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BuzzFeed News Is Shutting Down. Here Are Pocket Readers’ 10 Favorite Stories

The most-saved BuzzFeed News stories of all time, including a classic essay on burnout and explorations of how the internet broke our brains.

Pocket Editors

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

It’s a sad moment for the Internet. BuzzFeed has announced that its namesake news division will shut down as part of wider cuts at the company—the latest round of layoffs in what has already been a brutal year for the media industry.

When BuzzFeed News launched in 2011, there was plenty of side eye at the idea of the website best known for listicles and cute animal pictures doing longform journalism. But the site quickly established itself as an investigative powerhouse, even winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for its reporting on the Chinese government’s mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang.

BuzzFeed News has long been a favorite of Pocket readers, particularly its coverage of the dark side of the digital revolution. In honor of over a decade of stellar journalism, we’ve rounded up the most-read BuzzFeed News stories on Pocket.

Image by Drew Angerer / Getty Images

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.

This was Pocket’s Most-Saved Article of 2019.

"Down The Rabbit Hole I Go": How A Young Woman Followed Two Hackers' Lies To Her Death

Tomi Masters was a 23-year-old from Indiana who moved to California with dreams of making it big in the cannabis business. Then she met a hacker who introduced her to a dark new world of digital manipulation, suspicion, paranoia, and fear — one that swallowed her alive and left her floating in a river in the Philippines.

This Is How We Radicalized The World

On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done.

Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us

We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead, we found ourselves dislocated, distrustful, and disengaged.

People Are Ready To Log Off Social Media For Good

We’re so used to putting our entire lives online, but what if we just…didn’t?

The Cost of Next-Day Delivery

Deaths and devastating injuries. A litany of labor violations. Drivers forced to urinate in their vans. Here is how Amazon’s gigantic, decentralized, next-day delivery network brought chaos, exploitation, and danger to communities across America.

The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros

How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Facebook Showed Me My Data Is Everywhere And I Have Absolutely No Control Over It

A transparency tool on Facebook inadvertently provides a window into the confusing maze of companies you’ve never heard of who appear to have your data.

The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time

The rhythms of American life changed in the 2010s. How everything from TV to Trump to Instagram messed with your head just enough that time feels like it melted.

America’s Orthodox Jews Are Selling A Ton Of The Products You Buy On Amazon

A community of Orthodox Jews prospers by selling products on Amazon — and keeping one foot in modernity and one foot out.

BONUS READ: “We Were Always Playing An Entirely Different Game”: The Ultimate Oral History Of BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed News has been described as a chaos agent, a pirate ship, a reputable news organization, and, most notably, a “failing pile of garbage” by former president Donald Trump. We wanted to tell our own story — in our own words — about what it was like to be a part of it.