A few notable writers who made their Medium debut in 2024

🤫 It’s my favorite time of year: Dead Week, the no man’s land between Xmas and New Year’s Eve
Issue #237: weird libraries, beating procrastination, and a goal-setting technique

On Medium, anyone can publish a story, find an audience, and earn money. This happens thousands of times a day, often for writers brand new to the platform. Case in point: Here are a few of the top Boosted stories written by people who published for the very first time this year…

• Gaming journalist Giovanni Colantonio close-reads the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department, which broke the record for most daily Spotify streams in April. He sees the album as a meta commentary on Swift’s parasocial relationship with her fans, writing: “The subtext here is that overprotective Swifties don’t actually have Taylor Swift’s best interest in mind.”
• Adam DeMartino, cofounder of a buzzy specialty mushroom startup once valued at $90 million, conducts a public postmortem into why it failed. Essentially, they thought they were a tech company but were really a food company — and food can’t scale as fast as tech. “VC bets are inherently speculative,” he writes, “and if you want to ride that dragon, you need to be a literal dragon rider. I couldn’t ride the VC dragon.”
• Zhafira Aqyla sparked a conversation about why she chose an arranged marriage. “To me, arranged marriage is different [than] forced marriage,” Aqyla writes. “From the many candidates my parents offered, I had a choice to say no, and I did, plenty of times […] It’s a lot like Tinder, except in this scenario it is an extremely vetted Tinder customized to my personal interest.”
• Remylyn Tornilla (aka Remi) joined Medium via TikTok, publishing personal, confessional stories that resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers. We interviewed Remi on our blog last summer. “I honestly didn’t expect so many people to relate to my writing,” she says. “Writing on Medium has been my escape.”
• Jack Handey of SNL fame penned a satirical tale of young love. There’s an Aristocrats joke element to this, i.e. a twist at the end. “I am 58 years old,” Handey writes. “My fiancee, Holly, is 18. Some people might look askance at our relationship, because of the age difference. But what they don’t realize is how much Holly and I have in common: We both like to have sex a lot, we both like to make out in public, and we both like to drink heavily…”

Those are just a tiny handful of the new writers who opened up a blank post page and shared their ideas, experiences, feelings, and perceptions with us. Who were some of your favorite new writers this year? Who did you discover? Respond to let us all know, and to give us a few new writers to follow in 2025.

— Harris Sockel

⚡ Elsewhere on Medium

• Today is the first day of Kwanzaa, a weeklong celebration of African American culture that began in 1966 — and, as Chanté Griffin writes, its principles of unity and collective responsibility transcend its founder’s controversial past.
• To end procrastination, ruthlessly eliminate nice-to-haves. (Evgeny Khoroshilov)
• You’re not living if you don’t have a Weird Library (a cache of esoteric, out-of-print books that aren’t easily categorized). Read outside the lines! Find a dusty paperback in a used bookstore and get into it. As Rebecca Solnit says, “originality is partly a matter of having your own influences.” (AP Strange)

🎯 Your daily dose of practical wisdom

Most of the goals we set for ourselves are mimetic: We’ve been influenced into wanting them. Luke Burgis, author of a book on mimetic desire, recommends an exercise to help you become more self-aware of your goals:

1. On a piece of paper, draw a circle.
2. Inside the circle, list all of the people or institutions that have influenced your goals, covertly or overtly (e.g. “Instagram Fitness Influencer That I Follow Who Has Six-Pack Abs”)
3. Outside the circle, list what comes to mind when you ask yourself this question: What things might I want to pursue that are completely outside the boundaries of what people and institutions are asking of me, and for which there is no support or understanding? (Examples: learning needlepoint, starting a blog about your obscure interest in the history of mechanical keyboards, or really anything you’re zesty about that no one is asking for.)

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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