The Best Articles I Read in 2018

Those who know me best know that I enjoy two things above all else: Reading and recommending articles (and through a combination of luck and stubbornness, have managed to build a business peripheral to this).

The themes of technology’s impact on society, income inequality, Trump, disinformation, artificial intelligence are heavily represented in the selection. Some of them serve as fantastic overviews of topics like the Opioid Epidemic or Russia’s Election-hacking. A few provide an important historical perspective on today’s pressing issues, while others serve as predictions of what is to come. And there are a few simply engrossing stories that capture #2018Business perfectly (ICOs! WeWork! Bubbles!).

Without further ado:

45 highlights — March 2018

47 highlights — September 17, 2018.

You all know Facebook, fake news, and big tech monopolies are all current obsessions of mine, so it’s fitting this definitive New Yorker piece would find it’s way to #2. If these topics are important to you, this is the one to read.

43 highlights — October 2, 2018

39 highlights — November 2018 Issue

37 highlights — June 2018 Issue

This WIRED longread is just an incredible story. It’s got absurd characters, love and heartbreak, and ICOs. This was easily my definitive crypto-craze story that managed to capture every element of what went wrong, packaged into a compelling narrative.

36 highlights — February 2018 Issue

Andrew Sullivan’s still got it. This February 2018 NYMag article managed to tie together the topics of opioids, addiction, healthcare, community and even religion, in a way that helped someone detached from the direct day-to-day effects of the crisis want to learn more.

33 highlights

CB Insights breaks down a private, opaque business like nobody else can. If you’re at all interested in the WeWork business, or the world of opaque decacorns, make sure to read this one.

32 highlights — November 14, 2018

WIRED’s Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson and Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer join forces for this tech+foreign policy masterpiece. The China vs. U.S. tech arms race will be at the center of the next decade’s business and foreign policy, and this will get you up to speed on the challenges that lie ahead.

32 highlights — November 14, 2018

Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Fund is one of my favorite financial writers. Through a lengthy construction of America’s post World War2 economy, this chart-filled longread manages to lay out the case of our current state of inequality and a declining middle class “happened”.

31 highlights — November 27, 2018

This is an incredible story that captures the weirdness of the internet in 2018. An exploration that begins with a few odd packages delivered leads Jenny Odell, an Oakland-based writer and artist, into a world where it’s impossible to distinguish digital from physical, and real from fake. And makes you wonder if you can ever trust Amazon reviews again.

30 highlights — September 20, 2018

Continuing on the theme of definitive overviews of incredibly complex and news-dominating topics, this NY Times article can serve as your Russia Election Hacking 101 textbook.

30 highlights — October 24, 2018

This book excerpt from Jacob Hacker (a Yale Professor) serves as an incredible complement to the above Morgan Housel piece on the topic of income inequality.

29 highlights — April 24, 2018

29 highlights — August 14, 2018

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