Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Best Longform of 2018

If you’re not a regular reader of my site, please do me a favor and subscribe to the email (it comes infrequently — whenever I add a post here). I write about business, technology, history, mental models (a lot of those), and all the random interesting stuff I’m reading about. It’s a hodge-podge and I hope you’ll enjoy.

Update: Most of my writing now happens on my daily newsletter Why is this interesting? If you enjoy this, every email includes lots of interesting stuff to read.

At the beginning of last year I decided I was going to spend more time reading books in 2018. I set myself a goal of 30 on Goodreads and blew past that by year end. While it felt good and something I’m looking to reproduce in 2019, it left me wondering whether I’d actually read enough articles to put together my favorite longform list.

As I was wondering this, a series of plagues befell my house and knocked me off my feet (and computer) for just about two full weeks (it was not fun). When I was finally feeling better this week I thought I’d at least see how many articles I favorited in Instapaper and try to figure out whether a list was feasible. Sixty-something links later I realized I read enough to put it together, so here it is. Some usual caveats apply:

  • This is a list of my favorites. It’s not meant to be conclusive and I know I missed lots of great stuff (especially this year with my focus on books).
  • You’ll notice a concentration of articles from The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine. That’s because I get both of those delivered. Again, this isn’t meant to be the definitive list of best articles of the year (if you want that I’d head over to longform.org).
  • The way I put this together is first I just list out all the articles I favorited in Instapaper. You can find those at the bottom of this post and also follow them (and favorites from YouTube) at my @heyitsinstafavs automated Twitter account. After I list them all out I just look over the list again and pull out all the ones I specifically remember with the thought that those were the ones that had the biggest impact on me.
  • Everything is categorized and my picks are in bold throughout. The full list of favorites is at the bottom.

Finally, if you get through this whole list and want more, here are my past versions:

Okay, onto the list:

David Grann

If you’ve ever read one of these lists before you’ll know that I love David Grann. Basically anything he writes automatically makes the cut. In 2012 that was his story about an American who fought in the Cuban revolution titled “The Yankee Comandante” and in 2011 it was “A Murder Foretold”. After a few years off to publish his excellent book Killers of the Flower Moon, he was back in the New Yorker in February with “White Darkness”, an amazing story of a solitary journey across Antarctica. (It’s also out as a book now, though I think it’s just the article with some more pictures.) What’s amazing about Grann’s writing obviously starts with the stories he finds, but as you read you realize it’s more about the characters that make up those stories. Somehow he always seems to discover people who both live amazing adventures and are also poets, or something close to it. (As an aside, if you haven’t read Grann’s book of essays The Devil and Sherlock Holmes do yourself a favor and get on that or at least pick a few from his New Yorker profile page.)

[“The White Darkness” – David Grann – New Yorker – February 12, 2018]

Geopolitics

This is another category where there was really only one entry for me. It comes from the New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi, who will show up again when we get to favorite podcasts. Callimachi’s work is pure effort and for her huge feature on the Isis she found and sifted through thousands of internal documents and receipts to piece together the story of how the terror organization actually governed in Iraq. The work in and of itself makes the piece worthy for this list, but what makes the article so memorable for me is how it exposed the banality of Isis’s approach in Iraq. “ISIS built a state of administrative efficiency that collected taxes and picked up the garbage,” she writes. “[T]he group at times offered better services and proved itself more capable than the government it had replaced.” If you had to sum the piece up in one sentence it would probably be this one: “The world knows the Islamic State for its brutality, but the militants did not rule by the sword alone. They wielded power through two complementary tools: brutality and bureaucracy.” (If you’re interested in learning more about how the documents were collected or what’s happening with them, there’s a Q&A on the Times’ site. You should also check out Callimachi on the longform podcast for an inside look on how she approaches her work.)

[“The Isis Files: When Terrorists Run City Hall” – Rukmini Callimachi – New York Times – April 4, 2018]

Health & Parenting

I’ve got three entrants for this one and they’re all pretty different.

The first is all about parenting. I would have sworn “The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry” came out last year, but apparently it was from the beginning of this one. It makes sense I wouldn’t have much sense of time, though, since it came out right around when my second daughter was born. The article plainly spells out how big of an industry parenting advice is and how much its foundation is built on bullshit. The bit I remember best is this aside about how statistically insignificant most baby advice really is:

“(Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)”

The other two are a lot more serious. First is an amazing piece from Guardian writer Hannah Jane Parkinson about her own struggle with mental illness (and specifically bipolar disorder). Parkinson is a very good writer and there’s something about reading an accomplished journalist using her work to explain why her work is so hard that’s particularly impactful. The article’s title “It’s nothing like a broken leg” comes from this passage:

In the last few years I have lost count of the times mental illness has been compared to a broken leg. Mental illness is nothing like a broken leg.

In fairness, I have never broken my leg. Maybe having a broken leg does cause you to lash out at friends, undergo a sudden, terrifying shift in politics and personality, or lead to time slipping away like a Dali clock. Maybe a broken leg makes you doubt what you see in the mirror, or makes you high enough to mistake car bonnets for stepping stones (difficult, with a broken leg) and a thousand other things.

I would also highly recommend this short piece from Parkinson published at the end of December about her riding buses around London in the middle of the night when things get particularly bad.

Finally, my pick for this category comes from a New York Times Magazine story titled “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis.” The article shocked and saddened me as it spelled out just how inadequate the care pregnant black mothers receive. Education and income, as the article explains, don’t explain it. “In fact, a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.” Most shocking to me was this story about how the institutional racism embedded in the system manifests itself in obviously bad science amongst doctors:

In 2016, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia examined why African-American patients receive inadequate treatment for pain not only compared with white patients but also relative to World Health Organization guidelines. The study found that white medical students and residents often believed incorrect and sometimes “fantastical” biological fallacies about racial differences in patients. For example, many thought, falsely, that blacks have less-sensitive nerve endings than whites, that black people’s blood coagulates more quickly and that black skin is thicker than white. For these assumptions, researchers blamed not individual prejudice but deeply ingrained unconscious stereotypes about people of color, as well as physicians’ difficulty in empathizing with patients whose experiences differ from their own. In specific research regarding childbirth, the Listening to Mothers Survey III found that one in five black and Hispanic women reported poor treatment from hospital staff because of race, ethnicity, cultural background or language, compared with 8 percent of white mothers.

Go read the whole thing and when you’re done please donate to the Birthmark Doula Collective who are trying to help change the care black mothers receive.

[“Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis” – Linda Villarosa – New York Times Magazine – April 11, 2018]

Sports

As you may or may not know I’m a big NBA fan. The league is as good as its ever been and has been fundamentally transforming the way the game is played for the last ten years or so. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to explain this to friends and now, thanks to Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton, I can just send them the article “How the NBA got its groove back.” In the piece, the Kevins spell out how much faster the league got over the last decade, starting with the D’Antoni/Nash. In fact, as the article explains, those 2004-05 Suns wouldn’t even be considered a fast team by today’s standards. “Back then, Phoenix’s 98.6 pace was more than a possession per game faster than that of any other NBA team. In 2017-18, the average team had 99.6 possessions per 48 minutes, and the Suns’ 2004-05 pace would have ranked 19th in the league.” It’s a fun time to be an NBA fan. (Honorable mention sports story has to go to The Ringer’s insane “The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account”.)

[“How the NBA got its groove back” – Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton – ESPN – May 24, 2018]

Society

Society isn’t a perfect title for this category, but it gets at it. I’ve got two pieces here. The first comes from psychology professor Alison Gopnik (who shows up in the podcast list as well). Although not terribly wrong, I thought her review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now offered a really interesting rebuttal to the macro “everything is getting better” story. Gopnik opens the piece by stating her credentials: She’s a scientist, professor, and “card-carrying true believer in liberal Enlightenment values.” But she doesn’t think we can, or should, push aside local needs and values for the global:

The weakness of the book is that it doesn’t seriously consider the second part of the conversation—the human values that the young woman from the small town talks about. Our local, particular connections to just one specific family, community, place, or tradition can seem irrational. Why stay in one town instead of chasing better opportunities? Why feel compelled to sacrifice your own well-being to care for your profoundly disabled child or fragile, dying grandparent, when you would never do the same for a stranger? And yet, psychologically and philosophically, those attachments are as central to human life as the individualist, rationalist, universalist values of classic Enlightenment utilitarianism. If the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress is really going to be convincing—if it’s going to amount to more than preaching to the choir—it will have to speak to a wider spectrum of listeners, a more inclusive conception of flourishing, a broader palette of values.

In some ways there’s a similar theme in my pick for this category. “Pay the Homeless” is all about the local realities. It’s an argument against the idea that giving money to someone asking for it is somehow not good for the system as a whole or that individual specifically:

Yet on the whole, all the evidence, from the statistical to the spiritual, points in one direction: if you can give, you should give. It won’t solve the problems of mass homelessness or impoverishment. But it will improve someone’s life ever so slightly and briefly. “People are in dire straits and raising money for bare necessities,” Jerry Jones, policy director at the Inner City Law Center, told me. They might be trying to collect enough to pay for a room for the night. They might need bus fare or gas to get to an appointment.

[“Pay the Homeless” – Bryce Covert – Longreads – June, 2018]

Business

I try to read just about anything Tim Harford writes. His ability to take complicated topics and simplify them are impressive and inspiring. Last year’s piece on Arrow’s impossibility theorem is something I still think about and his BBC Pop-Up Ideas series was absolutely amazing, particularly this episode on the idea of feral cities. This year his FT feature “Why big companies squander brilliant ideas” introduced me to the idea of architectural innovation, which I wrote about in some length in my Framework of the Day piece on Conway’s Law. If you enjoy the piece I would also suggest checking out the reading list, which includes links to all the source material.

[“Why big companies squander brilliant ideas” – Tim Harford – Financial Times – September 8, 2018]

Politics

There aren’t that many pieces that stood out in the world of politics for me this year. I suspect that’s because I actively avoided them (as opposed to last year). With that said, one writer and two pieces stood out for me this year.

First, the writer. I don’t know of anyone I turned to more this year to get the pulse of the country than the Washington Post’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan. She doesn’t have a piece on the list because her writing is more ephemeral. In a world where the President is a TV star, it seems appropriate that the most important columnist is someone who has a deep understanding of how the media functions. A few of her pieces that stood out: “Publishing that anonymous New York Times article wasn’t ‘gutless.’ But writing it probably was.”, “It’s high time for media to enter the No Kellyanne Zone — and stay there”, “Don’t forget how the movement that changed Hollywood started: With great reporting”, and “Enough, already, with anything Steve Bannon has to say. We got it the first time.”. She’s who I turned to when I wanted to understand the importance of a moment.

Okay, back to the longform. First up is Jane Mayer’s masterful profile of Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Trump Dossier. The piece didn’t necessarily break new ground (after all, Buzzfeed had already published the whole thing), but it did paint an interesting picture for the man who wrote it, his credibility, and the accuracy, or lack thereof, that his methods may have led to.

My pick for politics goes to Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine profile of House leader Nancy Pelosi. We’re about to hear A LOT about Pelosi as she battles Trump and the Republicans over the next two years and, for me at least, my knowledge and understanding of her was surface at best. The profile is pretty unvarnished and paints Pelosi as a pure politician who knows how to operate as well or better than anyone out there. I suspect we’re going to see a lot of stereotypical framing of Pelosi because she’s a woman and this felt like a good foundation to build understanding. I thought this bit about how much of her perception, even amongst Democrats I’d argue, has been shaped by the Republicans was particularly interesting:

Still, Pelosi’s foremost liability is the effectiveness of the attacks against her. In 2010, Republicans spent $65 million attacking Pelosi in ads; the Republican National Committee hung a banner from its headquarters that read FIRE PELOSI. The attacks have often borne more than a tinge of sexism; in 2012, when Pelosi, as minority leader, wielded less power than the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, Republicans’ negative television ads were seven times as likely to mention Pelosi as Reid, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising. The 2010 onslaught took its toll on Pelosi’s public standing — her favorable rating dropped into the 20s — but otherwise did not faze her. She made clear to her caucus members that they should do whatever it took to win, even if it meant publicly distancing themselves from her. “I don’t know anyone in the world with thicker skin, or anyone about whom more callous things have been said, and she just truly doesn’t care,” a former Pelosi staff member told me. “There’s a small constituency she cares about: her members.”

[“Nancy Pelosi’s Last Battle” – Robert Draper – New York Times Magazine – November 19, 2018]

Podcast

I listened to fewer podcasts this year thanks to the introduction of audiobooks into my media diet. With that said, there were a few that stood out. Rather than specific episodes, though, this year my favorites felt more like shows in their entirety. This might be because I explored fewer new podcasts this year or just because there were a few exceptional short series that came out in 2018.

First off is Reply All. As far as week-after-week quality goes, it’s hard to beat these guys. Two (really three) episodes in particular stood our for me:

  1. “Invcel”: “How a shy, queer Canadian woman accidentally invented one of the internet’s most toxic male communities.”
  2. “The Crime Machine, Part 1” & “The Crime Machine, Part 2”: “New York City cops are in a fight against their own police department. They say it’s under the control of a broken computer system that punishes cops who refuse to engage in racist, corrupt policing. The story of their fight, and the story of the grouchy idealist who originally built the machine they’re fighting.”

Next up is American Fiasco, Roger Bennet’s ten-part series on the disaster that was America’s 1998 World Cup.

Finally, and my real pick, is Rukmini Callimachi’s ten-part series Caliphate. The podcast follows Callimachi as she reports on the Islamic State and the fall of Mosul. It’s an extraordinary piece of reporting with the kinds of twists and turns that we’ve come to expect in great podcasts these days. Again, I can’t say enough about Callimachi’s work this year between Caliphate and The Isis Files.

[Calpihate – April, 2018]

Not This Year

Finally, because I can’t resist, I read a bunch of longform that was amazing and didn’t come out this year. Although it doesn’t officially fit my rules, I’m going to include a few picks as a way to wrap things up.

I already talked about David Grann at length, so I won’t spend too much time introducing the amazing 2008 New Yorker story I reread titled “True Crime: A Postmodern Murder Mystery.” It’s insane. Go read it.

I think I read “Promthea Unbound” just after I put together last year’s list otherwise I have to assume it would have made the cut. It’s the extraordinary (sorry, I’m running out of superlatives) story of a child genius and her mom and how they got through life together.

Finally, my pick for “Not This Year” maybe shouldn’t officially even count as longform, but I’m making the rules and I say short stories are allowed. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a short story by Ursula Le Guin that feels as appropriate today (if not more) than it must have when it was published in 1973. It’s about the costs were willing to take on to live happily. I’ll leave it at that so you can enjoy.

[“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” – Ursula Le Guin – October, 1973]

The Picks

Alright, that’s it, thanks for reading. Here are the picks all wrapped up:

The Full Lists

Articles (in chronological order):

  1. “Parking for Gold” – Geoff Manaugh – The Atlantic – January 2, 2018
  2. “The Case for the Subway” – Jonathan Mahler – New York Times Magazine – January 3, 2018
  3. “Making China Great Again” – Evan Osnos – New Yorker – January 8, 2018
  4. “My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion” – Siddhartha Mukherjee – New Yorker – January 8, 2018
  5. “The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed” – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic – January 10, 2018
  6. “The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry” – Oliver Burkeman – The Guardian – January 16, 2018
  7. “The Rising Pressure of the #MeToo Backlash” – Jia Tolentino – New Yorker – January 24, 2018
  8. “To Be, or Not to Be” – Masha Gessen – New York Review of Books – Feburary 8, 2018
  9. “Has Anyone Seen the President?” – Michael Lewis – Bloomberg – February 9, 2018
  10. “Inside The Two Years That Shook Facebook—And The World” – Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein – Wired – February 12, 2018
  11. “The White Darkness” – David Grann – New Yorker – February 12, 2018
  12. “What has really been going on with Markelle Fultz?” – Kyle Neubeck – Philly Voice – February 12, 2018
  13. “Jerry and Marge Go Large” – Jason Fagone – Highline – February 28, 2018
  14. “I Got a Story to Tell” – Steve Francis – Player’s Tribune – March 8, 2018
  15. “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier” – Jane Mayer – New Yorker – March 12, 2018
  16. “A $1.6 Billion Spotify Lawsuit Is Based On A Law Made For Player Pianos” – Sarah Jeong – The Verge – March 14, 2018
  17. “Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous” – Peter Brannan – The Atlantic – March 15, 2018
  18. “Tragically Lost in Joshua Tree’s Wild Interior” – Geoff Manaugh – New York Times Magazine – March 22, 2018
  19. “When Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough” – Allison Gopnik – The Atlantic – April, 2018
  20. “The Isis Files: When Terrorists Run City Hall” – Rukmini Callimachi – New York Times – April 4, 2018
  21. “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis” – Linda Villarosa – New York Times Magazine – April 11, 2018
  22. “The Young and the Reckless” – Brendan Koerner – Wired – April 17, 2018
  23. “Whose Story (and Country) Is This?” – Rebecca Solnit – Literary Hub – April 18, 2018
  24. “How American Racism Influenced Hitler” – Alex Ross – New Yorker – April 30, 2018
  25. “Bad TV” – Andrea Long Chu – n+1 – Spring, 2018
  26. “The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code” – Kit Chellel – Bloomberg Businessweek – May 3, 2018
  27. “The Man Who Cracked the Lottery” – Reid Forgrave – New York Times Magazine – May 3, 2018
  28. “I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye” – Ta-Nehesi Coates – May 7, 2018
  29. “The Promise of Vaping and the Rise of Juul” – Jia Tolentino – New Yorker – May 14, 2018
  30. “How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds” – Nick Paumgarten – New Yorker – May 21, 2018
  31. “Trump vs. the ‘Deep State'” – Evan Osnos – New Yorker – May 21, 2018
  32. “How the NBA got its groove back” – Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton – ESPN – May 24, 2018
  33. “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It Somebody had to foot the bill for Anna Delvey’s fabulous new life. The city was full of marks.” – Jessica Pressler – New York Magazine – May 28, 2018
  34. “The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account” – Ben Detrick – The Ringer – May 29, 2018
  35. “The Ultimate Humiliation” – Sarah Nicole Prickett – n+1 – May 30, 2018
  36. “Pay the Homeless” – Bryce Covert – Longreads – June, 2018
  37. “Stephen A. Smith Won’t Stop Talking” – Vinson Cunningham – New Yorker – June 25, 2018
  38. “‘It’s nothing like a broken leg’: why I’m done with the mental health conversation” – Hannah Jane Parkinson – The Guardian – June 30, 2018
  39. “How a Notorious Gangster Was Exposed by His Own Sister” – Patrick Radden Keefe – New Yorker – August 6, 2018
  40. “Why big companies squander brilliant ideas” – Tim Harford – Financial Times – September 8, 2018
  41. “What Termites Can Teach Us” – Amia Srinivasan – New Yorker – September 17, 2018
  42. “The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care” – Larissa MacFarquhar – New Yorker – October 8, 2018
  43. “This Melissa McCarthy Story Just Might (Maybe? Possibly?) Cheer You Up” – Taffy Brodesser-Akner – New York Times Magazine – October 17, 2018
  44. “What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick?” – Gary Greenberg – New York Times Magazine – November 7, 2018
  45. “Nancy Pelosi’s Last Battle” – Robert Draper – New York Times Magazine – November 19, 2018
  46. “The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome” – Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson – New Yorker – November 19, 2018
  47. “Carmelo Anthony is the last great American ball hog” – Kirk Goldsberry – ESPN – December 6, 2018

Podcasts (in chronological order):

  1. “The Hollywood Edition” – Slate Money – March 31, 2018
  2. Calpihate – April, 2018
  3. “Jason Alexander” – WTF with Marc Maron – April 5, 2018
  4. “Alison Gopnik on ‘The wrong way to think about parenting, plus the downsides of modernity'” – Rationally Speaking – April 29, 2018
  5. “Invcel” – Reply All – May 10, 2018
  6. “Data, Decisions, and Basketball with Sam Hinkie” – Invest Like the Best – May 22, 2018
  7. American Fiasco – June, 2018
  8. “Charles Oakley Talks MJ Stories, LeBron, and His Favorite Fights” – The Bill Simmons Podcast – June 8, 2018
  9. “General Chapman’s Last Stand” – Revisionist History – June 13, 2018
  10. “The Crime Machine, Part 1” & “The Crime Machine, Part 2” – Reply All – October 11, 2018
  11. “Negative Mount Pleasant” – Reply All – December 6, 2018

Articles [Not 2018] (in chronological order):

  1. “The Last Question” – Isaac Asimov – November, 1956
  2. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” – Ursula Le Guin – October, 1973
  3. “True Crime: A Postmodern Murder Mystery” – David Grann – New Yorker – February 11, 2008
  4. “The Last Days of Stealhead Joe” – Ian Frazier – Outside – August 21, 2013
  5. “After decades of defeat, Caltech finds formula for winning in conference” – Chris Ballard – Sports Illustrated – November 23, 2015
  6. “The Falling Man: An Unforgettable Story” – Tom Junod – September 9, 2016
  7. “Promethea Unbound” – Mike Mariani – Atavist Magaqzine – October 27, 2017
  8. “Downward Spiral” – David Roth – The Baffler – December 4, 2017

January 2, 2019 // This post is about: , , ,

Best Articles of 2016

This hasn’t been my best year for blogging. My last post was June and, before that, January. Such is the life of an entrepreneur and new dad. However, while I haven’t found time to do the sort of writing I used to, I am happy to say I did a fair amount of reading this year and couldn’t let the holidays pass without sharing some of my favorite longform.

If you haven’t read one of these lists before (2011, 2012, and 2015), the basic gist is it’s a list of the stuff I read this year that I liked the most. Much of it is longform journalism written in 2016, though, as the internet is wont to do, there’s lots of older writing, podcasts, and who knows what else in the mix. (If you’re so inclined, I also have a Twitter account that just tweets out the articles I favorite in Instapaper.)

Without any further ado … (and in no specific order) … the list (lots more commentary below):

On the cost of war

A few years ago I got the chance to spend some time with CJ Chivers, the New York Times war correspondent. His book, The Gun, had just come out and Colin, Benjamin, and I were helping to get him set up on social media. We spent the day hanging out, discussing journalism, signing up for accounts, and talking about how extraordinary war photographers are. Since then CJ has returned home and given up his role as an on-the-ground war reporter (a great longread from 2015) and his latest feature is actually in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. The Fighter is a profile of former Marine Sam Siatta and his post-war struggles. What makes Chivers such an amazing person to cover war, beyond his ability to write and willingness to dig indefinitely for a story (he became the preeminent expert on ammunition serial numbers) is his profound respect for the military and the men and women who serve. Chivers served in the Marines in the 80s and 90s and brings that to every story he writes, but its intensified in a story about a person he clearly believes could have been nearly any Marine.

[The Fighter – C.J. Chivers – New York Times Magazine – December 28, 2016]

On artificial intelligence

The article that probably blew my mind the most was actually written in January 2015. I had heard about Wait But Why’s two–part primer on AI, but hadn’t gotten around to reading the 25,000 word tome quite yet. Once I did, I was not disappointed. I went from knowing basically nothing about artificial intelligence to being unable to carry a conversation without bringing it up. Tim Urban, the author of Wait But Why, read every book and article on the topic and ties it all together concisely (seriously) and with some excellent stick figure drawings. Warning: It’s heavy, like human extinction heavy. A snippet:

And while most scientists I’ve come across acknowledge that ASI [artificial superintelligence] would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that used beneficially, ASI’s abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to a second attractor state—species immortality. Bostrom believes species immortality is just as much of an attractor state as species extinction, i.e. if we manage to get there, we’ll be impervious to extinction forever—we’ll have conquered mortality and conquered chance. So even though all species so far have fallen off the balance beam and landed on extinction, Bostrom believes there are two sides to the beam and it’s just that nothing on Earth has been intelligent enough yet to figure out how to fall off on the other side.

Both James and I liked the article so much that we asked Tim to lead off our Transition conference this year. (If you like the AI article, I’d also highly recommend his article on the Fermi Paradox and just about anything else.)

[The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence Part 1 & Part 2 – Tim Urban – Wait But Why – January 22, 2015]

On immigration

In a year of lots of bombast about immigrants (especially ones with the last name Khan), this incredibly well-researched profile of Zarif Khan, an Afghani who immigrated to Wyoming in the early 1900s, was an intimate profile of the immigrant story of America. The conclusion has to be one of my favorites from the year:

Over and over, we forget what being American means. The radical premise of our nation is that one people can be made from many, yet in each new generation we find reasons to limit who those ‘many’ can be—to wall off access to America, literally or figuratively. That impulse usually finds its roots in claims about who we used to be, but nativist nostalgia is a fantasy. We have always been a pluralist nation, with a past far richer and stranger than we choose to recall. Back when the streets of Sheridan were still dirt and Zarif Khan was still young, the Muslim who made his living selling Mexican food in the Wild West would put up a tamale for stakes and race local cowboys barefoot down Main Street. History does not record who won.

[Citizen Khan – Kathryn Schulz – New Yorker – June 6, 2016]

On politics

Like everyone else, I read a lot about politics this year. Most of it I would never care to subject anyone to again, but along the way there some pieces that stood out. To me, this New Yorker profile of Logan County, West Virginia was the best telling of America’s divide. It’s a story we all know at this point, but part of what makes this article work so well is it’s more than just about Donald Trump or income inequality or the rural/urban divide, it’s really the profile of a state and it’s unique culture.

Rounding out politics articles: The Case Against Democracy (New Yorker) provides context for why our system works the way it does and asks whether it could work better. This Election Was About the Issues (Slate) argues against the refrain that the election was about everything but the issues, suggesting that it was about the issues Americans actually care about:

I’m talking about issues that involve the fundamental arrangements of American life, issues of race and class and gender and sexual violence. These are the things we’ve argued about in the past year and change, sometimes coarsely, sometimes tediously, but very often illuminatingly. This has been, by all but the most fatuous measures, an issue-rich campaign.

Ezra Klein’s amazing profile of Hillary Clinton, Understanding Hillary (Vox), argued that the things that make her a great governor are the same things that make her a bad politician and gave me hope.

It turned out that Clinton, in her travels, stuffed notes from her conversations and her reading into suitcases, and every few months she dumped the stray paper on the floor of her Senate office and picked through it with her staff. The card tables were for categorization: scraps of paper related to the environment went here, crumpled clippings related to military families there. These notes, Rubiner recalls, really did lead to legislation. Clinton took seriously the things she was told, the things she read, the things she saw. She made her team follow up.

And, of course, the “Goodbye Obama” pieces: David Remnick’s Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency (New Yorker) and Barack Obama and Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Ultimate Exit Interview (Vanity Fair).

[In the Heart of Trump Country – Larissa MacFarquhar – New Yorker – October 10, 2016]

On income inequality

In that David Remnick profile of Obama I just mentioned is probably the best single quote I read this year about income inequality, one of the defining issues of 2016:

“The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”

With that said, my pick comes from economist Branko Milanovic, who wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization. Though the data has been questioned the conclusion of the article hasn’t: Globalization has spread wealth around the world in some incredible ways … and it has happened, at least to some extent, at the expense of the Western middle class.

[Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization – Branko Milanovic – Harvard Business Review – May 13, 2016]

On the rest of the world (and podcasts)

It just so happens that my two favorite podcast episodes this year were on foreign affairs. The first comes from the always amazing This American Life who spent time in refugee camps in Greece speaking to people about their lives. As always, This American Life gives the most accurate macro view by focusing on the micro. The second comes from a show I’d never heard of before on China called Sinica. In the episode they talk to Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, who basically argues that China is actually following America’s growth playbook (called the American System), which included lots of state-led development, high tariffs, and even tons of intellectual property theft (from Europe at that time). Basically he argues we should stop being so surprised by what’s happening there.

Beyond those two, I listened to a lot of Marc Maron’s WTF (always skip the first 10 minutes) and really enjoyed his interview with Louis Anderson, who I didn’t realize was a serious standup. (Part of why I really enjoy WTF is that it’s effectively a show about the creative process. When he goes deep with someone on how they do their craft I find it endless fascinating. While the Louis episode isn’t exactly that, it’s also just loads of fun to listen to anyone serious about anything talk to someone they so clearly respect.) Gladwell’s Revisionist History was pretty good (though sometimes a bit preachy). His episode on Generous Orthodoxy was just a very well told story (and when you’re done, go read the letter the show was based on).

[Are We There Yet? – This American Life – July 29, 2016] [Arthur Kroeber vs. The Conventional Wisdom – Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn – Sinica – June, 2016]

On parenting

As you may or may not know, I became a parent in 2015. Since my daughter was born I’ve been keeping a collection of parenting articles that don’t suck (a surprisingly hard thing to find actually). My favorite of 2016 was probably Tom Vanderbilt’s piece on learning chess with his daughter. It’s both a well-told story and some really good lessons on the differences in learning between adults and children. A snippet:

Here was my opening. I would counter her fluidity with my storehouses of crystallized intelligence. I was probably never going to be as speedily instinctual as she was. But I could, I thought, go deeper. I could get strategic. I began to watch Daniel King’s analysis of top-level matches on YouTube. She would sometimes wander in and try to follow along, but I noticed she would quickly get bored or lost (and, admittedly, I sometimes did as well) as he explained how some obscure variation had “put more tension in the position” or “contributed to an imbalance on the queen-side.” And I could simply put in more effort. My daughter was no more a young chess prodigy than I was a middle-aged one; if there was any inherited genius here, after all, it was partially inherited from me. Sheer effort would tilt the scales.

Perfect.

[Learning Chess at 40 – Tom Vanderbilt – Nautilus – May 5, 2016]

On mental models

While not a longread in quite the way the others are, the piece that has probably dug its way deepest into my brain is this list of mental models from Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO of the search engine DuckDuckGo. He was inspired to write his mental models down because of something Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s business partner, said about them: “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.” I’ve been pretty obsessed with this idea myself because I think we (as in people who talk about business) often over-emphasize case studies and specific stories, while under-emphasizing the model that can help someone make a decision that can lead to a similar outcome. I’ve been keeping my own list of models since I read this and might share them some time down the road.

[Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful – Gabriel Weinberg – Medium – July 5, 2016]

On genitals

What might be the best essay of the year comes from New York Times culture critic Wesley Morris and explores what he calls “the last taboo”: Black penises in popular culture. Part of what makes for great cultural criticism is exposing you to something that you hadn’t noticed before but can’t ever not notice again, and Morris does just that. Race was obviously a big issue in 2016 and the article explores just one of the many ways racism roots in popular culture and perpetuates itself.

[Last Taboo – Wesley Morris – New York Times Magazine – October 27, 2016]

On sports

Most of the year-end lists I looked at included ESPN’s Tiger Woods profile as their top sports story of the year and it’s pretty hard to deny it. It’s engaging and breaks one of the crazier stories of the year: That Tiger Woods undoing may have been, at least in part, a result of his obsession with the Navy SEALs.

While the Tiger story is the flashiest and probably my favorite, looking back at my list of favorites there are actually a nice collection from a wide variety of sports. Nick Paumgarten’s delightful profile of 14-year-old climbing sensation Ashima Shiraishi made me want to get my 1.5-year-old into the climbing gym. The New York Times profile of Yannis Pitsiladis, a scientist trying to break the puzzle of the two hour marathon, was probably the sports story I talked about the most. Though not strictly a sports story, Deadspin’s profile of the meteoric rise and fall of sportswriter Jennifer Frey was gripping and sad. Finally, though most definitely not from this year, I went back and read John McPhee’s 1965 profile of Princeton basketball sensation Bill Bradley.

[The Secret History of Tiger Woods – Wright Thompson – ESPN – April 21, 2016]

On crime(ish)

Luckily for everyone that writes true crime, David Grann is working on a book, which means he didn’t submit any competition this year. Easily my favorite this year was California Sunday’s article about “Somerton Man”, a nearly seventy year old mystery about a man who washed up dead on the beach in Australia with nothing to identify him but a bit of a poem. Unfortunately this was from last year and I just didn’t find it until January, so I’ll reserve the spot for something actually written in 2016. Also missing out by a year (though I just discovered it) was this excellent story from the New Yorker about what actually happens when pirates take your ship.

That then leaves two crime(ish) articles to chose from: The excellent Guardian piece about the poisoning of Russian enemy of the state Alexander Litvinenko and New Republic’s piece on a mystery man discovered in Georgia. Considering the role of Russia on the world stage in 2016 and the level of reporting in the piece, I’ve got to give the nod to the Guardian on this one.

[Alexander Litvinenko: the man who solved his own murder – Luke Harding – The Guardian – January 19, 2016]

On the way we experience the world

One way I judge writing is to see how it lodges itself in my brain. I know something was particularly good when I find myself thinking and talking about it for weeks and months afterwords. Sometimes the best writing doesn’t hit you right away, it takes some time to percolate. This Aeon piece on how our brains process information happens to be one of those. It argues that our theory that the brain operates like a computer has led us down a path of research that has set back our understanding of the brain. We’ve got a long history of understanding our brains through the lens of the latest tech it turns out:

By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.

Speaking of brains, Blake Ross’s very personal essay of how he came to realize he has aphantasia, or no mind’s eye, is an exercise in trying to imagine the unimaginable (for most of us). Ross doesn’t picture things when he thinks about them and didn’t realize the rest of the world did until quite recently.

[The empty brain – Robert Epstein – Aeon – May 18, 2016]

The rest

I’ve got a few favorites left open in tabs that I figure I’ll chose one from. These didn’t quite fit into the previous categories and I’ll try to get through them quickly(ish).

The white flight of Derek Black is the amazing story of the son of a prominent white nationalist who found his views melting away as he exposed himself to the outside world of diversity.

State of the Species is Charles C. Mann’s 2013 essay on human plasticity and the possibility it holds to help us solve the world’s problems. (Charles gave a version of the essay in presentation form at Transition this year.)

Politico’s We’re the Only Plane in the Sky is an oral history of September 11th on Air Force One.

Finally, to end with a bit of inspiration, this Chuck Close profile from the Times Magazine included this amazing bit:

Three weeks earlier, Simon had released a new album, “Stranger to Stranger,” with its cover taken from a portrait that Close painted of the musician a few years back. Then, the day before I saw Close, Simon announced that the album would be his last. “I called him up, and I said, ‘Artists don’t retire,’ ” Close told me. “I think I talked him out of it. I said: ‘Don’t deny yourself this late stage, because the late stage can be very interesting. You know everybody hated late de Kooning, but it turned out to be great stuff. Late Picasso, nobody liked it, and it turned out to be great.’ ” Close reminded Simon that Matisse was unable to continue painting late in life. “Had Matisse not done the cutouts, we would not know who he was,” Close said. “Paul said, ‘I don’t have any ideas.’ I said: ‘Well, of course you don’t have any ideas. Sitting around waiting for an idea is the worst thing you can do. All ideas come out of the work itself.’ ”
He pointed out that Simon is 74, the same age he was early last summer. “I told him, ‘When you get to be my age, you’ll see,’ ” he said with a laugh.

[The white flight of Derek Black – Eli Saslow – The Washington Post – October 15, 2016]

January 1, 2017 // This post is about: , , ,

Climbing Rocks

Really enjoyed this New Yorker profile of 14-year-old climbing extraordinaire Ashima Shiraishi.

On what makes great climbers (and specifically Ashima so amazing):

In terms of pure talent—climbers speak of “strength”—she is near the top, but she is not too keen on taking risks. Anyway, her parents won’t allow it. She has small, powerful fingers, a light but sinewy frame, and a seemingly effortless yet peerlessly precise technique. All this enables her to find holds in nearly imperceptible chinks in the rock. A rock climber’s key attribute is a high strength-to-weight ratio, but the ability to create leverage, with subtle geometric variations in body positioning, is the force multiplier. A civilian might think crudely of climbing as something like ascending a ladder—all reach and pull—but watching Ashima adjust the attitude of her hips, shoulders, or heels as she tries to move from one improbable hold to another gives the impression that the human body can arrange itself in an infinite number of forms, each of slightly different utility.

On how you rate different climbing routes:

Another standard is the rating regimen. Sport and trad climbs are given a degree of difficulty, according to the Yosemite Decimal System: 1 is a walk on flat land, and 5 is a vertical climb, or close to it. So actual climbs are rated 5.0 through 5.15, with additional subcategories of “a” through “d.” The hardest routes at the moment are 5.15c—there are just two. (The system is open-ended, so it’s only a matter of time before someone pioneers a 5.16a.) In northeast Spain, last March, when Ashima was thirteen, she became the first woman, and the youngest person of either sex, ever to “send” (complete) a 5.15. It is a route called Open Your Mind Direct, which was recently upgraded from a 5.14d to a 5.15a, owing to a handhold’s having broken off. She spent just four days “projecting” the route—that is, studying and solving all the problems on it by trial and error. The men who had done it before had spent weeks, if not months. Obviously, the rating system is also subjective, but for Ashima this feat was an annunciation. If she could send a 5.15 during spring break from eighth grade, what more could she do?

Related, I read this piece a few weeks ago on the history of indoor climbing and how bouldering problems get designed:

If you think about a climb as a sentence and each move as a word, the holds are individual letters. The most commonly used holds provide a horizontal edge that you can hang from. When the hold is extremely positive, which means it has a large lip or is otherwise easy to grab, climbers call it a jug. A crimp, by contrast, has an edge that’s so thin, you can fit only your fingertips on it. When that edge is oriented vertically and off to the side, it serves as a side pull. Closer in it’s a Gaston, which the climber pulls on with elbow bent, as if prying the lid off a coffee can. If the edge points toward the ground, then it’s an undercling, and the climber must pull up and out to stay on the wall.

January 13, 2016 // This post is about: , ,

Some of my favorite reads of 2015

Did a quick dig through my Instapaper favorites (which also have their own Twitter account, by the way) and picked out a few of my favorite reads from last year. Many were written in 2015, but a few were just read by me for the first time last year. So, without any further ado and not in any particular order, a few of my favorites:

  1. I find snooker oddly satisfying to watch. Every time I’m in the UK and can’t sleep at 3am on the first night I seem to find it on TV and get entranced. Not sure what it is and can’t seem to get excited the same way about pool on TV here in the US. I tried to play once in Ireland with a friend and I was absolutely terrible. The table is about 6 miles long and the cue seems to be about 1/16th of an inch. All of that is just a long preamble to say that I really enjoyed this profile of snooker star Ronnie O’Sullivan from the New Yorker. (Two asides here: First, if you’re interested here’s a bunch of YouTube videos of people having perfect snookers games and second, I just ran across this profile of a darts champion Phil Taylor, which while obviously not the same as snooker, seems like a cousin.)
  2. I’ve always wondered about the East India Company, but have never really dug in much (mostly because I’m intimidated by the size of the books on the subject). As a result, this little Guardian primer was a great introduction into one of the craziest corporations in history.
  3. In the tweets I broke these up, but I’ll file this all here under marketing writing. My favorite marketing writing of last year (and probably favorite marketing writer as well) was from Martin Weigel and was titled “Marketing Crack: Kicking the Habit”. I actually enjoyed it so much I asked Martin to come speak at Percolate’s Transition conference in September (where he did an edited version of the talk). While not an article, my favorite marketing book of the year (and maybe of ever) was How Brands Grow (which I talked about to whomever would listen — sorry about that). If you’re not sure you’re ready to dive in and read it, the FT had a great writeup that built on many of the ideas (though so does Martin’s “Marketing Crack” piece as well as this one from 2010). Oh, and I haven’t read it yet, but there’s an update to How Brands Grow out now that’s on my must read list.
  4. Silk Road has all the components to be a movie you’d never believe. There’s “the dark web” (which movies and TV shows now all seem to love to reference), faked murder scenes, and lots of drugs being delivered by UPS. This two parter from Wired did a fine job telling the whole story (which, if you don’t feel like reading the 20-something-thousand words you could probably wait for a movie version of).
  5. Okay, now for some basketball stuff, which I continued my obsession with. First, a look at how shot arc effects free throw shooting. Second, an oral history of the greatest dunk of all time: Vince Carter’s insane leap over French center Frederic Weis in the Olympics (to be honest, the article isn’t even that good, it’s just so fun to relive and reread about this thing). Third, though not from 2015, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by this look at how the Houston Rockets are experimenting with their NBA D-League team.
  6. Following on the sports theme, I’m not sure what it is about tennis that lends itself to great writing, but this Serena Williams profile from the New York Times was really amazing (as is my all-time favorite piece of sports writing: David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer).
  7. Now for a New Yorker trio that have nothing to do with each other: First, a profile of Ken Dornstein, whose brother died in the Lockerbie bombing (he is also the author of the excellent book about his search for answers The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky). Second, a crazy story of a college couple who murdered their parents. Finally, a profile of Judy Clarke who defends the worst-of-the-worst in court, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
  8. Now a quick trip back to the Eighties for these two: First, it’s Steven Levy on the possibly effects of the introduction of the spreadsheet (1984) and second, Peter Drucker on the organization of the future (1988). Both are pretty spot on.
  9. This one’s a little different, but I really enjoyed this short Upshot piece on the two views of the economy. The challenge with writing about the economy is that while the factors that may drive it are simple, the outcome is incredibly complex. While this piece didn’t blow me away or teach me something new, I thought the debate between himself was a clever way to present a nuanced story.
  10. Finally, and purely for fun, The Good Bagel Manifesto is full of bagel snobbery like this (which I appreciate): “Having tasted bagels around the country and around the world, I understand why toasting is the default for most bagel shops: It’s because most bagel shops don’t serve good bagels. If there is one Golden Rule for good bagels, it is this: A Good Bagel Shall Not Require Toasting. All Else Follows.” (Emphasis theirs.)

There was lots else, but this was a few quick picks from my list. Hope you all had an excellent 2015 and I wish you an even better 2016.

January 1, 2016 // This post is about: , , , ,

Top Longform of 2012

Last year I listed out my five favorite pieces of longform writing and it seemed to go over pretty well, so I figured I’d do the same again this year. It was harder to compile the list this year, as my reading took me outside just Instapaper (especially to the fantastic Longform app for iPad), but I’ve done my best to pull these together based on what I most enjoyed/found most interesting/struck me the most.

One additional note before I start my list: To make this process slightly more simple next year I’ve decided to start a Twitter feed that pulls from my Instapaper and Readability favorites. You can find it at @HeyItsInstafavs. Okay, onto the list.

  1. The Yankee Comandante (New Yorker): Last year David Grann took my top spot with A Murder Foretold and this year he again takes it with an incredible piece on William Morgan, an American soldier in the Cuban revolution. The article was impressive enough that George Clooney bought up the rights and is apparently planning to direct a film about the story. The thing about David Grann is that beyond being an incredible reporter and storyteller, he’s also just an amazing writer. I’m not really a reader who sits there and examines sentences, I read for story and ideas. But a few sentences, and even paragraphs, in this piece made me take notice. While we’re on David Grann, I also read his excellent book of essays this year (most of which come from the New Yorker), The Devil & Sherlock Holmes. He is, without a doubt, my favorite non-fiction writer working right now.
  2. Raise the Crime Rate (n+1): This article couldn’t be more different than the first. Rather than narrative non-fiction, this is an interesting, and well-presented, arguments towards abolishing the prison system. The basic thesis of the piece is that we’ve made a terrible ethical decision in the US to offload crime from our cities to our prisions, where we let people get raped and stabbed with little-to-no recourse. The solution presented is to abolish the prison system (while also increasing capital punishment). Rare is an article that you don’t necessarily agree with, but walk away talking and thinking about. That’s why this piece made my list. I read it again last week and still don’t know where I stand, but I know it’s worthy of reading and thinking about. (While I was trying to get through my Instapaper backlog I also came across this Atul Gawande piece from 2009 on solitary confinement and its effects on humans.)
  3. Open Your Mouth & You’re Dead (Outside): A look at the totally insane “sport” of freediving, where athletes swim hundreds of feet underwater on a single breath (and often come back to the surface passed out). This is scary and crazy and exciting and that’s reason enough to read something, right?
  4. Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up (New York Times): I’ve been meaning to write about this but haven’t had a chance yet. Last year HBO had this amazing special called Talking Funny in which Ricky Gervais, Chris Rock, Louis CK and Jerry Seinfeld sit around and chat about what it’s like to be the four funniest men in the world. The format was amazing: Take the four people who are at the top of their profession and see what happens. But what was especially interesting, to me at least, was the deference the other three showed to Seinfeld. I knew he was accomplished, but I didn’t know that he commanded the sort of respect amongst his peers that he does. Well, this Times article expands on that special and explains what makes Seinfeld such a unique comedian and such a careful crafter of jokes. (For more Seinfeld stuff make sure to check out his new online video series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which is just that.)
  5. The Malice at the Palace (Grantland): I would say as a publication Grantland outperformed just about every other site on the web this year and so this pick is part acknowledgement of that and part praise for a pretty amazing piece of reporting (I guess you could call an oral history that, right?). Anyway, this particular oral history is about the giant fight that broke out in Detroit at a Pacers v. Pistons game that spilled into a fight between the Pistons and the Detroit fans. It was an ugly mark for basketball and an incredibly memorable (and insane) TV event. As a sort of aside on this, I’ve been casually reading Bill Simmons’ Book of Basketball and in it he obviously talks about this game/fight. In fact, he calls it one of his six biggest TV moments, which he judges using the following criteria: “How you know an event qualifies: Will you always remember where you watched it? (Check.) Did you know history was being made? (Check.) Would you have fought anyone who tried to change the channel? (Check.) Did your head start to ache after a while? (Check.) Did your stomach feel funny? (Check.) Did you end up watching about four hours too long? (Check.) Were there a few ‘can you believe this’–type phone calls along the way? (Check.) Did you say ‘I can’t believe this’ at least fifty times?” I agree with that.

And, like last year, there are a few that were great but didn’t make the cut. Here’s two more:

  • Snow Fall (New York Times): Everyone is going crazy about this because of the crazy multimedia experience that went along with it, but I actually bought the Kindle single and read it in plain old black and white and it was still pretty amazing. Also, John Branch deserves to be on this list because he wrote something that would have made my list last year had it not come out in December: Punched Out is the amazing and sad story of Derek Boogaard and what it’s like to be a hockey enforcer.
  • Marathon Man (New Yorker): A very odd, but intriguing, “expose” on a dentist who liked to chat at marathons.

That’s it. I’ve made a Readlist with these seven selections which makes it easy to send them all to your Kindle or Readability. Good reading.

January 4, 2013 // This post is about: , , , , ,

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