Posts Tagged ‘lists’
“Curation is a form of pattern recognition – pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view”*…
It’s that time of year again… we’re being inundated by “best-of” lists. Many of them are interesting, if only for the reactions they evoke (“how could you include/omit that???”). A few are gems. Here, two that your correspondent found especially interesting…
First, our (now annual) visit with Tom Whitwell and his “52 things I learned in 2025.” For example…
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… 11. The Radioactive Shrimp Scare of 2025 was likely caused when a recycling plant in Cikande, Indonesia accidentally melted scrap metal from a piece of medical or industrial equipment containing Caesium-137. A plume of smoke was released across Java, entering the BMS Foods plant which processes 1/3rd of the shrimp imported into the US. [Paris Martineau]…
… 31. In 2023, Nigeria had a million more births than the whole of Europe. [Our World in Data, via Charles Onyango-Obbo]…
… 52. Gall’s law says: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” [John Gall p.52]
Next, “The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026,” from Derek Thompson…
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… 2. The triumph of streaming video
In my essay “Everything Is Television,” [highy recommended] I wrote that all media are converging toward the same flow of video. Social media is becoming less about keeping up with friends and more about watching short-form videos made by strangers—i.e., television. Podcasts are becoming less about listening to Internet radio and more about watching YouTube talk shows—i.e., television…
[in this entry– as in all of his points– Thompson elobaorates (e.g., here, the end of reading, the victory of streaming, the threat to movie theaters, and the warning that TikTok might be mealting your brain) and substantiates his points with data.]…
… 5. The whole US economy right now is one big bet on artificial intelligence
Housing is in a rut. Farmers are hurting. Manufacturing has been shrinking for months. Hiring is hell. And yet, the US economy continues to grow, powered by an AI infrastructure project unlike anything in modern history…
… 13. Americans aren’t drunk. They’re high.
In 2010, daily or near-daily drinkers outnumbered daily marijuana users by a two-to-one margin. But since then, a wave of decriminalization has allowed marijuana use to soar into the 2020s, so that today daily marijuana users exceed drinkers for the first time ever…
… 26. [in it’s glorious entirety] Great art can save lives.
We’ll close with one of the finer letters to the editor you’ll read, from the Times of London, on the occasion of the death of playwright Tom Stoppard.
“Saved by Stoppard”: Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia. – Michael Baum, Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
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As we read ’em and reap, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that Dusty Springfield was deported from South Africa after performing before a desegregated audience at a show near Capetown. Springfield was the first British artist to stipulate the inclusion of a specific “No Apartheid” clause into her contract, and her disgust with the country’s policy of racial segregation and discrimination helped inspire a cultural boycott of South Africa.
“The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis”*…
Kanya Kanchana‘s panegyric to lists in literature, to the literature of lists, and to the authors who make them…
… We all make lists, if only to buy bread and milk. But we tend to forget how mythic and subversive (as we have just seen), joyful and maddening, enchanting and sobering, and utterly chilling lists can be—and what they can do. To love a list is to partake in letter and word, form and change. To make lists is to join a long line of list makers, to indulge in a timeless art, to break down the artificial wall that separates thinking and doing, thinkers and doers…
From Borges and the Bhagavad-Gītā to Georges Perec and Atul Gawande: “One Thing After Another: A Reading List for Lovers & Makers of Lists,” from @Longreads.
* Umberto Eco (one of the authors on the list)
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As we check it off, we might note that today is National I Am In Control Day… an annual celebration of two disparate things: it is meant to encourage people to take control of their lives. At the same time, it marks the occasion of an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan (on this date in 1981) immediately after which then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, in a press briefing, uttered the famous words, “I am in control“… which wasn’t factually correct and contributed to his resignation not too long after.
“There is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language”*
James Vincent on the emergence of earliest writing and its impact on culture, with special attention to the phenomenon of the “list” and its role in the birth of metrology…
Measurement was a crucial organizing principle in ancient Egypt, but metrology itself does not begin with nilometers. To understand its place in human culture, we have to trace its roots back further, to the invention of writing itself. For without writing, no measures can be recorded. The best evidence suggests that the written word was created independently thousands of years ago by a number of different cultures scattered around the world: in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, and Egypt. But it’s in Mesopotamia—present-day Iraq—where the practice is thought to have been invented first.
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There’s some debate over whether this invention of writing enabled the first states to emerge, giving their rulers the ability to oversee and allocate resources, or whether it was the demands of the early states that in turn led to the invention of writing. Either way, the scribal arts offered dramatic new ways to process knowledge, allowing for not only superior organization, but also superior thinking. Some scholars argue that the splitting of noun and number on clay tablets didn’t just allow kings to better track their taxes but was tantamount to a cognitive revolution: a leap forward that allowed humans to abstract and categorize the world around them like never before.
Lists may not seem like cognitive dynamite, but their proliferation appears to have helped develop new modes of thought in early societies, encouraging us to think analytically about the world. “The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity,” writes anthropologist Jack Goody. “[I]t encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract.”…
More at: “What If… Listicles Are Actually an Ancient Form of Writing and Narrative?” from @jjvincent in @lithub
* Michel Foucault
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As we organize, we might recall that it was on this date in 1872 that the Mary Celeste (often erroneously referred to as Marie Celeste, per a Conan Doyle short story about the ship), an American-registered merchant brigantine, was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands.
The Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia found her in a dishevelled but seaworthy condition under partial sail and with her lifeboat missing. The last entry in her log was dated ten days earlier. She had left New York City for Genoa on November 7 and was still amply provisioned when found. Her cargo of alcohol was intact, and the captain’s and crew’s personal belongings were undisturbed. None of those who had been on board were ever seen or heard from again.
At the salvage hearings in Gibraltar following her recovery, the court’s officers considered various possibilities of foul play, including mutiny by Mary Celeste‘s crew, piracy by the Dei Gratia crew or others, and conspiracy to carry out insurance or salvage fraud. No convincing evidence supported these theories, but unresolved suspicions led to a relatively low salvage award.
The inconclusive nature of the hearings fostered continued speculation as to the nature of the mystery. Hypotheses that have been advanced include the effects on the crew of alcohol fumes rising from the cargo, submarine earthquakes, waterspouts, attack by a giant squid, and paranormal intervention.
After the Gibraltar hearings, Mary Celeste continued in service under new owners. In 1885, her captain deliberately wrecked her off the coast of Haiti as part of an attempted insurance fraud.
The ship in 1861 (source)
“Short was good in a book”*…
With the kids in the house all day I am finding it terribly hard to concentrate when reading. Hopefully you’re the opposite, and having a fine time, tackling Moby-Dick or War and Peace or Ducks, Newburyport or whatever. But, if not, here, copy and pasted from an old newsletter, are some of my favorite short books:
Novellas:
- Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
- Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
- Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
- Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Short stories:
- Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God
- David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives
Lectures:
- Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology
- Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
Memoir:
- Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
- Joe Brainard, I Remember
- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Poetry:
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Ursula K Le Guin translation)
- A.R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year
Comics:
- Eleanor Davis, You & a Bike & a Road
- James Sturm, Market Day
Art:
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing
- Walter Murch, In The Blink of an Eye
Staying sane:
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death
- Alan Jacobs, How To Think
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Biography:
- Stefan Zweig, Montaigne
- Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick?
Essays:
- Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
- Donald Hall, Essays Over Eighty
- Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers
- Montaigne, On Solitude
- Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty
You could read many of these in a single afternoon. Happy reading!
(Buy from your local bookstore or Bookshop if you can.)
Characteristically-good advice from the estimable Austin Kleon (@austinkleon): “Short was good in a book.”
* Charles Portis, Gringo
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As we concentrate on the compact, we might send charming birthday greetings to Ludwig Bemelmans; he was born on this date in 1898. An author, illustrator, and artist, he is best known for his six Madeline picture books.
In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines… the smallest one was Madeline…
“I’m still learning”*…
1) Each year humanity produces 1,000 times more transistors than grains of rice and wheat combined. [Mark P Mills]…
24) “Mushrooms and truffles are fungi, more closely related to humans than they are to plants.” [Lynne Peskoe-Yang]…
51) Fast fashion is hitting the wiping rags businesses, because some clothing is just too badly made to be sold as rags. [Adam Minter]…
From Tom Whitwell (@TomWhitwell) of Fluxx, the sixth of his annual lists: “52 things I learned in 2019.”
[image above: source]
* “Ancora imparo,” Michelangelo
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As we continue our educations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1839 that John William Draper took a daguerreotype of the moon, the first celestial photograph (or astrophotograph) made in the U.S. (He exposed the plate for 20 minutes using a 5-inch telescope and produced an image one inch in diameter.) Draper’s picture of his sister, taken the following year, is the oldest surviving photographic portrait.
An 1840 shot of the moon by Draper– the oldest surviving “astrophotograph,” as his first is lost
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