That precious slice of time between Christmas and New Year’s is the chance to get stuck into those new books you’ve been wanting to read all year. And if you’re not averse to more screen time, it’s also prime time for catching up on all those profound, entertaining or illuminating longform stories you’ve left open in various tabs. Here are our faves from this year, in no particular order.
You Don’t Need To Document Everything – Substack
My favourite longform piece this year comes from London-based writer Freya India’s Substack, Girls. It was published back in January and it’s been on my mind ever since. In it, she critiques our tendency to capture and record moments in our lives instead of being content with making memories. She laments the rise of family vloggers, and suggests our need to share so much of our personal lives is doing far more harm than good. While I don’t agree with every point she makes, I do agree with her general sentiment, especially as someone who works in content creation. I love one of her last lines: “Stop selling your life off so cheaply to strangers.” Ooft. – Maggie Zhou, fashion editor-at-large
On Board the Creed Cruise: The Unfathomable Return of the “Worst Band of the ‘90s” – The Guardian
Higher. One Last Breath. With Arms Wide Open. If you don’t know this muscular trio of ‘90s Christian-lite anthems, then consider this fun piece of gonzo journalism your wake-up call: Creed is back, baby! Tied with Nickelback for most-hated rock act of the last 30 years, Creed experienced full memefication this year, resulting in a sell-out cruise of the Bahamas attended by fans willing to pay a minimum $895 for a “windowless hovel” to see them perform two career-spanning sets.
The article posits that Creed’s unlikely career revival is a symptom of the indiscriminate power our various algorithms have over the culture – has good taste gone down the drain like so much Coors Light on a Creed cruise? (Side note: cruises are one of our favourite narrative nonfiction settings at Broadsheet, from David Foster Wallace’s 1996 masterpiece for Harper’s to the Kid Rock cruise (GQ), the Goop cruise (Harper’s) and this year’s “A Meatball at Sea” by author Gary Shteyngart in The Atlantic.) – Dan Cunningham, acting features editor (food & drink)
Tycoon or Tradwife? The Woman Behind Ballerina Farm Makes Her Own Path. – The New York Times
I spent a solid chunk of my year on Tiktok. From the hot CEO-assassin to Moo Deng and Pesto, it’s been an eventful year on my FYP. But between all the passing fads, nothing captured my attention more than the Mormon trad wives. Chief amongst them is Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, a family-run operation in Utah. When The Times published an article portraying Neeleman as a victim of her husband’s unchecked ambition, claiming she had been “forced” to give up a career as a ballerina to have eight children and live on a farm, the discourse about “trad wives” bubbled over. It led to many thought-provoking articles, including this one from Julia Moskin. The discussion forced us to confront the role these women play and question just what it is they’re trying to communicate, as they make mozzarella from scratch while holding a baby in a $100 apron. – Lucy Bell Bird, national assistant editor
Over Three Decades, Tech Obliterated Media – Intelligencer / New York Magazine
Technically an excerpt from Kara Swisher’s memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (which has the iconic blurb “‘You’re an asshole,’ – Elon Musk, Twitter guy, October 2022”), this piece is essential reading for anyone who spends time online. Swisher is one of the best and most-respected tech journalists in the world, and her sharp observations and intimate knowledge of tech companies and the people who run them are on full display here. As Mark Twain supposedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This story, and Swisher’s memoir, help us understand how we got here – and what to look out for as new tech giants form and existing players gain even more power. – Audrey Payne, Melbourne food & drink editor
Hippy, Capitalist, Guru, Grocer: The Forgotten Genius Who Changed British Food – The Guardian
I love an article that boils down to, “Here’s a huge amount of information on someone (or something) you’ve never heard of.” The brilliant Jonathan Nunn, founder of the even more brilliant Vittles magazine, delivers the goods with this deep dive on the life and legacy of Nicholas Saunders.
The son of an aristocratic academic, Saunders was an anti-establishment hippie who became a central figure in the counterculture scene in ‘70s London. If you’ve shopped at Borough Market, drunk Monmouth Coffee or eaten cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy, you’ve patronised a business set up by Saunders and his friends. Saunders helped popularise wholefoods, Greek yoghurt, organic farming and freshly roasted coffee, all while promoting communal living and recreational drugs.
Saunders’s most successful ventures gradually moved away from his more radical ideas. But many helped rehabilitate Britain’s notoriously terrible food, setting the stage for the rise of modern British cuisine and celebrity chefs, from Jamie Oliver to Heston Blumenthal. Nunn clearly traces the cultural pipeline trends like wholefoods go through, from scrappy, idealistic, oddball movement to yuppie wanker status symbol. The story is also a reminder that, in the right circumstances, one person can make a lasting difference – but it might not be the one you’d expect. – Kit Kriewaldt, subeditor
The Frightening Truth About AI Chatbots: Nobody Knows Exactly How They Work – Fast Company
I was on a tour in China recently when one of our group wanted to know if she could bring a particular ingredient through Australian quarantine. “I’ll just ask ChatGPT,” she said. I was horrified. Had she not heard that that particular AI model frequently hallucinates? (Hallucinates: techspeak for “makes shit up wholesale with enough confidence that you’ll believe it”.) She had not. And maybe you haven’t either.
Earlier this year, Fast Company published a piece about the rampant use of AI chatbots and large language models and how no one really knows what’s under the hood. Quite apart from the severe environmental cost of using AI to make shit up, this is a sobering read for those who use AI because it makes life easy. Turns out it’s very easy to be fast and wrong.
– Adeline Teoh, subeditor
Picasso’s Transformations – The New York Review of Books
It’s an indication of Andy Warhol’s polarising status (and, some might say, proof of his art’s impact) that it is just as easy to be convinced he was a talentless, opportunistic hack who made fools of us all, as of his genius as a prophetic, iconoclastic visionary.
This essay by Jed Perl, one of the world’s greatest living art critics, falls firmly into the first camp as he measures Warhol against Pablo Picasso, “a titan of the makers and shakers of modernity”, and finds the pop artist decidedly wanting. Perl was writing about a series of shows in New York that marked the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, as well as a major Warhol survey in the same city, Andy Warhol: Thirty Are Better Than One.
The crux of his angle is that while Picasso’s name today has become a “compromised brand” amid reckonings around his sexism and misogyny, Warhol’s fame, and art-world hysteria over his work, continue to soar – when he is by far the lesser artist. In 2014 Perl wrote an excoriating takedown of Jeff Koons, which left my opinion of that artist irrevocably low. It’ll take an extraordinary act of criticism in the future to rescue Warhol for me now. – Barnaby Smith, subeditor
We Took Angelina Jolie to the Opera. She Found “A Poetry to It All.” – The New York Times
I don’t often read celebrity profiles and I especially didn’t think I’d find myself reading one on Angelina Jolie. But this piece, on her new biopic about opera diva Maria Callas, surprisingly drew me in. Writer Javier C Hernández accompanies Jolie and Maria director Pablo Larraín to the opera at the Met, prompting questions around the actress’s personal life, return to film after a three-year hiatus, learning to sing again, loneliness and finding joy.
I know nothing about opera, let alone the life of Callas, but this read moved me. Hernández is correct: despite being one of Hollywood’s most recognisable and powerful figures, Jolie remains an “enigma”. Here, Jolie reluctantly yet eloquently, without revealing too much, offers glimpses into a guarded softness and heaviness around her life, and a childhood bullfight that forever shaped her. – Gitika Garg, directory editor
How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer—and Shook the World – Wired
This feature came to me in a newsletter, with a much more compelling headline: The Invisible Waterfall at the End of the World. “Are you bored by most climate stories? Same!” wrote features editor Jason Kehe, introducing the story. I nodded to myself emphatically. “Not saying they’re not important,” he continued. “They’re just chores, so much of the time.” More nods from me.
This one is different. In addition to the human element – scientists feuding! Papers and counter-papers! – there’s the subject matter itself, aka The Invisible Waterfall at the End of the World. It’s a gigantic ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which I’d never heard of prior to this story and I assume you haven’t either. But what happens to it might well determine the fate of the planet. Scary but essential reading.
