My favorite longform of 2024

Hi friends,

This has been a productive year for me, writing about industrial hog farms, transgender health care, and a would-be governor who was too good to be true. But with the approach of New Year’s, I want to turn the lens outward: to share my favorite longform stories by other writers. I’ve done this for about a decade now, and you can read see my 2017-2023 picks here.

Here’s my highly subjective 2024 list:

• Adventures of a Teen-Age Wharf Rat (Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker): A personal story of an adventure gone awry.

• The Stasi Files (Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker): Archivists have spent 30 years trying to restore the files of East Germany’s secret police.

• From the Edges of a Broken World (Joanna Chen, Washington Monthly): An Israeli author writes about ferrying sick Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals before and after October 7.

• Guilty (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post): Over more than two years, the author embedded with Michigan prosecutors as they pursued their high-risk case against the parents of a school shooter.

• Guns. Knives. Bats. Hammers. Hatchets. Spears (Ruby Cramer, The Washington Post): A road-rage school tries to address the impact of the nation’s trauma.

• The Alchemists (Kim Cross, Bicycling): A story of the brave women cyclists of Afghanistan, trying to escape the country as the Taliban closed in.

• An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice (Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine): Two couples discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch?

• The Man Who Raced to Tell the World That Mount Everest Had Been Climbed (Peter Frick-Wright, Outside): Weeks after Ten Tsewang Sherpa ran 200 miles to Kathmandu to deliver the news, he died. The author retraced his steps and told his story for the first time.

• A Semblance of Peace (Masha Gessen, The New Yorker): The author visited an interfaith village in Israel, rooted in a belief in Jewish-Palestinian dialogue, during a time of war.

• Lost Highway (Emily Gogolak, Harper’s): On the trials of trucking school.

• Masters of the Green (Latria Graham, Garden & Gun): The Black caddies of Augusta National were “talented prognosticators who turned a racist policy, rooted in subjugation, into a livelihood and a source of esteem.”

• Maui on Fire (Erika Hayasaki, New York): The bracing story of a young couple fleeing the Lahaina wildfire.

• The Redemption of Al Sharpton (Mitchell S. Jackson, Esquire): A beacon of the civil-rights movement? A loudmouth in a tracksuit? The outspoken minister leader has a complex legacy.

• The Breaking of an American Family (Michael Kruse, Politico): Two brothers, one battling Stage 3 colorectal cancer, are no longer speaking. On the surface, this is about Donald Trump, but it’s about far more.

• “Eat What You Kill” (J. David McSwane, ProPublica): A Montana oncologist’s patient deaths went unchecked at every turn.

• Coming to America (Rhana Natour, The Atavist): Layan Albaz, a 14-year-old girl from Gaza, lost her legs during an Israeli airstrike. She was one of the few pediatric amputees who could travel to the United States for medical treatment.

• What Will Become of American Civilization? (George Packer, The Atlantic): Climate change meets political extremism in Phoenix, the nation’s fastest-growing city.

• The Insurrectionists Next Door (Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic): What happened when Ashli Babbitt’s mother and the wife of a January 6 rioter moved into the author’s overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood.

• The Lost Village (Nicole Sadek, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists): Western oil companies were supposed to make Kazakhstan energy-independent. Instead they left towns like Berezovka in ruins. 

• A Republican Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies (Eli Saslow, The New York Times): A rural Nevada election official comes under siege by neighbors who think she’s part of “the deep state cabal.”

• A Double Life (Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post): A leading global drug trafficker hid in plain sight: as the starting midfielder on a professional soccer team he had purchased.

• My Unraveling (Tom Scocca, New York): The author had his health. He had a job. And then, abruptly, he didn’t.

• Is Forgiveness Possible? (Clint Smith, The Atlantic): Tthe author travels to Rwanda and talks with perpetrators and victims of the genocide.

• The Marked Man (Christopher Spata and Dan Sullivan, Tampa Bay Times): An innocent man’s exoneration after 37 years in prison revealed a rash of serial killings in 1980s Tampa.

• This man saved his town from deadly floodwaters. So why did the US government try to stop him? (Katie Thornton, The Guardian): Windell Curole built a vast levee in Louisiana. Had he listened to federal officials, he says, ‘we wouldn’t have a community.”

• In the Land of the Very Old (Sam Toperoff, The Sunday Long Read): The author reflects on approaching 90.

• Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain (Kate Wagner, Road & Track): A card-carrying socialist attends the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix. The magazine quickly pulled the article offline, but an archived version remains.

• Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy (Mark Warren, Esquire): “The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure.”

• Recovery Town, U.S.A. (Oliver Whang, New York Times Magazine): Opioids ravaged Louisa, Kentucky. Then rehab became its business.

• A small city in Oklahoma elected a white nationalist. Will it be able to vote him out? (Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News): Judd Blevins, who marched in the 2017 Unite the Right rally, faces a recall.

• What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living (Phoebe Zerwick, New York Times Magazine): Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help both the dying and those they leave behind.

Plus, a book to offer you hope: Back in 2020, John and Karen Noltner sold their Minnesota home and crisscrossed the country for 900 days and 93,000 miles. John, a documentary photographer, interviewed numerous people—about criminal justice, anti-Black violence, immigration and borders, Native American sovereignty, wildfires, racial reconciliation, the teaching of history, the Covid-19 pandemic, sex work, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, water crises, deep listening, mortality, and moral leadership. In the resulting book, Lessons on the Road to Peace, the spirit of hope and commitment in the face of unprecedented challenges is palpable.

My favorite recording of 2024: t's been more than a decade since I wrote The Gutbucket King, a profile of blues guitarist Little Freddie King. It tells the story of a young man who jumped onto a moving freight train in Mississippi, rode to New Orleans, survived addiction, violence, and an apocalyptic hurricane, and continues to produce stirring music today. King is now 84. His newest recording is called Things I Used to Do. I love how stripped down it is: Jake Clapp at Gambit Weekly compared it to "stumbling across the elder bluesman on his porch as he digs into old memories for no one but himself and passersby."

Finally, an old music video to finish out your year: When I’m down, this one by Michael Franti lifts me up pretty quickly.

Happy New Year!

All best,
Barry Yeoman