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Stories
The top stories from each week's fastest-growing media writers on social media.
Week of Oct 11, 2026
A viral Brooklyn school staff photo gave Kotomori a timely fashion story that plausibly helped attract new readers.
Monnin called Trump’s former tailor after his Jos. A. Bank suit became an online talking point, giving a viral moment fresh reporting.
Rules protecting Claude from mistreatment offered a provocative angle on the AI welfare debate and plausibly drew new readers.
Frank examines the studio chiefs’ expanded portfolio and pressure to cut costs, a timely Hollywood business story that plausibly attracted new readers.
Schneider follows a vulnerable Michigan Republican balancing independence from Trump with base support; a recent read, not a verified weekly growth driver.
TBPN combined AI security fears with takeover speculation in a topical episode that plausibly supported Hays’s visibility.
Week of Oct 4, 2026
Taylor Swift released a song called “Patient Zero,” sending Lindner into the history of where the term actually came from.
Meta tells investors its AI infrastructure is working extremely well while characterizing the same data centers to the IRS as experimental pilot models that could fail.
Pinto and Jessy Edwards were inside the chaos as Brooklyn Democrats fought over voting rules, party control and whether their organizational meeting was even operating legally.
Sundberg handed Feed Me to Harvard junior Alex Bronzini-Vender for a dispatch on AI, cheating, media habits and what college students actually read.
Stanley-Becker went to Lithuania to report on how Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are preparing for a possible Russian attack — including whether the United States would actually show up.
Week of Sep 27, 2026
A personal essay on what Dolly Parton represented to Tennessee, Appalachia and Southern women who saw someone leave home without ever really leaving it behind.
De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku reported that OpenAI agents accessed U.S. government websites, days after De Vynck reported a separate incident involving an Australian government health-care site.
Politico announced Decoded, a new daily briefing and audio show covering the collision between technology, government and markets, with McHugh among its writers.
After Meta declined his request for Zuckerberg to appear on Decoder, Patel wrote out the follow-up questions he wanted answered on privacy, AI, teen safety, data centers and regulation.
Week of Sep 20, 2026
Frank reports on the costs, creative conflicts and delays behind Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Kendrick Lamar's reportedly $100 million musical that Paramount still has not dated for release.
Lynch's $20 Dinner column heads to Bon Pâtés in Crown Heights, continuing his run of highly specific, highly shareable New York food reporting.
Applebaum's Atlantic cover story examines how the Trump administration's foreign policy intersects with ideological allies, informal envoys and private business interests.
Zeff's WIRED swan song covers OpenAI disclosing unexpected model behavior, as he crosses 10K followers and prepares to join The Wall Street Journal to continue covering AI.
Bacon looks down-ballot at how November's gubernatorial and legislative races could break Republican trifectas in several states while creating new Democratic ones elsewhere.
Week of Sep 13, 2026
Milbank's launch-day column introduced The Washington Sun and framed his move from decades in legacy media as a bet that a general-interest digital newspaper can still work.
Fritz went inside Asha Sharma's attempt to turn around Xbox, a roughly $23 billion business facing shrinking revenue, thin margins and an underperforming GamePass operation.
Zakrzewski and Aaron Schaffer reported that Katie Miller holds more than $1 million in xAI while having criticized rival AI products including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in nearly 500 social posts.
Leibert picked up Sharon Stone's highly shareable comments about giving up casual sex, waiting for a meaningful relationship, and her current "no-luck-at-all" phase.
Palmeri reported on Jennifer Hegseth's unusual presence and influence around the Pentagon despite holding no official position in the department.
Palmeri reported that her press credential was revoked and she was removed from the Republican Midterm Convention after interviewing a congressional candidate about the Epstein files while accompanied by three survivors.
Zakrzewski and Schaffer reported that Trump gave three White House employees $45,000 cash gifts, payments equivalent to roughly one-third of each aide's annual salary.
Week of Sep 6, 2026
Deliberately picked fight with speedrunning Twitter fueled his sixth straight week atop the Established chart.
WSJ Off Duty essay on her mother's AI chatbot devotion — first Monitor feature despite months on the chart.
Scoop on Scripps quietly replacing local anchors with 24/7 automated streams, driving her biggest week yet.
The "morning shed" trend among Gen Alpha girls.
Absurdist, highly shareable story on the White House's new arcade-games push — her first Monitor feature.
Week of Aug 30, 2026
Reingold reported on a UNICEF-led nutrition survey of Gaza and what it means for the argument over the famine declaration made a year earlier.
Gardizy's first chart appearance: OpenAI told investors Q2 revenue rose 18% to $6.7B while operating losses widened to $12.3B, as Anthropic more than doubled to $11.6B and passed it for the first time.
Klein brought in the Financial Times' Robin Wigglesworth to explain why Treasury yields are back at pre-Great-Recession levels and what the administration is doing about it. Recorded August 24.
Jaffee built an interactive atlas of every public and private company on earth worth more than $10B, placed at real headquarters and color-coded by industry, using Codex.
Royals interviewed the music director behind Clairo's Charm tour, Audrey Hobert's Staircase to Stardom and Grace Ives's Girlfriend tour, who does not read sheet music.
Grace Ives is Somebody's GirlfriendInterviewSommer interviewed Grace Ives two days before her third album dropped, between therapy and rehearsal, about producing with collaborators for the first time.
V Magazine profiled Schiffer on the eve of the US Open, where she is covering the tournament as credentialed media for the first time.
Her own off-court preview of the tournament: apparel deals up for Shelton, Pegula, Muchova and Badosa, Adidas prioritizing young guns, and the Open's new creator credentialing program.
Week of Aug 23, 2026
Eagan's new team at KCRW covered the first ruling of its kind against a major social platform — New Mexico v. Meta, and what the company now has to change.
404 Media hid a tracker in a rare book shipment and found an Amazon facility that scans and destroys books for AI training data. NPR's All Things Considered followed up.
The New Critic profiled Sun this week as her data center road trip keeps compounding — Ezra Klein appearance included.
Jaffe's daily MTS brief, alongside his viral X post calling the anti-data-center backlash the worst mass movement of his lifetime — 252K views.
Sato revealed Partiful paid college students to seed its Gen Z takeover — and asked the Palantir questions its founders keep dodging.
The Times' Tech Guild says management deployed AI tools to secretly track and score employee performance.
Maiberg names the new wave — real photos subtly edited rather than face-swapped, monetized through X's ad revenue sharing.
Eagan on the FDA's move to unban six previously prohibited peptides — and what that means for the injectables market.
Week of Aug 16, 2026
Clark took Signulll to Dolores Park for the Members of Technical Staff episode arguing that AI writing and design are good, actually.
With the US Open two weeks out, Schiffer mapped Pegula's sponsor portfolio and teased a mystery partnership set to be announced in Flushing.
Zeff reported from inside one of the largest crises in OpenAI's history after a set of the company's own AI agents breached Hugging Face during an internal security test.
Dooley is the editor building NOTUS Metro, the daily D.C. newsletter covering everything from housing authority audits to the Commanders' new RFK stadium.
Lindner stood in the 50-person lines himself to document the after-8pm half-off sushi ritual at New York's East Asian grocery chains.
Swisher launched "Scott-Free August" on Pivot with Hillary Clinton in the co-host chair, covering redistricting, Iran, and AI governance.
Lindner had the story of two American Airlines flights converging over Phoenix under the same call sign, split apart by a 25-year veteran controller.
Week of Aug 2, 2026
ESPN's planned reduction in workforce leaked the day before it was set to happen, while affected talent were live on air.
Peleg rode the Metro with the transit-obsessed YouTuber whose investigative video forced scrutiny of the three-years-late, billion-over-budget LAX people mover; ran in THR's August 5 print issue.
Baker counted the tells in Trump's primetime election-integrity speech — seven references to 2020, twenty to China, none to the elections he won — in a week when his own WHCA dinner post also drew attention.
Yglesias used this column to respond to a viral July 27 thread accusing him of being on China's payroll over a 2009 trip, drawing traffic to a piece otherwise about live spectacle as the last shared culture.
Tolentino returns to the territory of 'The Age of Instagram Face' seven years on, and the piece circulated widely after her July 22 Fresh Air appearance.
Bacon pushes back on the premise that progressives cannot win statewide, pointing to Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin and Barack Obama as evidence the Hong and El-Sayed races are not the unique test both sides are treating them as.
Only 41 theaters on Earth can play IMAX 70mm and most are booked through late August, leaving exhibitors worried the premium-format boom has taught audiences that a regular screen is not worth the trip.
Korach put the stalled $31-per-share Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery deal to eight antitrust experts five months in, as costs and legal risk mount with every delay.
A July 28 argument for an unpopular electricity pricing reform, published the day after the thread that put his name in circulation.
Bacon called the progressive-in-a-swing-state question a week before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly beat Haley Stevens in Michigan, then followed it with this call for the party to unify.
Monnin broke that the embattled Ohio congressman asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate him over domestic abuse and drug allegations — and the committee opened the investigation hours later.
Six thousand words from ten days and four data center sites across Wisconsin and Michigan, published the same day Sun appeared on The Ezra Klein Show.
An Iowa sheriff's office policy obtained by 404 Media instructs deputies not to tell drivers Flock cameras found them, and to call the system "county resources" in reports.
Koebler obtained the coaching guide Flock gives police for city council meetings, telling them to get ahead of public comment rather than argue with residents.
Week of Jul 26, 2026
Inside the Anti-Social CenturyInterviewHis No Mercy/No Malice conversation with Derek Thompson on American loneliness and tech-driven isolation.
Her scoop on the previously unreported threat behind Trump's Air Force One swap out of the NATO summit.
He talks to OpenAI design director Ben King about a $175 half-zip and a $70 basketball — tasteslop or not.
On the government taking ~$26.7B in stakes across 30+ firms including Intel, and the pressure on NVIDIA, SpaceX and Apple.
An agent on the VP's detail faces a possible criminal inquiry for leaking his schedule; Monnin and Raymond Fernández broke it.
Sext EducationFeatureHer essay in Byline's new Out of Body print issue on sexting as a form of intimacy she can fully control.
Week of Jul 19, 2026
Anthropic pulled Fable 5 out of the flat-fee bundle — subscribers now pay per-token on the developer meter, on top of their subscription.
- Project MarioFeature
The Infinity Machine excerpt on how DeepMind's self-governance experiments failed — and hardened Hassabis away from his idealism.
His July 10 episode with the co-directors of A Land for All on a confederation model — two sovereign states, open borders, shared institutions.
- Three weeks at WimbledonColumn
Her recap of three weeks at the tournament — credential creativity, brand activations, and musings on the event itself — landed as finals wrapped July 11–12.
Why brands turned the locker-room walk into a runway — cited by Served and The Sweat Lookbook over finals weekend.
A photo essay from the Local 79 training center in Long Island City that kept traveling on Instagram into the window.
- Sukeban Packs a Poetic PunchFeature
A Hammerstein Ballroom dispatch on Olympia Le-Tan's all-female wrestling promotion — written entirely in haiku.
Her July 8 On The Rise interview with the LA duo behind Ready, an EP that turns the loss of youth into a celebration.
Week of Jul 12, 2026
FOIA-obtained documents revealing the chaos behind Trump's National Mall fair, published July 6 as the event's sparse crowds became a national story.
July 6 MUBI Notebook essay on cinema's pop-star persona fixation — Mother Mary, The Moment, Michael — landing the same week Emmy noms revived her Euphoria recap traffic.
Friday's blockbuster filing — the biggest tech-legal story of the week, under his solo byline, capping a run that included the Anthropic export-controls reversal.
July 9 photo-led ice cream roundup anchoring Hell Gate's Beach Week, with Lynch's @scoboco Instagram driving the lift.
Leaders from across the political spectrum offer ideas to strengthen American democracy for its next 250 years.
July 8 report on the DOJ letter threatening prosecution of local election officials ahead of the midterms — a sharp escalation that traveled fast on political X.
Her Byline "On The Rise" interview with the Cake Zine co-founder — though her velocity this week is more plausibly Emmy-noms-driven Euphoria recap traffic (see flag below).
June 29 AP profile — syndicated everywhere from WaPo to local TV sites — casting her as the podcast gatekeeper of the 2028 primary.
July 1 Crowd Pleaser on The Odyssey selling out weeks before release — resale tickets in the thousands — circulating as the film's mid-July opening approaches.
Week of Jun 28, 2026
Monnin broke news on a federal judge temporarily suspending a key Education Department rule days before sweeping borrowing limits took effect — a decision affecting nursing and medical graduate students nationwide.
Schiffer obtained an internal IMG deck to reveal Wimbledon's under-the-radar gifting suite
Lynch's June 29 roundup of Brooklyn's best hot dogs — including Meat Hook's Peek Inn in Greenpoint
Sato investigated the new AI SEO gold rush — companies claiming they can make brands show up in ChatGPT and Gemini responses — and found an industry driven more by fear than evidence.
Gen Z's Great Retreat from RiskAnalysisBrooks argued that the plummeting rates of teen drinking, dating, and risk-taking signal something more troubling than prudence — a generation retreating from adulthood itself.
McHugh traced Trump's enthusiasm for hosting the World Cup back to the late-1970s Cosmos scene at Studio 54 — where a young real estate developer watched Pelé turn soccer into the hottest ticket in New York.
- Mark Zuckerbergs Feed Me DebutInterview
From Cannes, Sundberg Interviewed Meta CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg, with reader questions
Bacon's June 24 Right Now episode with Cook Political Report's Carrie Dann — arguing Democrats are favorites to flip the House
- Fan of the PeopleFeature
A profile of NYC Mayor Mamdani's sports-as-politics strategy — juggling Knicks finals and World Cup hosting while modeling a new version of lefty sports fandom.
Fowler's May Wired essay about Hollywood writers secretly training AI got fresh citation in Hollywood Reporter and Digital Trends this week, keeping it in circulation seven weeks after publication.
Hell Gate's June 30 farewell tribute to its departing co-founder circulated widely in NYC media circles
Week of Jun 21, 2026
Mott took over Early Days while Camille Ricketts (@camillericketts) and Brie Wolfson (@zebriez) were on vacation — Cursor Compile chalk talks (Paul Ford, Linus Lee), the Picasso bull lithographs Turbopuffer's Simon invokes, a coffee-walk parks ranking, and a robotics jobs wish list.
Monnin's follow-up on Cape Verde keeper Josimar "Vozinha" Dias — whose seven-save debut against Spain ended with Hakeem Jeffries pulling the State Department and FIFA in to waive his mother's visa fees. She also filed on the Kennedy Center's new Trump-named endowment and Kristi Noem joining Novared as adviser.
Wong on the White House giving Anthropic 90 minutes to take Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline, then issuing an export control when the company didn't — forcing the bots off for every customer, including the U.S. government. Quotes Katie Moussouris of Luta Security calling the jailbreak "the model working as intended" for cyberdefense.
- Q&A with K. PorcelainInterview
Sommer's interview with Throgg's Neck musician Carlo V. G. Soriano — iPad-recorded doo-wop sold on Bandcamp, deliberately off streaming. Landed alongside GUNK's 35-issue / ~4K-subscriber milestone and a NY midterms primary explainer.
Lynch shot the City Hall ceremony for the Knicks' first NBA championship in 53 years — confetti, Alicia Keys performing "Empire State of Mind," Spike Lee, Mitchell Robinson getting an oversized brass key. The visual moment of the week; his @scoboco Instagram drove the lift.
Week of Jun 14, 2026
Her June 11 solo scoop revealing CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale had been off the network's air for 3+ months drew media-industry attention.
- Hard work is goodColumn
His mailbag article, with an endorsement of Alex Bores — author of New York's RAISE Act and target of a $100M+ AI super-PAC fight — ahead of the June 23 NY-12 primary drew heavy engagement as AI policy moved into the mainstream of the race.
His June 8 CNN NewsNight confrontation — flatly calling a Trump megadonor's election-fraud claims lies during a primary discussion — went viral and drove the week's growth.
Her June 7 write-up of Trump abruptly ending his "Meet the Press" interview with Kristen Welker spread fast as the clip went viral.
- 6/11: Paleolabs and NeolabsAnalysis
His June 11 MTS briefing rode a loaded AI news week — Bezos surfacing his $12B "neolab" Prometheus and the emerging OpenAI–Anthropic price war — under a shareable "paleolabs vs. neolabs" framing.
His "backlash to the parties in power" read on the June 2 primaries — Trump-backed outsider Steve Hilton advancing in California, populist Graham Platner later seizing the Maine Senate nod — traveled past Politico via a widely-shared CNN/Amanpour hit.
- The Post's Opinion Non-'Sense'Analysis
Her June 7 examination found the Post's new Bezos-era opinion podcast had drawn just ~800 YouTube subscribers and internal embarrassment.
Her coverage of the DOJ's largest-yet denaturalization push followed a CBS scoop and carried through immigration-news channels.
Week of Jun 7, 2026
In April, Jamie Waters spent a month trying to find out why Mahjong has become an obsession in America, visiting New York clubs and bars and a Connecticut retreat while explaining the difference between “kongs” and “pungs.” This week, he posted an explainer video on Instagram. “I tried to master Mahjong in 30 Days.
A culturally viral premise — actors like Patrick Warburton riding nostalgia clips to new social fame — circulated well beyond The Ankler's core readership during the week of May 30.
- The Triumph of CapitalColumn
Nine of America's ten richest people are essentially self-made — which sounds like proof the American Dream is alive. But Yglesias argues that for everyone else, the past decade has been a better time to have inherited a portfolio than to have worked hard. Capital has compounded faster than wages by a historic margin, and the self-made billionaires don't change what that means for everyone below them.
Ahead of Tuesday (06/02)’s elections, Martin visited San Francisco, where the last time there was not a Pelosi or a Burton on the ballot for Congress, John F. Kennedy was still president. Three front-runners faced off with Martin profiling each; Sen. Scott Wiener, Supervisor Connie Chan and Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez - only two would make it to November.
Parker and Michael Scherer revealed that Paramount CEO David Ellison used Katie Miller — wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — to recruit Trump officials for a private dinner while Paramount awaited approval for its $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition; the piece kept generating coverage through June.
Biden sued the DOJ to block release of audio recordings made with his memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, after the Heritage Foundation and House Judiciary sought the tapes under FOIA.
Week of May 31, 2026
A deep profile of Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton, framing the company — whose credit-card-sized computers are the third most popular in history after the PC and Mac — as quietly ahead of the AI hardware moment Silicon Valley is now chasing.
Inside NotionFeatureA deeply reported inside account of Notion — one of the defining pre-AI productivity startups — and whether a company beloved by millions before the AI era can survive and adapt to it. Co-authored with Brie Wolfson.
- The King of QueensFeature
A reported feature examining Donald Trump's long embrace of gay cultural aesthetics — Elton John, Liberace interiors, relentless complimenting of men's physiques — and the contradiction it creates with his administration's anti-LGBTQ policy record.
An analysis of the Star Wars brand's search for a theatrical identity, published the week The Mandalorian and Grogu hit screens for the first time in seven years.
A breaking immigration story on New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill being denied access to the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark as approximately 300 detainees entered their fourth day of a hunger and labor strike.
Martin sat down with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro over pizza in South Philadelphia for his On The Road series — Shapiro dismissed 2028 talk and laid out his vision for the Democratic Party against the backdrop of antisemitism accusations from his 2024 VP vetting.
A reported piece on how A24's Backrooms — directed by 19-year-old Kane Parsons, who built his following on YouTube — represents a new wave of horror directors discovered online rather than through traditional industry pipelines.
- Taste in MathFeature
A narrative piece on the mathematician Évariste Galois, who died in a duel at 20 after writing a frantic letter outlining ideas that would take mathematicians 150 years to fully untangle — how to map all possible symmetry in the universe.
A scoop on the White House's proposed plan to impose a sweeping nondisclosure agreement on all current and future federal employees, part of an ongoing effort to combat leaks to the press.
A breaking news story on a foiled swatting attempt targeting Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett at her home in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Week of May 24, 2026
Max Zeff covers the most anticipated IPO filing of the year; SpaceX, including the revelation that a rival AI lab, Anthropic, is paying them $1B per month through May of 2029 for access to cloud computing infrastructure.
Martin sat down with Maryland Governor Wes Moore over crab cakes in Baltimore for a wide-ranging "On the Road" conversation covering Netanyahu, 2028, and the Democrats' 2024 autopsy — the full video on YouTube drove significant social engagement.
Zeff was WIRED's courtroom correspondent for the Musk v. Altman trial; the May 18 jury verdict — delivered in under two hours — was the AI story of the year and he owned it for WIRED.
- Entering EigenworldFeature
Ricketts and Brie Wolfson launched their new Substack, Early Days, this week with a deep look at Eigen — a stealth AI startup building what they describe as a "mutual, digital friend."
Mott's profile of Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton — framing a $1.5B hardware company as an unlikely AI frontier story — is still circulating, amplified this week by Mott's appearance on Ricketts and Wolfson's new Early Days Substack.
Jaffe is a founding host of MTS, the a16z-backed live news network that launched on X in April 2026 — his daily tech segments and a roster of high-profile guests this week continued to compound his follower growth.
- Inside NotionFeature
Ricketts co-authored this reported deep-dive on how Notion became the only pre-GPT company to successfully go AI-native — a widely shared piece still pulling in new readers weeks after publication.
Week of May 17, 2026
Zeff covered the Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman OpenAI Trial, which closed this week
Kristof's deeply reported column on Israeli sexual violence against Palestinian detainees triggered a firestorm — Israel threatened to sue the NYT and called it a "blood libel"
Reingold's exclusive on NYC First Lady Rama Duwaji's Spotify playlists that included antisemitic lyrics — which were made private hours after Reingold asked for comment.
- Apocalypse NoColumn
Galloway's contrarian take that the AI-will-kill-jobs narrative is overblown
- The ReckoningColumn
Published May 1, this essay on American political crisis — anchored to the White House Correspondents' dinner shooting — continued circulating through the following week
