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: 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: 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 / Railroad Profit-Making Strategy Comes at a Cost: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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