Best of 2021

Annual Best Of 2021

Books

  • Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order (2021)
    • (Nonfiction: Dense; meandering; polemic and yet an exceptional take on how to be a good human.) Recommended
  • Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff (2020)
    • (Nonfiction: A psychologist enters the world of professional poker to discover how the game itself relies not only on skill and luck, it reveals philosophical truths and lessons of human fallibility.) Recommended
  • Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021)
    • (Nonfiction: The subject of a New Yorker, a must read. The next cold war has already begun and everyone who is online or depends on our public infrastructure such as electricity or medical care is in the line of fire.) Recommended
  • Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century (2021)
    • (Nonfiction: Evolutionary biologists (and husband-wife) take up the questions of (a) why in the age of prosperity and advanced medicine we are becoming more anxious, less healthy, and growing increasingly suspicious of the forces shaping our culture and  (b) how to overcome this dilemma.) Recommended.
  • Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies (2020)
    • (Autofiction: While the first-generation immigrant story has already been told and retold—there are probably now whole shelves dedicated to left-handed Lithuanians born who overcame a lisp and live in the Bronx(th)—the author’s take on what it means to be an immigrant of Muslim decent living in the U.S. in a post 9/11 world offers extraordinary insights into the cultural norms of both American and the Muslim worlds. The book begs to be made into a play.)
  • Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram, (2004)
    • (Fiction: A sprawling, immersive story of life in Bombay in the 1980s. The author, reportedly an escaped convict from Australia, deftly captures the details of daily life of the city’s inhabitants from the palaces and the slums to the expatriates who forever remain on the run. The work, reportedly semi-biographical, borders on magical realism. Long, sophomoric, and often overwrought, it is ultimately a triumph in capturing not so much in the stories of the individual characters but in the dazzling life of the city itself.) Warning: Violent.
  • Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (1958)
    • (Fiction: While certain mores have thankfully changed since the book was originally published—a woman can now dance barefoot without scandal—the drama surrounding crimes of passion, especially a murder, remains immutable. As a former trial lawyer, I can attest that few books more accurately chronicle the life and rhythm of a trial from unpredictability of the witnesses to the inscrutability of a jury to the highs and lows of participating in the drama. While there are many books fashioned around the law, Robert Traver shows us how the law itself—the charges, defenses, and rules of evidence—is the true arbiter of the story that unfolds. For the non-lawyer it is an exposition of the tools and trade. For the practicing lawyers and former lawyers among us, it is a reminder of our craft.)
  • Carl Zimmer, Life’s Edge (2021)
    • (Nonfiction: From the NY Times:  “Zimmer’s book tackles some of biology’s hardest questions: What is life? How did it begin? And what criteria should we even use to call something “living”? From metabolism to sentience to evolution to our current focus on DNA, Zimmer takes the reader on an elegant, deeply researched tour….”)

Movies

Series

Music

Videos

Articles

Joshua Rothman, “Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational?,” The New Yorker, August 23, 2021 (“The  realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use  what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula.  But, in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes  individually, but often together. For all this to happen, rationality is  necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the  work.”)

Jill Lepore, “The Next Cyberattack Is Already Under Way,” The New Yorker, February 1, 2020 (In a book review for This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race: “A zero-day is a software or hardware  flaw for which there is no existing patch…zero-days represent vulnerabilities that can be turned into weapons… Every second, Americans plug into the Internet a  hundred and twenty-seven devices, from refrigerators and thermostats to  library catalogues and bicycles…. In March, 2020, as the federal government first began to frame  a response to COVID-19,  hackers attacked the Department of Health and Human Services. That  spring, hackers started attacking hospitals around the world that were  treating coronavirus patients, shutting down thousands of computers with  ransomware… It has been the ethos of Wall Street and  Silicon Valley for decades… Perlroth likes a piece of graffiti  she once saw: ‘Move slowly and fix your shit.’ Lock down the code, she’s  saying. Bar the door. This raises the question of the horse’s  whereabouts relative to the barn. If you listen, you can hear the  thunder of hooves.”)

Danielle Kraese and Irving Ruan, “The Advice Gap,” The New Yorker, February 22, 2021 (“My Parents: Don’t put photos of yourself on the Internet. You’ll get kidnapped! Me: Post thousands of carefully curated photos of your life on Instagram so you can build a following and attract sponsors who reflect your core values, such as Bacardi and MeUndies.”)

Bess Kalb, “A Selection of the 30 Most Disappointing Under 30,” The New Yorker, January 5, 2017 (“Will Heller, twenty-six: After a month at a Zen silent-meditation retreat, Heller went back to his job at Goldman Sachs as a commodities trader in oil and gas…”)

Deepak Chopra, “Evolution of Wisdom,” Resurgence & Ecologist, Issue 243, July/August 2007 (“The state of the planet today is a direct result of human vision. The way we pursue happiness – by exploiting natural resources, ignoring environmental degradation, and largely giving up on overpopulation – represents our current stage of evolution. We have created a vision without wisdom. The key ingredients of this vision are both obvious and subtle: • Happiness based on consumption • A shift from centuries of religious idealism to pragmatic materialism • A desire to conquer Nature and be free from disasters and threats • A belief in science and progress as separate from spirituality • Loss of community, replaced with individualism and competition • Feeling isolated and unsupported except on the physical level • Denial of the existence of a transcendent power. Changing these factors will take time, and there is no guarantee that we will succeed in finding a vision that will promote wisdom for survival….Luckily, despite all the self-destructive threats from our innate hostility and aggression, human consciousness displays a huge amount of good and an infinite amount of potential. We should try to survive on the basis of wisdom. If we succeed, this dark phase that we are passing through will dissolve, as all the dark ages that went before it have.”)

Hal Shorey, “How We Really Pick Our Romantic Partners,” Psychology Today, December 12, 2021 (Fluff piece that illuminates a larger surrounding decision making: “Think about where you are in your life. For many of us, this was simply a function of yes or no decisions. “Would you like to be my friend?” “Would you like to have a drink?” “Would you like to live here?” “Would you like to go out on a date?” Based on your answers, you will indeed end up somewhere; but did you actually choose your destination?”)

Joanna Stern, “I Gave My Mom a Crypto Wallet: A Simple Guide to NFTs, Blockchain and More,” The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2021

 

Poems

  • “Rain,” by Don Paterson
  • “The Way,” by Adam Goldbarth

 

Quotes:

Responsibility is not an easy sell. Parents have been striving forever to make their kids responsible. Society attempts the same thing, with its educational institutions, apprenticeships, volunteer organizations, and clubs. You might even consider the inculcation of responsibility the fundamental purpose of society. But something has gone wrong. We have committed an error, or a series of errors. We have spent too much time, for example (much of the last fifty years), clamoring about rights, and we are no longer asking enough of the young people we are socializing. We have been telling them for decades to demand what they are owed by society. We have been implying that the important meanings of their lives will be given to them because of such demands, when we should have been doing the opposite: letting them know that the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden. Because we have not been doing this, they have grown up looking in the wrong places. And this has left them vulnerable: vulnerable to easy answers and susceptible to the deadening force of resentment. What about the unfolding of history has left us in this position? How has this vulnerability, this susceptibility, come about?

—Peterson, Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order

 

Never do anything, no matter how small it may seem, without asking why, precisely, you’re doing it. And never judge anything others do without asking the same question. “Every action your opponent takes has a reason behind it, whether conscious or unconscious,” he says. One of the most common things he hears from people who are starting out—and sometimes even veterans of the game—is how hard it is to play with bad players. They are impossible to read, the argument goes, because “they could have anything.” Not true, Phil argues. “Even terrible players make the plays they make for a reason, and it’s your job to figure it out,” he tells me. “When a hand is shown down, try to walk back through your opponent’s decision and come up with reasons they might have had for taking the actions they did.” Don’t judge them. Don’t berate them, even in your head, by thinking what an awful play they’ve made—a bad bet, a crazy call, an insane raise. Just try to figure out the why behind it. It’s powerful advice. How often do we go off on someone for making a decision that we, personally, wouldn’t have made, calling them an idiot, fuming, getting angry? How much time and emotional energy we’d save if we simply learned to ask ourselves why they acted as they did, rather than judge, make presumptions, and react. And how much money we’d save on bills for our shrink if we paused to ask the same about our own actions and motivations. Don’t forget the why, I write down and repeat silently to myself. I don’t even want to think about the number of times I’ve done things just because. I know in theory that I should know the reason I make any choice, but how often I’ve simply acted, in the hurry of acting, without stopping to reflect.

—Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff

 

“Christian” is used to stand in for the totality of American life. For indeed, where some might see modernity or individualism or mercantile democracy or the heritage of the Enlightenment or an irreducibly complex and endlessly heterogeneous nation, we saw Christianity. To us, it was all Christian. Not just the churches and their ice cream socials and Friday fish fries; or the bacon at breakfast; or the wine with wafers on Sundays and with everything else all week long. Not just the place names and first names drawn from the Gospels and the roll of Catholic saints; or the painted eggs in April and pine wreaths and winter sleds in December. No, I mean also the department-store sales in January and the interest-charging credit cards used at them; and the vacations spent at the beach driven by the bizarre urge to darken one’s skin; and the shrill perfect fifths of a violin; and the notion that running a piece of toilet paper along your anus is enough to keep you clean; and the discomfort of working with a blade of cloth tied to your neck so tightly you can barely breathe; and the bikinis and knee-high skirts; and, of course, the needlessly happy ending to every story. I don’t think we were exactly wrong to see things as we did. After all, it was even in the language we spoke here, its plain, unadorned beauty, its range of short, percussive verbs, its oracular strength, a language of the sermon and of world making, in tone and lexicon not just borrowed from the King James Bible but also shot through and through—even today—with the simple, active robustness of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Lord. And yes, the founding fathers had sued for religious freedom, a value much vaunted and advertised—which should have put us at ease—but of course we would learn (at school, at citizenship training) that those white-wigged Protestant fathers had mostly been making room in a new republic for competing factions of their various protesting Christian persuasions. Even the Enlightenment itself, the alleged origin of this national experiment, even this could not be divorced from the European Christian culture to which it was a response. And the secular humanism that resulted? The evolved-to-some, mutated-to-others fruit picked from long-tended orchards of Christian learning. In my dream, I saw an encapsulating mise-en-scène of our kind’s failure to understand—let alone flourish in—this Christian land, an unwilling participation in its symbols, its rituals, and, as ever, our resulting disappointment.

—Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

 

Reductionism…combined with this is the hyper-novel world in which we live, so complex, so filled with choice and authorities of varying credentials arguing opposite things, that many of us crave simple, immovable rules with which to navigate our lives. We want, at least in some realms, to be able to “set and forget”—to rely on culture, rather than consciousness. This is part of what drives brand loyalty, taking the same commute even when a better one is available, and sticking to pharmaceutical and dietary recommendations even after they’ve been debunked. In our quest for set-and-forget rubrics, we fall prey to reductionist thinking. What we need instead is flexible, logic-based, evolutionary thinking with which to navigate….Simple prescriptions make snappier sound bites, and they are easier to remember for those looking for set-and-forget solutions, but when they fail you, you are left with nowhere to stand, no ability to problem solve for yourself. Rather than blindly “trusting the science” or following the lead of authorities, learn to do at least some of the logic for yourself, and seek authorities who are willing to both show you how they arrived at their conclusions and admit when they have made mistakes…

—Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century

 

By the time Becky joined Crossroads, he’d already mastered the game of it. The object was to move closer to the center of the group, to become an inner-circler, by following the rules exemplified by Ambrose and the other advisers. The rules required counterintuitive behaviors. Instead of comforting a friend with fibs, you told him unwelcome truths. Instead of avoiding the socially awkward, the hopelessly uncool, you sought them out and engaged with them (making sure, of course, that you were noticed doing this). Instead of choosing friends as exercise partners, you (conspicuously) introduced yourself to newcomers and conveyed your belief in their unqualified worth. Instead of being strong, you blubbered. Where his tears on the night of drinking gin had been cathartic, his tears later on came more easily and were a more fungible currency, redeemable for progress toward the inner circle. Because it was a game, he was good at it, and although intimacies achieved by game-theoretical calculation were hard to feel great about, he sensed that other people genuinely valued his insights and were genuinely moved by his emotional displays. 

—Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

To step into a boxing ring, a fighter must convince himself that several things he knows to be true are, in fact, false. He must convince himself that the blows he sustains to his brain will not do irreparable damage and that the accretion of these blows will not, eventually, destroy him, as it has so many others. He must convince himself that his opponent is not altogether human, because otherwise how do you strike someone toward whom you bear no ill will, and strike him not just for show but savagely, to hurt him? Above all, he must convince himself that what goes on inside the ring and what goes on outside it are separate matters entirely, that the one has no relation to the other. And he can have no doubt, because doubt breeds hesitation, and in the ring, hesitation can be deadly. 

—Jacob Stern, “Can a Boxer Return to the Ring After Killing?,” The Atlantic, November 18, 2021