Annual Best of 2019

Annual Best Of 2019

A few notable diversions from the past year:

  • Books
    Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018)

    • (A series of essays providing sober on abstract ethical principles, psychology, mythology, religion. Favorite book of the year.)
  • Sheelah Kolhatkar, Black Edge (2017)
    • (The true story of the rise and fall of ultra-successful investor Steve Cohen and his firm, SAC Capital.)
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2010)
    • (A former options trader describes the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively.)
  • James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (2011)
    • (Well crafted, bordering on gimmicky. A good counterpoint to  the zero-sum thinking of The Prince: redefine the playing field such that boundaries exist solely for the purpose of continuing the game.)
  • Peter Schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 (2019)
    • (Extraordinary essays on art and its influence on culture.)
  • Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It (2016)
    • (A valuable primer for negotiations both to become a better negotiator as well as to recognize the tools a skilled negotiator may use against you. As a friend observes: You get what you negotiate for rather than what you deserve.)
  • Red Hawk, Self Observation: The Awakening of Conscience: An Owner’s Manual (2009)
    • (A helpful guide to self-awareness or consciousness, an important skill to develop in a culture of declining attention spans.  One star deduction for the somewhat blurry description of how self-awareness is connected to The Work, an approach to self-development developed by George Gurdjieff.)
  • Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers (2004)
    • (A real-life tale of obsession. Hold your breath as a pair of divers extend the limits of the sport while searching a number of famous and not-so-famous shipwrecks including one particularly mysterious WWII U-boat.)
  • Anthony Horowitz, The Word Is Murder (2018)
    • (One of the most fun whodunnits in years. Clever, campy, and will keep you guessing to the end. Bonus: there is also a sequel and a third in the works.)

Movies
Perfect Sense, 2011 (Favorite movie of the year.)
Eastern Promises, 2007
The Guilty, 2018
Margin Call, 2011
Steve Jobs, 2015

Music
Billie Eilish, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? (2019)
Sharon Van Etten, Remind Me Tomorrow (2019)
Raphael Saadiq, Jimmy Lee (2019)
Sault, 5 (2019)
Michael Kiwanuka, Love & Hate  (2016)

Articles
Doug Preston, “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” The New Yorker, March 29, 2019 (If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began…One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary [the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike], a depth representing many thousands of years….Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species.)

Adam Gopnik, “Younger Longer,” New Yorker, May 20, 2019 (The true condition of youth is the physical ability to forget ourselves…The work of the AgeLab is shaped by a paradox. Having been established to engineer and promote new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged, the AgeLab swiftly discovered that engineering and promoting new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged is a good way of going out of business. Old people will not buy anything that reminds them that they are old. They are a market that cannot be marketed to. In effect, to accept help in getting out of the suit is to accept that we’re in the suit for life. We would rather suffer because we’re old than accept that we’re old and suffer less.)

Nathan Heller, “Driven,” New Yorker, July 22, 2019 ([T]he makers of gas cars didn’t so much win the market as create a market they could win. The triumph of gas engines entailed a shift in the whole transportation model—from shared cars to privately owned cars, from an extension of the metropolitan network to a vehicle that required infrastructure of its own…Free men and women on the open road have turned out to be such disastrous drivers that carmakers are developing computers to replace them. When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?0

Hanna Fry, “Your Number is Up,” New Yorker, September 9, 2019 (We can now forecast, with remarkable accuracy, the number of women in Germany who will choose to have a baby each year, the number of car accidents in Canada, the number of plane crashes across the Southern Hemisphere, even the number of people who will visit a New York City emergency room on a Friday evening…In some ways, this is what you would expect from any large, disordered system. Think about the predictable and quantifiable way that gases behave. It might be impossible to trace the movement of each individual gas molecule, but the uncertainty and disorder at the molecular level wash out when you look at the bigger picture. Similarly, larger regularities emerge from our individually unpredictable lives. It’s almost as though we woke up each morning with a chance, that day, of becoming a murderer, causing a car accident, deciding to propose to our partner, being fired from our job. “An assumption of ‘chance’ encapsulates all the inevitable unpredictability in the world,” Spiegelhalter writes….)

Tad Friend, “Value Meal,” New Yorker, September 30, 2019 (Americans eat three hamburgers a week, so serving beef at your cookout is as patriotic as buying a gun….Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Razing forests to graze cattle—an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century—turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot….Ninety-five per cent of those who buy the Impossible Burger are meat-eaters. The radio host Glenn Beck, who breeds cattle when he’s not leading the “They’re taking away your hamburgers!” caucus, recently tried the Impossible Burger on his show, in a blind taste test against a beef burger—and guessed wrong. “That is insane!” he marvelled. “I could go vegan!”…In the past decade, venture capitalists have begun funding companies that view animal meat not as inflammatory, or as emblematic of the Man, but as a problematic technology. For one thing, it’s dangerous. Eating meat increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer; a recent Finnish study found that, across a twenty-two-year span, devoted meat-eaters were twenty-three per cent more likely to die. Because antibiotics are routinely mixed into pig and cattle and poultry feed to protect and fatten the animals, animal ag promotes antibiotic resistance, which is projected to cause ten million deaths a year by 2050. And avian and swine flus, the most likely vectors of the next pandemic, pass easily to humans, including via the aerosolized feces widely present in slaughterhouses. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found fecal matter in sixty-nine per cent of pork and ninety-two per cent of poultry; Consumer Reports found it in a hundred per cent of ground beef. For another thing, meat is wildly inefficient. Because cattle use their feed not only to grow muscle but also to grow bones and a tail and to trot around and to think their mysterious thoughts, their energy-conversion efficiency—the number of calories their meat contains compared with the number they take in to make it—is a woeful one per cent…)

Joan Acocella, “Beyond the Waters of Death,” New Yorker, October 14, 2019 ([T]he Iliad and the Odyssey have been studied by scholars for about a hundred and fifty generations; the Aeneid, for about a hundred; “Gilgamesh,” for only seven or eight. Translators of Homer and Virgil could look back on the work of great predecessors such as Pope and Dryden. Not so with “Gilgamesh.” The first sort-of-complete Western translation was produced at the end of the nineteenth century…)

Greg Ip, “The World Is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better,” Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2019 (Poverty around the world is plummeting; half the world is now middle class; and illiteracy, disease and deadly violence are receding. These things don’t make headlines because they are gradual, relentless and unsurprising. That is why they are worth highlighting. The problems the world faces are far smaller than those it has already overcome and can be solved the same way: not by betting on miracles but by patiently applying knowledge and tools we already possess….

Perhaps it also feels irresponsible to celebrate the many ways the world is quietly getting better because it distracts from the fight against things that are loudly getting worse: polarized and authoritarian politics, deadly opioids, nuclear proliferation, and most of all, a warming climate—a consequence of all those new middle-class entrants burning fossil fuels…Yet obsessing over such perils is how we’ll likely solve them. Take global warming: Public concern over climate change is rising in the wake of wildfires and floods. Some media reports last year made much of a federal assessment that a warming climate could leave the U.S. economy 10% smaller by 2100.)