Design Hunting - Our Most-Read Stories of the Year

New York Magazine's Most Read Stories 2022

Well, we survived the vibe shift. It was a strange year, though! It’s hard to believe that less than 12 months ago, Allison P. Davis wrote about the possibility that you might get caught forever in a previous era’s cultural stylings and fixations. More than a few of our readers found that prospect actually quite wonderful — why not just pick a vibe and settle in? — but magazine-making is, among other things, the art of keeping up, and I’m happy to look back on our year of journalism and see evidence of a newsroom always on the lookout for the new and the next.

Below, you’ll find a list of our 20 most-read articles we published this year. It’s a vivid testament to our wide-ranging interests, from Meghan Markle to Dianne Feinstein to crashing crypto billionaires to high-school seniors struggling to apologize and forgive. But before you get there, here are just a few of the stories and projects we published this year that didn’t break into the top 20 but that make me especially proud of my extraordinary colleagues.

I love that we took six months to assemble writing from more than 20 journalists and essayists to produce a sweeping and moving history of the first decade of Black Lives Matter.

I love that a couple weeks later, we raced to cover the first weeks of the invasion of Ukraine through first-person accounts from young people living through it. And then we scrambled our plans for our annual Yesteryear Issue, quickly publishing a beautiful love letter to New York’s Little Ukraine neighborhood.

I love that Tirhakah Love paused his work prototyping the newsletter Dinner Party to publish the fiercest defense of The Slap I read anywhere.

I love two new columns on Curbed: “Looking to Settle,” whose first installment was written by Emily Gould, and “The Eavesdropper.”

I love Tammie Teclemariam’s midyear collection of 100 restaurant tips, and Sarah Thankam Mathews’s particularly elegant Grub Street Diet, and Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s romp through outdoor dining.

I love the Cut’s enormous, useful, and moving “State of the Uterus” project, which kicked off with the “This Magazine Can Help You Get an Abortion” cover package, and Monica Corcoran Harel’s poignant story of setting up playdates for her mother.

I love how much smart finance coverage we published on Intelligencer this year, from August’s “What Is Elon Musk?” package to November’s relentless, sharp, and lucid coverage of Sam Bankman-Fried.

I love Jason P. Frank’s ground-shaking interview of 1776’s Sara Porkalob and Andrea Long Chu’s review of Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel and Angelica Jade Bastién’s dissection of the Brangelina marriage.

I love Esther Wang’s difficult reported feature on Asian-American politics and Zak Cheney-Rice’s difficult recent column on Brittney Griner and Jonathan Chait’s prescient intellectual profile of Ron DeSantis.

I love “Steal My Couch,” the first of a new column at the Strategist that gives you both helpful shopping service and the chance to snoop in people’s homes. And speaking of homes, I love so many of Wendy Goodman’s “Design Hunting”s this year — but none as much as her own.

I love that Hanna Rosin somehow found time beyond overseeing all of our audio journalism to co-host a wild season two of Cover Story.

And I love that a whole slew of New York staffers traffic-copped 72 notable New Yorkers crossing Little West 12th to create a “Reasons to Love New York” cover we’ll remember for years to come.

Happy holidays, and thank you as always for being loyal readers.

— David Haskell, editor-in-chief