Every December marks Longreads’ annual Best Of package, a series of pieces published over a two-week period that celebrate the editors’ favorite stories from that year. We tried something new this year, and in keeping with that spirit, I tried something new as well.

For the past few years, we’ve structured the package to concentrate on journalistic categories: Personal Essays, Investigative Reporting, Profiles, that sort of thing. The structure makes sense. It has a clarity of purpose that benefits the editor and the reader. (People don’t talk enough about how clarity is a two-way street, and also a feedback loop of its own.¹) Its focus invites deeper thinking. If someone were to publish something like “The 50 Best Stories of the Year,” they’d need to weigh personal essays against deeply reported investigations; when we filter by genre, we’re able to discuss each piece’s merits without feeling like we have to create some sort of universal value system in order to do so.

But the structure has a downside, too. In addition to editing stories, Longreads editors write about other stories all year long²³. They (we) do so in the form of editors’ picks—around 600 a year—but also in slightly longer form for the Top 5 weekly newsletter. This means that whatever stories they (we) write about in a year-end package, they (we) have invariably written about before, and in basically identical form. All well and good, but once you write 200 words extolling the virtues of a feature, writing a different 200 words extolling the virtues of the same feature doesn’t feel particularly additive.

Which brings us to this year. Instead of doing those genre-based roundups, we decided that each editor would revisit all the stories they’d written about this year, and then write a short essay teasing out one of the themes they’d noticed in their own reading patterns. We had readers in mind with this change, but we also had ourselves in this mind with this change—speaking for myself, just the act of switching things up flicked on a different burner in my brain.

First, I went back to revisit my recommendations. I wrote 93 editor’s picks, and wrote longer blurbs about ~50 of those for the Top 5 newsletter⁴. When I fuzzed my eyes and looked at them in the aggregate, I could see a few constellations.

1. Cultural shifts, especially the (d)evolution of media in the digital age
2. Deep reporting that animates a story with a very narrow scope.⁵
3. Fascinating subcultures⁶
4. Esoterica and the self.⁷
5. Slow thinking: intellectual history, cognitive science, etc.⁸
6. Breaking through archetypes/stereotypes.
7. Cottage industries and power structures.
8. Interrogating pop culture.

I went back and forth on a few of these, but ultimately settled on the one that felt the most . . . fertile, I guess. I wanted to seed some sort of argument in there, not just point at stories that prove I like that kind of story.

So I was armed with a loose framework. I also wanted to try a new writing process, though—something that felt like the continuation of some changes I started making earlier this year. But I’ll save that for the next post.

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Tenuous Thematic Tie: Dirtsman, “Hot Dis Year”

Dirtsman’s death is one of the great tragedies of dancehall. After a slew of big singles—1992’s “Hot Dis Year” arguably the most enduring among them—he signed with BMG, only to be gunned down at his own house in 1993. If you hear shades of Peter Tosh in that, you’re not wrong. Dirtsman’s contemporary Panhead had been shot dead in the street just months before, and the twin murders (along with Garnett Silk’s killing the next year) cast a pall over reggae, with songs like Buju Banton’s “Murderer” mourning the situation. Capleton’s smash “Tour” even recounts learning the news on his return to Jamaica: “come back mi hear Panhead skull bore / come back an’ hear Dirtsman skull bore . . . seem like di people dem nuh love God no more.” Thankfully, songs like this remind you of the talent he brought to the world.

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1. Is that two metaphors, or one? One if the two-way street is a track, I guess. ↩︎
2. Internally, we shorthand this as “curation,” so if I use the word again, that’s what I mean. Also, I don’t know why I’m hiding that in a footnote, though I’m going to assume I have a decent reason for it. ↩︎
3. Okay, I realized why I hid it in a footnote. I tried it in a few places in the graf, and it never quite fit. It felt either interruptive, or like it was arriving too late to matter. So: footnote. ↩︎
4. Those longer blurbs totaled somewhere north of 12,000 words, which I only know because I keep each year’s blurbs in a single doc. ↩︎
5. These sorts of pieces usually centered on one or two people, but they weren’t profiles. They hinged on intimacy and a lot of scene reconstruction. ↩︎
6. This is the least surprising thing I can imagine. I’ve always loved subculture/microscene stories. Read hundreds or more, written a few. ↩︎
7. These were all over the places: a wild Harper’s profile of “the QAnon Shaman,” a very cool Nautilus story that explores a lingering (and mind-blowing) question about psychedelic experiences, a Paris Review essay about having been Mike Mew’s patient as a young man. ↩︎
8. Even typing that made me feel like a productivity/performance bro. I apologize. Let’s just say “stories about brain shit.” ↩︎