Best of 2020

Annual Best Of 2020

Books

Movies

Series

Music

Articles

  • Jon Sindreu. “Don’t Try to Prepare for the Next Black Swan. You Can’t,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2020 (“The nature of uncertainty is that investors will never know ahead of time whether they should hedge more. Nor will companies. Global airlines had enough cash to survive three months without income, which would have been enough to navigate most crises that didn’t involve an unprecedented 70% fall in air traffic. Even if their buffers were multiplied by 10 it might not be enough for the next pandemic. So how should investors and officials take uncertainty into account? Individually, weak companies should indeed be encouraged to hold more cash. For industries as a whole, however, the strength of public institutions is what matters.’)
  • James Wood, “Creating God,” The New Yorker, November 9, 2020 (“What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority. The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life. But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command. Who was this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit? If he didn’t exist, then Sunday morning was a mass sickness, nothing more than the contagion of hallucination.”)
  • Adam Gopnik, “Coming Home,” The New Yorker, November 16, 2020 (“‘You know, I just want to come back to something that the brother was saying before,” he said. “About how you have to hit bottom to come back up. Now, I don’t believe that’s true. What’s bottom? Where’s bottom? How do you know you’ve hit bottom? There may be a bottom below the bottom you’ve hit already! There may be a thousand bottoms you could hit if you let yourself. So—say that this, wherever you are, is your bottom. You’re going to declare that it’s as low as you’re going to let yourself go. Then come back up. Don’t wait to hit bottom before you start working your way back up. Call this bottom the bottom.’”)
  • Joshua Rothman, “In Another Life,” The New Yorker, December 21, 2020 (“It’s likely, Miller thinks, that capitalism, ‘with its isolation of individuals and its accelerating generation of choices and chances,’ has  increased the number of our unlived lives. ‘The elevation of choice as  an absolute good, the experience of chance as a strange affront, the  increasing number of exciting, stultifying decisions we must make, the  review of the past to improve future outcomes’—all these ‘feed the  people we’re not’…Novelists often show us people who, trapped by circumstances, struggle  to live their ‘real’ lives…Sartre  thought we should focus on what we have done and will do, rather than  on what we might have done or could do… As Sartre says, we are who we are. But isn’t  the negative space in a portrait part of that portrait? In the sense  that our unled lives have been imagined by us, and are part of us, they  are real; to know what someone isn’t—what she might have been, what  she’s dreamed of being—this is to know someone intimately. When we first  meet people, we know them as they are, but, with time, we perceive the  auras of possibility that surround them. Miller describes the emotion  this experience evokes as ‘beauty and heartbreak together’… We all dwell  in the here and now; we all have actual selves, actual lives. But what  are they? Selves and lives have penumbras and possibilities—that’s  what’s unique about them. They are always changing, and so are always  new; they refuse to stand still. We live in anticipation of their  meaning, which will inevitably exceed what can be known or said. Much must be left unsaid, unseen, unlived.”)
  • Anna Weiner, “Is Substack the Media Future We Want?,” New Yorker, December 28, 2020 (“The great journalistic totems of the last century are dying. News organizations—and other entities that masquerade as them—are turning to increasingly desperate measures for survival. And so we have content farms, clickbait, listicles, inane but viral debates over optical illusions, and a “fake news” epidemic. Just as damaging is that, in the eyes of consumers, journalistic content has lost much of its perceived value—especially as measured in dollars…The subscription-based news industry, the founders speculated, could someday ‘be much larger than the newspaper business ever was, much like the ride-hailing industry in San Francisco is bigger than the taxi industry was before Lyft and Uber.’”)

Quotes

  • Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses. —Alphonse Karr
  • The challenge in addressing the utility of our dreams is not whether to reject them outright in an effort to privilege the sort of logical truth the rational mind offers us. It’s to picture a conversation between imagination and intellect, one that might produce an advantageous vision, one the intellect itself cannot discern and which the imagination alone is not able to create. —Barry H. Lopez, Horizon
  • Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had?  Such chances are rarely granted.  Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action.  If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.  And yet… today I am granted such a chance…  —Greg Iles, The Quiet Game (quoting William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun)

Other:

Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action