Illustrations by Erlend Peder Kvam
Jealousy List
December 9, 2019
Every year, Bloomberg Businessweek releases our annual Jealousy List—stories other outlets published that we feel deserve a tip of the cap. It's a modest way of recognizing some of the great work that our peers, competitors, and frenemies made happen. For this installment, Businessweek editors also recruited submissions from some of the magazine’s regular Bloomberg News contributors.
In general, this project fills us with dread. We spend much of the year in angst, wincing whenever a worthy work emerges. We pass the pieces along to each other, sighing deeply and then putting our heads in our hands once we've read every word. The spreadsheet we use to keep track of entries is titled “EMOTIONAL PAIN.”
But bruised egos heal, eventually. And like that earwormy Kelly Clarkson song, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Please enjoy the 2019 Jealousy List at our expense.
Check out our previous Jealousy Lists:
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015
The Hidden Cost of GoFundMe Health Care
from the New Yorker
I’m extremely jealous of Nathan Heller’s article on the rise of GoFundMe as the health insurance of last—and, increasingly, first—resort in the United States. It’s a brilliant piece about the desperation of parents, the false promises of social media, and the dystopian competition that arises when access to medical care depends on audience engagement: “Whoever has the most heartrending story wins,” Heller writes. Although I really, really wish we’d thought of doing this article, I’m glad someone did, and did it so unforgettably.
The Wild Ride at Babe.Net
from New York Magazine
You might remember Babe.net as the women’s website that shot briefly to national consciousness after it reported sexual misconduct allegations against comedian Aziz Ansari. What you probably don’t know is that shortly after that story hit, Babe.net was rocked by a workplace sex drama of its own. It’s a crazy story—the website’s managers seem to have staged scenes of girl power bonhomie solely for reporter Allison P. Davis’s visit. But it’s also one of the most thoughtful explorations I’ve read of the #MeToo moment and all its various shades of gray.
The Two Jacobs: The Faragist Future by James Meek
from the London Review of Books
James Meek delves into Jacob Rees-Mogg, the pro-Brexit MP whose upper-class mannerisms have led people to call him the “Honorable Member for the 18th Century.” Meek explores how Rees-Mogg embodies Brexit Britain through two seemingly incompatible ideologies: the MP who extols archaic English traditions while being a partner in a Caymans-registered fund management firm that invests in Russia, China, and India. The narrative sometimes goes off-piste, but that’s where the delicious deep powder of this story can be found.
The “Post-Truth” Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News
from the New Yorker
This piece pulls back the curtain on how China maintains its grip on the information informing Chinese students in the diaspora in a totally entertaining and fun way, replete with colorful characters and see-it-to-believe-it anecdotes. It then wraps it all up by explaining the real-world implications of a post-truth world. I was kicking myself for not writing a similar story.
A Second Chance
from the Washington Post
Emily Giambalvo’s tale about the 47 pups rescued from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation 12 years ago is tragic, heartwarming and sublimely hopeful. She tracked down every one of them. The triumph of these animals after being saved from hell has been a crucial moment in animal welfare, and the personal stories of their recovery after the dogs were dispersed around the country put beautiful, furry faces on a broader movement against cruelty. I adopted a dog last year. This made me cry. A lot.
Where Are All the Bob Ross Paintings? We Found Them.
from the New York Times
I am jealous of this Bob Ross video. It’s so simple, informative, and utterly charming.
Gone
from California Sunday Magazine
The stories written about the devastation caused by California’s wildfires surely touch all who read them, chronicling displaced communities and the destruction of our planet’s very lungs. The hot and rainless summers brought on by climate change usually take the lion’s share of the blame, as they did in The New York Times Magazine’s cover story on the Camp Fire in Paradise. But Mark Arax’s staggering investigation of that same fire instead revealed damning ties to the incompetence of Pacific Gas & Electric, a serial and deadly culprit in California’s being set aflame.
Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music
from the New York Times
I went into this wonderful story, by David Samuels, expecting a tech-focused dissection of how Spotify and other streaming services work, and how the listening experience has changed as a result. What I got instead was an engrossing meditation on the life and legacy of the world’s greatest living singer-songwriter (sorry, Dylan, it’s not even close), and on the awesome power of music to delight, transform, and maybe even heal. I didn’t want it to end.
Superhuman is Spying on You
from Mike Industries
How is it that in a year when so many of the world’s smartest journalists fixed their attention on the misdeeds and excesses of Silicon Valley, I’ve found myself coming back to a personal blog post about a company I hadn’t heard of? Because Mike Davidson's meticulous critique of Superhuman—a $30 per month email service with a 180,000-user waiting list and a bunch of well-known investors—explains, with remarkable clarity, how easy it is for tech companies to violate our privacy without our (or their) even realizing it. In doing so, Davidson makes the best case I’ve read for why these “dark patterns,” to borrow a design term he uses, are so common, and why they’re worth resisting.
Economists are rethinking the numbers on inequality
from the Economist
It isn’t that I think inequality isn’t real or a problem or a big deal, but the data Thomas Piketty produced intuitively seemed too neat. And now they are being used in a number of countries to write policy prescriptions that can be pretty radical. So, what if the data are wrong? This piece goes a long way to explain why Piketty’s findings need to be treated with a lot more caution than they are.
The Jungle Prince of Delhi
from the New York Times
The piece begins like fiction by Jorge Luis Borges but is really a marvel of a detective story—and a parable of the great and tragic partition of British India.
The Ice Stupas
from the New Yorker
The Ice Stupa digital feature, photographed by Vasantha Yogananthan and published in the New Yorker, took my breath away. The online presentation had the perfect balance of photography, video, and info-graphics to make it a multimedia masterpiece.
I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.
from Vox.com
Ceaseless monitoring and control are making low-wage work “inescapably, chronically stressful,” writes journalist Emily Guendelsberger, who took jobs at McDonald’s Corp., Amazon.com Inc., and call-center operator Convergys Corp. The article is based on her 2019 book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane.
Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free
from ProPublica
Sometimes corporate malfeasance is hiding in plain sight. Using Washington lobbying and a subtly deceptive website, TurboTax has made billions charging people to file simple tax returns that should be free. I fell for it once myself. ProPublica’s Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel obtained internal documents to show how the company managed to, in its words, “monetize free.”
Ghosts of War in a Wisconsin Forest
from the New Republic
In this short piece, Bryan Cox describes his time in combat in Afghanistan, which was so destructive to him and to so many others, and his work now as a forest ecologist—work that is expressly about healing. You might think he’d be contrasting and comparing. Instead the ideas flow into one another, one sentence to the next. It’s daring, and briefly challenging, until you realize what he’s up to. Then it feels like the only way to tell this intensely personal story.
The Coast of Utopia
from Vanity Fair
We used to use the internet to share what was happening in our lives. Now we shape our lives to perform well on the internet. In this piece, Carina Chocano captures the charade of keeping up an Instagram-worthy life by focusing on a surfing community in Byron Bay, Australia, which has become overrun by influencers. She’s following, in her words, “a cross-tagging, cross-promoting, mutually amplifying, audience-sharing group of friends living, loving, working, and posting aspirational lifestyle content in a highly Instagrammable paradise.” The resulting piece is brilliant, entertaining and terrifying.
Climate Change Is Finally Having a Political Moment. That’s No Accident.
from Mother Jones
A compelling look at how younger people are taking the lead on calling for action to combat climate change, and the organizing strategy that’s helping them “keep a movement growing instead of fizzling out after a few splashy protests.”
Why Do Cats And Dogs …?
from Google News Labs
Adam Gopnik wrote in 2011 that people “have false intuitions about [dogs’] inner lives but limitless imagination about them.” For proof of this obsession, spend a few minutes with this wildly comprehensive data visualization by Nadieh Bremer breaking down the most commonly Googled questions about dogs (and, I suppose, cats) beginning with “Why.” The data are parsed into constellations of circles whose complexity is softened by playful but considered design. The result is entertaining but also a poignant reminder that our pets’ motivations elude us, driving us to the internet for answers.
Billie Eilish and the Triumph of the Weird
from Rolling Stone
Cool teens have known about Billie Eilish at least since 2017, when she released Ocean Eyes, the song she recorded with her brother in their bedrooms that was meant just for her dance class but described what every outwardly aloof but inwardly aching adolescent wished they could express: “You really know how to make me cry/When you give me those ocean eyes,” set to a minimal, techno-weird backdrop of synthesized drums and lyrical vocal echoes. Fast forward to 2019, when everyone—even me!—got to feel like a cool teen with the release of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Eilish’s first full-length album.
A Black Legacy, Wrapped Up in Fur
from the New York Times
The clothes we wear have always said something about us. For black women, whose voices are often relegated to the sidelines, fashion choices take on a greater meaning. That’s what Jasmine Sanders captures so poignantly in her essay. Fur coats represent elusive wealth, heirlooms and glamour. As more brands, retailers and cities move away from selling fur, this piece is a reminder that to black communities, fur isn’t just a material to be worn but a legacy to carry on.
Four Years in Startups
from the New Yorker
Anna Wiener is a writer who always seems to pick the perfect and surprising word. This piece, adapted from her upcoming memoir, slices through her time in the snack-filled, boisterous and heady trenches of Silicon Valley’s startups and captures both the allure and the hollowness of its ambition.
Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class
from Gen
If your parents, like mine, were forced decades ago to drop $100 on a graphing calculator for high-school math, you might be surprised to learn that this has remained North American tradition. Maya Kosoff’s fascinating account traces how STEM FOMO and lobbying made the devices indispensable, straining communities already burdened by systemic inequalities. Absent proper funding, teachers have been forced to crowdfund—a needlessly complex calculus for a straightforward problem.
Who Killed Tulum?
from New York Magazine
This piece had the dual virtue of: a) the great journalistic tradition of “We Did This So You Don’t Have To”—now I don't have to waste my precious vacation time going to Tulum or being jealous of anyone who posts an Instagram from Tulum—while also b) making me feel a little envious that I had never gone to Tulum before it was ruined. Bravo, Reeves Wiedeman, and thank you, I think.
Imminent Danger
from the Houston Chronicle, in partnership with NBC
This was a haunting story about Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, a psychiatric condition that’s more often explored through what happens to the child. This investigation was told through the eyes of an accused mother instead and showed how the system might be penalizing the wrong people.
The Festival Industrial Complex: How food festivals hurt the chefs they’re meant to help
from the Los Angeles Times
As food festivals have become as ubiquitous as kale, and consumers fork over $250 a person to eat substandard patties at Burger Bashes nationwide, reporter Hanna Raskin uncovers an unsavory truth: Chefs often lose significant amounts of money to participate. “They’re putting on a Bonnaroo and not paying the bands,” one cook says. It's so well reported and compelling, you will never again eat a bite-sized sausage at a festival without feeling guilty.
They Welcomed a Robot Into Their Family, Now They’re Mourning Its Death
from the Verge
Imagine an Amazon Echo that dances, cracks jokes, and shows affection to your loved ones. That was the concept of the short-lived social robot Jibo, whose servers went offline earlier this year. The Verge profile of families devastated by the loss of their robots had me thinking about how technology will impact our relationships—and not just with other humans.
Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild
from Texas Monthly
Tiger-lion hybrids, irate animal activists, mysterious deaths and murder for hire. Part true crime, part profile, part oddity piece, it sprinkles in details sometimes fun (an exotic, animal–themed bed-and-breakfast), sometimes bizarre (alligators boiled alive) that take the reader into the life of flamboyant zoo keeper Joe Exotic and his baffling dark turns.
In the Land of Self-Defeat
from the New York Times
In this piece by Monica Potts, a dispute in Van Buren County, Ark. over whether to increase the town librarian’s pay to $25/hour sheds light on the psychology behind the less-government philosophy that animates so many of Trump’s followers. The bottom line: Some folks don’t want to see their government spending more, even if that spending stands to benefit their own community, which I thought was an interesting insight.
The Millions Who Left
from Die Zeit
2019 marked the first year since Germany’s reunification that more people moved from former West Germany to former East Germany than vice-versa. Die Zeit told the story through really amazing graphics. They simplified 29 years of complex historical migration data in an engaging, user-friendly and beautiful way.
Can Babies Learn to Love Vegetables?
from the New Yorker
As a new father, I’m often clueless about basic things. Like what to feed my daughter. That’s why I loved this colorful, often hilarious story about the economics, history, changing tastes and general absurdities of how we feed our babies. Burkhard Bilger visited a Gerber’s skunk works, a U.S. military food lab and many other places in a bid to help people like me. I ate it up. Then I pounded the table, wanting more.
One is Chinese. One is American. How a journalist discovered and reunited identical twins
from the Los Angeles Times
This was a narrative about China that felt deeply personal. It was, at its simplest, a story of connections lost, found and reformed in new ways. It framed government policy in terms of individual impact. And it threw up a bunch of ethical questions.
What Remains
from California Sunday
This piece imbued the death of Yosemite’s Lyell Glacier with history, personal narrative, romance, and some unexpected and vivid anthropomorphizing. Plus, hats off to any reporter who transforms an assignment into a backcountry camping trip. At the very least, just gawk at the stunning photographs.
Competitive Oyster Shucking Is Real, Decadent, And China’s Best Party
from Deadspin
The extraordinary final days of Deadspin last month made me realize how much I’d miss its spiky, irreverent output. This piece from September stood out: a look at a bizarre, boozy world that I never knew existed. “Three, two, one ... SHUCK!”
“Breaking our back”: Food banks are drowning in milk China won’t buy
from The New Food Economy
My favorite stories are the ones that make me go, “I didn’t know that existed.” This story, which came out around the peak of Chinese-American tensions over the summer, touched on all kinds of things I knew nothing about, ranging from the intricacies of the farm bailout program to the immense logistical undertaking it is to run an American food bank.
Life Without the Tech Giants
from Gizmodo
If anyone tells you to just stop using Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Apple if you're really so outraged about the latest outrage, point that genius to Kash Hill’s series from last winter. She and technologist Dhruv Mehrotra make clear that without changes, the companies won’t stop using us.
Dolly Parton’s America
from WNYC Studios
This podcast makes the case that Parton is our Beethoven, with bigger and better hair. But it goes to surprising places. One episode shows how the nostalgia for home that infuses Parton’s songs is the feeling the podcast host’s father has for his birthplace in Lebanon. It pulls back to trace how human migration is reflected in commonalities in music around the world. Explaining why Parton’s music resonates with so many people also reminds us that we are connected. And it made me cry while I washed dishes.
“I Need to Be Careful”: Texts Reveal Warner Bros. CEO Promoted Actress Amid Apparent Sexual Relationship
from the Hollywood Reporter
A billionaire, a big-time movie producer and a studio boss, all entangled with a 21-year-old aspiring starlet who may have been used to get a big deal closed. Warner Bros. hired a prominent law firm to investigate, and the actress denied any inappropriate behavior, but leaked text messages told a different story, and AT&T, in its first big introduction to Hollywood scandal, canned the executive in question, Kevin Tsujihara.
My Years in the Florida Shuffle of Drug Addiction
from the New Yorker
Drug addiction has become big business, and this is a story Bloomberg could have told in some form. The first-person account is powerful—raw and graphic and has a William Burroughs quality to it. It’s so disturbing, but you just can’t stop reading.
An Unexpected Letter from John Paul Stevens, Shakespeare Skeptic
from the New Yorker
It’s common for journalists to hear from readers with crackpot conspiracy theories. But this was no ordinary crackpot and no ordinary conspiracy theory: The late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote to James Shapiro, author of several books on Shakespeare, to argue that the actual author of the bard’s plays was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. A fascinating six-month debate ensued between Stevens and Shapiro. No minds were changed.
What If We Stopped Pretending
from the New Yorker
It’s hard to think of a New Yorker article that triggered as much opprobrium as Jonathan Franzen’s slap in the face of pretty much everyone in the climate crisis debate. (Not that it's a debate, of course.) His indictment of those who caused it and those almost gleefully unwilling to fight it was matched by his wistful dismissal of everyone who thinks it will be slowed or stopped. As every day goes by, Franzen’s grim pronouncement becomes that much more inescapable.
The Battle of Grace Church
from New York Magazine
Every single year, Jessica Pressler is at the top of my personal jealousy list. But this year’s entry hit close to home. Every yuppie in Brooklyn and beyond will love this popcorn-in-mouth tempest-in-a-teapot about a leadership struggle in a small Brooklyn private school. The tale involves money, celebrities, and a certain kind of New York power that only matters to a privileged (and, it turns out, pugnacious) few. It’s a story about a people that you love to hate.
Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India
from the New Yorker
This is one of those stories that flooded my WhatsApp chats and generated a tremendous amount of chatter (and arguments) within them. The gruesome title is just the start of all the horrific details in this piece.
How Rosalía and J Balvin Made ‘Con Altura’ a Global Reggaeton Hit
from the New York Times
This series serves as a wonderful example of content shaping form. The use of FaceTime, the editing, the animation—everything comes together in a way that makes me think there couldn't possibly be a better way to tell these stories. They are full of insight in the most casual, yet intimate, way you would want to learn from artists.
John Crist Cancels 2019 Tour Dates After Reports of Sexting, Harassment, Manipulation
from Charisma Magazine
This Christian magazine’s skin-crawling feature on comedian John Crist showed how religious media’s #ChurchToo coverage of adult victims’ abuse, grooming and manipulated consent often outpaces secular #MeToo work. Young associate editor Taylor Berglund’s nine-month investigation had immediate impact: Netflix put Crist’s debut special on hold, Random House delayed his book and Crist cancelled tour dates.
18 Questions. 21 Democrats. Here’s What They Said.
from the New York Times
This was a smart, interactive way to cover the candidates. It’s digestible and direct and provides a quick but candid glimpse that helps you meet the 2020 Dems in a consistent format—and free of the limitations of a live debate or long form profile.
Bari Weiss’s Unasked Questions
from Jewish Currents
Hit pieces are usually fun to read, but the philosopher Judith Butler has delivered a tutorial on how to be strict but kind, with a net effect infinitely more devastating than mere dismissal. Her subject is a book on antisemitism by the New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss, and her takeaway, “More courage, Bari Weiss!”, nicely sums things up for everyone involved.
All-American Despair
from Rolling Stone
Our mental health crisis is a grave concern and a topic we must discuss more openly. Stephen Rodrick’s story was especially poignant. Seventy percent of suicides are middle-aged white men, he writes, and the U.S. states with the highest rates are in the American West. Guns, drugs, alcohol, poverty, isolation, and unemployment have lethal consequences, especially when they’re combined.
Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
from the Guardian
A tale of the vulnerable and the gullible and greed that takes modern consumer sensibilities and removes the Instagram filter. Writer Tess McClure went underground (literally) with children to show the human cost of "wellness."
(Corrects publication attribution for the article Climate Change Is Finally Having a Political Moment. That’s No Accident.)
Jealousy gremlins by Erlend Peder Kvam
Design by Steph Davidson
Design by Steph Davidson