22 things I actually enjoyed in 2022
As a subscriber bonus, here are some things that I just think are neat.
While I’m counting down the worst columns of 2022, I thought I’d make this paid subscriber bonus a rare positive edition. Here’s a list of things that I liked this year, though they may not be from this year. Please enjoy judging me on my taste.
The list of my favourite articles of the year is free but the other categories are a paid subscriber bonus.
6 articles, in no particular order
The All-Female Band Fanny Made History. A New Doc Illuminates It.
Mark Yarm for The New York Times (May 25, 2022)
If you’re from the UK, let’s get past the laughing at the name Fanny now. Done? Okay. This profile by Mark Yarm (author of Everybody Loves Our Town) is a rare piece of pin-sharp music journalism that gives the band members space to tell their stories.
Listen to: Changing Horses — Fanny (1970)
Bob Gottlieb Is the Last of the Publishing Giants
Matthew Schneier for Vulture (December 22, 2022)
Another profile, this time a fascinating glimpse into the world of Bob Gottlieb, the legendary book editor, who is still working aged 91:
Gottlieb is perhaps the longest-serving man in publishing, a living link to those days when a successful book editor and his stage-actress wife could buy themselves an entire Manhattan townhouse like this one and stuff it full of books. Their house, and his office, looks out onto the private, semi-communal Turtle Bay Gardens, shared with their neighbors on the block. “Bob never goes into the garden, you have to understand,” says Gottlieb’s wife, Maria Tucci, who has come home with lunch. “He says real Jews don’t like nature.”
Eve Babitz's Hunger
Philippa Snow with an illustration by Sinjin Li for
I love what
does and represents, and there could have been many essays from that publication in this spot but Phillippa Snow’s exploration of Eve Babitz and food was bang in the centre of my interests:‘When we finished making love that Sunday,’ Babitz wrote in a piece for Cosmopolitan in 1978, remembering sleeping with a(nother) gorgeous man, ‘we lay in each other’s surprised arms looking out the open wall of glass windows at the pink sunset sky and the lavender-tinted garden. All I could say was “I’m hungry.”’ Only boring people get bored, she appeared to imply in her life and in her work – very exciting people just get ravenous.
Baumbach’s disaster (movie)
Terry Nguyen for
I like an interesting review even or perhaps especially when I haven’t consumed the thing being discussed.
is a reliably surprising newsletter and I loved this review of Noah Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise. It’s short and very to the point:There is an inherent challenge in adapting a “systems novel” like White Noise — a work that is more interested in examining the external social forces that shape characters’ lives, rather than their personal motivations. Without Jack’s reliable first-person narration guiding viewers through the movie (as he does in the book), the rehearsed, sitcom-style dialogue between characters keeps the audience at a remove. The Gladneys feel like stock characters.
The Ideas Man
James Waddell for The Fence (Issue 12)
An investigation into the weird (and exploitative) world of the Insitute of Art and Ideas (IAI) which runs How The Light Gets In on a lot of goodwill and even more free labour:
Some candidates had to pretend to call famous philosophers and convince them to speak at the festival. Verisimilitude was key: ‘I had to pretend to hold a phone over my ear.’ Some candidates had this game sprung upon them by surprise, when the interviewer interrupted them with a ring-ring! mid-sentence. So far, so much harmless eccentricity. But although the iai no longer runs unpaid internships, in previous years successful candidates were reportedly asked to work for little or no pay. Those brave enough to ask for money were allegedly offered salaries of about £13,000 or £16,000 for entry-level roles. One worker was paid just £250 cash for ten days of long hours over the festival period, along with accommodation and a discount on food.
Why Does Taylor Swift Hold Her Pen Like That?
Heather Schwedel for Salon (October 24, 2022)
I read the headline, instantly assumed I’d hate the article, and then discovered it was a fascinating look at how we learn to write with a pen that just used Swift’s video as a way in. Did this teach me not to simply get enraged by headlines? Sort of…
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