Source: ChatGPT
Dear Friends,
I’ve always been a fan of year-end lists. They can be tacky and ridiculous. But sometimes they’re brilliant and useful. I will forever stand by an article we published when I was running The New Yorker’s website titled “The Hundred Best Lists of All Time.” Since the formatting is now all weird, here are the top five:
5) The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
4) The Ten Commandments
3) Craigslist
2) The Bill of Rights
1) The Periodic Table of the Elements
I’ll thus start my list with my favorite lede, which absolutely goes to Josh Tyrangiel and his story about the short-lived political comeback of Anthony Weiner.
“Our subject is Anthony Weiner, whose surname was a burden long before it became a curse—so fused with his disgrace that you can’t say it without triggering an avalanche of cringe. Weiner, who was caught texting pictures of his penis, first denied it, then admitted it, then resigned from Congress, then ran for mayor of New York City, at which point he sexted again under the alias Carlos Danger, was caught again, lost the election, sexted a photo with his young son in the background, sexted a minor, and forfeited a laptop with emails from his estranged wife that caused the FBI to reopen its Hillary Clinton email investigation, greasing the way for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and hastening the possible end of the republic and democracy as we know it.”
My favorite concluding paragraphs go to Graham Burnett in his superb essay on what AI will do to the humanities—and why you can care deeply about all that matters most in education and still embrace the technology.
“But we’ll need vigilance, and a fighting courage, too, as we again take up this unending experience of coming into ourselves as free beings responsible for world-making. Because it is, of course, possible to turn the crank that instrumentalizes people, to brutalize them, to squeeze their humanity into a sickly green trickle called money and leave only a ruinous residue. The new machines are already pretty good at that. The algorithms that drive these systems are the same algorithms that drive the attention economy, remember? They will only get better.
What it is like to be us, in our full humanity—this isn’t out there in the interwebs. It isn’t stored in any archive, and the neural networks cannot be inward with what it feels like to be you, right now, looking at these words, looking away from these words to think about your life and our lives, turning from all this to your day and to what you will do in it, with others or alone. That can only be lived.
This remains to us. The machines can only ever approach it secondhand. But secondhand is precisely what being here isn’t. The work of being here—of living, sensing, choosing—still awaits us. And there is plenty of it.”
The funniest story I read this year was Helen Lewis on comedy in Saudi Arabia. My favorite book was Rich Benjamin’s Talk to Me. I gave copies for Christmas to my younger sister and older son along with the note, “You think we have a complicated family?”
My favorite narrative podcast was The Redefector, which traces the incredibly strange and twisting story of Vitaly Yurchenko, a CIA defector and possible double-or-triple agent in 1984. My favorite reporting podcast was No Easy Fix; my favorite regular AI podcast was Dwarkesh Patel’s, which consistently hosted deep conversations about how AI actually works and what it’s actually doing; and my favorite podcast that I hosted was probably this one with Bill Gross, digging deep into the question of the AI Copyright Wars. My favorite new religious document is the long essay on AI published by The Vatican.
My favorite cartoon is this one by the brilliant Marketoonist.
Source: Marketoonist
My award for the Internet hero of the year either goes to Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, who is trying to restore power to content creators before they are wiped away by AI, or the great Audrey Tang, who continues to work toward a future in which AI is directed to help democracy, restore civic trust, help us become better humans, and “summon the Buddha.”
My favorite run goes to Kilian Jornet and this 50-mile loop he finished in six hours, giving him ten minutes to spare between when he dropped his daughter at kindergarten and when he had to pick her up. Jornet also managed to summit the 72 tallest mountains in the United States in 31 days, while traveling between them on bicycle. A report on this excursion notes that, in this single month, he “covered 629 miles on foot and biked an additional 2,568 miles, which outdistanced this year’s Tour de France by more than 400 miles. And he did all that while amassing 403,691 feet of elevation gain.”
Jornet also read, and wrote a beautiful blurb for, The Running Ground, which of course was the personal project I’m most proud of completing outside of my job. Please do read it. And please do post about it on social media, mention it to your favorite podcasters, and inquire about it in your local bookstores if they don’t have it placed in the window. And if you happen to be going to Aspen on Monday, please come say hello.
Cheers * N
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