How the Chart stays honest

Rankings are usually a market. Pay for placement, buy the top slot, rent the audience. Our Chart cannot be bought for a structural reason: the cheers live in your browser, and we never see them.

Each reader’s Chart is their own — your cheers rank your top twenty, seeded lightly by what the whole magazine marks as most-read. Nobody else’s opinion leaks into it, and no placement can be sold into it.

The honest cost is that we cannot tell you what everyone else loves. We think that is a feature. The Chart answers one question — what did I like? — and answers it without a middleman.