The Cut’s 20 Most-Read Stories in 2024
Here at the Cut, we’re building a community for women and femmes and the curiosities that drive us. This year, our readers were driven by a curiosity about the lives of others. You read and commented and shared as writers got personal about divorces and almost-divorces, fraught family dynamics in every shape and form, autism diagnoses and disease, and falling victim to scams. In another year defined by tumult and turmoil, it’s possible readers simply wanted an escape — to experience someone else’s life, if only for as long as it takes to reach the end of an article. But even if you simply come for a diversion, reading these stories will hopefully open your eyes and make you think about the world and some of the 8 billion other people in it differently.
Below, you’ll find our 20 most-read articles, defined by total minutes of audience engagement. This list is just a small sample of the work the Cut produces alongside New York’s print edition and its five other digital sites and growing portfolio of newsletters. For more of all of it, be sure to sign up for the Cut’s daily newsletter and subscribe to New York.
‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’
By Gabrielle Glaser
First on the list is an investigation into the most appalling corner of the American adoption industry. Did you know that no federal agency regulates adoption? Instead, there’s a mishmash of state rules, and no place creates opportunities for abuse and exploitation more than Utah. Here, Gabrielle Glaser, a reporter and the author of American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Secret History of Adoption, tells several harrowing stories featuring the voices of both birth mothers and adoptive parents. Read the story ➼
By Jen Wieczner
The “Bad Nanny Post”: It’s a report, usually written by a mom, alleging that a nanny has been spotted publicly doing something alarming. This often leads to a nanny’s firing; it also often blows up into online arguments about class, race, entitlement, and paranoia. Jen Wieczner talked to dozens of people on both sides of Bad Nanny posts to find out what happens in their toxic aftermath, with lots of time given to the party who doesn’t typically get a chance to speak. Read the story ➼
By Chantal Fernandez
The Abercrombie & Fitch brand, once an easy cultural punching bag, now brings in more revenue than it did when it dominated teen culture in the aughts, and its namesake parent company is the toast of Wall Street. It’s a curious case study for business reporters. Feature writer Chantal Fernandez traveled to A&F HQ in Columbus, Ohio, to find out how the brand pulled it off. Read the story ➼
By Reeves Wiedeman
There are NDAs for first dates, NDAs for job applications, NDAs for getting an upgrade at your hotel. Their ubiquity first strikes one as absurd but almost immediately as a tad frightening, too: It’s proof of the lengths those in power will go to keep people quiet. Here, features writer Reeves Wiedeman assembled a compendium of how they’re used (and abused), showing the ways a legal document that was once meant to protect corporate trade secrets has jumped into all avenues of life. Read the story ➼
My Disinheritance Gave Me What I Actually Needed
By Tracie McMillan
When Tracie McMillan wrote about abuse she remembered from her childhood, her father called her memories “fantasy” and wrote her out of his will. Here, she reflects on how being disinherited made her future, and her relationship with her partner, feel more secure than ever. Read the story ➼
By Erika Hayasaki
When 18-year-olds Lanz Aguinaldo and Isabella Lynch woke up at home in Maui the morning of August 8, 2023, to find that school was closed because of high winds, the day felt like a holiday. It quickly became a harrowing journey as wildfires razed their hometown to the ground, culminating in hours hanging onto a palm frond in the ocean, sea urchins circling. Here, Erika Hayasaki reports on an intimate love story about teenagers set against one of the deadliest natural disasters in history — and the maddening failures by the government to warn the family now having to rebuild. Read the story ➼
By Dyan Neary
Half of women in the U.S. have dense breasts, and for them, standard mammography technology can be much less accurate — prone to missing signs of cancer and yielding false negatives. For this story, reporter Dyan Neary spoke to two-dozen women across the country whose dense breast tissue had obscured the presence of cancer on regular mammograms for years, often until the disease had spread too far to effectively control. Read the story ➼
Getting to the Bottom of the Kate Middleton “November Photo” Theory
By Ellie Hall
The royal family makes headlines with new drama nearly every week, but back in March, one story dominated our attention more than any other: the conspiracy surrounding an altered Mother’s Day family photo. This story is the result of one royal reporter’s quest to discover the origin of that photo using some serious TikTok sleuthing. Read the story ➼
What Does a Polycule Actually Look Like?
By Allison P. Davis
Ethical non-monogomy is au courant, and this year, talk of polyamory felt less outlandish and more like just another way to date. At least, that’s how it seems from the outside. On the inside, achieving a successful polycule isn’t always so simple. We know because, for this cover story, Allison P. Davis embedded with a mostly functional one to find out how they deal with organization, time management, jealousy, and taking care of each other. Read the story ➼
By Rachel Sklar
Last winter all of New York was hacking, so we sent Rachel Sklar on a mission to find out what can help — if anything. She interrogated cough specialists and came back with answers to all our questions. Read the story ➼
The Last Thing My Mother Wanted
By Evelyn Jouvenet
In this breathtaking essay, Evelyn Jouvenet writes about her mother, who had been a cruel, imperious, and frightening presence throughout her daughters’ lives, and who, at age 74, announced that she planned to go to Switzerland for an assisted suicide. The mother was healthy but “tired of life” and ready to end her own. “I hoped a deadline might compel her to give me the thing I’d been seeking for years,” Jouvenet writes, “some accounting of who she was as a parent, some sign that she had thought about all the nicks and bangs she had given my sister and me.” Read the story ➼
By Angelina Chapin
Dentists are increasingly seeing young women come into their practices looking for movie-star-quality smiles. What these patients don’t understand — or what nobody may warn them about — is that getting a confidence boost via a mouthful of veneers isn’t at all like visiting your derm for a shot of Botox. As Angelina Chapin learned when she spoke to 20 patients and dentists, a normie simply cannot access the level of craftsmanship that we see in celebrity veneers. Read the story ➼
By Irin Carmon
When her husband, J.D. Vance, was named to the Republican ticket, Usha Vance became the target of a particular liberal disorder: projecting tangled allegiances and quiet resistance onto the non-elected women in Donald Trump’s orbit. There is some real reason to wonder what Usha truly believes: She’s a former registered Democrat, a non-white daughter of immigrants, and a high-achieving female professional. Irin Carmon spoke to former and current friends and acquaintances of the Vances and learned that Usha has always held her cards close to the chest — but also that the couple may have originally intended for things to go quite differently. Read the story ➼
What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained
By Mary H.K. Choi
While most of us fall in the neurotypical range, the response to Mary H.K. Choi’s essay about getting diagnosed with autism in her 40s was an overwhelming “this is relatable.” Many of us caught glimpses of ourselves in the catalogue of behaviors and habits that Choi struggled to attribute to autism or all the other sedimentary sources that have shaped her over her lifetime. The result is a fascinating, vulnerable essay that raises thorny questions about what the “self” even is, and chronicles one writer’s experience of rewriting her entire life story at 43. Read the story ➼
By Justine Harman
Anthony Flores and his girlfriend, Anna Moore, met Dr. Mark Sawusch, a twice-divorced ophthalmologist who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, at a vegan-ice-cream shop in Malibu in 2017. A week later, they moved into his bungalow; a year later, he was dead and the couple was still living in his house. Talking with massage therapists, assistants, and various other people whom Flores and Moore had employed to work on the doctor, Justine Harman pieced together what that shared life looked like and found the lines between caretaking and scamming had become very blurry. Read the story ➼
The Truths and Distortions of Ruby Franke
By Caitlin Moscatello
Last summer, the two youngest children of Mormon YouTubers Ruby and Kevin Franke were found in the desert, emaciated and wounded. In this story, Caitlin Moscatello draws from dozens of sources — police files, interviews, video footage — to piece together the definitive account of Ruby Franke’s spiral from a hands-on parenting influencer with 2.5 million YouTube subscribers to a mother who would harm her own children. Read the story ➼
The Case for Marrying an Older Man
By Grazie Sophia Christie
“A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help.” That’s one writer’s opinion, at least, and to say it hit a nerve would be an understatement. When Grazie Sophia Christie wrote about her experience marrying a man ten years her senior (and recommended others do the same), readers left 550 comments on the story. Jil Filipovic responded in a column at Slate. McSweeney’s published a send-up of it. We don’t use this term lightly: It went viral. Read the story ➼
By Emily Gould
Speaking of viral essays, this one by New York features writer Emily Gould recounts the period when she contemplated divorcing her husband, the writer Keith Gessen, and also examines the literary divorce-memoir genre. It’s a knockout piece of writing that doesn’t flinch from the hard stuff — Gould at the height of her form. Read the story ➼
By Beth Raymer
When Beth Raymer and her sister, Colleen, were children, Colleen was raped by a relative. She told their mother, but nothing much changed, and the event turned into a kind of family secret, cloaked in ambiguity and denial. But there was a twist: Their father, suspicious of their mother’s infidelity, had tapped the family phone lines for a number of years. When Beth would finally listen to the tapes in her 30s, she’d stumble upon the truth about what the “adults” in the family actually knew and how they chose to respond. Read the story ➼
How I Got Scammed Out of $50,000
By Charlotte Cowles
In this propulsive essay, Charlotte Cowles (who is the Cut’s personal-finance columnist) lays out exactly how she fell for a sophisticated, cruel scam involving accusations of drug smuggling, money laundering, and CIA investigations and that ended with her handing off the contents of her savings account to a stranger five hours later. Millions of Americans report falling for scams every year, and they keep losing more money: a record $8.8 billion in 2022. You may be certain you would never fall for something like this. Maybe you’ll read to the end and wonder if you just might. Read the story ➼