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In 2015, BBC Culture polled critics around the world and came up with a list of the best 100 American films. The video above offers a visual look at the list. Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Spielberg each have several films on the list. Although many of the films were edited by women, only one was directed by a woman.
In a conversation last year with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates recommended that readers of his acclaimed Between the World and Me check out a baker’s dozen other books, including his mentor David Carr’s The Night of the Gun, The Half Has Never Been Told (previously mentioned here), and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.
I could have imagined Isabel Wilkerson’s excellent The Warmth of Other Suns on this list too; it’s the most eye-opening American history book I’ve read in years. (Paging Lin-Manuel Miranda to make a play out of this.)
When a show spans 27 seasons and almost 600 episodes, you’re bound to hit your futuristic mark at least some of the time. Here are ten instances in which The Simpsons predicted inventions which have since come to pass, including smartwatches you can talk to, baby translators, and left-handed stores.
On the occasion of the release of Radiohead’s latest album, Consequence of Sound has ranked every album and every song by the band. I won’t tell you the exact order, but Kid A, In Rainbows, and OK Computer are their top 3 albums (spot on…Kid A is my #1) and Airbag, The National Anthem,1 Fake Plastic Trees, and Everything In Its Right Place make the top 10 songs (mine is Everything In Its Right Place or maybe the live version of True Love Waits).
My kids and I were listening to Kid A in the car last summer and when The National Anthem came on, Ollie read the display, scratched his head, and said, “this is a really weird version of the national anthem.”↩
From the nonbinary.org wiki, a list of gender identities that aren’t male or female.
transgender is an umbrella term for all genders that go beyond society’s ideas of gender, which includes some kinds of binary gender people. Some call their gender identity simply “transgender,” as a nonbinary identity itself.
genderfuzz. Coined by lolzmelmel in 2014. “having multiple genders that are fuzzy and blurred together, making it impossible to identify each one individually or separate one from the rest. alternative names: blurgender (not to be confused with genderblur)
cosmicgender. Coined by dragon-friker in 2014. “A gender so vast and complex that you are only able to process a small bit of it at a time. like viewing the night sky through a telescope you cannot hope to see all of it at once however you may gain more knowledge about parts of it the longer you focus on one part. may contain any number of sub genders within it that may present themselves to you. it is infinite in its possibility. name from the vast reaches of space filled with things we cannot begin to imagine.”
hijra. In south Asian countries including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the Hijra are people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression. This is a very ancient tradition. Today, Hijra are legally recognized as a gender other than female or male.
nocturnalgender. Coined by passengender in 2014. Any gender that feels more intense during the night, “but weak/nonexistent when it is light out.” Syn. batgender, owlgender, moongender. Counterpart: flowergender.
Fascinating.
Update: Sam Escobar answers some frequently asked questions about non-binary gender.
The gender binary separates those who identify as male or female, simple as that. Non-binary genders, however, don’t fit neatly within these two-they can be a combination of male and female, a fluid back-and-forth, or totally outside of the binary. Cisgender people, on the other hand, are folks whose identities align with the gender they were assigned at birth.
(via @djacobs)
The American showman P.T. Barnum published a book of rules for making money called The Art of Money Getting. Here are the 20 rules from the book:
1. Don’t mistake your vocation
2. Select the right location
3. Avoid debt
4. Persevere
5. Whatever you do, do it with all your might
6. Depend upon your own personal exertions
7. Use the best tools
8. Don’t get above your business
9. Learn something useful
10. Let hope predominate but be not too visionary
11. Do not scatter your powers
12. Be systematic
13. Read the newspapers
14. Beware of “outside operations”
15. Don’t indorse without security
16. Advertise your business
17. Be polite and kind to your customers
18. Be charitable
19. Don’t blab
20. Preserve your integrity
The book is also available in a convenient paperback format.
P.S. If you find it difficult to believe that this book was written by the same man who said “there’s a sucker born every minute”, then you’ll be pleased to know that Barnum probably never said that.
There are spoilers galore in Cinefix’s look at the best ever plot twists in movies, sorted into categories including It Was All a Dream, Not Dead, and Unexpectedly Bad.
I like how Cinefix does these videos. They pick the ten films, but they also mention other films that take similar approaches. In this case, the picks are also more populist than usual, which I appreciate.
From Complex, a listing of the best rapper alive for each year since 1979, from Grandmaster Caz to Biggie to Nicki to Drake.
Christopher Wallace was only alive for 67 days in 1997, but with a talent so immense, that’s all it took for him to be the most dominant rapper of the year. In the months after Biggie’s March 9 death, it’s almost as if his stock rose. The untimely loss of someone so young, with so much heft in the language of hip-hop, was like a call to reflection. Infatuation with his wit, wordplay, and delivery soared, and 1997, in spite of tragedy, was Biggie’s biggest year.
Life After Death was released just over two weeks after Biggie passed and peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The album was an ambitious two-disc set with a tracklist comprised of every type of song imaginable. While the diverse styles and subject matter — his daughter’s college plan, kinky sex, hotel heists, a fully-sung ballad — were an organic product of Biggie’s incomparable range, the strategy of Life After Death’s sequencing has become the de facto approach for rap albums in the years since. It’s an incredibly influential project, before you even press play.
Check out more great covers at the NY Times, Buzzfeed, and The Casual Optimist. Compare with last year’s picks.
From Steven Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style, here are some of the most common words and phrases that trip people up.
Bemused means bewildered and does not mean amused.
Correct: The unnecessarily complex plot left me bemused. / The silly comedy amused me.
Data is a plural count noun not, standardly speaking, a mass noun. [Note: “Data is rarely used as a plural today, just as candelabra and agenda long ago ceased to be plurals,” Pinker writes. “But I still like it.”]
Correct: “This datum supports the theory, but many of the other data refute it.”
Enormity means extreme evil and does not mean enormousness. [Note: It is acceptable to use it to mean a deplorable enormousness.]
Correct: The enormity of the terrorist bombing brought bystanders to tears. / The enormousness of the homework assignment required several hours of work.
A deplorable enormousness!
The person I listen to the most regarding books I should be reading is Tyler Cowen…he has never once steered me wrong. So when he wrote about the best fiction of 2015, I perked up. I’ve been hearing many good things about Elena Ferrante’s series (Cowen himself flagged her The Lost Daughter as a favorite back in 2008) but his assertion that her recent series of novels ranks as “one of the prime literary achievements of the last twenty years” puts it solidly on my holiday beach reads list. The New World by Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz and Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty also sound particularly interesting.
Update: Cowen recently shared his list of best non-fiction books of the year as well. Biographies rule the list: on Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, and Genghis Khan. What a list…but I have to say that reading biographies of Thatcher or Kissinger doesn’t appeal at all.
Update: The NY Times weighs in with their list of 100 Notable Books of 2015. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an appearance, as do the latest installments by Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Update: From Buzzfeed, The 24 Best Fiction Books of 2015 and from Slate, The Overlooked Books of 2015.
Update: The NY Times Sunday Book Review names their 10 Best Books of 2015. Coates and Ferrante feature. By my count, 7 of the 10 books are written by women.
Update: From Slate, a list of the best audiobooks of 2015. The Economist’s best books of the year, including SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes. For part one of their best books list, The Guardian asked writers for their favorite books of the year; Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers got multiple mentions (but is not yet out in the US).
Update: Amazon’s editors picked their 100 best books of the year and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies topped the list. The top non-fiction book is Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family.
Update: A design-oriented list from Michael Bierut, including The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
Update: Bill Gates shared his favorite books of 2015, including Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words.
For The Millions Year in Reading 2015, they asked a bunch of writers for their reading recommendations. Joyce Carol Oates recommends the Didion biography The Last Love Song while Celeste Ng read The Suicide Index.
The Atlantic asked their editors and writers to share The Best Book I Read This Year. This is one of several lists to include The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf.
Update: The NY Times book critics weigh in with their favorite books of the year. Moar Ferrante! Moar Coates!
From the New Yorker Food Issue,1 Lauren Collins examines how the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list comes together. I haven’t eaten at any of these sorts of restaurants in years (for a lot of reasons), and this bit gets to part of the reason why:
The restaurants in the upper reaches of the list tend to fall into a certain mode. They are all the same place, Giles Coren once conjectured in the London Times, “only the face changes, like Doctor Who.” Just as there is Oscar bait, there is 50 Best bait. “It’s opening up in Beijing,” David Chang said, imagining the archetypal 50 Best restaurant. “It’s a Chinese restaurant by a guy who worked for Adrià, Redzepi, and Keller. He cooks over fire. Everything is a story of his terroir. He has his own farm and hand-dives for his own sea urchins.” Hearing about 50 Best winners, and having eaten at a few of them, I started to think of them as icebreaker restaurants — places that create moments, that give you prompts. This can be exhilarating, or it can be infantilizing. It is the dining experience as Cards Against Humanity.
Not to be confused with the NY Times’ Food Issue, which was out this past weekend.↩
Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder polled 1600 people to find a list of the 50 best non-fiction podcasts. The list skews nerdy, science, and tech. The top 5 is unsurprising:
1. This American Life
2. Radiolab
3. Serial
4. 99% Invisible
5. WTF with Marc Maron
I wasn’t expecting much, but this list of status items from The Cut is pretty interesting reading. Status is often equated with money, but this list goes beyond that with picks like Japanese chalk for lecturing professors, the proper throat balm for theater people, watches for bankers1, weed for High Times editors, and the best canned tomatoes.
You might think that the watches get more expensive as you climb the corporate ladder, but that’s not how status symbols work sometimes. For instance, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wears a Swatch that can’t have cost him more than a couple hundred bucks.↩
From the always excellent BLDGBLOG, a list of recommended books for your end-of-summer reading. Included on the list are a novel about drug cartels, a book about crime in the future, a history of Nazi concentration camps, and a book on rust, about which I have personally heard good things.
From Back to the Future’s DeLorean to Dr. Who’s Tardis, here’s a listing of sci-fi vehicles ranked from slowest to fastest.
In the ongoing struggle of Star Wars vs. Star Trek, Wars is the clear winner in the speed category: the Millennium Falcon is thousands of times faster than the Enterprise. Also, I didn’t know the Death Star was so fast!
Ok, so narrowing down all of the beautifully shot movies in the world to a list of just 10 is absurd, but to their credit, the gang at Cinefix manage to mention more than 50 or 60 movies in their top 10 review. If you’ve only seen even a few of these, you’re doing well.
Manhattan, Citizen Kane, The Fall, 2001, Hero, The Tree of Life. Damn.
Still, where did the lighter fluid come from?
Sister is my new mother, Mother.
I’m afraid I just blue myself.
I’m about halfway through season two of Arrested Development again on Netflix and it might be the best show ever on television. I’m not even kidding.
Update: NPR has been obsessively cataloging the show’s running gags here. Holy shit, the extensive foreshadowing of Buster losing his hand! This show is amazing. (via @Nick__Vance)
This list ranking Don DeLillo’s novels into categories ranging from “Classic” to “Avoid” from 2007 excludes his two most recent novels, but if you have little exposure to the author, it’s a good place to start.
White Noise. DeLillo’s breakthrough success, arguably still his quintessential masterpiece, and the funniest and most sustained example of his talent. Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies, struggles with information overload, simulated disasters, an “airborne toxic event,” the most photographed barn in America, and a drug that neutralizes the fear of death. If you’re going to like DeLillo, this is the book that will make it happen.
Confession: aside from attempting to tackle Underworld1 more than 10 years ago, I have not read any DeLillo. I should probably fix that? (via @davidgrann)
I bought my copy of Underworld at a San Francisco used book store at the same time I bought Infinite Jest. Like I said, Underworld didn’t do it for me, but reading IJ became an odd sort of turning point in my life.↩
Near the end of a piece by Morgan Housel called Innovation Isn’t Dead, appears “the typical path of how people respond to life-changing inventions”:
1. I’ve never heard of it.
2. I’ve heard of it but don’t understand it.
3. I understand it, but I don’t see how it’s useful.
4. I see how it could be fun for rich people, but not me.
5. I use it, but it’s just a toy.
6. It’s becoming more useful for me.
7. I use it all the time.
8. I could not imagine life without it.
9. Seriously, people lived without it?
That’s about right. I can only recall a couple of instances where I’ve skipped from step 1 to step 8 or 9: when I first used the Web1 and when Jobs introduced the iPhone at MacWorld. Everything else — Google, HD TV, Twitter, personal computers, streaming music services, wifi, laptops, Instagram, mobile phones — went through most of the 9 phases. (via @cdixon)
Not the Internet, the Web. I used the Internet before I used the Web (Usenet, FTP, and Gopher mostly) and I never got the “OMG this is going to change everything” vibe I got after using the Web for five minutes.↩
From John Horgan, a list of 25 Terrific Science(y) Books. There are some unorthodox picks here (next to some no-brainers):
Ulysses, by James Joyce, 1922. Yeah, it’s a work of fiction, but as I argued a few years ago, Joyce was a more astute observer of the mind than anyone before or since. He exemplifies Noam Chomsky’s dictum that we will always learn more about ourselves from literature than from science.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, 1962. This sneaky, subversive assault on conventional notions of scientific truth and progress triggered a revolution itself within the philosophy of science. Be sure to note where Kuhn compares scientists with drug addicts.
From Steven Weinberg, a list of the 13 best science books for the general reader. Solid list. But The Origin of Species is more than a little tough for the lay reader; I tried reading it a few years ago and it was a slog. I recommend The Elegant Universe and The Making of the Atomic Bomb w/o reservation.
From designer Karl Sluis, a list of nine great book about information visualization not written by Edward Tufte. Gonna keep my eye out for Stephen Few’s Now You See It and David McCandless’ The Visual Miscellaneum, but Herbert Bayer’s World Geographic Atlas is a little too rich for my blood.
From Petapixel, a list of photographic firsts, including the first photograph (1826), the first digital photograph (1957), the first photo of the Sun (1845), and the first photograph of a US President (1843).
John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was the first president to have his photograph taken. The daguerreotype was shot in 1843, a good number of years after Adams left office in 1829. The first to have his picture taken in office was James Polk, the 11th President, who was photographed in 1849.
Adams was born in 1767, which got me thinking about a long-standing interest of mine: who was the earliest born person ever photographed? The Maine Historical Society believes Revolutionary War vet Conrad Heyer was the earliest born. Born in 1749, he crossed the Delaware with Washington before sitting for this portrait in 1852.
But according to the Susquehanna County Historical Society, John Adams (no apparent relation to the above Adams) was born in 1745 and was photographed at some point before he died in 1849. Other contenders with unverified ages include Revolutionary War vet Baltus Stone (born somewhere between 1744 and 1754 according to various sources) and a former slave named Caesar, photographed in 1851 at the alleged age of 114, which would mean he was born around 1737.
Still, that’s photographs of at least two people who were born in the 1740s, at least five years before the start of the French and Indian War. As children, it’s possible they could have interacted with people who lived through England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 or even the English Civil War (1642-1651). The Great Span lives on.
Brown Bunny, Cannibal Holocaust, The 120 Days of Sodom, and The Last Temptation of Christ… they are among the most controversial movies of all time.
Perhaps a little NSFW. (via devour)
Tim Grierson and Will Leitch did a pretty good job in this list of All 15 Pixar Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best.
We went back-and-forth on the top two here, but we ultimately had to go with [Wall-E], the most original and ambitious of all the Pixar movies. The first half-hour, which basically tells the story of the destruction of the planet and the devolution of the human race without a single line of dialogue, is total perfection: It’s almost Kubrickian in its attention to detail and perspective, though it never feels cold or ungenerous.
Piece-of-shit Cars 2 is rightly parked at the bottom of the heap, Wall-E is obviously #1, and they correctly acknowledged Up as overrated. I would have rated the original Toy Story lower and Ratatouille higher, but overall: well done.
From Parents Against Gun Violence, a few of the reasons people shot people in May 2015.
My fiancee and I had an argument, so I open-carried my gun to a park and shot four random people.
The bartender put Clamato in my beer when I wanted tomato juice, so I shot him and his dog.
I found suspicious calls on my boyfriend’s phone, so I shot him. He was armed at the time too.
Rather than let my ex-wife win custody, I shot my own daughter to death.
Click through for the whole depressing list and links to news articles about each incident.
Jan Chipchase writes about Twelve Concepts in Autonomous Mobility, aka behavioral and design considerations of self-driving vehicles. You may not have thought of some of these.
Nanny mode: vehicles that are assigned to pick up young children from school, but end up trailing them at a discreet distance because the kids prefer to walk home alone.
Car surprise: when you come across your car somewhere where you didn’t expect it to be and witness your vehicle engaging in unexpected activities e.g. pickup up flowers at the mall: the equivalent of catching your parent or kid smoking or shoplifting.
And why is Google, an advertising company, interested in self-driving cars? Perhaps this:
Trailer trashing: where dodgy looking vehicles are assigned to trail an otherwise apparent owner either as a joke or to send a message e.g. a hearse sent by a debt collection agency to scare-up payment. You’ll also see this happen with more aggressive companies who send a vehicle around to their competitors to send a message, recruit their staff or to gather intelligence. Task Rabbit or San Da ha + autonomous mobility + intent. The most obvious market for this will be straight-up advertising.
In 2015, you can follow brands on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In 2023, the brands follow you! Around town!
While researching this post on some weekend reading from David Foster Wallace, I stumbled across Way More than Luck, an anthology of notable commencement speeches.
Here, in an anthology of some of the finest of the genre, brilliant creative minds in every sector offer their wisdom: David Foster Wallace on living a compassionate life, Debbie Millman on the importance of taking risks, Michael Lewis on the responsibility that good fortune merits — and so many other greats. Some of this advice is grand (believe in the impossible), and some of it is granular enough to check off a life list (donate five percent of your money or your time).
I’ve never had the desire to go to business school or get an MBA, but I found this post by Ellen Chisa about what she learned during her first year at Harvard Business School fascinating. It almost nearly sort of makes me want to think about maybe applying to business school.
People often know what they’re good at (it got them where they are!) Unfortunately, things won’t always go well in your career. How you react and recover impacts everyone around you.
One of the best things I did this year was answering these two questions honestly, for myself:
What is my worst self?
When does my worst self come out?My worst self: critical, impatient, stubborn, cynical, and sarcastic. It comes out when I feel like I’m not in a position to make an impact, and when I feel undervalued in a situation. It also happens if I think I’m fundamentally “right” and someone disagrees. If it goes on for too long I become incredibly apathetic and don’t do anything.
I have a hard time avoiding this, but I am better at catching it now. When I do catch it, I attempt to apologize to the group, move on, and catch it faster the next time.
Knowing yourself wasn’t really something I was taught in school, nor was it emphasized at home, so I was slow to learn my strengths and weaknesses and how to properly apply them to situations in my life. That struggle continues even today.
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