I read a lot of articles, papers, and essays online every week. This list is my favorite ten pieces of the year, in no particular order.
Sam Kriss’ describing his obsessive few months reporting on Taylor Swift was the most entertaining thing I’ve read in a long time.
This piece has geology, history, birds, and literature; what more could you want?
Ian Leslie’s piece on the interesting parallels between nervous Vienna at the turn of the century and our modern malaise continues to make me think about the similarities between the two times.
This was a gripping example illuminating John Warner’s thoughts on LLMs and education in general, through the lens of a novel from the 1940s.
Erik Hoel’s series on teaching his preschooler to read has been insightful. This piece documents the “literacy lag“, or the theory that schools start to teach reading too late.
“Boredom is when life happens.” Plenty has been written about modern attention spans and their obliteration by smartphones. I enjoyed this piece because it offers a simple alternative; make room in your life for boredom.
This was a delightful essay on enjoying the wrath of Alexander Pope.
This piece about Graydon Carter’s gilded reign at Vanity Fair, when Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, Sebastian Junger, and Annie Leibovitz were all in the mix, was absolutely jaw-dropping.
This was an unexpectedly fascinating look at a new book about “Wound Man,” the figure depicted with various injuries in medical texts since the Medieval Era.
Weighing the pros and cons of the color black.
Photo by Peter Olexa on Unsplash
