State of online reading: Pocket’s annual Best of 2022

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The year’s most intriguing ideas and indispensable advice, plus the top stories in science, technology, sports, culture, long reads, and more

Each year, Pocket celebrates the stories and articles that readers loved most over the past 12 months. This year’s collection includes over 100 articles from 50 different major and smaller known publications representing the very best of the web as curated by Pocket readers and editors.

Pocket—the leading social bookmarking service—has published its annual Best of 2022 list, with 20 lists celebrating the year’s top articles across culture, technology, science, business, and more.

This is based on an aggregated analysis of all of the links saved to Pocket in 2022, with a focus on English-language articles. The results took into account how often articles were saved, opened, read and shared. 

Pocket’s Best Of list offers insight into the cultural trends that dominated the media, as well as key metrics into the most popular story themes and top authors and outlets.

This year’s findings signal a shift to reinvention as readers are gravitating towards stories about happiness, relationship building and learning – a sharp contrast from last year’s top readings managing burnout and uncertainty during the pandemic.

Most Read

The most saved and read articles on Pocket in 2022.

1. The Atlantic: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
2. The New York Times: A Neurologist’s Tips to Protect Your Memory
3. The New Yorker: A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything
4. ZDNet: Why you should really stop charging your phone overnight
5. Harvard Business Review: A Simple Way to Introduce Yourself
6. Vox: The sleep advice no one tells you
7. Foreign Affairs: What If Russia Loses?
8. The Reader: The Time Hack Everyone Should Know
9. The Guardian: Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen
10. The New Yorker: Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?
11. The Atlantic: How to Want Less
12. The Atlantic: What the Second Happiest People Get Right

Best Of The Stories That Lived in Our Heads Rent Free This Year

What’s the magic formula for creating a story that unites the entire internet? If 2022 was any indication, it involves either toddlers, word games, or letting out our inner goblins.

1. Quanta Magazine: Two Weeks In, the Webb Space Telescope Is Reshaping Astronomy
2. The Guardian: Slobbing out and giving up: why are so many people going ‘goblin mode’?
3. Experience Magazine: How Wordle brought us back together
4. The Washington Post: ‘Don’t Worry Darling,’ we’ll break all the drama down for you
5. Vox: How “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” turned Encanto into a sleeper hit
6. Vulture: The Queen Died and Nobody Online Knows How to Act
7. Politico: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Is America’s Cry for Help
8. The Atlantic: The Kate Bush Resurgence Is a Reminder That We Can Have Nice Things
9. Bloomberg: The Great Resentment: Why Beyoncé Holds the Key to Office Culture
10. The New Yorker: The Gentle Thrills of “Old Enough!,” a Show About Toddlers Running Errands
11. The Cut: Sheryl Lee Ralph Gave the Best Acceptance Speech of All Time
12. The New York Times: The Slap Wasn’t the Only Astonishing Thing About the Oscars

Best Of Long Reads

Dive into the absorbing long reads and deeply reported features that Pocket users loved most this year.

1. The New York Times: I Lived the #VanLife. It Wasn’t Pretty.
2. The Atlantic: The Nocturnals
3. The New Yorker: How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student
4. NY Mag: The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars
5. Rolling Stone: He Spent 25 Years Infiltrating Nazis, the Klan, and Biker Gangs
6. WIRED: North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet
7. NY Mag: A Tinder Revenge Story
8. The New Yorker: The Unravelling of an Expert on Serial Killers
9. Business Insider: Disaster at 18,200 feet
10. LongReads: Love Song to Costco

Best Of Small Wins

Life is hard. The internet can (occasionally) help. Explore the most rewarding low-lift tips that helped Pocket readers level up this year.

1. The Guardian: 100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying
2. The New York Times: The Default Tech Settings You Should Turn Off Right Away
3. Lifehacker: How to Estimate Distance Using Just Your Thumb
4. Martha Stewart: Your Section-by-Section Guide to Storing Foods in the Fridge, From the Upper Shelves to the Crisper Drawers
5. Ideas.Ted: We all know people who seem to attract fun — here’s how you can do it too
6. Buzzfeed: People Are Sharing The One Small Ingredient That Makes The Biggest Difference In Their Go-To Dishes (And I’m So Excited To Try These In My Own Kitchen)
7. Well and Good: Here’s How To Use the HALT Method To Figure Out Why You’re So Grumpy
8. Bonappetit: If You Have Eggs and Tomatoes, You Have Dinner
9. WIRED: How to Block Spam Calls and Text Messages
10. Quanta Magazine: How to Win at Wordle (Without Cheating)

Best Of Great Advice

Explore the indispensable advice that Pocket users gravitated to this year.

1. Psyche: How to take things less personally
2. Vox: An end-of-life doula’s advice on how to make the most of your time on earth
3. WIRED: How to (Ethically) Get Rid of Your Unwanted Stuff
4. Shondaland: How to (Try to) Quit (Almost) Anything
5. Harvard Business Review: How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut
6. The Guardian: Be bad, better – from anger to laziness, how to put your worst habits to good use
7. BBC: How to live with your regrets
8. Slate: Stop Venting! It Doesn’t Work.
9. Greater Good Magazine: How to Get Comfortable With Uncertainty and Change
10. Anne Helen Substack: What to Actually Do About an Unequal Partnership

Best Of Big Ideas

Explore the thought-provoking essays and features that Pocket users loved most this year.

1. WIRED: Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation
2. Dame Magazine: Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
3. Nautilus: The Afterlife Is in Our Heads
4. Harper’s Magazine: Routine Maintenance
5. The Drift Magazine: What Was the TED Talk?
6. Gawker: Failure To Cope “Under Capitalism”
7. Bustle: Have We Been Thinking About Burnout All Wrong?
8. The New Yorker: The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism
9. The New York Times: Is the World Really Falling Apart, or Does It Just Feel That Way?
10. Noema: The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance

Best Of Technology

Explore the technology reads that Pocket users loved most this year.

1. Moxie: My first impressions of web3
2. The New York Times: The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto 
3. The New Yorker: How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens
4. The Markup: Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker
5. WIRED: 6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet
6. The New Yorker: How Harmful Is Social Media?
7. Nautilus: Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall
8. Eye on Design: We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business
9. Spectrum: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported
10. Seattlemet: The Twisted Life of Clippy

Best Of Business and Careers

Explore the business and career coverage that Pocket users loved most this year.

1. The New Yorker: It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity 
2. Harvard Business Review: 38 Smart Questions to Ask in a Job Interview
3. NPR: Inside the rise of ‘stealerships’ and the shady economics of car buying
4. Vulture: Netflix’s Bad Habits Have Caught Up With It
5. The New York Times: The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score
6. Bloomberg: What Really Happens When Workers Are Given a Flexible Hybrid Schedule?
7. CNN: Nobody likes self-checkout. Here’s why it’s everywhere
8. Harvard Business Review: How to Manage Your Anger at Work
9. Rest of World: Here’s what actually happens to all your online shopping returns
10. ProPublica: When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord

Best Of Culture and Entertainment

Explore the culture and entertainment reads that Pocket users loved most this year.

1. Vulture: The Undoing of Joss Whedon
2. The Atlantic: Is Old Music Killing New Music?
3. ELLE: Confessions of a Perpetually Single Woman
4. The Cut: A Vibe Shift Is Coming
5. WIRED: The End of Alcohol
6. The Guardian: Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?
7. The New York Times: How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable
8. Vox: Colors: Where did they go? An investigation.
9. The Hustle: The economics of Spotify
10. The New Yorker: The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class

Best Of Food

Deeply satisfying stories about what—and how—we ate this year. 

1. Eating Well: Why Deli Sandwiches Taste Better Than Yours
2. The New York Times: The Case for Induction Cooking
3. Food52: Italians Avoided Pizza for Centuries—Tourism Changed Everything
4. BBC: The revival of a forgotten American fruit
5. Bonappetit: What Dinner Will Look Like in the Next 100 Years, According to Scientists (and Sci-Fi Authors)
6. Knowable Magazine: How sustainable are fake meats?
7. Paste Magazine: An Ode to Pickle Juice
8. Eater: Hacked to Bits
9. Mother Jones: The Curry Trap: How a Continent’s Worth of Food Got Mashed Into One Word
10. Taste Cooking: The Utopian Promises and Novelty Cheese of a Discount Grocery Store

Best Of Science

Explore the science reads that Pocket users loved most this year.

1. BBC: How our brains cope with speaking more than one language
2. GQ: How Testosterone Therapy Is Transforming Aging
3. The New Yorker: The Great Siberian Thaw 
4. Nautilus: Love Is Biological Bribery
5. The Reader: On Meditation and the Unconscious: A Buddhist Monk and a Neuroscientist in Conversation
6. Aeon: How might neuroergonomics help us deal with mental overload?
7. Quanta Magazine: A Good Memory or a Bad One? One Brain Molecule Decides.
8. WIRED: The Curious Afterlife of a Brain Trauma Survivor
9. GQ: I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller
10. Hakai Magazine: It’s 10 PM. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is?

Best Of Sports and Gaming

Explore the sports stories that Pocket users loved most this year.

1. The New York Times: How A.I. Conquered Poker
2. Vanity Fair: Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist.
3. Cycling Tips: Exposed by a Strava KOM: The many lives of a fake pro cyclist
4. Outside Online: Stone Skipping Is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It.
5. SI: ‘Pickleball Is the Wild, Wild West’: Inside the Fight Over the Fastest-Growing Sport in America
6. The Ringer: What Do Cities Lose When They Lose Pro Sports?
7. GQ: The Second Coming of Stephen Curry
8. The Guardian: The trouble with Roblox, the video game empire built on child labour
9. NY Mag: Why Isn’t Brittney Griner the Biggest Sports Story in the Country?
10. The Ringer: Serena Williams Refused to Bend. She Bent Tennis Instead.

Best Of Collections

Explore the top stories from Pocket’s collections.

1. Get Pocket: A Dozen Brilliant Recipes Starring the Humble Egg
2. Get Pocket: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making and Keeping Friends
3. Get Pocket: Why Air Travel Is Uniquely Terrible Right Now—and How to Make It Bearable
4. Get Pocket: Your New Favorite Weeknight Recipe Is Meat-Free (and Easy, Too)
5. Get Pocket: How to Be Less Judgmental
6. Get Pocket: A Counterintuitive Guide to Happiness
7. Get Pocket: How a 500,000-Word Harry Potter Fanfiction Blew Up Online
8. Get Pocket: The Non-Gardener’s Guide to Happier Houseplants
9. Get Pocket: “It’s Not Just Burnout:” How Grind Culture Failed Women
10. Get Pocket: Down the Rabbit Hole: Why People Fall for Conspiracy Theories

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For easy reference, you can find all of Pocket’s top articles for 2022 here.