Our executive editor handpicks his Best of 2022.
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My favorite stories this year encapsulated what I think makes the

**Prospect** great: They anticipate trends everyone will eventually be
talking about, and they carry a depth of reporting that makes them stand
out. They encompass health care, transportation, higher education,
climate policy, financial machinations, and even a little of the
campaign trail. They include that distinctive

**Prospect** lens on the stories of the day, telling you who has power
and what they're doing with it.

Here they are:

Rollups: There's a Hospital Bed Monopoly
<[link removed]>:
This was the introductory article in a successful new feature of ours
that peeked into obscure corners of the economy to find concentrated
power. The first one was about hospital beds. Yes, one company makes
nearly all of them.

How We Broke the Supply Chain
<[link removed]>: Our
kickoff piece from our special issue on the supply chain was my
most-read story of the year, and I think it helped spur a rethink of the
causes of inflation, away from pointing the finger at government
spending and toward real scrutiny of the way we introduced hidden risk
into our economic system through outsourcing, financialization,
monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics.

Rail Workers Punished for Taking Days Off, Union Says
<[link removed]>
/

****Railroad Profit-Making Strategy Comes at a Cost
<[link removed]>:
Months before everybody was talking about the railroads, we were writing
about the peculiarities of the industry in our supply chain issue. I
carried that forward with stories about the brutal sick leave policy,
and the throttling of capacity for short-term profits that has exposed
significant vulnerabilities in the system.

Washington's Best Hope
<[link removed]>: I
believe this remains the biggest profile of Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra, who is an example of
policymaking at its best, always finding a way to advance his ideas,
even if he's outnumbered, even if his authority is weak.

The Ohio Model for Purging Progressives
<[link removed]>: In
this piece, our former staff writer Alex Sammon and I set the stage for
what was the dominant theme of the 2022 primaries, with crypto and
Israel-focused PACs using millions of dollars to target progressives,
having succeeded with this model to beat Nina Turner in a House race in
2021.

Blowing the Truck Whistle
<[link removed]>: One of
my favorite whistleblower stories that I've ever done. It concerns
Cyrus Coron, a CO2 truck driver for a company called Airgas, which he
alleges passed off fake billing slips to thousands of customers during
the pandemic. He's a really engaging subject.

All Corinthian College Loans to Be Canceled
<[link removed]>:
In a year where the Biden administration attempted to cancel student
debt broadly and got hung up in the courts, this was an example of a
debt cancellation they got right. It was also special to me because
Corinthian students really started it all, changing the popular
conception of student debt, and extinguishing all of their corruptly
granted loans brought things full circle.

The Hidden Driver of High Gas Prices
<[link removed]>:
When gas prices spiked this summer, nobody was paying attention to one
of the real culprits: refinery capacity, which had suddenly bottlenecked
throughout the previous year. I had to learn about crack spreads and
other jargon in this piece, which I think did unearth this other
important piece of the gas price puzzle. States like California are now
scrutinizing refineries much more heavily.

How Policy Got Done in 2022
<[link removed]>: I wrote a
ton about what would become the Inflation Reduction Act over the past
two years, and this long piece brought all of that reporting together,
trying to answer why what made it into the bill stayed and why other
policies didn't. Really had fun with this one, tracing the climate and
health and tax policies of the IRA back through decades.

Congressmembers Tried to Stop the SEC's Inquiry Into FTX
<[link removed]>:
Crypto became a fascination for me later in the year. The utter
shamelessness of its boosters on Capitol Hill, who decried the
Securities and Exchange Commission for investigating crypto at the
behest of companies like the doomed FTX, and then turned around and
blamed the SEC for not stopping the FTX collapse, tells you a lot about
Washington.

Building Steam in Lithium Valley
<[link removed]>: I
didn't expect to wind up in a toxic dust storm on the first day of
reporting this story, which brings together drought, potential
revitalization of an economically depressed area, the electric-vehicle
revolution, mineral extraction, and the resource curse. It's about
Imperial County, California, and whether the massive deposits of lithium
a couple miles underneath the surface will bring public enrichment and
boom times, or just another promise of prosperity that never seems to
reach the people. If you have time for just one of these stories, make
it this one.

~DAVID DAYEN

READ MORE FROM DAVID DAYEN >> 
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