The Top Better Strangers Articles of 2024

It was a B.S. year, and this was the best B.S. we put out.

This was a weird year for this Substack: I experimented with running “courses” on topics that I have a lot of knowledge on (Mutual Aid, Alan Moore, and Human Rights) that were mostly just open to paid subscribers, and I took the summer off in order to move my family to a new state. The internet — along with the world in general — seems to have been in decline for the entirety of the year, with the rise of AI, the Muskification of Twitter, and with billionaires undermining the editorial independence of the legacy publications they bought and promised never to undermine.

In spite of all of this, when I was looking back on what I’ve written this year, I was happy with what I put out. The Alan Moore course was the most enjoyable thing I’ve written in a long time, and I’m playing with ways I could make a larger book out of that project. My first article on the “most-read” list this year is from that series. I’ve removed the paywall, because it’s the holidays and because I found writing it such a delight that I want to share it with more people.

The actual #1 most read was a subject I’ve returned to and expanded upon a lot over the years. I began the anti-despair reading list years ago, and I’ve spent the intervening years expanding on it and adding to it. I posted an updated version after the catastrophic results of the 2024 election.

My Mutual Aid 101 series was the most popular of my courses, and I think for good reason: mutual aid is the future of the left. The global right wing is ascendant, and they will do nothing but lead the world to catastrophe. But in moments of catastrophe, we know that people default to mutual aid to pull their societies through. If the left can seize on this impulse and use these now-constant moments of crisis to pull people together and solve problems that our governments have no interest in solving themselves, we might begin to lay the groundwork for a new, more just, more sustainable world. I discussed the concept of “disaster utopias” in the context of COVID, and it was one of my most-read articles of the year:

The introductory article to the Mutual Aid course was another big one. This is back from when I still had the energy to record spoken word versions of the articles, so if you don’t wanna read, give it a listen!

I don’t let myself engage in full blown doomerism particularly often — it’s not great for my mental health — but when I sat down to write a Halloween article, I started thinking, “what scares me most?”

The answer is undoubtedly “my kids’ future,” so I wrote about it and it seemed to hit a nerve.

I was really happy to see this one take off: Chelle King is a friend-of-a-friend, we’ve been connected on social media as casual acquaintances for the better part of two decades at this point, so when I saw on Facebook that she was struggling against her NIMBY neighbors to put a community fridge in her yard, I decided to interview her for my mutual aid series. It’s a fascinating look at putting lofty ideals into practice.