For your reading list

Conor Friedersdorf, an associate editor of The Atlantic, has compiled his list of the best journalism of 2010. Sure, it comes six months after everyone else’s list, but this is a good one and annotated to boot.

• best of
• best of 2010
• Conor Friedersdorf
• lists

The most loathsome Americans

Always a fun read: The Beast’s list of the 50 most loathsome Americans of 2010. The idiot Alaskan lady is a mere sixth on the list; #1 is “you”:

Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of blind evolution and it shows. You’re clumsy, stupid, weak and motivated by the basest of urges. Your MO is both grotesquely selfish and unquestionably deferential to questionable authority. You’re not in control of your life. You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor and gleefully submit to oppression, malfeasance and kleptocracy. You will buy anything. You will believe anything. You believe that evolution is a matter of belief. You likely scrolled down to #1, without reading the rest, because you’re an impatient, semi-literate Philistine who’s either unable or unwilling to digest more than 140 characters at a time.

• best of
• best of 2010
• lists
• USA

Quentin Tarantino’s favorite films of 2010

1. Toy Story 3
2. The Social Network
3. Animal Kingdom
4. I Am Love
5. Tangled
6. True Grit
7. The Town
8. Greenberg
9. Cyrus
10. Enter The Void

The rest of the list is here.

• best of
• best of 2010
• lists
• movies
• Quentin Tarantino

Best movie posters of 2010

Two very different lists of the best movie posters from last year: the more indie-oriented list from Mubi and the mainstream one from FirstShowing. The Mubi list is better but you may recognize more of the films from the FirstShowing list.

• best of
• best of 2010
• design
• lists
• movies

The best of 2010

The mega list of best of 2010 lists is up and running at Fimoculous. Prepare to lose yourself in this for several hours.

• best of
• best of 2010
• lists

Death spiral and the other top astronomy photos of the year

Bad Astronomy lists its top fourteen astronomy photos of the year, including this nearly unbelievable spiral pattern caused by a binary star.

The object, called AFGL 3068, is a binary star, two stars in an 800-year orbit around one another. One of them is a red giant, a star near the end of its life. It’s blowing off massive amounts of dark dust, which is enveloping the pair and hiding them from view. But the system’s spin is spraying the material out like a water sprinkler head, causing this giant and delicate spiral pattern on the sky. And by giant, I mean giant: the entire structure is about 3 trillion kilometers (about 2 trillion miles) across.

• astronomy
• best of
• best of 2010
• photography

Best science of 2010

Science magazine has named their top scientific breakthroughs of 2010 and the insights of the decade. The quantum paddle deservedly took the top spot:

“This year’s Breakthrough of the Year represents the first time that scientists have demonstrated quantum effects in the motion of a human-made object,” said Adrian Cho, a news writer for Science. “On a conceptual level that’s cool because it extends quantum mechanics into a whole new realm. On a practical level, it opens up a variety of possibilities ranging from new experiments that meld quantum control over light, electrical currents and motion to, perhaps someday, tests of the bounds of quantum mechanics and our sense of reality.”

• best of
• best of 2010
• physics
• science

The year in photos, 2010

The Big Picture has chosen its best photos of the year for 2010. Part one, part two, part three. What a world we live in.

• best of
• best of 2010
• photography

The Year in Ideas, 2010

The annual NY Times feature is out: the Year in Ideas for 2010. A particular favorite is the ten-year retrospective by Tyler Cowen:

The editors asked Tyler Cowen, the economist who helps run the blog Marginal Revolution, to read the previous nine Ideas issues and send us his thoughts on which entries, with the benefit of hindsight, struck him as noteworthy. Do any ideas from this year’s issue look promising? “I recall reading the 2001 issue when it came out,” he says. “And I was hardly bowled over with excitement by thoughts of ‘Populist Editing.’ Now I use Wikipedia almost every day. The 2001 issue noted that, in its selection of items, ‘frivolous ideas are given the same prominence as weighty ones’; that is easiest to do when we still don’t know which are which.”

• best of
• best of 2010
• Tyler Cowen

A Year in Reading for 2010

The Millions annual Year in Reading mega-feature is back for 2010 and features contributions from Al Jaffee, Margaret Atwood, and Stephen Elliott.

For a seventh year, The Millions has reached out to some of our favorite writers, thinkers, and readers to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these ruminations, cheers, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help make your year in reading in 2011 a fruitful one.

• best of
• best of 2010
• books
• lists

To read later

Give Me Something to Read selects the best long form essays and articles from 2010. I’ve read a few of these, but not as many as I would have guessed. (via waxy)

• best of
• best of 2010

Tyler Cowen’s book picks for 2010

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen picks some of his favorite books of the year. Cowen has never steered me wrong with a book recommendation (even in recommending his own books). Of the most interest to me this year are Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (which I’ve seen rave reviews for all over the place) and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

• best of
• best of 2010
• books
• Tyler Cowen