I have trouble keeping up with all links to great long-form journalism and essays that stream past every day, but here are my favourites (out of the ones I managed to catch and read and either remember or save (thank you Longreads & Instapaper)).
In not much of an order:
How the Internet gets inside us, Adam Gopnik
I love Adam Gopnik’s writing more than I like his underlying analysis. I had the same feeling about his recent piece on fantasy literature. He gives a rich impression of substance — and I mean, there is real substance, intelligently pulling together a lot of material — but it’s too soft and somewhat shallow to support a durable understanding of the subject. Which is fine. This was a joy to read and good to muse on:
All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.
Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?, Paul Ford
Paul Ford was new to me this year. He’s been around the internet for a while — he links! — and knows how to use a word or two (also read his personal, quite personal essay, The Age of Mechanical Reproduction). So Ford managed to convey a lot more nuance and detail on this topic than, for example, Gopnik (see above). He’s funny, insightful and grounded:
Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.
Hollywood: A Love Story, Clive James
Clive James on David Thomson, “the film critic’s critic.” You have to be a movie buff to love it, but there’s also lots here about criticism and writing. Self-recommending:
Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start. Writing at his best, Thomson is well qualified. You have to know about more than just the movies to see the “nobility” in Denzel Washington’s best acting; to isolate Al Pacino’s characteristic of “outrageous inner size,” you have to be up to speed with short-legged Napoleonic warlords since Alexander the Great; evoking Warren Beatty’s “puzzled look” is a nice way of describing catatonia, but it proves that the critic’s eye for aesthetic value can penetrate a surface; and it takes a knowledge of the American class structure to make the correct observation about Katharine Hepburn that she “loved movies while disapproving of them.” Thomson just loves them, but he knows there is a world elsewhere.
The suburb that changed the world, Jaron Lanier
This one from Jaron Lanier surprised me. When he’s writing about the culture around technology like this it’s usually more polemical, but this is just a really enjoyable mix of personal reminiscence with objective history and just the right amount of moral questioning. It also anticipated some of the history-telling after Steve Jobs’s retirement and passing:
The overlap between the late stages of hippie bohemia and the early incarnations of Silicon Valley was often endearing. There was a sense of justice in the way that males who had been at the bottom of the social ladder in high school were on track to run the world. Greasy cottages with futons on the floor, with dustings of pot and cookie crumbles rubbed into cheap oriental rugs, a carnage of forgotten dirty clothes in the corner, empty refrigerators and tangles of thick grey cables leading to the huge computer monitors and the hot metal cabinets where the silicon chips crunched. Asymmetrical, patchy beards, shirts part tucked, prescriptions for glasses powerful enough to find life on a distant planet. This was the new model of hippie nerd, supplanting the ascetic fellow with the pocket protector.
What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really?, Steve Silberman
When Isaacson’s biography came out, I was impressed by how useful its omissions were. It became a central point of reference for everyone to contribute their own stories from unique perspectives. This one by Steve Silberman would be a good read about Buddhism even if you weren’t interested in Steve Jobs, or if you’re just interested in Jobs and Apple, it offers a new angle on those well-known success stories, all nicely woven together:
The physical environments Jobs practiced in at Tassajara and other Zen centers offered breathtaking juxtapositions of highly cultivated traditional craftsmanship and wild, rugged California landscapes. I doubt that the Japanese joinery (no nails!) that held up the walls of the zendo was lost on the aspiring design geek, or that he was unmoved by the vibrant, airy layout of Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, punctuated by an enormous, twisting redwood burl (rescued from a beach in Marin) that had been sculpted to sprout tables and chairs. Zen Center’s aesthetic was a harmonious fusion of East and West — as Apple’s would be.
A Rough Guide to Disney World, John Jeremiah Sullivan
I’d never heard of Sullivan till this year but he made a big impression. His new book (which is getting great reviews) will be one of the first I pick up in the new year. I also liked his DFW review and his story about his house being a set for One Tree Hill, but this Disney story was the one I enjoyed the most in 2011:
Lil’ Dog and the ladies were sailing by up above on the Dumbo ride, in three successive elephants. Mimi had a tentatively happy face. It said, “I’m ready to think of this as fun, as long as it doesn’t go any faster or higher.” Trevor and I leaned on the railing like bettors at a track, smiling and waving every time they went past, as if we were dolls with arms hooked to wires. Trevor had his phone out, with the Internet dialed up to “the guide.” He consulted it when they were on the dark side of their orbit. Checking it against a map of the park, we determined that one of the spots mentioned wasn’t too far away, a little-used maintenance pathway with trees alongside it and some Dumpsters. Given a properly positioned lookout, you could have a puff in relative calm. We slipped away.
The King of Human Error, Michael Lewis
Another self-recommending one. Lewis profiles one of the most influential psychologists of the last half-century, the guy who partly inspired Moneyball (the best book I read in 2011, finally) and wrote one of the big books of the year, Thinking, Fast and Slow:
When I first met Kahneman he was making himself more miserable about his unfinished book than any writer I’d ever seen. It turned out merely to be a warm-up for the misery to come, the beginning of an extraordinary act of literary masochism. In effect, the psychologist kept trying to trick himself into doing things he didn’t want to do and failing to fall for the ruse. “I had this idea at first that I could do it easily,” he said. “I thought, you know, that I could talk it” to a ghostwriter, but then he seized on another approach: a series of lectures, delivered to Princeton undergraduates who knew nothing about the subject, that he could transcribe and publish more or less as spoken. “I paid someone to transcribe them,” he says. “But when I read them I could see that they were very bad.” Next, he set out to write the book by himself, as he suspected he should have done all along. He quit and re-started so many times he lost count, and each time he quit he seemed able to convince himself that he should never have taken on the project in the first place. Last October he quit for what he swore was the last time. One morning I went up the hill to have coffee with him and found that he was no longer writing his book. “This time I’m really finished with it,” he said.
Yep, writing is hard.
