Best of Further Reading 2024: FT journalists pick their favourite non-FT articles of the year
Fearless. Authoritative. Iconic. There are many ways to describe The New Yorker magazine, which seems to have once again dominated the external reading habits of Financial Times journalists.
As 2024 draws closer to a close, FT Alphaville has once again enlisted the help of our legacy media colleagues to bring together the best articles published over the past year that weren’t in the FT, in a special edition of Further Reading.
Their choices and reasoning is below. Yours go in the comment box. Last year’s edition can be read here, and 2022’s here.
There’s hopefully something here for everyone. Especially if that someone has an NYer sub. Lightly edited, and in roughly chronological order by submission time:
Olaf Storbeck, Frankfurt bureau chief
This first-hand account by two US surgeons who volunteered in a Gaza hospital almost made me cry: We volunteered at a Gaza hospital. What we saw was unspeakable (Politico)
Hannah Rock, FT Edit editor
The Divorce Tapes (The Cut), in which a writer uncovers just how awful her family truly is, is 6,000 words of pure, cathartic rage — and, like all the best stories, there is no happy ending.
Kate Allen, Weekend news editor
I’m going to attempt to nominate a podcast by cunningly mentioning it in conjunction with a related article.
The article: Bad News (The Atlantic)
The podcast: The Third Information Crisis (BBC Sounds)
Both address the post-truth world that journalism finds itself in. I’d like to see more discussion among reporters and news editors (not commentators) about how we handle it.
🥇 TOP PICK OF 2024
Josh Spero, wealth editor + Murad Ahmed, technology news editor + Simon Foy, European banking correspondent + Martha Muir, reporter + Georgina Quach, newsletter editor + Arjun Neil Alim, Asia markets correspondent + Sarah O’Connor, correspondent and columnist (duplicate entry)
A teen’s fatal plunge into the London underworld (The New Yorker)
Josh: The unparalleled Patrick Radden Keefe investigated how a mixed-up London teenager found his grim death in the Thames, having become an unlikely associate of some unsavoury types. The piece is a masterwork, both enraging for the failures of the police to dig deep and devastating for Zac Brettler’s family.
Murad: Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigation in the New Yorker into the death of a London teenager was a crime mystery that packed a punch.
Simon: A brilliant piece of reporting that raised serious questions. The Sunday Times also produced a number of strong pieces on the same subject that revealed new details.
Martha: Loved The New Yorker/Patrick Radden Keefe’s bizarre and tragic account of how a fabulist North London teenager ended up wrapped up in the criminal underworld and ultimately jumped off a balcony into the Thames.
Georgina: Patrick Radden Keefe’s forensic research in this magnificently-told story helps us get closer to the truth.
Arjun: I expect I am one of an army FT staff to recommend that blockbuster Zac Brettler story in the New Yorker.
Sarah: I think of this piece whenever I pass the Riverwalk building opposite MI5 in London.
+ bonus Murad
Andrew O’Hagan gave a devastating critique (London Review of Books) of Tom Bower’s biography of the ‘House of Beckham’. And Edward Zitron’s screed (Where’s Your Ed At?) against the perceived sins of modern tech journalism — whatever you think of the critique — has a clarity of passion that keeps you hooked.
+ bonus Georgina
Forget Brexit, nothing defined the summer of 2016 quite like the Pokémon Go craze that had taken over the world, and made all my mates at school obsessed with travelling far and wide to hunt Pikachu and co.
But the game’s ubiquity, it turned out, had sparked paranoia among US intelligence officials especially when Pokémon started popping up inside nuclear weapons laboratories and covert CIA facilities: The great Pokémon Go spy panic (Foreign Policy)
+ bonus Arjun
I thought this piece wonderfully portrayed the human stories behind US industrial policy and the culture clash arising from foreign companies opening manufacturing capacity there: TSMC’s debacle in the American desert (Rest of World)
Dan McCrum, eyewear influencer
Here’s a trio of blood boilers that prove the merits of never giving up. All three unearthed startling new evidence in slow burning scandals of official, corporate, and regulatory impunity, all of it enabled by biddable lawyers the legal profession should, but probably won’t, reckon with:
— Tom Burgis dug into “the Trio” for a decade. He beat them in the courts, but the Serious Fraud Office didn’t, largely due to the poisonous effect of a very greedy lawyer (The Guardian).
— Dan Neidle at Tax Policy Associates has been a thorn in the side of the Post Office for years, and eviscerated a compensation scheme (Tax Policy Associates) that visited fresh injury on wrongly accused Postmasters.
— Nick Davies broke the phone hacking scandal a decade ago. Ahead of Prince Harry’s trial that’s due to start next month, he suggested a Murdoch cover-up may have been far larger than ever suspected (Prospect).
Marianna Giusti, audience engagement journalist, FT Weekend
This dark, surprising and wonderful profile (Vanity Fair) of Cormac McCarthy’s muse, whom he met when she was 17 and who informed many of his characters and stories.
The clickbaity headline doesn’t do justice to the author’s vivid, perfectly-paced writing (“There is a shimmer of recognition with her, an intimate equidistance. After all, I’ve been reading about her for half my life. And now here she is, in the flesh.”).
One I’d recommend to lovers of McCarthy who aren’t afraid to face the man behind the books.
George Hammond, venture capital correspondent
This was great and prescient, given crypto cash helped win so many races: Silicon Valley, the new lobbying monster (The New Yorker).
Alan Livsey, asset management reporter
I liked this article about the language of birds, involving the work of people such as this biologist and bird ecologist, Sonia Kleindorfer: How scientists started to decode birdsong (The New Yorker).
“To me, the most amazing thing is that every generation of vocal learners has its own sound,” Kleindorfer said. “So, just like our English is different from Shakespeare’s English, the songbirds, too, have very different songs from five hundred years ago. I am sure of it.” I like to watch birds, but it’s listening to them that perhaps demands more study.
Joseph Cotterill, emerging markets correspondent + Sam Joiner, visual stories and investigations editor + Aanu Adeoye, west and central Africa correspondent (duplicate entry)
Inside the secret negotiations to free Evan Gershkovich (The Wall Street Journal)
Joseph: Story of the year was the WSJ’s inside account of the release of their colleague Evan Gershkovich after nearly 500 days in Russian custody. An absolutely forensic examination of the most complex prisoner swap since the cold war. With a killer last line. Hope Evan gets that interview one day.
Sam: Full of eye-popping details and with a kicker for the ages, this WSJ tick-tock of the secret negotiations to free Evan Gershkovich is an extraordinary read. The story unfolds on three continents, involving spy agencies, billionaires, political power players and Evan’s fiercest advocate — his mother.
Aanu: The Journal’s reporting on diplomatic efforts to free Evan Gershkovich from Putin’s Russian gulag reads like a spy thriller with its cast of characters and behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing. I expect it to be on a screen in the not so distant future: it’s catnip for Hollywood. But at its heart it’s largely a remarkable story of an ordinary family — especially his dogged mother — who just wanted their son back
+ bonus Sam
This NYT piece blends on-the-ground reporting with graphics and videos to tell the story of the West Bank’s unequal roadways. Great idea for a visual story, executed beautifully: Roadblocked (The New York Times).
Cat Rutter Pooley, financial news editor
It’s not new news that women have had a hard time fighting their way up the ranks at Wall Street’s premier legacy brand, Goldman Sachs. But this piece, ‘Women aren’t getting the big jobs at Goldman Sachs, and they’re heading for the exits’ (The Wall Street Journal), from March was nonetheless devastatingly reported with a string of killer statistics that demolished any corporate gumpf protestations.
Henry Mance, chief features writer
This was the greatest media acquisition of the year, and therefore the article that I most wish I’d written: Here’s why I decided to buy ‘Infowars’ (The Onion)
And this was a jaw-dropping story about alleged hacking by ExxonMobil’s lobbyists: Exxon lobbyist investigated over hack-and-leak of environmentalist emails, sources say (Reuters)
Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, Berlin bureau chief + Caroline Binham, UK companies news editor (duplicate entry)
A drunken evening, a rented yacht: the real story of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage (The Wall Street Journal)
Anne-Sylvaine: One of my favourite reads this year was this (crazy) account by the WSJ of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage operation.
Caroline: The Wall Street Journal’s deep dive (#sorrynotsorry) into how a crack team of Ukrainian officers hatched a plan to sabotage the Nord Stream pipeline. Come for the drunken plotting worthy of Hollywood, stay for the combat dolphins:
+ bonus Anne-Sylvaine Chassany
I have also been an absolute fan of Le Monde’s corporate succession series (part III last summer), translated here in English: Successions (Le Monde).
Dan Stewart, deputy head of longform
OK, my choice didn’t make this list last year [ed: sorry] so I’ve been bookmarking stories all year in the hope of exhibiting the competency in this field implied by my job title.
Kathryn Schulz’s piece for the New Yorker on how a major solar storm could cripple our planet will have you rereading sections to loved ones in horrified amazement. Also in the New Yorker, Charles DuHigg’s investigation into how crypto bros and AI evangelists are lobbying Washington serves as a warning bell for the direction the tech industry is likely to go under Trump.
New York magazine killed it this year, from Max Read’s instant classic on AI slop to that FTAV-quoting Bill Ackman profile, to the “paleontologists at war” piece every magazine writer should read. Megan Agnew’s profile of “trad wife queen” Hannah Neeleman in the Sunday Times magazine gently skewered her subject with great skill and tact. This post-election screed by Sam Kriss is a pure burst of intense rage at US politicians and the pundit class. It is highly offensive and yet hugely quotable, everything I want from a Substack.
[Longform indeed! 😉]
Andrew Hill, senior business writer
Ethan Mollick’s blog One Useful Thing is a must-read for anyone navigating the use of generative AI. Early in the year. he spooked those of us with “writer” in our title or job description with this post on the potential of AI to disrupt those “whose measurable output is words”, and posed the question: “What does your skill and effort mean if people don’t care if your work was done by a machine?”
🥈 runner-up
Madison Marriage, special investigations editor + Chris Allnut, junior subëditor, HTSI + Alice Ross, acting international economy news editor + Isabel Berwick, Working It editor (duplicate entry)
The invisible man (Esquire)
Madison: This piece floored me. Beautiful prose by a former Boston Globe journalist on his life as a homeless man in Rhode Island, living out of a car with his beloved dog, Lily. Heartbreaking and infuriating in equal measure.
Chris: A devastating demonstration of the power of showing rather than telling, Patrick Fealey’s 9,000-word, first-hand account of homelessness in America for Esquire speaks louder than any number of opinion pieces ever could. The author, an award-winning arts journalist suffering from bipolar disorder, exposes how easy it is to fall through the cracks in society and the inadequacies of the safety nets available.
Alice: This was very good.
Isabel: The best feature I have read all year (and h/t to Adrian Monck for sharing this in his excellent newsletter Seven Things, source of many of my best recs). The Invisible Man chronicles Fealey’s life in a Toyota, parked wherever he can stay without being moved on — Walmart, the beach — and facing near-constant hostility from both police and public. We see the rhythm of his days: he writes, he has a beloved dog. I started reading — and put all distraction aside.
This guy can really write: he brings a reporter’s clarity to his own life. There’s no self-pity and nothing spare here. I can’t stop telling people about it.
Katie Martin, markets columnist
Scouse bias pushed me in the direction of the Liverpool Echo’s reporting of the city’s infestation of massive seagulls (AKA XL Gullies).
But then I was reminded of this extraordinary tale (the Cut) from February, when an apparently sensible person *who writes a personal finance column for the NYT* got scammed out of $50K in a mind-bendingly ridiculous ruse.
“I vote, floss, cook, and exercise. I’m not a person who panics under pressure and falls for a conspiracy involving drug smuggling, money laundering, and CIA officers at my door. Until, suddenly, I was.” Mind-blowing.
[STOP PRESS further entry from Katie: Neither Elon Musk nor anybody else will ever colonize Mars (Defector)]
+ bonus Katie and Josh Spero (duplicate additional entries)
The nonstop gay sex party on the Mexico City subway (The Nation)
Katie: Recency bias led me to want to list this eyebrow-raising tale of what goes on in the last carriage of underground trains in Mexico City (it’s, um, a lot).
Josh: My Mexican friends say they’ve never heard of this, but The Nation has located a decades-old tradition of gay cruising in the final carriage of Mexico City’s subway trains, the último vagón. What could have been a salacious story in fact has valuable insights into how marginalised cultures find freedom.
Daniel Thomas, man of few words
This was great: A mistake in a Tesla and panicked final call: the death of Angela Chao (The Wall Street Journal)
John Reed, South Asia bureau chief
I didn’t love The God of Small Things, but I discovered Arundhati Roy’s essays this year, and wow.
Whether or not you agree with all her views on India, Israel/Palestine or anything else — and I personally don’t — she is a superb and fearless left-wing polemicist; her razor-sharp writer’s voice reminds me of the late Gore Vidal’s, another leftist pamphleteer who was wrong about a lot of things, but sometimes right and always a joy to read.
Roy this year was charged under India’s sweeping counterterrorism law; when I see any writer facing prosecution for her work I tend to seek out her books. This speech on the Israel-Hamas war is just a sample — look for the essay collections too: Stop this slaughter in Palestine (The Hammer & Hope)
Annachiara Biondi, assistant fashion editor
This gut-wrenching investigation into North Korean forced labour in China which reports in detail the confinement, beatings, wage theft, sexual abuse and forced prostitution experienced by workers across fifteen seafood-processing plants in the country: Inside North Korea’s forced-labor program (The New Yorker)
Madison Darbyshire, investment correspondent
Forever obsessed with the saga of The Laundress: The Laundress’s founder on what really happened at Unilever (The Cut).
After creating a market of luxury laundry detergent and then giving her customers sepsis, founder of the Laundress is back and telling all the secrets of big Consumer.
Peter Campbell, UK political news editor
The NYT piece on how undersea internet cables are repaired was fascinating and a reminder of the forgotten fragility of modern connectivity: Undersea Surgeons (The New York Times)
Brooke Masters, US managing editor-elect
Much ink has been spent warning of the potential impact of climate change, but the Washington Post found a way to show how it is already depressing house prices in Florida. Great interactive graphics and smart interviews here: Where climate change poses the most and least risk to American homeowners (The Washington Post)
Tom Hannen, executive producer for video
You’re maybe looking for proper articles from proper newspapers [no sir! — ed], but I thought this blog by John Gruber (an Apple tech pundit) was surprisingly moving, just after the US election: How it went (Daring Fireball)
And this blog about how battery supply chains could be a security risk in the light of the exploding pagers was in-the-weeds fascinating: Turning everyday objects into bombs is a bad idea (Bunnie’s Blog)
Ahmed Al Omran, Saudi Arabia correspondent
This piece about the uselessness of the American penny and why it remains in circulation despite every logical reason against that was fascinating and fun: America must free itself from the tyranny of the penny (The New York Times Magazine)
Aiden Reiter, Unhedged underling
Great piece on health and people’s obsession with living forever: How to die in good health (The New Yorker)
Sujeet Indap, Wall Street editor
Two banker bros met in the Morgan Stanley analyst training program. Twenty five years later, their seemingly dull cold storage roll-up is one of the rare mega IPOs of the year. It is a tale about financiers making the rare transition into successful operators: Why a cold-storage company just delivered the year’s hottest IPO (Wall Street Journal)
Cordelia Jenkins, Weekend magazine editor
Obviously Letby, obviously everyone will have said that [they had not — Ed. Article link here, nb UK readers will have to find another way in.]
But for me I think it’s this by Jonathan Nunn on Monmouth’s Nicolas Saunders, who tried to create countercultural alternative businesses but kept accidentally becoming a more and more successful capitalist: Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer: the forgotten genius who changed British food (The Guardian)
Natalie Thomas, Lex ‘tennis/athletics bore’
This probably reveals more about my own obsessions than anything else but Owen Slot of The Times’s summing up of Rafael Nadal’s career through the lens of the 7 July 2008 Wimbledon final versus Roger Federer was brilliant, I was transported right back to that day: I cycled five miles on a day off to witness Rafael Nadal’s genius in dark (The Times)
It also has an interesting segue into right-handed sportsmen/women who play with their left hands (as Nadal did).
Sarah Provan, acting deputy technology editor
How this trial and Gisele Pelicot’s courage rocked France as well as women (and hopefully men) all over the world. But the anguish was most felt in the idyllic small town in Provence that the couple called home. “It feels a bit like it’s in our family,” says one resident of Mazan: In this town, a rape trial hits painfully close to home (The New York Times)
Jemima Kelly, columnist
Bit of a recency bias here but I loved this piece by Joe Bernstein on Hunter Biden’s stripper socialite ex girlfriend Zoë Kestan: She met Hunter Biden one night at a club. Then she fell in love (The New York Times)
Fave bit might was when Hunter agreed to go to California to “get sober”, but had a slight change of heart once he got to LA and instead rented out a bungalow at Château Marmont for a month, where he told Zoe about Genghis Khan and Cleopatra and “mused about posting explicit videos of himself to Pornhub”. “Ms. Kestan remembers this stay as the highlight of their relationship,” lol.
Sally Hickey, reporter
Heaven is Tuesday afternoons, when Tina Brown’s weekly substack drops. She was the much-lauded editor of Vanity Fair, as well as a small, parochial east-coast magazine you’ve probably not heard of, and her newsletters combine succinct political takes with gossipy tales from her long career. A particularly good one was her pre-November 5 special, which took us back to the 2000 presidential election: Countdown crazy (Fresh Hell)
Tina recalls finding herself in a posse following Harvey Weinstein as he stalked out just-elected-as-senator Hillary Clinton in an attempt to prove his absolute power. “Harvey had only one thing on his wish list that night: obeisance from Hillary . . . [he] manoeuvred his enormous bulk into Hillary’s boudoir with the inner circle, like a satisfied pufferfish.”
Clara Murray, data journalist
It’s been a good year for deep dives into women commodifying their lives on the internet — like this story about the queen of the tradwives: Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children) (The Times)
. . . and this recent one from the Verge about two influencers fighting over their “aggressively neutral aesthetic”: Bad influence (The Verge)
Adrienne Klasa, correspondent de Paris
This article on the new Macron after the disastrous summer elections is excellent. You can also read it in an English version: Depuis la dissolution de l’Assemblée nationale, le lent crépuscule d’Emmanuel Macron (Le Monde)
Anjli Raval, management editor
If you have a small child, Cocomelon will inevitably enter your world whether or not you like these creepy animated toddlers and this piece is very much about the ins and outs of “being in the business of children’s attention”. Take a deep breath before you read it: How Cocomelon captures our children’s attention (The New Yorker)
This Businessweek piece about Bernard Arnault delves into what it’s like to be the “Wolf in Cashmere”, how his wealth stacks up, his pet peeves and how to get yourself fired from the LVMH empire: The House of Arnault (Bloomberg)
Emma Jacobs, work & careers writer
Because it’s the end of year and you might want something to watch while hiding from your relatives. And I thought about it much longer than I should. They got things wrong (terrible omissions) but picked the right SATC episode (the one that always makes me cry): The 100 best TV episodes of all time (Rolling Stone)
Antonia Cundy, special investigations reporter
It’s from the New Yorker *and* about Kanye West. Can you forgive me?: Kanye West bought an architectural treasure — then gave it a violent remix (The New Yorker)
Lucy Fisher, Whitehall editor
We all know how much parents and academics fret about teenage smartphone addiction — but what do children themselves think? This ‘experiment’ by Decca Aitkenhead, in which her sons and their friends locked away their smartphones for a month, was gripping: What happened when I made my sons and their friends go without smartphones (The Sunday Times)
The teens reflected on the ‘trap’ and ‘drug’ of social media, while Aitkenhead also considered some uncomfortable truths about parents’ unhealthy reliance on phones’ GPS functions to practise surveillance on their offspring.
Rob Smith, award-winning corporate finance editor
As someone who has spent much of this year trying to parse Thames Water’s labyrinthine financing documents, I admired James Meek’s ability to cut through the noise for the LRB and explain how water privatisation is a system that is simultaneously “too expensive and too cheap”. Elsewhere, Abi Whistance’s investigation into a Liverpool charity kingpin (The Post) gave me hope for the future of local journalism.
Finally, The Fence continued to be a reliable home for the best in British longform writing; I particularly enjoyed this tale of deceit at the heart of the Church of England and this vivid portrait of gang violence in pre-gentrification Hackney.
Sam Agini, holding midfielder
The Prince we never knew (The New York Times)
Alison Killing, senior visual investigations editor
This is an incredible story of a Uyghur man’s escape from Xinjiang, a hazardous journey overland, a daring prison escape and finally safety in exile in Turkey: He made a daring escape from China. Then his real troubles began (The New York Times)
As a Uyghur who grew up in the region, Elimä brings huge insight to a story that is notoriously difficult to report and moves it beyond the main thing that people know about XJ — the camps — to show what the region was like and the creeping oppression in the years before the detention programme escalated, as well as what it takes for people to leave.
David Firn, weekend news editor, FT.com
I’ve long wondered about the economies that were able to produce Stone Henge or the Pyramids and how much long distance trade there was at a time when it’s often assumed people’s horizons were, literally, the horizon.
This article about bronze hoards suggests market economies much like our own replaced barter and exchange much earlier than we had assumed: Bronze Age hoards hint that market economies arose surprisingly early (New Scientist)
Manuela Saragosa, executive producer, FT audio
OK this is totally random (not just ‘quite random’!) but in this multimedia world can I recommend an audio essay which elevated the format to art and was produced and reported by an award-winning freelance audio journalist who’s also done work for the FT, Talia Augustidis: Lights Out (BBC Sounds)
It was made for a Radio 4 series, which has sadly been discontinued this year amid wider BBC cuts.
[And finally, in FTAVabetical order]
Alex, token tradmom
Aughts nostalgia is big right now, and that’s apparently brought back The Oversharers: women writing essays with personal details that no fully sane person would ever divulge. The women are (like myself) middle-aged now, so the topics have changed — what used to be dating and drug stories are now about childcare, family and finance.
The most mind-blowing of the bunch was this personal essay (The Cut)* by a woman who got scammed into giving away $50,000 (!!) of cash (!!!) in a shoebox (!!!!). The woman is The Cut’s financial advice columnist (!!!!!!).
Scams are everywhere in the US these days; it’s usually a bad idea to answer a call or text from an unknown number. Would you ever give away $50K in a shoebox? Of course not! At least, I hope not!
But that’s the appeal of the essay. I was by turns horrified, judgmental, angry and vicariously mortified for an entire day.
[*also recc’d by Katie Martin ^^]
Bryce, bystander
The most educational, informative and entertaining piece of original research to be published this year is the tracklist to Floating Points’ five-hour Boiler Room set. That’s not the kind of thing we’re after here, though, so let’s go instead for a blog post by software engineer Nikhil Suresh that caught the public mood: I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again (Ludicity)
Louis, hack-of-all-trades
I dunno about best, but unintentionally funniest article of the year was a late entry: ‘Extremely ironic’: Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying played video game killer, friend recalls (NBC). IYKYK.
Røbin Ullring Hämmërhänd ‘Trillions: on sale now’ Wigglesworth, area man
I’m tempted to just say “all of Matt Levine”, because — infuriatingly — he remains the gold standard. But it feels like such a cop-out that I’ll instead nominate this etymological study of synthetic risk transfers by former Alphavillain Tracy Alloway: One of the hottest trades on Wall Street, an etymological study (Bloomberg)
Writing compellingly about recondite financial shenanigans is incredibly difficult, but Tracy is incredibly consistently good at it. Here she found a killer angle and effortlessly used it to explain the evolution of one of the most interesting trends in finance. Though I doubt SRMPRRSATVMBDPPRRTOGDCBSW is ever going to catch on as an acronym.
Read the full article here