It's officially a new year, y'all. 

With 2024 ahead, including yet another installment of the harrowing that is elections in the U.S., we thought we'd take some time to reflect on our top stories of 2023 that encapsulate the maelstrom that was that year:

From organizers and activists in Atlanta, Week of Writing: #StopCopCity spotlighted conditions folks faced on the ground while weaving essential context, delving deeply into the histories behind the conflagration; two of those essays made the cut for our Top 5. 

Before Gaza was on the lips of every mainstream pundit following October 7, our fourth year of Abolition Week—The Bars We Can't See—was an eerily prescient investigation into the world's largest open air prison and is the source of two more of our top stories. 

In yet another instance of prophetic publishing, pop justice's perspective on the tangled web of Georgia's RICO obsession rounds off our top five.

We'll be seeing y'all soon when Scalawag returns on January 16. Until then, here's a look at our most-read of the 125(!) pieces we published in 2023.

"As the struggle to stop Cop City has gone national and international, it has also left many wondering: Given so much widespread opposition, why is the city of Atlanta so intent on building Cop City? And if they insist on building Cop City, why build it atop such precious forest land? And why now, when the plans were first proposed as early as 2017 and the city had previously committed to protecting and preserving the land in question?"

For this year's inaugural Week of Writing, we focused on #StopCopCity, collecting articles, essays, graphics, maps, and art in response to Atlanta's intentions to turn acres of land into a police training facility. This series gave on-the-ground organizers the space to reclaim the narrative around Cop City. Micah Herskind's Cop City primer, complete with a timeline dissecting the '90s to present-day Atlanta, is a must-read. 

He makes sense of the city's history—from long-term gentrification, exclusion, and displacement to attract the 1996 Olympics to the COVID-19 pandemic—uncovering decades-long fights about who Atlanta truly belongs to. "It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. The struggle is not over; the movement goes on," he writes. "Despite what the interests behind Cop City would have us believe, nothing is inevitable."

"The justifications to wield violence and the expropriation of resources becomes much more convenient when it is against a people said and believed to be innately violent and criminal. In such cases, violence against them becomes prudent and is even regarded as self-defense. Consequently, indigeneity becomes positioned as the criminal from which the colonial entity must protect itself—this is done through stripping the Indigenous of their rights and denying them control of their own destiny."

This year's Abolition Week was dedicated to formerly and currently incarcerated writers and Palestinians living in the world's largest open-air prison. In their essay, Masri and Nemer outline the interrelated historical atrocities and different juridical policies undergirding Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank, and Jerusalem. Beyond this, they describe violences against the deceased, such as the Cemeteries of Numbers: "Plots of land used to inter the bodies of Palestinians accused of 'terrorism.' The bodies are buried in numbered graves, without ritual or dignity." 

Amidst the high-level recountings of a myriad of legislative violences, they also aptly name the contradictions inherent within colonial ideologies striving to erase indigenous people. However, just as they can do nothing "about the sun shining outside," Israel cannot quell the manifestations of the "bone deep conviction" about the right to life and dignity of resistance that Palestinians nurture across generations.

While this necessary read applies an urgent abolitionist lens to current realities in Palestine, the pervasion of the global colonial regime is laid bare for us to understand and respond accordingly—resist in "a thousand different interconnected ways."  

"There's this sense of protectiveness in it, a feeling that oozes out of YSL's whole catalog. In the face of a rapidly changing Atlanta, the hip-hop generation has kept this place a holdout. The YSL indictment raises the stakes for these efforts. With the label dismantled, the city could seize the opportunity to insert their own idea of what the neighborhood should be, even if current residents end up displaced."

In his two-part series, Justin A. Davis reveals the ties between gentrification—or so-called "urban renewal"—in Atlanta, the trial against Young Thug's YSL, and the 85-acre police training facility. In fact, he shows how these phenomema and their respective violences feed each other, while chronicling how members of the Young Stoner Life (YSL) artist collective became the latest victims of Georgia's RICO statute.

The essays combine tweets, lyrics, and poignant political commentary to invite us, the reader, to reframe the violence of gentrification and see its larger implications. Because whoever has control over Atlanta's greenspace has a say in far more than just the region's forests, but rather, its music, residents, movements, and perhaps above all, its future. 

This series is just one of many pop justice stories that house in-depth perspectives on the ways that pop culture and media seep into our understandings of justice and abolition.

"The millions of incarcerated people lose something every day: our agency, our identity, our ability to have children and procreate, our autonomy. We grieve daily losses of things that the free population takes for granted. These losses are felt differently and mourned differently. Do we experience grief? The answer is most assuredly yes. Can we grieve? The answer is most assuredly no."

This piece is a part of Scalawag's fourth-annual Abolition Week, our devotion to first-hand stories from formerly and currently incarcerated writers and Palestinians. This year, we wanted to explore abolition through our theme, The Bars We Can't See, to reveal the boundless destructiveness of carcerality. It lives beyond tangible cages: in our neighborhoods, families, minds, and in E.J.'s case, the act of grief. 

In this devastatingly honest essay, she chronologically outlines how constant policing and trauma forever bent her relationships to love and grief, her emotions and her home. No longer is grief a process she can hold close, but one she must control, amid constant surveillance and state-induced violence. She writes: "While healing is difficult for all of us, for those of us on the inside, it's against regulations."

"But here we are, presented with the opportunity to take this uniquely united–divided leftist front to another level. As we continue to launch random, uncoordinated attacks that plant obstacles to wealth and privilege in the pathways of liberals, progressives, and conservatives, with each strike, we move closer toward materializing what it looks like to actually '#StopCopCity.'"

As Miliaku Nwanueze eases readers into her Week of Writing essay through a fictional narrative (because "we owe each other the indeterminate," she writes, citing The Undercommons, by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney), she reminds us: "What we build must also destroy, for if we construct something that fails to deconstruct, we will fail to be a threat."

Miliaku breaks down the myth of a "peaceful protest"—and the ways mass media continues to differentiate between "peaceful" and "violent" protesters—while making her case for the Chaotic Protester, or "those who aspire to be untraceable, untrackable actors creating unpredictable situations." In other words, the deliverers of the indeterminate, those who resist by disrupting and standing strong against state violence.

And just like she began, she leaves us with another gift: a list of strategies to consider as Chaotic Protesters, including being honest about the movement's stakes, avoiding deeming things as "peaceful," and drawing connections between the #StopCopCity movement and others.