clean eating to be the real thing so desperately, want quinoa and kale and the rest to save us all so much, that even when the core ideas of the movement are debunked (I mean, the “Blonde Vegan” starts noticing that her HAIR IS FALLING OUT), they still cling to it with frightening intensity. Everyone is writing about these confusing times, but in many ways I think Bee nails it best in a story about coconut oil and avoiding gluten.
Michael Schur: There was an old Bloom County cartoon, when I was a kid—I loved Bloom County—where Opus the penguin asks Milo to help him find a fad diet, so he could try to get in shape. He flips through a book and finds all sorts of weird eating plans—”the broccoli broth and bean-bath diet”—and after every one, Milo just says, “How about eat less, and exercise?” And Opus keeps looking for the magical diet that will help him avoid eating less and exercising.
What’s my point here? (Besides that I remember a specific Bloom County cartoon I probably read 30 years ago, which is a very cool thing that I should definitely brag about?) My point is: most people should probably use the same diet: “eat moderate amounts of healthy food.” That’s your tl;dr for this excellent piece. (But please do read the whole thing.) (And then go back and read old Bloom County books—they’re great.)
2018
Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It
By Jessica Pressler for The Cut
Glynnis MacNicol: If you missed this brilliant and wonderfully consuming piece by Jessica Pressler about a young white woman who spectacularly grifted her way through New York, where have you been?
“Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.”
Listen to Jessica Pressler on The Sunday Long Read Podcast!
2019
The American Missionary and the Uncontacted Tribe
By Doug Bock Clark for GQ
You might remember the story of a young Christian missionary who attempted to befriend and convert the inhabitants of a remote Indian island, only to be killed on arrival. John Chau’s death has been revisited multiple times since then. Now one of our favorite longformers offers a definitive historical account, told with empathy for all sides and a deep curiosity for how an adventurous believer came to collide with a group determined to fight off intrusion.
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2020
Tatiana’s luck
By Hannah Dreier for The Washington Post
Tatiana Angulo came to America with the intention of doing everything right. Then the country let her down, leaving a woman full of dreams stuck in an attic, fighting despair.
This year, The Washington Post staff brought the myriad horrors of COVID-19 to life time and time again. This instance, from Hannah Dreier, didn’t just stick out. It stuck with me. There won’t be many songs or pictures or poems that capture 2020 in America quite like this graf:
“Clothes in a suitcase. A fistful of flowers already starting to wilt. A view out a window of a street, in a city, in a country that yesterday was feeling normal and beautiful and today was feeling forbidding.”
(If you’re not a WaPo subscriber, you can read the story here, including commentary from the writer)
2021
What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind
By Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic
When this piece by Jennifer Senior was published, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, declared that it was one of the greatest magazine stories he’d ever read. And, damn, that was no home-field hyperbole. The story went viral so you might have already read it. For those who haven’t, try to make time for this unforgettable 9/11 story about a grieving family, conspiracy theories and the search for meaning among the memories.
2022
The Rescue
By Stephen Rodrick for Rolling Stone
Two Afghanistan-born US soldiers returned to Kabul during the final days of America’s withdrawal, hoping to save their families from whatever horror might await them. What they found at the airport will stay with them—and whoever reads this emotional, meticulously reported story—forever.
2023
Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job
By Willa Paskin for The New York Times Magazine
Barbenheimer is behind us, but we can still enjoy one more profile of Greta Gerwig—and of the doll she’s made a blockbuster movie about—as she attempts to thread a nearly impossible needle: “doing the thing and subverting the thing” at the same time.
In 113 minutes of screen time Gerwig delighted Barbie’s fans and haters. I love how Gerwig marvels that Mattel’s new CEO allowed her and star/producer Margot Robbie to do pretty much anything they wanted in their bright lights, pink city makeover of the struggling toy company’s 64-year-old iconic plaything: “[T]he fizzy marriage of filmmaker and material would break through the cacophony of contemporary life and return a retirement-age hunk of plastic to the zeitgeist.” A rare sure thing in Hollywood, especially these days.
Willa Paskin explores the doll’s evolution, including the fascinating journey of its inventor Ruth Handler, and the debate about whether Barbie is (or was built to be) a feminist. The result is a big-hearted celebrity profile that ventures into all sorts of sophisticated places.
2024
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?
By Rachel Aviv for The New Yorker
What’s easier to believe: that an underfunded and overcrowded hospital system could have contributed to a string of tragedies, or that an “angel of death” hiding in plain sight was responsible? In gripping, painful detail, Rachel Aviv explains how the latter narrative took hold in the West of England, despite loads of evidence that a respected professional was likely just in the wrong place at the horribly wrong time.
Journos will also appreciate (and possibly be baffled) why this piece isn’t accessible in the UK.
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