It’s been a year since I last updated this site. Appropriately enough, that update was last year’s best articles of the year list. In the interim I’ve written a few things over on Medium, most notably a long piece about the future of marketing. I’ve also been sending out some stuff via a small email list (if you’d like to subscribe, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to add you).
With that said, I’ve been doing plenty of reading and have compiled a pretty extensive list of favorite longform from 2017. To be clear on the format: I’ve broken the list down by a few big themes. My picks are based on my own preferences, meaning it’s not always the best piece of pure writing, but often the things that stayed rattling around in my head the longest. I’ve tried to contextualize things as much as possible (hence the length). This is one of my favorite things to write every year and I hope you enjoy (and let me know what articles I missed).
For those not ready to commit to my 7,000+ words of context, I’ve included all the picks at the bottom in chronological order (obviously I’d prefer you read all the way through).
Finally, in case you somehow get through all 50+ articles linked here and want more to read, here’s my lists from 2005, 2006 (part 1 & part 2), 2011, 2012, 2015, and 2016. Not quite sure what happened in those missing years …
I assume for many of us the year started out the same way: Trying to figure out what happened on November 8, 2016. I read everything I could find to help me wrap my head around Trump and the state of America, I searched for new voices that had insight into what was happening, and I tried to come to my own conclusion about questions like Russia. I kept an Evernote note titled “Trump Theory” where I copied quotes and links to articles that I felt said something genuinely different, interesting, or useful for understanding the moment.
In that search there were a few voices that felt like they separated themselves from the pack: Masha Gessen writing for the New Yorker and the New York Review of books, Maggie Haberman for The New York Times, as well as Adam Gopnik and Jelani Cobb at the New Yorker. Each offered lots of material for that Evernote note in the early days of 2017. Here’s a pick from each from those first three months (except for Haberman, who put together an insane article in December that was too good not to mention):
Gessen – “Russia: The Conspiracy Trap” (March 6, 2017)
Haberman – “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation” (December 9, 2017)
Gopnik – “Trump’s Radical Anti-Americanism” (February 13, 2017)
Cobb – “The Bind of Historically Black Schools in the Age of Trump” (March 4, 2017)
The question at the front of my mind was why didn’t I (and lots of others) see Trump coming, take him more seriously when I did, and, having missed it, how should I think about him and interpret his actions?
Ta-Nehisi Coates did an admirable job trying to answer those questions in two pieces this year: “We should have seen Trump coming” in the Guardian (September 29, 2017) and “The First White President” in the Atlantic (October, 2017). (A small aside on Coates: If his December Longform interview came out this year, it probably would have been my favorite podcast episode of the year. After listening I went back and read all his Atlantic pieces and his book Between the World and Me, which completely blew me away. Also, just missing the cut from him was his excellent December piece in the Atlantic, “My President was Black”, which was in the January issue, but came out in December of 2016.)
One place lots of people looked for answers was around Russia, trolling, and the overall role of technology in the election and culture. The first of my favorites in this realm came from Jason Tanz at Wired who wrote “In Trump, Tech Finds a Troll it Can’t Ignore” (February 1, 2017) before all the hand-wringing about tech, Trump, and trolls was in full swing. The second was independent, from Dale Beran who wrote “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump” (February 14, 2017), which dug deeper into 4chan than anything I read from more mainstream sources. (I also went back and read Adrian Chen’s 2015 New York Times Magazine piece on Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which is definitely worth it.) Finally, just this week I was turned on to Angela Nagle whose book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right came out this year. Nagle wrote a bunch of essays for The Baffler, my favorite of which – “The New Man of 4chan” – came out last year. Two of her 2017 essays that are definitely worth a read are “Goodbye, Pepe” (August 15, 2017) and “A Tragedy of Manners” (September 4, 2017). She’s a voice I’m looking forward to tracking more closely in the coming year.
Then, of course, there were the digs into Trump’s team and associates. My two favorites of this lot were both from the New Yorker: One a profile of Carl Icahn and his on-again-off-again advising of President Trump from Patrick Radden Keefe (August 28, 2017) and the other a long profile of Michael Flynn from Nicholas Schmidle that came out just as Flynn was stepping down (February 27, 2017).
Of everything, though, the pieces that stuck with me the most were the ones that took interesting approaches to answering the same questions I was trying to answer. In this category I’ve got four articles: Rebecca Solnit’s “The Loneliness of Donald Trump” (May 30, 2017), Matt Latimer’s “What if Trump Had Won as a Democrat” (July 8, 2017), Luke Savage’s “How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing” (June 7, 2017), and Kelefa Saneh’s “Intellectuals for Trump” (January 9, 2017). The Saneh piece particularly stuck with me as it poses the question of how one would outline a Trump doctrine.
In the end my favorite Trump piece is probably “How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing” from Current Affairs Magazine. Partly because I like the article, and partly because Current Affairs represents a triumph in my search for new voices. At the beginning of the year I was madly searching for commentary on the left that wasn’t Pod Save America and its ilk (I just couldn’t do it after the collective October victory lap). My search yielded a bunch of stuff that was new to me but ultimately didn’t feel quite right for one reason or another. I started listening to Chapo Trap House (interesting, but way too bro-y), I tried Jacobin Magazine (good, but too socialist), and I got a subscription to n+1 (excellent, but too academic for a regular read). I also started reading Current Affairs, a magazine started in 2015 by Nathan Robinson, who was then a PHD student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard. Of everything new I discovered it felt most right to me: It was left of the left, but not so far left that I couldn’t see how the ideas could be implemented. It was also funny, which helped. I’m not sure the West Wing article is the best piece of writing I found in Current Affairs in 2017 (I’m guessing it’s not), but it felt like it perfectly nailed a feeling about the current state of liberalism, turned the focus from Russia and external influences to the left’s role, and ultimately burrowed an idea in my brain that I couldn’t extract. Here’s one of many bits that stuck:
It’s a smugness born of the view that politics is less a terrain of clashing values and interests than a perpetual pitting of the clever against the ignorant and obtuse. The clever wield facts and reason, while the foolish cling to effortlessly-exposed fictions and the braying prejudices of provincial rubes. In emphasizing intelligence over ideology, what follows is a fetishization of “elevated discourse” regardless of its actual outcomes or conclusions. The greatest political victories involve semantically dismantling an opponent’s argument or exposing its hypocrisy, usually by way of some grand rhetorical gesture. Categories like left and right become less significant, provided that the competing interlocutors are deemed respectably smart and practice the designated etiquette. The Discourse becomes a category of its own, to be protected and nourished by Serious People conversing respectfully while shutting down the stupid with heavy-handed moral sanctimony.
(For the record, I liked the West Wing, a lot. But I also can very much see how it helped to shape an idea about how politics works – or should work – that is far from the reality of what happens in Washington.)
[“How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing” – Luke Savage – Current Affairs – June 7, 2017]
Phew, glad we got Trump and politics (mostly) out of the way. I promise not every section of this is going to be that long. I’ve only got four articles in the tech category and none are about fake news, Uber, or Amazon. Before my pick, here are a few of my favorites that didn’t make the final cut:
Tim Harford had an excellent piece that ran in the Financial Times titled “What We Get Wrong About Technology” (July 8, 2017). Harford is one of my favorite writers and thinkers and he was covering one of my favorite subjects: How to understand the future of technology.
Sarah Jeong at The Verge had a fun piece on the techno-literate judge presiding over some of the biggest technology lawsuits in the world (October 19, 2017). (I also read an amazing article from 2016 by Kyle Chayka at The Verge on what he calls “airspace”, the modern aesthetic that is spreading like a virus thanks to Airbnb and the like. I wrote a short take on the airspace trend at the beginning of December: “Santa Claus, Airspace, & The Modern Aesthetic”.)
James Somers told the story of Google’s audacious attempt to digitize and make available all the world’s books in “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria” (April 20, 2017), which includes wonderful little details like this:
The stations—which didn’t so much scan as photograph books—had been custom-built by Google from the sheet metal up. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place. Above, there was an array of lights and at least $1,000 worth of optics, including four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book, and a range-finding LIDAR that overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book’s surface to capture the curvature of the paper. The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano.
In the end, though, my favorite article about technology was a profile of Claude Shannon by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni for Aeon (August 30, 2017). The piece dives into Shannon’s history and the invention of information theory, which still plays an incredibly important role in computing today. The article is well-told, covers a fascinating subject (both the person and his studies), and manages to explain very complex ideas simply (one of my favorite things). Here’s an excerpt:
Shannon’s ‘mathematical theory’ sets out two big ideas. The first is that information is probabilistic. We should begin by grasping that information is a measure of the uncertainty we overcome, Shannon said – which we might also call surprise. What determines this uncertainty is not just the size of the symbol vocabulary, as Nyquist and Hartley thought. It’s also about the odds that any given symbol will be chosen. Take the example of a coin-toss, the simplest thing Shannon could come up with as a ‘source’ of information. A fair coin carries two choices with equal odds; we could say that such a coin, or any ‘device with two stable positions’, stores one binary digit of information. Or, using an abbreviation suggested by one of Shannon’s co-workers, we could say that it stores one bit.
[“The Bit Bomb: It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information’. His answer was both a revelation and a return” – Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni – Aeon – August 30, 2017]
I did a fair amount of reading on AI this year, though I don’t know that much of it actually came from 2017. Inspired by Robin Sloan’s experiments with using a character-based recurrent neural network to generate sci-fi text, I spent some time playing with machine learning myself (I generated some pretty realistic sounding McLuhan for what it’s worth). One piece I ran into that stood out is Andrej Karpathy’s 2015 essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”, which offers a good place to start on the specifics of recurrent neural networks and how they work.
But it wasn’t an article that made me think the most about AI in 2017, it was a game. Specifically, a game about paperclips.
Frank Lantz’s Universal Paperclip (iOS version) is an amazing exploration of the role of technology as told through a simple clicker game. The game is based on a thought experiment from AI philosopher Nick Bostrom (explanation via The Economist):
Imagine an artificial intelligence, [Bostrom] says, which decides to amass as many paperclips as possible. It devotes all its energy to acquiring paperclips, and to improving itself so that it can get paperclips in new ways, while resisting any attempt to divert it from this goal. Eventually it “starts transforming first all of Earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities”. This apparently silly scenario is intended to make the serious point that AIs need not have human-like motives or psyches. They might be able to avoid some kinds of human error or bias while making other kinds of mistake, such as fixating on paperclips. And although their goals might seem innocuous to start with, they could prove dangerous if AIs were able to design their own successors and thus repeatedly improve themselves. Even a “fettered superintelligence”, running on an isolated computer, might persuade its human handlers to set it free. Advanced AI is not just another technology, Mr Bostrom argues, but poses an existential threat to humanity.
Universal Paperclips goes beyond imagining it and puts you in the drivers seat as the paperclip maximizer. It’s amazing, and interesting, and teaches you a lot about how the world works (one tiny non-spoiler-spoiler: all companies eventually become finance companies). As John Brindle explains in his excellent writeup (December 6, 2017) of the game:
When we play a game like Universal Paperclips, we do become something like its AI protagonist. We make ourselves blind to most of the world so we can focus on one tiny corner of it. We take pleasure in exercising control, marshalling our resources towards maximum efficiency in the pursuit of one single goal. We appropriate whatever we can as fuel for that mission: food, energy, emotional resources, time. And we don’t always notice when our goal drifts away from what we really want.
All of this sounds pretty highfalutin for a game about paperclips, but somehow it makes sense when you play.
[Universal Paperlips (iOS Version) – Frank Lantz – October 9, 2017]
If there were three or four big stories in 2017, one of them was definitely opioids. There were a ton of worthwhile pieces on the subject this year, but two stood out for me: A story about the family behind oxycontin and another about how a community in West Virginia, one of the hardest hit states, is fighting to save the lives of those addicted.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” (October 30, 2017) tells the anger-inducing story of the Sackler family and their knowing exploitation of people’s addiction to their company’s drug, OxyContin. See if this makes you sick:
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Quinones’s investigation is the similarities he finds between the tactics of the unassuming, business-minded Mexican heroin peddlers, the so-called Xalisco boys, and the slick corporate sales force of Purdue. When the Xalisco boys arrived in a new town, they identified their market by seeking out the local methadone clinic. Purdue, using I.M.S. data, similarly targeted populations that were susceptible to its product. Mitchel Denham, the Kentucky lawyer, told me that Purdue pinpointed “communities where there is a lot of poverty and a lack of education and opportunity,” adding, “They were looking at numbers that showed these people have work-related injuries, they go to the doctor more often, they get treatment for pain.” The Xalisco boys offered potential customers free samples of their product. So did Purdue. When it first introduced OxyContin, the company created a program that encouraged doctors to issue coupons for a free initial prescription. By the time Purdue discontinued the program, four years later, thirty-four thousand coupons had been redeemed.
The other shows the depth to which OxyContin, and the opioid addiction it brought with it, has devastated a place like West Virginia. In “The Addicts Next Door” (June 5, 2017), Margaret Talbot lays out the tragic tale of Berkeley County as a view into what’s happening throughout the rest of the state; “West Virginia has an overdose death rate of 41.5 per hundred thousand people. (New Hampshire has the second-highest rate: 34.3 per hundred thousand.) This year, for the sixth straight year, West Virginia’s indigent burial fund, which helps families who can’t afford a funeral pay for one, ran out of money.”
She describes the damage to West Virginia’s children – “One of the biggest collateral effects of the opioid crisis is the growing number of children being raised by people other than their parents, or being placed in foster care. In West Virginia, the number of children removed from parental care because of drug abuse rose from nine hundred and seventy in 2006 to two thousand one hundred and seventy-one in 2016.” – and how some doctors are teaching regular citizens to use Narcan, a drug that can immediately counteract the effects of an overdose: “[Dr.] Aldis taught his first class on administering Narcan on September 3, 2015, at the New Life Clinic. Nine days later, a woman who’d attended the class used Narcan to revive a pregnant woman who had overdosed at a motel where they were both staying. During the next few weeks, Aldis heard of five more lives saved by people who’d attended the class.”
I know there were many other portraits like this throughout the year, but this is the one I found most affecting.
[“The Addicts Next Door” – Margaret Talbot – New Yorker – June 5, 2017]
Podcasts were a new addition to the list last year. Like many of you, I’m sure, I spend much of my commuting and dog-walking time listening to them. Much of my listening is pretty mindless sports stuff (I’m a big fan of tuning out to the NBA banality of Dunc’d on Basketball), but there’s plenty of really amazing writing, reporting, and interviewing in the 20 or so podcasts that I subscribe to and try to listen regularly.
With that said, a few weeks ago I realized that I didn’t have a good list of favorites and sent out a call on Twitter and Facebook asking for recommendations. What came back was amazing and a bunch of episodes that ended up in my own favorites came from those suggestions. Here’s a few picks:
Say what you will about Malcolm Gladwell, but the guy knows how to tell a story. Season 2 of his Revisionist History podcast was excellent and included two stand-out episodes for me: “A Good Walk Spoiled” (June 15, 2017) tells the story of how golf courses exploit tax loopholes to create giant private parks and “McDonald’s Broke My Heart” (August 10, 2017) tells the story of why Micky D’s changed the oil they use for their french fries.
When I sent my podcast request out, Felix Salmon insisted I listen to Switched on Pop’s episode about Selena Gomez’s Bad Liar (July 14, 2017) which was amazingly (shockingly?) fascinating. There’s a lot more to that song than you ever imagined.
Uncivil, a new Civil War podcast from Gimlet, offers the untold stories of race and the War. The show opened with an amazing episode, “The Raid” (October 4, 2017), telling the story of a covert operation you never learned about in your US History class.
Last, but not least, was More Perfect’s “The Gun Show” (October 12, 2017), which explains just how recently we came to interpret the Second Amendment in the way we do today. Here’s a little taste from the description: “For nearly 200 years of our nation’s history, the Second Amendment was an all-but-forgotten rule about the importance of militias. But in the 1960s and 70s, a movement emerged — led by Black Panthers and a recently-repositioned NRA — that insisted owning a firearm was the right of each and every American. So began a constitutional debate that only the Supreme Court could solve. That didn’t happen until 2008, when a Washington, D.C. security guard named Dick Heller made a compelling case.”
I know I’m pretty light here. Still making it through a bunch of recommendations. But that last episode, “The Gun Show”, is an angle on the gun debate I had never heard before and definitely stood out to me as the best I heard this year.
[“The Gun Show” – Radiolab Presents More Perfect – October 12, 2017]
It’s pretty sad that this year requires a special category for the best article about the increased possibility of nuclear annihilation … but that’s where we’re at. I read two pieces that pretty clearly separated themselves from the competition in this regard. The first was Evan Osnos’s amazing (and very long, even for this list) piece “The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea” (September 18, 2017). This pretty well sums up the vibe of the story (and situation):
Suddenly, the prospect of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the most hermetic power on the globe had entered a realm of psychological calculation reminiscent of the Cold War, and the two men making the existential strategic decisions were not John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev but a senescent real-estate mogul and reality-television star and a young third-generation dictator who has never met another head of state. Between them, they had less than seven years of experience in political leadership.
The second piece, which was my favorite of the bunch, came from Michael Lewis with his Vanity Fair deep dive into the Department of Energy, “Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House” (September, 2017). The details are astonishing and describe the governmental organization responsible for our nuclear capabilities as in complete disarray. This bit, about why you don’t want people who dreamed of working on nuclear weapons actually working on nuclear weapons, stuck with me the most:
The Trump people didn’t seem to grasp, according to a former D.O.E. employee, how much more than just energy the Department of Energy was about. They weren’t totally oblivious to the nuclear arsenal, but even the nuclear arsenal didn’t provoke in them much curiosity. “They were just looking for dirt, basically,” said one of the people who briefed the Beachhead Team on national-security issues. “ ‘What is the Obama administration not letting you do to keep the country safe?’ ” The briefers were at pains to explain an especially sensitive aspect of national security: the United States no longer tests its nuclear weapons. Instead, it relies on physicists at three of the national labs—Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia—to simulate explosions, using old and decaying nuclear materials.
This is not a trivial exercise, and to do it we rely entirely on scientists who go to work at the national labs because the national labs are exciting places to work. They then wind up getting interested in the weapons program. That is, because maintaining the nuclear arsenal was just a by-product of the world’s biggest science project, which also did things like investigating the origins of the universe. “Our weapons scientists didn’t start out as weapons scientists,” says Madelyn Creedon, who was second-in-command of the nuclear-weapons wing of the D.O.E., and who briefed the incoming administration, briefly. “They didn’t understand that. The one question they asked was ‘Wouldn’t you want the guy who grew up wanting to be a weapons scientist?’ Well, actually, no.”
[“Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House” – Michael Lewis – Vanity Fair – September, 2017]
Race, Gender, and Sexuality
(Quick note: I’ve separated this section from #MeToo as best as I can, though obviously there’s a lot of overlaps in the themes.)
In April, Rahawa Haile wrote “Going it Alone” (April 11, 2017), which describes her experience hiking the Appalachian trail during a moment of political chaos as a queer black woman. Here’s an excerpt:
The rule is you don’t talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can’t talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system’s inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave.
In May, Ian Parker wrote “What Makes a Parent” (May 22, 2017) for the New Yorker, the story of a custody battle for an adopted son between a lesbian couple. The question at the heart of the case is what is a parent:
New York’s statutes describe the obligations and entitlements of a parent, but they don’t define what a parent is. That definition derives from case law. In 1991, in a ruling in Alison D. v. Virginia M., a case involving an estranged lesbian couple and a child, the Court of Appeals opted for a definition with “bright line” clarity. A parent was either a biological parent or an adoptive parent; there were no other kinds. Lawyers in this field warn of “opening the floodgates”—an uncontrolled flow of dubious, would-be parents. Alison D. kept the gates shut, so that a biological mother wouldn’t find, say, that she had accidentally given away partial custody of her child to a worthless ex-boyfriend. But many saw the decision as discriminatory against same-sex couples, who can choose to raise a child together but can’t share the act of producing one. Judge Judith Kaye, in a dissent that has since been celebrated, noted that millions of American children had been born into families with a gay or lesbian parent; the court’s decision would restrict the ability of these children to “maintain bonds that may be crucial to their development.”
In July, Masha Gessen wrote “The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge” (July 3, 2017) for the New Yorker. It’s an absolutely heartbreaking story at every moment.
In August, Jay Caspian Kang wrote about the hazing death of Michael Deng at the hands of an Asian-American fraternity in “What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity” (August 9, 2017). As the title suggests, Kang turns it into something even bigger than the tragic story of another fraternity hazing death:
“Asian-American” is a mostly meaningless term. Nobody grows up speaking Asian-American, nobody sits down to Asian-American food with their Asian-American parents and nobody goes on pilgrimages back to their motherland of Asian-America. Michael Deng and his fraternity brothers were from Chinese families and grew up in Queens, and they have nothing in common with me — someone who was born in Korea and grew up in Boston and North Carolina. We share stereotypes, mostly — tiger moms, music lessons and the unexamined march toward success, however it’s defined. My Korean upbringing, I’ve found, has more in common with that of the children of Jewish and West African immigrants than that of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States — with whom I share only the anxiety that if one of us is put up against the wall, the other will most likely be standing next to him.
In December, Wesley Morris (who wrote one of my favorites from last year, “Last Taboo”) profiled the director of this year’s breakout movie Get Out in “Jordan Peele’s X-Ray Vision” (December 20, 2017). I’m sure there’s a bit of recency bias with this pick, but I finally got around to watching Get Out this month and, despite my assumption it could never live up to all the hype, it was so interesting and weird that it definitely reached the bar. Then I read this article and Morris writes about race as well as anyone out there and Peele made a movie that tackles questions of race as interestingly as any in recent memory and when you put the two of them together you get stuff like this:
Peele had been talking about the restricted ways bigotry is discussed. “We’re never going to fix this problem of racism if the idea is you have to be in a K.K.K. hood to be part of the problem,” he said. The culture still tends to think of American racism as a disease of the Confederacy rather than as a national pastime with particular regional traditions, like barbecue. “Get Out” is set in the Northeast, where the racial attitude veers toward self-congratulatory tolerance. Mr. Armitage, for instance, gets chummy with Chris by telling him he’d have voted for Obama a third time. “Get Out” would have made one kind of sense under a post-Obama Hillary Clinton administration, slapping at the smugness of American liberals still singing: “Ding dong, race is dead.” Peele shows that other, more backhanded forms of racism exist — the presumptuous “can I touch your hair” icebreaker, Mr. Armitage’s “I voted for Obama, so I can’t be racist” sleeper hold are just two. But Clinton lost. Now the movie seems to amplify the racism that emanates from the Trump White House and smolders around the country.
As with all the other categories, each of these are deserving of a choice (and in the end I’m writing about them all because I think they’re all very worth reading), but I think if I had to pick one I’d go with Kang’s piece about a hazing death at an Asian-American fraternity. It tells a familiar story from a different perspective and draws a spectrum in a space we normally see as singular.
[“What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity” – Jay Caspian Kang – August 9, 2017 – New York Times Magazine]
Outside of Trump (and depending on whether you include Russia part of the Trump story or not), this was the biggest news of the year. Time named their Person of the Year “The Silence Breakers” (December 18, 2017), the women who came forward throughout 2017 to name their abusers. Here’s how Time editor Edward Felsenthal explained the choice:
The year, at its outset, did not seem to be a particularly auspicious one for women. A man who had bragged on tape about sexual assault took the oath of the highest office in the land, having defeated the first woman of either party to be nominated for that office, as she sat beside a former President with his own troubling history of sexual misconduct. While polls from the 2016 campaign revealed the predictable divisions in American society, large majorities—including women who supported Donald Trump—said Trump had little respect for women. “I remember feeling powerless,” says Fowler, the former Uber engineer who called out the company’s toxic culture, “like even the government wasn’t looking out for us.”
Nor did 2017 appear to be especially promising for journalists, who—alongside the ongoing financial upheaval in the media business—feared a fallout from the President’s cries of “fake news” and verbal attacks on reporters. And yet it was a year of phenomenal reporting. Determined journalists—including Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, Ronan Farrow, Brett Anderson, Oliver Darcy, and Irin Carmon and Amy Brittain, among many others—picked up where so many human-resources departments, government committees and district attorneys had clearly failed, proving the truth of rumors that had circulated across whisper networks for years.
While the reporting was clearly amazing (it’s worth reading or re-reading all the articles mentioned by Felsenthal), two essays on the movement, where it came from, and what it means stood out for me. The first, from November by Claire Dederer in the Paris Review, asks “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” (November 20, 2017).
The second, which I just read this week, opened the Winter issue of n+1 magaizine. “In The Maze” (December, 2018) by Dayna Tortorici covers #MeToo, but also finds a string that goes back before 2017’s women came forward, to a general shift that has left some white men to feel like victims. She makes a compelling case that #MeToo is part of a much broader change happening in the United States and was a big component of the resentment that fueled Trump’s rise over the last few years. It ties together the themes of 2017 as well as anything I read this year:
Must history have losers? The record suggests yes. Redistribution is a tricky business. Even simple metaphors for making the world more equitable — leveling a playing field, shifting the balance — can correspond to complex or labor-intensive processes. What freedoms might one have to surrender in order for others to be free? And how to figure it when those freedoms are not symmetrical? A little more power for you might mean a lot less power for me in practice, an exchange that will not feel fair in the short term even if it is in the long term. There is a reason, presumably, that we call it an ethical calculus and not an ethical algebra.
Some things are zero sum — perhaps more things than one cares to admit. To say that feminism is good for boys, that diversity makes a stronger team, or that collective liberation promises a greater, deeper freedom than the individual freedoms we know is comforting and true enough. But just as true, and significantly less consoling, is the guarantee that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others. It would be easier to give up some privileges if it weren’t so traumatic to lose, as it is in our ruthlessly competitive and frequently undemocratic country. Changing the rules of the game might begin with revising what it means to win. I once heard a story about a friend who’d said, offhand at a book group, that he’d throw women under the bus if it meant achieving social democracy in the United States. The story was meant to be chilling — this from a friend? — but it made me laugh. As if you could do it without us, I thought, we who do all the work on the group project. I wondered what his idea of social democracy was.
[“In The Maze” – Dayna Tortorici – n+1 – December, 2017]
What’s left defies categorization or fell into a category of one. There’s an article about the Pope from October – “The War Against Pope Francis” (October 27, 2017) – and two from the world of sports: The terrible story of a Brazilian football team whose plane crashed – “Eternal Champions” (June 8, 2017) – and Dion Waiter’s delightful open letter to the rest of the NBA titled, appropriately, “The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles” (April 25, 2017).
There was an excellent profile of the author, journalist, and writing teacher John McPhee from The New York Times Magazine – “The Mind of John McPhee” (September 28, 2017) – which got me obsessed with McPhee and his process and led me to read his new book Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. There was also Longread’s excerpt from the book The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road titled “A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy, Rich People, and Moby Dick” (June, 2017), which is the only article on this whole list that will leave you with a cheatsheet for trucker slang:
There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.
There were two very different pieces from the Guardian. The first, “‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death” (March 17, 2017), laid out in amazing detail what will happen when Queen Elizabeth dies. The second, “Why we fell for clean eating” (August 11, 2017), goes deep into the weeds of the clean eating craze and just how crazy much of it is. It also includes what may be the most transferable sentence of 2017: “But it quickly became clear that ‘clean eating’ was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure.” Replace the words “clean eating” and “diet” and you have a pretty good descriptor for everything that seems to be happening around us right now.
But in the end, my favorite of this category came from the article very hardest to categorize: Kathryn Schulz’s “Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank them” (November 6, 2017). I’m still not sure I can do this justice, but the basic premise is that our ability to rank the “realness” of imaginary beings like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or ghosts, is a critical part of our humanity. I love this article partly because I can’t imagine pitching it to a New Yorker editor, partly because it was a nice break from the onslaught of 2017, and partly because it was just super interesting.
Patterns of evidence, a grasp of biology, theories of physics: as it turns out, we need all of these to account for our intuitions about supernatural beings, just as we need all of them to explain any other complex cultural phenomenon, from a tennis match to a bar fight to a bluegrass band. That might seem like a lot of intellectual firepower for parsing the distinctions between fairies and mermaids, but the ability to think about nonexistent things isn’t just handy for playing parlor games on Halloween. It is utterly fundamental to who we are. Studying that ability helps us learn about ourselves; exercising it helps us learn about the world. A three-year-old talking about an imaginary friend can illuminate the workings of the human mind. A thirty-year-old conducting a thought experiment about twins, one of whom is launched into space at birth and one of whom remains behind, can illuminate the workings of the universe. As for those of us who are no longer toddlers and will never be Einstein: we use our ability to think about things that aren’t real all the time, in ways both everyday and momentous. It is what we are doing when we watch movies, write novels, weigh two different job offers, consider whether to have children.
[“Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank them” – Kathryn Schulz – New Yorker – November 6, 2017]
That’s it. Here’s my ten favorites in chronological order (you might sense a bit of recency bias here, which I’m not sure how to fix):
“The Addicts Next Door” – Margaret Talbot – New Yorker – June 5, 2017
“How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing” – Luke Savage – Current Affairs – June 7, 2017
“What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity” – Jay Caspian Kang – August 9, 2017 – New York Times Magazine
“The Bit Bomb: It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information’. His answer was both a revelation and a return” – Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni – Aeon – August 30, 2017
“Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House” – Michael Lewis – Vanity Fair – September, 2017
Universal Paperlips (iOS Version) – Frank Lantz – October 9, 2017
“The Gun Show” – Radiolab Presents More Perfect – October 12, 2017
“Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank them” – Kathryn Schulz – New Yorker – November 6, 2017
“In The Maze” – Dayna Tortorici – n+1 – December, 2017
And here is all 47 pieces favorites from 2017 in chronological order:
“Intellectuals for Trump” – Kalefa Sanneh – New Yorker – January 9, 2017
“In Trump, Tech Finds a Troll it Can’t Ignore” – Jason Tanz – Wired – February 1, 2017
“Trump’s Radical Anti-Americanism” – Adam Gopnik – New Yorker – February 13, 2017
“4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump” – Dale Beran – Medium – February 14, 2017
Michael Flynn, General Chaos – Nicholas Schmidle – New Yorker – February 27, 2017
“The Bind of Historically Black Schools in the Age of Trump” – Jelani Cobb – New Yorker – March 4, 2017
“Russia: The Conspiracy Trap” – Masha Gessen – March 6, 2017 – New York Review of Books
“‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death” – Sam Knight – The Guardian – March 17, 2017
“Going it Alone” – Rahawa Haile – Outside – April 11, 2017
“Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria” – James Somers – The Atlantic – April 20, 2017
“The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles” – Dion Waiters – The Player’s Tribune – April 25, 2017
“What Makes a Parent” – Ian Parker – New Yorker – May 22, 2017
“The Loneliness of Donald Trump” – Rebecca Sonit – Literary Hub – May 30, 2017
“A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy, Rich People, and Moby Dick” – Finn Murphy – Longreads – June, 2017
“The Addicts Next Door” – Margaret Talbot – New Yorker – June 5, 2017
“How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing” – Luke Savage – Current Affairs – June 7, 2017
“Eternal Champions” – Sam Borden – ESPN FC – June 8, 2017
“A Good Walk Spoiled” – Malcolm Gladwell – Revisionist History – June 15, 2017
“The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge” – Masha Gessen – New Yorker – July 3, 2017
“What if Trump Had Won as a Democrat” – Matt Latimer – Politico – July 8, 2017
“What We Get Wrong About Technology” – Tim Harford – Financial Times – July 8, 2017
Selena Gomez: Bad Liar, Psycho Songwriter – Switched on Pop – July 14, 2017
“What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity” – Jay Caspian Kang – New York Times Magazine – August 9, 2017
“McDonald’s Broke My Heart” – Malcolm Gladwell – Revisionist History – August 10, 2017
“Why we fell for clean eating” – Bee Wilson – The Guardian – August 11, 2017
“Goodbye, Pepe” – Angela Nagle – The Baffler – August 15, 2017
Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington – Patrick Radden Keefe – August 28, 2017
“The Bit Bomb: It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information’. His answer was both a revelation and a return” – Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni – Aeon – August 30, 2017
“Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House” – Michael Lewis – Vanity Fair – September, 2017
“A Tragedy of Manners” – Angela Nagle – The Baffler – September 4, 2017
“The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea” Evan Osnos – New Yorker – September 18, 2017
“The Mind of John McPhee” – Sam Anderson – New York Times Magazine – September 28, 2017
“We should have seen Trump coming” Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Guardian – September 29, 2017
“The First White President” – Ta-Nehisi Coates – Atlantic – October, 2017
“The Raid” – Uncivil – October 4, 2017
Universal Paperclip (iOS Version) – Frank Lantz – October 9, 2017
“The Gun Show” – Radiolab Presents More Perfect – October 12, 2017
The Judge’s Code – Sarah Jeong – October 19, 2017
“The War Against Pope Francis” – Andrew Brown – The Guardian – October 27, 2017
“The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” – Patrick Radden Keefe – New Yorker – October 30, 2017
“Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank them” Kathryn Schulz – New Yorker – November 6, 2017
“What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” – Claire Dederer – The Paris Review – November 20, 2017
“In The Maze” – Dayna Tortorici – n+1 – December, 2018
This Game About Paperclips Says A Lot About Human Desire – John Brindle – Waypoint – December 6, 2017
“Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation” – Maggie Haberman – New York Times – December 9, 2017
“The Silence Breakers” – Stephanie Zacharek, Eliana Dockterman, and Haley Sweetland Edwards – Time – December 18, 2017
“Jordan Peele’s X-Ray Vision” – Wesley Morris – New York Times Magazine – December 20, 2017
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