Best of 2022

Annual Best Of 2022

Books

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Series

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Articles

  • *Stephen Witt, “The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer,” The New Yorker, December 12, 2022
    • (A full-scale quantum computer could crack our current encryption protocols, essentially breaking the Internet. Most online communications, including financial transactions and popular text-messaging platforms, are protected by cryptographic keys that would take a conventional computer millions of years to decipher. A working quantum computer could presumably crack one in less than a day. That is only the beginning….At the root of quantum-computing research is a scientific concept known as “quantum entanglement.” ​​Entanglement is to computing what nuclear fission was to explosives: a strange property of the subatomic world that could be harnessed to create technology of unprecedented power….[O]nce entangled, [particles] ceased to be distinct objects, and functioned as one system that existed in two parts of the universe at the same time. (This phenomenon is called nonlocality.)”)
  • Ben Taub, “Profiles: Close to the Sun,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2022
    • (“Piccard anticipated that the weeks ahead would prove as much an emotional journey as a test of engineering and will. On land, he worked as a psychiatrist, and he encouraged patients to embrace dislocations from their everyday lives—to build confidence and reframe their priorities through novel experiences. “Routine is more dangerous than adventure,” he told me. “I don’t like le risque aléatoire”—random, incalculable risk. “I don’t like Russian roulette. But routine is killing us,” dulling people’s sense of curiosity and purpose and wonder, leaving them looking back on their lives with regret. He went on to attribute a saying to an early aviator, Jimmy Melrose: “Someone asked him, ‘Are you not afraid of having an accident?’ And he said, ‘The accident would be to die in my bed.’ ”)
  • Jeannie Suk Gersen, “Keep Out,” The New Yorker, June 20, 2022
    • (“In 1875, the future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis met his classmate Samuel Warren at Harvard Law School…[Later] the two men published their famous law-review essay “The Right to Privacy,” in 1890…. By the nineteen-sixties, many courts and legislatures had recognized such a right, in various forms, entitling people “to be let alone” and protected from incursions into their private affairs… The knowledge that others—whether private citizens or the government—may be observing our words and actions against our will alters the environment in which our decisions are made; it makes it harder to exercise true control over personal decisions… Rather than a prerogative of the privileged, intent on keeping the general public at bay, the right to privacy should have been understood from the start as a prerogative of the people, establishing a zone where the state cannot readily trespass. Deciding where the zone extends and when that zone can be breached will always be a vexed and demanding process, because it takes place at the very interface between a polity and a person. Yet when we diminish an individual’s protections against the state the costs are far from insignificant. That shouldn’t be a secret. Personal autonomy, the ultimate value that privacy enshrines, doesn’t just buttress freedom; it is freedom.”)
  • Scott Hershovitz, “How to Pray to a God You Do Not Believe In,” The New York Times, May 02, 2022
    • (‘This is the ‘problem of evil.’ It’s an old philosophical question…People have proposed many answers, but most are poorly reasoned. For instance, some say that good requires evil — that it can’t exist without it. It’s not clear why that would be true. But the bigger problem is that if you take that view, you call into question God’s omnipotence. It turns out there’s something God can’t do: create good without evil… When [my son] Rex was 4, he reframed my view of religion. One night, I was cooking dinner, and he asked, ‘Is God real?’ ‘What do you think?’ I asked… “God isn’t real,” he said. “But when we pretend, he is.” Philosophers have a name for this sort of view. They call it ‘fictionalism.’ Suppose I say, ‘Dumbledore teaches at Hogwarts.’ If that was a claim about this world, it would be false. Hogwarts doesn’t exist here, and neither does Dumbledore, so he can hardly teach there. But they do exist in a different world — the fictional world that Harry Potter lives in. The sentence ‘Dumbledore teaches at Hogwarts’ is true in that fiction….Pretending blurs the boundaries between this world and the ones we imagine. It breathes life into stories, letting them shape the world we live in. Just think of the delight kids take in Santa Claus, even those who know, deep down, that he’s not real. Or the way they lose themselves in play. Pretending makes the world more magical and meaningful. And it’s not just for kids. When it feels like the world is falling apart, I seek refuge in religious rituals — but not because I believe my prayers will be answered. The prayers we say in synagogue remind me that evil has always been with us but that people persevere, survive and even thrive. I take my kids so that they feel connected to that tradition, so that they know the world has been falling apart from the start — and that there’s beauty in trying to put it back together….”)
  • Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” The New Yorker, March 28, 2022
    • (“More than twenty million people a year pass through the doors of a Margaritaville-branded establishment…The development in Daytona was a joint project of Margaritaville Holdings and Minto Communities USA, the American branch of a builder based in Ottawa…It attracts people—and this may sound corny—who have a set of common values. Those values are rooted in this attitude. A person created that attitude. But whether or not you feel connected to that person, it’s not physics. It’s, ‘We’re interested in meeting other people. We like to have fun. We don’t want to be overly political. We like the idea of being happy.’…A point that residents kept making to me was the diversity of people, of backgrounds and talents…They’d sold their homes and come south, in large part, they said, because of the high taxes in New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. This was a near-universal refrain. Low taxes, low homeowner’s-association fees, warm climate, like-minded folk: you can’t knock it. In one sense, it was heartening that men and women who’d put their life on the line had got a chance to live out their next chapter in a place like Margaritaville. But I couldn’t help thinking, home-town-centrically, of all the retired public-sector employees I’d met in Latitude Margaritaville from high-tax blue states who’d got their pensions, which were funded (or underfunded) by those high taxes, and had withdrawn to this low-tax red state. It wasn’t just one-per-centers who were fleeing to Florida to escape the state and city tax regimens of the Northeast. Our ramshackle system of interstate tax arbitrage had provided incentives for teachers, bureaucrats, health workers, firefighters, and police officers to exacerbate both the exodus and, perversely, the burden on the taxpayers left behind. Whatever one’s politics, it wasn’t hard to see Latitude Margaritaville as a manifestation of an economy out of whack…Latitude Margaritaville came off both as an escape from America and as the most quintessentially American setting of all.”)
  • David Marchese, “Christopher Walken Shares the Secrets of Acting Like Christopher Walken,” The New York Times, February 8, 2022
    • (“I remember making a movie once where they had me dye my hair this completely unnatural color. I argued, but they had their way, and there I was. So in every scene I was in, whomever I was talking to, my subtext was What do you think of my hair? No matter what I was talking about to anybody, I was thinking, What do you think of my hair? Are you looking at my hair? Isn’t my hair horrible? It colored everything that I did, and I ended up being rather amusing but nobody knew why except me. Sometimes I do things just to amuse myself. I’ve played scenes pretending that I was Elvis or Bugs Bunny or a U-boat commander. I just don’t tell anybody.”)
  • Parul Sehgal, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” The New Yorker, January 03 & 10, 2022
    • (“P.T.S.D., is the fourth most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in America…Defined by the DSM-III…[t]he expanded definition has…stretched the concept so far that some 636,120 possible symptom combinations can be attributed to P.T.S.D….The ambiguity is moral as well as medical: a soldier who commits war crimes can share the diagnosis with his victims. Today, with the term having grown even more elastic, this same diagnosis can apply to a journalist who reported on that atrocity, to descendants of the victims, and even to a historian studying the event a century later, who may be a casualty of ‘vicarious trauma’…In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage.”)
  • Maria Popova, “Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on the Deeper Meanings of Friendship, Love, and Heartbreak,” the marginalian
    • (Quoting David Whyte: “The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence….But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self; the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”)
  • Paul Graham, “What You Wish You Had Known,” January 2005
    • (When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I’m going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us….”)

Poems

 

Quotes

  • Most people want to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch. —Robert Orben, as quoted in The Reader’s Digest, 1986

 

  • Adults [are] those who knew how to feed and shelter themselves, how to be constructive and productive members of a group, how to think critically. This knowledge does not magically accrue with age, though. It must be earned. —Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century

 

  • For light is the noble bond between the perceiving faculty and the thing perceived, and the god who gives us light is the sun… Now that which is the sun of intelligent natures, is the idea of good, the cause of knowledge and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and standing in the same relation to them in which the sun stands to light…. And this idea of good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and the author not of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than either in dignity and power. —Plato, The Republic

 

  • Listen again to the opening of “Black Dog,” or to Plant’s forlorn wail at the start of “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” or Page’s fingers in full flow in “No Quarter,” or the violent precision of Bonham’s beat in “When the Levee Breaks.” It’s like listening to atheism: the charge is still there, ready to be picked up, ready to release lives. The anti-religious religious power of rock was exactly what my mother feared. I don’t think it was the obvious mimicry of religious worship—the sweaty congregants, the stairways to Heaven, and all the rest of it—that worried her. I think she feared rock’s inversion of religious power: the insidious power to enter one’s soul. —James Woods, “Good Times, Bad Times.” The New Yorker, January 31, 2022.

 

  • Steve frowned. Can that really be true? he wondered. It’s hard to believe. But then Steve thought about Delmore. Were all of the executives there truly interested in profitability? He remembered attending an off-site meeting with the leadership team of Delmore’s paper-making division. The division had been mired in a slow decline for over a year, as more and more of the market gradually shifted to competitors’ products. Yet, to judge by the content of their discussions, most of the executives were focused on things the division was already doing well, whose impact on profits seemed to be small—incremental quality improvements and modest production efficiencies—rather than the needs of their customers [or big strategic changes]. It was the kind of disturbing experience that had driven Steve to seek out Zhao’s tutelage in the first place. Maybe Zhao’s right, Steve mused. Maybe some people in business just aren’t very interested in profitability. —Adrian Slywotzky, The Art of Profitability

 

  • Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc—ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war—we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas—the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is to be foolish—can have no future with us. It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. It is more important to bring E. O. Wilson’s biophilia into our daily conversations than it is to remain compliant in a time of extinction, ethnic cleansing, and rising seas. It is more important to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost. Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known.  …In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world? —Barry Lopes. Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

 

  • An adventure is a crisis that you accept. A crisis is a possible adventure that you refuse, for fear of losing control.— Swiss psychiatrist and aeronaut Bertrand Piccard as quoted by Ben Taub, “Profiles: Close to the Sun,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2022

 

  • It’s a basic truth that Jack knows: if you’re dragged out of your bed by the cops at four in the morning and they want to talk to you about the Kennedy assassination, the Lindbergh kidnapping or aiding and abetting freaking Pontius Pilate, what you do is you keep your fucking mouth shut. Doesn’t matter if they ask you your height, your favorite color or what you had for breakfast that morning, you keep your fucking mouth shut. If they ask you if night is darker than day, or whether up is higher than down, you keep your fucking mouth shut. There are four words, and only four words, you can say. I want my lawyer. When your lawyer gets there he’ll give you some sage advice. He’ll tell you to keep your fucking mouth shut. —Don Winslow, California Fire and Life 

 

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