All Writers Have Off Days

...so here’s a selection of 2024’s good stuff

Writers often have a poor sense of their own work’s quality and persistence. A piece I think is exceptional and thoughtful sinks like a stone among readers; a piece I wrote in half-an-hour and forgot about immediately afterwards finishes up all over the internet.

Sometimes, however, there is genuine convergence between the thought-through piece and popularity. I had this experience twice in 2024: first, for People Unlike Me, which did finish up all over the internet (and in the oddest places, too). So many people have riffed off it in some way I’ve lost track—I’ve even had people recommend my own article to me.

The other “thoughtful, nuanced, but nonetheless popular” piece ran over at Law & Liberty (the Liberty Fund-owned magazine where I’m Senior Writer). It concerns Raygun at the Paris Olympics, otherwise known as “Australia’s greatest sporting faceplant.”

Other very popular 2024 pieces include Mutually Assured Cancellation (which was featured in Substack Inc’s “Reads” for the year), this republication of my 2016 Spectator review of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, this review of

Gareth Roberts

’s Gay Shame, and finally this longread from me on the Israel-Palestine conflict (aka “the Omnicause”) and how it’s managed to colonise so much geopolitical and intellectual bandwidth.

For his part,

Lorenzo Warby

of this parish had a similarly popular post—The Fable of Progressive Innocence—over at his place, to go with his very popular US election piece here.

Now all that’s left is to wish readers a happy new year—we’ll be kicking off 2025 with a pre-recorded podcast (for paid subscribers) and a follow-up to

Louise Perry

’s response to People Unlike Me (for everyone).