I do pay for the FT and agree it's worth it but it pisses me off that they still serve you ads.

The big read is definitely very good https://www.ft.com/the-big-read. You can read the articles by googling any article title in a private window.

Just to give some examples, in the last week they published lengthy articles all with charts on topics as varied as a European private equity company's IPO, Ben & Jerry's activism, and tech companies shredding old memory disks.