Categories
reviews

The Best Comedies of the 21st Century

Rolling Stone magazine recently released its 70 Best Comedies of the 21st Century. The list is not good. For one, it doesn’t include The Hangover or Pineapple Express. Those movies may not be in the top ten, maybe not even in the top twenty, but top seventy? C’mon!

While Rolling Stone’s 10 Best Comedies aren’t a horrible representation of the genre, there is a better list to be made.

In fact, there are two better lists to be made.

A Quick Word on Process

I comiled a comprehensive list of comedies released in America between January 2000 and July 2023, using Wikipedia as my reference. I identified the potential candidates from each year to create a preliminary list comprising ninety-five different titles.

Weirdly, it did not include a single film from the year 2019.

I attempted to select the top ten comedies from that list of ninety-five. However, I struggled to choose between movies that made me laugh the most and films that were of excellent quality overall. Eventually, I decided to create two separate lists to avoid having to make any compromises.

Second, instead of boring you with an analysis of why each film is on the list, I stuck with clips.

So, without further adieu…

The 10 Movies of the 21st Century That Made Me Laugh the Hardest

10. Super Troopers (2001)

9. Ted (2012)

8. Anchorman (2004)

7. Borat (2006)

6. In Bruges (2008)

5. Jackass: The Movie (2002)

4. The Death of Stalin (2017)

3. Team America: World Police (2004)

2. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)

1. The Foot Fist Way (2006)


The 10 Best Comedies of the 21st Century That Were Also Great Films

10. Burn After Reading (2008)

9. Knocked Up (2007)

8. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

7. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

6. The Death of Stalin (2017)

5. I Heart Huckabees (2004)

4. Boy (2010)

3. Punch Drunk Love (2002)

2. The Royal Tennenbaums (2001)

1. Adaptation (2002)

Categories
life reviews

Three Books That Changed My Life

In 2007, I began tracking my reading habits on Goodreads. Over the past sixteen years, I read or listened to 581 books containing 210,880 pages. Suppose we use my averages over the past sixteen years to estimate my reading habits for the twenty-five years of my reading history before Goodreads existed. In that case, I’ve read 1,500 books containing nearly 524,000 pages.

I’d like to tell you about the three that most changed my life.

Skinny Legs & All

By Tom Robbins

My friend, Jess Tanen, found me in the hallway of our high school. The year was 1992, and we were in ninth grade. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to her locker. She took a book from her backpack and handed it to me, saying, “Here. This is the weirdest book I’ve ever read. I didn’t like it, but I think you’ll love it.”

I opened it up and read the first sentence:

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper.

I don’t think I’ve come across a better combination of words in the English language than “wolfmother wallpaper.” Like a heroin addict, I’ve been chasing the high ever since.

Tom Robbins quickly became my role model as a writer, thinker, and philosopher. He luxuriated in extended metaphors, dazzled with whimsical, mind-expanding analogies, and wrote about the history of religion, politics, governments, and culture without forgetting the role of vaginal juices in the lives of his sexually progressive heroines.

I was already a wannabe writer by ninth grade. I didn’t have the size or talent to be a jock, the work ethic to be an honors student, the discipline to be a musician, or the skills to become a theater geek. But I did love books, and I could sit for hours in a room with a keyboard and a blank screen without getting lonely or bored.

Most importantly, pretty girls gave me positive feedback on my writing. If sports, good grades, guitars, or theatrical monologues weren’t going to do it, writing would have to be my thing.

Every high-school writer goes through an emo phase. They believe in big, heavy literature that plumbs the depth of the human soul. They imagine heroes who look out windows into the pouring rain, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the existential French woman who left them for a one-legged veteran of the Great War who struggles with nightmares and smells like boiled cabbage. Suicide figures prominently in the writing of high schoolers.

Tom Robbins saved me from that. He wrote outlandish books full of big ideas without forgetting to make his readers laugh with delight or get turned on by raw descriptions of human sexuality. He embraced the principles of the Enlightenment at the same time as he reveled in the darkness of our romantic, pagan inclinations. He wove together evolution and spirituality, commercialism and divinity, astronomy and astrology, utopia and reality.

He gave me a way to see the world, care for the world, and love the world without taking it too seriously to remember how ridiculous we all are.

Louis C.K. tells the story of his first memory. He is four years old, standing in front of his parent’s house, shitting in his pants — “a massive, terribly painful shit.” He doesn’t remember the first half of the shit — his memory begins halfway through shitting. “I came online as a result of the anal pain that I was experiencing. It actually awakened me — yeeeeeoooooow! — into the stream of consciousness I’m now living. That’s how my life started. That’s who I am.”

I have the same feelings about Skinny Legs & All and Tom Robbins. Reading that book awakened me into the stream of consciousness I’m now living in.

House of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewski

My wife had a boyfriend when we first met. She doesn’t remember this and denies it being accurate, but she told me that she and her boyfriend were engaged. I was attracted to her, sure, and over the next seven or eight months, that attraction would become the love and devotion it continues to be (no feelings were made known until long after she’d broken up with her boyfriend), but in our first months in each other’s lives, we were, more than anything else, great friends.

We were both freshmen in college. We met under a tree. I sat beneath it reading a book, and she had the nerve to approach me (a stranger) and initiate a conversation. One of her first questions was, “What are you reading?” It wasn’t long before it became clear how much we loved books.

We spent virtually all our time together over the next three months. Neither of us enjoyed our roommates, so we exiled ourselves from our dorm rooms and lived in the college library, “surrounded by stories surreal and sublime.

We wrote papers sitting next to each other in the computer labs, suggested which books the other should read, and printed out short stories the other needed to experience. We ate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners together, made late-night runs to Denny’s, and grabbed ice coffees at Dunks.

At the end of the first semester, she was flying home to Chicago to spend the holidays with her family, and I was driving to Boston to spend the month with mine. I dropped her off at the airport, but before we left campus, she gave me a book to read.

I looked at the cover: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

“Look inside,” she said.

I began to flip through it, and the typography and layout were as much a work of art as the story itself.

The story has several layers to it. The main text is a book-length, critical review of a non-existent documentary. The documentary is made Real World style, with mostly fixed cameras placed throughout a home. It follows a famous filmmaker (the director of the documentary) and his model wife as they buy, move into, and settle down in their new home. They quickly discover an impossible hallway on the house’s outer wall. After further investigation, the married couple uncovers an impossible maze built beneath their home, which they soon delve into.

Hundreds of footnotes comment on the critical study. The footnotes were written by an L.A. drifter named Johnny. Johnny discovered the study in the burned-out apartment of an old blind recluse who died violently under mysterious circumstances. His footnotes often run for pages and contain a novel’s worth of plot within them.

The layout and typography of House of Leaves mirror the maze in the story, requiring the reader to, for example, twist and turn the physical book as the characters climb a spiral staircase or skip dozens of pages when the characters go through a secret door. The spillover of the footnotes also causes the reader to flip through six or seven pages to follow Johnny’s story before flipping back to where the footnote started to return to the main thread.

The effect is that the reader gets as lost in the story as the characters. As Johnny begins to question reality and sense an ever-increasing dread at the unknown monster(s) that stalk the characters through the maze, the reader takes on the same emotions, making the book one of the most engaging I’ve ever read and one of the scariest.

I found it so scary that I couldn’t put it down. I read the book in one marathon sitting because the moment I turned out the light, I could hear Johnny’s monster breathing at my bedside, threatening my sleep.

The next day, I called my friend and told her how incredible it was. That’s when she admitted that she hadn’t finished it.

“It was too weird for me,” she said, “But I knew you’d love it.”

We’d read many of the same books that semester. Some were assigned by our shared professors. Others were the result of recommendations from friends.

But when I finished House of Leaves and discovered that she gave it to me because it was too weird and she knew I would love it, I felt more seen than I ever had before.

We wouldn’t confess our love for each other for another four months, but after reading House of Leaves on her recommendation, I knew I was hooked.

James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and The Dead Sea Scrolls

By Robert Eisenman

Jesus was not an only child. He had at least two brothers and probably multiple sisters. After Jesus’ crucifixion, his brother, James, became the arch-leader of the movement. James, the Brother of Jesus, attempts to uncover who James was and how understanding him will bring us closer to the historical Jesus.

In my own life, it served as the final break between me and the faith in which I was raised.

James, the Brother of Jesus, is not a great book. At 1,156 pages, it is 700-800 pages too long and incredibly repetitive. It strays for scores of pages at a time, making it difficult to follow the author’s thread.

It also contains (though not by the author’s fault) a cast of historical personages with similar or identical names, requiring the reader to do too much detective work to determine which person the author is referring to at any given moment. True, this confusion of names lies at the heart of the author’s scholarly investigation (he maintains that the chaos of names was intended to obscure the reality of the Church’s history). Still, he could have made it easier for the reader to untangle the relationships and identities of the individuals involved.

Despite its flaws, James, the Brother of Jesus serves as the foundation of everything I understand about Christianity — namely, that it has very little to do with the historical personage of Jesus and everything to do with the words and acts of a man who never met Jesus, a man we now call St. Paul.

This is not a new understanding of Christianity. Scholars have long understood, and the New Testament makes it clear (Acts 15:2), that the Jerusalem community of Christians that arose after Jesus’ crucifixion had issues with Paul’s work among the Gentiles.

But by focusing on “James the Lord’s Brother” (Gal. 1:19), whom Eisenman shows was the “actual, physical successor” to Jesus, the book provides “a historically accurate semblance of what Jesus himself, in so far as he actually existed, might have been like.”

I first read the book when it made its debut in 1998. I was twenty-one years old at the time. Despite having served as an altar boy for three years, despite working as a receptionist for the priests in the rectory, and despite the nuns who led my Catholic education in the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) telling me since the first grade that I would become “the first American Pope,” I had already ventured beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church thanks, primarily, to the journey Tom Robbins had sent me on (see above).

I retained a deep connection to the Church, however. I may no longer have been a Catholic, but I was still, in many ways, a Christian. James, the Brother of Jesus, shattered my perception of Christianity.

The book highlights the biases of “historians” such as Eusebius, as well as the authors of the New Testament and its Apocrypha, in the creation of Christianity, demanding that believers reckon with the political realities of the early Christian writers and the way Roman and Jewish power structures required so much to be hidden away from plain-reading eyes.

While the orthodox-upending nature of the book is not revolutionary, its subject most definitely was. If we accept Eisenman’s conclusion that “who or whatever James was, so was Jesus,” then we have to admit that the all-loving Christ presented by modern Christianity is fake. Jesus was actually a militant Jewish zealot, a member of an oppositional alliance against the establishment of Rome and the Herodian-controlled Second Temple, whose followers went about armed for battle (Matt. 26:51).

Jesus came not to save the souls of the world but to free Jerusalem from foreign invaders, a political messiah more than a spiritual one. The historical Jesus has more in common with today’s militant Muslims who seek to drive the forces of the infidel American Empire out of Saudia Arabia than with the all-loving Christ preached about in our churches. To get closer to Jesus, one must look to the lost traditions that were driven out of the Roman Church in the fourth century.

With that as the basis for my understanding of the reality of Jesus, my approach to received histories was changed forever.

This perception-shattering work has been followed by dozens of others, all of which could be categorized under the grand title of another essential book, Lies My Teachers Told Me.

As a result, James, the Brother of Jesus, caused me to not only break with my faith; it formed my philosophy as an educator. My goal as a teacher has been, first and foremost, to destroy whatever misunderstandings have been delivered to my students by the myths of our time. For twenty-one years, I was beholden to the myth of Christianity, the complex reality of world history hidden from me and (I imagine) from my teachers. I refuse to let my students suffer the same fate.


Skinny Legs & All opened me up to a universe where humor, sexuality, and profound philosophical inquiry harmoniously coexist. Tom Robbins disarmed me from the stereotypical broody, angst-ridden teenage writer phase and liberated me to become an audacious explorer of thought.

House of Leaves, with its labyrinthine narrative structure, not only tested the limits of my reading comfort but also marked the inception of a deep and understanding relationship with the woman who would become my wife.

Lastly, James, the Brother of Jesus, shook the foundations of my religious faith, transforming my worldview and shaping my pedagogical philosophy. This book, despite its flaws, helped me confront the discrepancies between received histories and the more intricate, often concealed narratives of reality.

These three books have undoubtedly catalyzed significant shifts in my life, and their effect on my personal evolution stands as a testimony to the transformative power of books.


Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward
Categories
reviews

The Books I Read in 2022

Every year, I participate in the Goodreads Challenge, where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books for the year and track your progress.

This year I set a goal of 45 books. I read or listened to 56.

I used to go through the books one by one. Now that I’m cracking 50 books a year, however, I choose my favorites in various categories, then post the whole list with a simple note on each.

A fantasy painting of a landscape with three moons and mountains.

Best Fiction

Battle of the Linguist Mages

The cover of the novel, Battle of the Linguist Mages
By Scotto Moore

The second novel from Scotto Moore, a playwright from the Seattle area, Battle of the Linguist Mages is ridiculous, rowdy, hilarious, touching, and wildly compelling.

It combines virtual-reality video-gaming with linguistics, anarchism, artificial intelligence, magic, raves, and the apocalypse.

One of this year’s best-selling fantasy novels, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R.F. Kuang, also uses the power of language to develop a system of magic, but where Babel is a magical history in the vein of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Moore’s ridiculous novel is more akin to Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. They both take place in the near future, make use of virtual worlds, and have a hyperkinetic energy that keeps the reader flying through the pages.

If you like your books about the potential technodestruction of the planet to be hilarious and fun, Battle of the Linguist Mages will not disappoint.

Runner Up: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

This book surprised me so many times, and never disappointed me. Another book centered around video games, this novel explores the lifelong relationship between two people.

I read a lot of high-concept fiction: speculative fiction, cli-fi, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. While Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow contains aspects of those, it’s a more character-driven story about two lifelong friends and the successes and challenges they face together…and alone.

Zevin’s book appears at the top of a lot of book lists this year. For me, though, Battle of the Linguist Mages has it beat due to the sheer audacity of what Mr. Moore attempted.

The Rest of The Fiction Books I Read

This list is arranged in the order I read them. It does not include books in a series or graphic novels, both of which I discuss further below. Recommended books are starred.

  • Ulysses, by James Joyce
    This was my third reading of Mr. Joyce’s masterpiece, though this time, I stopped at Scylla & Charybdis. I found it tough to motivate through when I was only reading it before bed.
  • Flint & Mirror, by John Crowley 🌟
    John Crowley’s latest historical fiction is about Tyrone’s Rebellion against the Tudor conquest of Ireland, with a dash of magic thrown in.
  • This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal Al-Mohtar & Max Gladstone 🌟
    A beautiful romance about two opposing agents in a secret war to secure the future by destroying the past.
  • Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison 🌟
    A children’s book mentioned in This Is How You Lose The Time War, recommended by Ursula K. Leguin, and definitely worth your time.
  • Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson 🌟
    The newest from Stephenson, this cli-fi novel explores what happens when one billionaire decides to seed the clouds with sulfur in a fit of entrepreneurial geoengineering. The effects will create a new system of climate winners and losers.
  • Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
    Many consider this a classic, and while I’m a big fan of Butler’s Patternmaster and Xenogenesis series, this one didn’t do it for me.
  • Babel (or) the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Rebellion, by R.F. Kuang 🌟
    A compelling magic system keeps the concept of this novel in the clouds; still, the characters and story are grounded in loss, grief, identity, self-worth, and colonialism.
  • Gypsies, by Robert Charles Wilson 🌟
    A multiverse story about a family capable of imagining a better reality and then going there…oftentimes because they are hunted.
  • The Aenid, by Virgil (trans. by Robert Fagles) 🌟
    This one’s as good as they say. The last time I read The Illiad was in 2010. I don’t remember it describing in as much detail the religious rituals and sacrifices that Virgil’s poem includes. As a result, Virgil’s poem feels more visceral — in every sense of the word.
  • The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin
    While I love N.K. Jemisin’s previous works, this one left me a bit flat. I enjoyed the characters enough. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy her conceit: certain cities are alive, personified in avatars, and their birth results in transdimensional disasters. I appreciate Jemisin’s creativity. Her Broken Earth trilogy blew my mind, and I loved her Inheritance and Dreamblod series. Unfortunately, this one just didn’t do it for me.
  • The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
    This author’s second novel follows humanity after we abandoned Earth and settled on a tidally-locked, alien-inhabited planet. Days and nights don’t exist, and temperatures range from burning your skin to freezing your blood. Despite its conceptual story of survival and politics on the edge of an eternal twilight, the characters’ obsession with each other will have you doubting some of their decisions.
  • How High We Can Go in The Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu 🌟
    A strong contender for my favorite fiction of the year, this collection of interconnected short stories is sympathetic, darkly funny, and incredibly sad. Imagine a world where virtually all children and millions of adults are guaranteed to die from an ancient virus unleashed by the thawing of the Arctic tundra. Now imagine a series of short stories that explore a diverse range of subjectivities who inhabit that world, all of whom have lost someone (or everyone) they love. Now include enough bread crumbs in each story for the reader to discover a singular novel unwritten in the spaces between the stories. A beautiful book.
  • Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin
    A 40-page story, Emergency Skin is the transcript of a “consensus consciousness” giving instructions to a test-tube-created space traveler. The traveler has come to what is supposed to be a dead Earth to retrieve ingredients for the Founders (think Musk, Bezos, and Branson of the planet it came from, only to learn that all Earth needed to recover was to rid itself of the billionaire class. Decent enough for 40 pages, but nothing that will blow your mind.
  • A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles 🌟
    Another strong contender for fiction novel of the year — and a wonderful book to read in December — A Gentleman in Moscow informs, delights, connects, and excites. This novel of a former Russian aristocrat under a lifelong house arrest in one of Moscow’s grandest hotels pleases on every level.
  • When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut 🌟
    A masterful blend of fact and fiction, this collection of stories explores the inner lives of some of the most famous names in science and mathematics, including Heisenberg, Schrödinger, De Broglie, and Grothendieck. It makes for a fascinating journey on the borderland between genius and madness.
  • No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood 🌟
    This book devastated me. If I didn’t finish reading it on New Year’s Eve (ten days after I originally posted this list), I might have even selected it as my favorite fiction of the year. Lockwood’s writing vividly captures the fleeting consciousness of today’s cultural moment only to smite it with tremendous emotional force in the back half of the work. This one made me laugh out loud several times, and then it brought me tears. Just a beautiful book that everyone alive right now should read.

Best Fiction Series

The Expanse

The cover of Leviath Wakes, by James S.A. Corey
By James S.A. Corey

The nine novels of The Expanse are essentially three trilogies that follow the crew of a spaceship named after Don Coyote’s horse.

The first trilogy begins after humanity colonizes the solar system and accidentally uncovers an alien bio-weapon that defies physics while infecting any lifeform it encounters.

The second trilogy takes the characters beyond the solar system via an alien technology that opens a gate to a kind of Grand Central Station for the universe. This section focuses on the politics of who will control the metaphorical Grand Central Station.

The third trilogy explores the mystery of the alien civilization that created the bio-weapon and gate while examining how the Expanse functions when an upstart galactic empire takes over.

Of the nine novels, only one (the fifth book, Nemesis Games) was a disappointment. I could only finish it because one of the characters, Amos, is a joy to read. The subsequent four novels returned to the quality of the previous four, and the whole series ended about great.

The series became a TV show on SyFy (and later Amazon), ending after six seasons in Dec. 2021. People raved about it, but when I tried it, I couldn’t get past the production quality and the way it ignored a vital element of the books.

The Expanse series is the first science fiction I’ve read that takes gravity seriously. It shapes the physical structures of a whole new class of human beings who’ve only ever lived in the zero gravity of space. But it also affects virtually every scene in the story. The writers (“James S.A. Corey” is a pen name for a pair of writers) take great pains to remind readers that things work differently in space.

The TV show avoids this crucial element of the books by giving the characters magnetic boots that allow them to walk semi-normally. I quickly grew bored by the show without the effects of gravity (or its lack) to make this tale different from any others I’d encountered.

I loved the characters in the novels, especially how they adapted and evolved throughout 5,000+ pages of the story. But what I loved most was the gravity.

Runner Up: The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells

I read five of the six novels in the series (so far) and found all five fast and intriguing. The titular murderbot is a hilarious, paranoid artificial intelligence who would rather spend time watching soap operas than having to murder so many humans. Most of the books are under 200 pages in this series, but they keep you turning pages fast.

Best Nonfiction

Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

By Kathryn S. Olmstead

One of my colleagues scheduled me to teach a summer class called “Conspiracy Theories.” Like any well-educated person, I’m familiar with many conspiracy theories. I adhere to some of them (e.g., Oswald did not act alone, nor did Epstein kill himself). Others, I find laughable (e.g., 9/11 was not an inside job, and the moon landing most definitely happened).

I didn’t want the class to be a rehash of various conspiracy theories, though. We’ve seen the consequences of misinformation, disinformation, and poor critical thinking skills getting in the way of reality. Over a million Americans died partly because our President told us to shine sunlight up our ass.

A class that surveyed some of the theories that bedeviled the country since the Salem Witch Trials might be fun for the students, but it wouldn’t prepare them to live in 21st-century America.

Thanks to Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, I could do more than provide a survey. Armed by Kathryn Olmstead, a professor of History at UC Davis, I could present a thesis that would be meaningful in their adult lives. Her book reveals the actual, no doubt about it, 100% real conspiracies enacted by the U.S. government throughout the 20th century that fostered the cancerous growth of the paranoid style of American politics.

Many Americans believe their government conspires against them because the American government admits it conspired against them.

Dr. Olmstead writes in her introduction, “…generations of anti-government conspiracy theorists since World War I have at least one thing in common: when they charge that the government has plotted, lied, and covered up, they’re often right.”

The book debunks many of the conspiracies of the 20th century. At the same time, it reveals the conspiracies that drove the anti-government groups crazy enough to imagine the now-debunked conspiracy in the first place.

For example, those interested in history have heard that President Roosevelt had an advance warning about Pearl Harbor. This “advanced-knowledge conspiracy theory” suggests the president allowed Americans to die and ships to sink because he wanted the U.S. to get involved in World War II. This, of course, is not true.

Thanks to American code breakers, Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack was imminent. But he (along with everyone else) expected it to take place in the Philippines (which, in fact, it also did). Olmstead writes, “American leaders knew only that war was coming somewhere, sometime soon.”

The actual conspiracy was not that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was the target. It’s that, after the attack, he conspired to prevent Congress from investigating his administration’s intelligence failure. As one Congress member said, “There will have to be an explanation—sooner or later—and it had better be good.”

Instead of letting Congress investigate, Roosevelt created a five-person commission to whitewash the administration’s failures. We can look at the Warren Commission and the 9/11 Commission for how other presidents followed Roosevelt’s lead.

The Roberts Commission’s objective was to determine which, if any, U.S. military officials the U.S. should blame for the attack. Most importantly, the commission was not asked to investigate the failures of civil politicians such as President Roosevelt and his cabinet.

Roosenvelt’s enemies fell into a frenzy when the Roberts Commission pinned the disaster on two of Pearl Harbor’s commanders. Their disbelief led to the creation of the conspiracy that is still debated today.

Olmstead’s book explores conspiracies related to the Red Scare, the Kennedy Assassinations (of course), Nixon and Watergate, UFOs, CIA mind control experiments, Jonestown, the Iran-Contra scandal, CIA-led infusions of crack into the Black community, Ruby Ridge & Waco, and (of course) 9/11.

Throughout each investigation, she shows that the crackpots who saw a government conspiracy in blameless behavior had their origins in the American government conspiring to do something else instead.

As the man said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Runner Up: Against Elections, by David Van Reybrouck

Elections are bought and paid for by the millionaire and billionaire classes in this country. The working poor and (basically non-existent) middle class has little say over its representative leaders. Nor do these “representatives” serve the interests of their constituents once they take office. The 2020 HBO documentary, The Swamp, clarifies that America’s electoral reality forces politicians (regardless of their original intent) to adjust their objectives to those of the lobbyists.

Surprising no one: electoral politics is all about money, and unless we fix campaign financing in the country, it will not change.

That is unless we decide to get rid of elections altogether.

In Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck argues in favor of replacing politicians with randomly selected Americans — think of Congress as jury duty. As he writes, “Elections are the fossil fuel of politics. Whereas they once they gave democracy a huge boost…it now turns out they cause colossal problems of their own.”

He doesn’t suggest replacing elections with sortition is a panacea. “Citizens chosen by lot may not have the expertise of professional politicians, but they add something vital to the process: freedom. After all, they don’t need to be elected or re-elected.”

His book has many examples demonstrating how sortition has worked in the past and practical methods for putting it into practice in the United States.

The jokes about the governing skills of a populace that can hardly name the branches of its government write themselves. They make it easy to dismiss Van Reybrouck’s idea. But I challenge you to give this short book a read and come out the other side not agreeing that the solution to Congressional gridlock is to abolish elections.

The Rest of The Nonfiction Books I Read

This list is arranged in the order I read them. It does not include graphic novels which I discuss further below. Recommended books are starred.

  • Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), by Jeff Tweedy
    A memoir of the frontman for the rock band Wilco. You’ll enjoy it if you love Wilco. You probably won’t care if you don’t.
  • How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky
    A shallow exploration of the title. Suppose you’ve read any decent magazine articles about the current state of our democracy and/or its historical precursors. In that case, there’s nothing here for you.
  • Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, by Lyall Watson 🌟
    A beautifully written book that provides just what the subtitle says it will. This was the first read of my summer this year. It gave me a new sense of the sacred as I sat in my backyard, drinking a beer, listening to the wind tickle the leaves of our maple tree, and feeling its breath across my skin.
  • How to Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr 🌟
    So what do you know about how the United States conquered its territories (Puerto Rico, etc.) and dominated the globe? Not enough is what. Read this one to learn more.
  • How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, by Thomas Cahill
    This one had been on my To Read list for decades before I added it to my Audible library this summer. I listened to it while carting students around Vermont. I’m glad I read it, but you probably don’t need to.
  • JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass 🌟
    A good friend recommended this one while we debated the take on the Kennedy Assassination presented in Real Enemies. This book reveals a lot of information I hadn’t known, specifically the secret interactions Kennedy had with Kruschev and Castro, all in the hopes of peace. His move towards a common peace is “why he died and why it matters.”
  • The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, by Michael Finkel 🌟
    This read like a great, extra-long magazine article. The hermit, Christopher Knight, lived for nearly three decades within a mile of a bunch of summer homes on North Pond in Maine, but he only spoke to humans twice during his self-exile. He did, however, burgle those homes a lot.
  • A Human History of Emotion: How The Way We Feel Built The World We Know, by Richard Firth-Godbehere
    I was excited by this popular introduction to “the growing discipline called the history of emotion,” which “tries to understand how people understood their feelings in the past.” While I found some nuggets, the book eventually bogged down. The later chapters feel like a checklist designed to get us into the modern era.
  • The Gus Chronicles: Reflections From An Abused Kid, by Charles D. Appelstein
    We were assigned this reading at my job this year. The Gus Chronicles is a fictional memoir of an abused kid at a residential facility. The main character is a composite of my students, and almost every page gave me something new to think about. But if you don’t work with this population, you’ll probably get bored by the author’s attempts at cleverness.
  • Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett 🌟
    One of my former colleagues gave a presentation highlighting “the lizard brain.” I’d known for a while that the theory of “the triune brain” had long been discounted, but I didn’t have a clear understanding of today’s more scientific understandings. This book gave a good introduction.
  • Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen 🌟
    This fantastic look at the Lakota perspective on North American history demonstrates that former European colonists were not the dominant civilization on the continent for much of our history.
  • Yearbook, by Seth Rogen
    A fun memoir where the audiobook was recorded, in part, like an audio play with different actors performing different voices. Because I’m a sucker for Seth Rogen’s “fuck it” sensibility, I enjoyed this series of stories from his life. They generally circle around (surprise, surprise) his relationship with drugs. It didn’t include nearly enough Hollywood gossip, but each story was strong enough on its own that I didn’t much care.
  • Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan 🌟
    Another book appearing on many Best of the Year lists, Index, A History of the doesn’t attempt to be more than it says it is, but it is more fun than you’d expect. Duncan makes each chapter compelling, and the indexes at the end are, as you might imagine, a vital part of the work.

Best Graphic Novel

Penultimate Quest

By Lars Brown and Bex Glendining with John Kantz

I picked this one up thinking it would be little more than an adult-appropriate Dungeons & Dragons-themed graphic novel, but it turned out to be much deeper than that.

The characters in the book experience a quasi-Groundhog Day existence. There’s a never-ending dungeon with monsters, treasures, and a tavern where they can celebrate their victories. If they die, they return to the start of the dungeon. However, the stakes of their existence are nil, and after several adventures, they question their purpose.

The sections in this omnibus take each character’s story deeper, revealing that there is more to this adventure than meets the eye.

Note the man in the Hawaiian shirt and sandals. This ain’t a normal fantasy tale.

I’m selecting it as my favorite graphic novel of the year because the omnibus surprised me so much. I generally had no idea where each story was going.

Runner Up: The Arrival, by Shaun Tan

This wordless graphic novel tells the story of a man who leaves his family behind in a dangerous country so he can make a start for them in a new land. Its use of “gibberish” symbols for writing and language, its otherworldly architecture, its alien food, and its alien creatures capture (I have to assume) the isolation and out-of-placeness of being an immigrant. By committing to the fantastic elements of his world, Tan makes the immigration story universal, bypassing the prejudices and bigotry that can quickly turn empathy into politics.

All that ever matters.

The art in this graphic novel is (as it must be in a wordless book) stupendous. Every page is a delight, every pencil stroke, every shadow. Next time you’re in a library or killing time in a bookstore, find this one, sit down in a comfortable chair, and allow yourself to arrive in this intimately drawn, strangely familiar world.

The Rest of The Graphic Novels I Read

This list is arranged in the order I read them. Recommended books are starred.

  • Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species: A Graphic Adaptation, by Michael Keller & Nicole Rage Fuller
    One of my colleagues asked me to read this book and decide if it would be appropriate for our students with reading difficulties. The book is more than an adaptation of On The Origin of the Species; it also includes biographical elements and the broader context of the time Darwin worked in. Not a bad read, but definitely too complex for most of my students.
  • Boxers, by Gene Luen Yang 🌟
    A fantastical version of China’s Boxer Rebellion, where a young boy who communes with the ancient Chinese gods leads the Boxers against the foreign devils: the colonialists and the Christians. Unfortunately, many of those Christians are Chinese, leading to severe moral questioning. A fantastic book.
  • Saints, by Gene Luen Yang 🌟
    Picking up with one of the side characters from Boxers, this graphic novel explores the Chinese Christian on the other side of the Boxer Rebellion. More than just a retelling of the first book from a different perspective, however, Saints is a story about loyalty: to one’s people, one’s country, or one’s faith. Another fantastic book.
  • First Man: Reiminaging Matthew Henson, by Simon Schwartz 🌟
    I’d never heard of Matthew Henson. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this African-American salesclerk worked as Robert Peary’s valet, traveling with him to Nicaragua and, later, on seven voyages to the Arctic. According to Henson, he was the first person to reach the geographic North Pole in April 1909, not Peary (many dispute that Peary or Henson actually got there). As the White leader of the expedition, Peary took all the credit, of course. Though Henson did achieve some level of fame in his later years, he suffered through plenty of lean times. This graphic novel tells an imaginary version of that tale.
  • They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei 🌟
    George Takei is one of country’s more famous individuals. He first gained fame as Sulu from Star Trek. Takei later became an outspoken activist for gay rights and one of the most followed individuals on Facebook. But before that, he was a Japanese-American boy whose family was illegally sent to an internment camp during World War II. In They Called Us Enemy, Takei shares his family’s story.
  • Long Walk to Valhalla, by Adam Smith & Matthew Fox 🌟
    A story about a young man at the end of his rope. He grew up without a mother and with an alcoholic, abusive father and a special needs brother who hallucinates. He meets a young girl who claims to be a Valkyrie who has come to accompany him to Valhalla, but before that, there are a few things she needs him to do. Another book that ended up being more profound than I expected.

Thanks for checking out the books I read this year. I hope you’ve found a few books you can add to next year’s list.

Categories
reviews

Top 5 TV Shows of 2022

My wife and I didn’t watch too many shows released this year. We caught up on old shows we hadn’t seen yet (e.g. Yellowstone) and chased them with faithful sitcoms (e.g. 30 Rock). Separately, I started a bunch of 2022 shows but due to … you know, “life” … I haven’t finished them yet (e.g. House of Dragons, Rings of Power, Sandman).

Of the shows I did finish, here are my top five.

5. We Need to Talk About Cosby

In 1965, Bill Cosby was already a successful stand-up comedian and was just about to become the first Black man in American history to star in the lead role of a nationally-broadcast television drama. He was also already a sexual assaulter.

By the time the accusations against the man who would become known as “America’s Funniest Father” came to light in 2014, Cosby had committed at least 60 instances of rape, drug-facilitated sexual abuse, sexual battery, child sexual abuse, and sexual misconduct. He had even terrorized young women who appeared on his massive hit sitcom, The Cosby Show, women those of us who grew up in the 1980s still remember seeing on TV.

In short, Bill Cosby was a monster.

In W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series for SHOWTIME, we learn the man’s history of violence, but we also learn the ways he contributed to the growth and development of Black America. Bell tells the full story in all its complexity, showing why Bill Cosby really is, as Philadelphia Magazine described him, “Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Hyde.

This is what documentaries were invented for. Bell doesn’t provide any easy answers. His series shows that humans are messy and complicated and can simultaneously contain the worst and best of our nature.

He was right. We need to talk about Cosby, which is why you need to watch this show.

4. The Bear

My wife is from the suburbs of Chicago. I’m from the suburbs of Boston. The first time our families met was at our college graduation party. Her father prepared Italian beef for everyone. After tasting it for the first time, my brother said (not within earshot of my future father-in-law), “Meh. It tastes like Steak-ummms.”

And thus was declared the regional war between Boston-style roast beef and Chicago-style Italian beef.

For the record, I love them both.

I also loved The Bear, FX’s anxiety-inducing series focused on the story of a world-renowned chef who inherits an Italian beef joint in Chicago after its owner, his older brother, kills himself. The series focuses on his attempts to make changes to the restaurant while also respecting its traditions and the people who work there, most of whom he’s known since he was a kid.

But more than just a workplace dramedy, The Bear explores panic and grief as the main character, his sister, and crew deal with the loss of the brother and boss who inspired, angered, protected, and loved them.

The casting is perfect, with no weak link among them, and the pacing of the episodes is fantastic, giving viewers just enough of each character to sense their heart and humanity without (d)evolving into an anthology show (see Atlanta).

Should you watch The Bear if you haven’t yet? Yes, chef.

3. The Legend of Vox Machina

Despite being a die-hard Dungeons & Dragons player and dungeon master (sometimes playing in three different games per week and going on five or six years of using D&D in the classroom with my students), I do not listen to or watch Critical Role, the most successful D&D-focused podcast on the Internet with Twitch episodes that regularly draw in half a million viewers per week.

Despite not knowing anything about the world or storylines of Critical Role, I thoroughly enjoyed their animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, on Amazon Prime.

You probably know the basic plotlines of a typical Dungeons & Dragons campaign. A small group of adventurers go on a quest to kill a dragon, find a jewel, save a princess, stop the goblin king, etc. They use special abilities and weapons to overcome their foes, solve mind-bending puzzles, and avoid death-inducing traps. Plus, there’s magic.

But unless you’ve played a game of Dungeons & Dragons, you might not know the experience is typically wildly chaotic and filled with obscene language, rampaging violence, and a dragon’s hoard of double-entendres. On the other hand, players often care deeply about their characters, and they’ll genuinely wrestle with certain decisions, such as whether to sacrifice their character for a compatriot or go against their principles to avoid betraying a friend.

The Legend of Vox Machina does a fantastic job of recreating what it feels like to sit down at a table with some of your funniest and weirdest adult friends and play a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Combine its perfect tone with talented voice actors, a massively experienced dungeon master, and high-quality animation, and you’ve got an almost perfect show.

I can’t wait for Season Two.

2. Severance

First, it’s just nice to see Adam Scott working. I’ve been a fan since the 2007 HBO series Tell Me You Love Me (canceled after one season) and became an even bigger fan thanks to 2009’s Party Down (canceled after two seasons). When he showed up as a regular on NBC’s Parks & Rec in 2010, I thought the same thing I thought in 2022: It’s nice to see him working.

What’s better, though, is to see him working on something so good. Adam Scott’s comedy chops ingratiated him in the Adult Swim universe, which is fine but not something I watch much. His affability also led to a stint as a game show host.

But to see him as the lead character on a high-concept, expertly written, wonderfully cast, sci-fi-influenced, suspenseful drama that kept viewers surprised all season long was just a pure delight.

Of course, there was more to Severance than Adam Scott. He was joined onscreen by the always incredible John Turturro, whose character enjoys a heartwarming relationship with a character played by the surprisingly delightful Christopher Walken. The other two main characters — played by Britt Lower and Zach Cherry — round out our heroes, and each of them is given enough focus to make it a true ensemble. Then we get Patricia Arquette as one antagonist and the incredible Tramill Tillman as the other, both of whom brought so much tension to the screen.

Season One ended on a huge cliffhanger. I’m excited to see how its creator will surprise us next.

1. Reservation Dogs

This is simply the best show on television right now.

Every episode hits just right. Some of them make you laugh. Others bring tears to your eyes. Most of them do both. Each of the four main characters is perfect, and every supporting character makes you want a spin-off show that focuses exclusively on them.

Whether it’s an episode about a reservation police officer being accidentally dosed with acid and stumbling upon a secret society of fish-fuckers out in the woods or a bottle episode where the entire community rallies around a teenage girl whose grandmother and lone caretaker is dying in her bed, this series about four Native American teenagers dealing with the suicide of their leader and best friend is as good as it gets.

Several times during the season, my wife or I would ask the other, “Which character is your favorite?” And every single time, it’s an impossible question to answer. Each one is so freakin’ good and played so freakin’ well that to choose an answer would be disrespectful.

For example, one of the episodes this season focused on Cheese. His uncle (whom he lived with) got arrested for growing weed, so the state sent him to a boy’s home run by Marc Maron. Each of the characters in the boy’s home, including Marc Maron’s, was played perfectly by the actors, and they each explored the humor and the pathos of their small parts. Meanwhile, the actor who plays Cheese nailed every scene. The character is lovely and sweet without being cloying or losing his edge (gotta love a character who is thoughtful enough to introduce himself with his pronouns while also wearing a GWAR shirt) that at the end of the episode, it only makes sense to say Cheese is my favorite character.

But then in another episode, the actress who plays Elora pulls off a single moment — the moment when she realizes her grandmother has died (note the change in her expression at 1:07) — with such subtlety, grace, and…well, truth…that I made my wife rewind the scene and watch it again. How could she not be my favorite character?

But then there’s Willie Jack, whose depth, loyalty, and “realness” are unparalleled, not to mention Uncle Brownie, Big, Mose & Mekko, and all the wonderful aunties. How can a person choose a favorite from this incredible bounty of talent?

I will say, however, that I find myself giddy whenever we get a scene with the spirit guide.

I love this show, these characters, and these actors so much. And you should too.

Categories
reviews

Top 5 Albums of 2022

According to Apple Music, I listened to 4,038 songs this year across 348 albums by 1,215 different artists. Most of those albums were not recorded in 2022 — 423 minutes of my listening time, for example, came from the Grateful Dead, a now-defunct band that hasn’t recorded a new song since 1995, and 395 minutes came from Miles Davis, who has been dead since 1991.

That said, I added 533 songs across 47 different albums from 2022 to my Music Library this year. The Apple-Music-defined genres of those albums included African, Alternative, Electronic, Folk, Funk, Hard Rock, Hip-Hop/Rap, Jam Bands, Jazz, Pop, Psychedelic, R&B/Soul, Rock, Singer/Songwriter, and Underground Rap (an official Apple Music genre, I guess).

It is an eclectic group that does not include some of the year’s most celebrated albums but does include popular artists such as Lizzo, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé, as well as niche artists such as The Gasoline Brothers and Natalie Cressman & Ian Faquini.

Without further adieu, I present my Top 5 Albums of 2022.

5. Benevento

Marco Benevento

Marco Benevento, a renowned multi-instrumentalist, has played with greats such as Trey Anastasio, Pink Martini, Ween, John Medeski, Phil Lesh, and Joe Russo. He recorded the twelve songs on this self-titled album in his home studio in Woodstock, NY, where he played all of the instruments and enlisted his wife and children to sing background for him.

The album sounds like an optimistic sun kiss of 70s Californian psychedelic jazz-pop. The drums include electronic and acoustic beats, and his vocals sound like they’re filtered through a drive-through speaker at a carhop along the Pacific Ocean. It’s difficult not to sway your head and bop your shoulders as you listen.

Each song on the album includes his incredible keyboard skills, and even the 36-second track, “Polysix,” which sounds like a sunshower composed by a child’s toy (manipulated by a computer), has enough of a dance groove to keep your foot tapping.

4. This Machine Still Kills Fascists

Dropkick Murphys with lyrics by Woody Guthrie

As a devotee of Bob Dylan, Wilco, and John Steinbeck, I’m a sucker for a Woody Guthrie lyric. As a Boston native, I’m a sucker for the homegrown Celtic punk-folk music of Dropkick Murphys. When you combine them, as the Murphys do on This Machine Still Kills Fascists, and add to them the blue-collar-fueled political progressivism embodied in the ass-kicking AntiFa movement, well, you’re gonna earn yourself a spot on my Top 5 Albums of the year.

The Murphys never try to present themselves as more than they are: a bunch of hardworking Bostonians who’ll kick your ass for disrespecting the neighborhood but who’ll always wrap their arms around you to sing a maudlin folk song that brings the bar to tears at the memory of the Irish lads who sacrificed their lives to defend their principles. They’re the kind of band that invites their friends, family, and fans into the recording studio to add beef to their raucous choruses. They play guitars, bang on drums, and spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to mic up bagpipes.

That doesn’t change on This Machine Still Kills Fascists, but they do it 100% acoustic this time. As they announced on their website, “That’s right – there’s not a guitar amplifier on this album!!” The lack of amplified electricity can’t stop their infectious driving anthems, and the addition of Guthrie’s pro-union, eat-the-rich lyrics makes this album exactly what our country needs right now.

Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground
Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Gonna lay you fascists down

3. Unlimited Love

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Unlimited Love marks the first album from the Chilis in six years and the first to include guitarist John Frusciante in sixteen years. Produced (once again) by Rick Rubin, Unlimited Love captures the natural evolution of this quartet.

One has to remember that the Chili’s perenially shirtless singer, Anthony Keidis, perenially naked bassist, Flea, and perenially baseball-hatted drummer, Chad Smith, are all in their 60s, and even Frusciante, the teenage guitarist wunderkind who turned down Frank Zappa to join the Chilis in the late 1980s, is now 52.

This is not the same Californian funk-punk band that George Clinton and Maceo Parker introduced the world to in 1985. They’ve lost members to drugs, toured the globe, fought their addictions and lost and fought again. They’ve ascended the charts, won awards, been criticized for chasing hits, dated a Spice Girl, Cher, Madonna, Sinead O’Connor, Ione Skye, and Heidi Klum (among many others), slept with over a hundred women in a year (including the 14-year-old daughter of a police chief), and been charged with sexual assault against a fan in the crowd. They rode in the ambulance when teen-hearthrob River Phoenix overdosed, had children with multiple women, and made their way through at least ten former band members (most of them guitarists who tried to replace Frusciante).

Life has happened to these four, and the evolution of their music shows it. The songs on Unlimited Love were most definitely written and played by the Red Hot Chili Peppers we all fell in love with on Blood Sugar Sex Magick, but these are not young men anymore, and their sense of what sounds good includes emotions and complexities that their younger versions could not have heard.

Crazily enough, after being on hiatus for six years, the Chilis released two albums this year. Unlimited Love is the first one (and the better, in my opinion) but the second, Return of the Dream Canteen, is a quality album too, and you should definitely give it a listen.

2. Conspiranoid

Primus

No song captures the political reality of our late-stage democracy better than Primus’ “Conspiranoia.” The verses in this eleven-minute epic depict the dread fantasies of Lloyd Boyd the Paranoid and Marion Barrion the Contrarian. As Les Claypool, Primus’ prime mover, sings, “You can lead a horse to water / but you cannot make him drink. / You can guide a fool towards logic / but you’ll rarely make him think.”

If it were just the political messaging of the lyrics and the hilarious list of conspiracy theories spoken in the final three minutes, the song would still be a must-listen in a post-Jan. 6th America, but Claypool’s virtuosic bass lines, supported by Tim Alexander’s powerful drumming and Larry LaLonde’s experimental guitar excursions, keep every moment of this sonic behemoth fresh and exciting.

Conspiranoid is a three-song EP. “Conspiranoia” is followed by the infectious “Follow the Fool” and the haunting “Erin on the Side of Caution.” The other two songs are decent and fit the musical tone set by “Conspiranoia,” but it’s the first song that kept me listening to this EP again and again.

1. Omnium Gatherum

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

If you’re not already onboard with this Australian band, you’re missing the most excitingly unpredictable band since Ween. They released four albums in 2022: Omnium Gatherum (April); Ice, Death, Planet, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava (October 7th); Laminated Denim (October 12th); and Changes (October 28th).

That wasn’t even the most albums they’ve released in a year; they released FIVE full-length albums in 2017! In short, they’re friggin’ nuts. Changes marks the twenty-third album released by this sextet since they formed in 2010.

There’s simply no way to describe King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. A single song may include death metal screaming choruses, smooth psychedelic bass lines, Beastie/Beck-like raps, jam-band guitar adventures, poly-genre fusions, melodic harmonies, and trippy production effects.

Any of the four albums released by KGLW this year could have been on the list, but with sixteen songs and a running time that exceeds 80 minutes, Omnium Gatherum provides the largest taste of what these incredible artists are capable of. Press play and let that baby surprise you at every turn.

Categories
politics reviews

Sincerely, Goodbye Mr. C.K.

My students have to write an essay this week on any controversial topic of their choosing. They have to state their opinion and support it using at least three different reasons, each supported in their own right. Topics include the reëlection of former President Trump, the right of trans women to participate in women’s sports, the status of digital art, involuntary mental-health therapy for teenagers, Disney’s financial donations to anti-gay politicians in Florida, and more.

One student elected to address “cancel culture,” though he has little understanding of the issue’s nuances. That’s where his research will come in, and I look forward to seeing his opinion develop.

When discussing examples of cancel culture with him this morning, he began by bringing up Bill Cosby. I explained to him that there’s a difference between “cancel culture” and being held accountable for one’s criminal acts. Instead, I suggested he consider the case of another world-famous comedian, Louis C.K.

In 2017, Louis C.K. published an open apology letter in The New York Times. He admitted to exposing himself to women who felt unable to reject his advances due to his influence in the entertainment industry. Though he claimed he never exposed himself to a woman without first asking her permission, he realized — now that their story was public — that the women did not feel safe enough to reject him.

He ended his letter by saying he would now “step back and take a long time to listen.”

After publishing the apology, Hollywood canceled its relationship with Louis C.K. His recently-completed movie did not get released. He lost deals with Netflix, HBO, and TBS. His animated characters received new voices (even in reruns). He later claimed the incident cost him $35 million.

About nine months later, Louis C.K. returned to the stage in New York City and began his comeback, which later blossomed into national and international tours.

Three years and one pandemic later, over 12,000 members of the Recording Academy voted to give Louis C.K. the award for “Best Comedy Album” at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.

Whose culture, I wonder, is being canceled?

I have very little doubt that Louis C.K.’s award-winning album is funny. Before deciding I didn’t want to give him any more of my money, I found Louis C.K.’s comedy to be nothing short of genius.

Its genius, however, required irony, and C.K.’s actions removed irony from the table. While creepiness had always been a conscious part of his comedy, without irony, all that was left was a creep. I didn’t want to give any more of my money to a creep.

Of course, my lack of support hasn’t stopped him. He’s a comedian. He tells jokes. And he tells them well enough for people to pay him for the privilege to hear them.

(I question the character of those who still choose to give him their money, but I questioned my own character for watching the NFL, and look how much that changed the world.)

He tells them so well, in fact, that I once crafted an etymological argument explaining why he should be invited back onto the world’s stage: because maybe only he had the genius to help us…(alas)

Louis C.K. tells jokes. People pay to hear them. All the power to him.

But I’m choosing not to listen. That’s not called canceling. That’s called “Moving on.”

Categories
reviews

The Books I Read in 2021

Every year, I participate in the Goodreads Challenge, where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books for the year and then track your progress.

This year I set a goal of 35 books. I read or listened to 58.

I usually go through the books one-by-one, but I don’t want to write, and you don’t want to read, an annotated list of 58 books, so this year, I’m going to select my favorites from various categories, then post the whole list.

Favorite Fiction

51342031 SY475

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Like many dutiful readers of speculative fiction, I’ve read my share of “cli-fi” (i.e., fiction that focuses on climate change). Still, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future outshines all the others. 

Several of my friends have read this one, and not all of them were as impressed as I was, but I enjoyed the relationships between the characters, the terrible vision of what’s to come, and the possibilities Robinson comes up with as to how any changes at all will be made to our societies.

If you’re living in the 21st Century, The Ministry for the Future is a must-read.

Favorite Nonfiction

Book Cover

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist, The Dawn of Everything re-examines our understanding of humanity’s earliest years in light of the latest discoveries in anthropology and archaeology.

But more than an update on the scientific literature, the book restates the question of our origins. With examples throughout the world, they demonstrate that “There is no ‘original’ form of human society…[and that] as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.”

Throughout the book, the authors reveal historical examples of various social structures. They use their findings to build new theories of domination and freedom, exploring how the growth of one led to the protection or expansion of the other, a sociological dance that is still ongoing today.

“What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, government, bureaucracies, ruling classes the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are?”

The importance of this book is not just historical; it shows that, from the very beginning, humans have experimented with their social and political structures and that most changes in those structures were self-conscious. Our world has not always been this way, and this way is not an inevitable conclusion to history. We can, and we have always had, the freedom to change.

Not-so-Quick Note: Graeber and Wengrow put forth two major theories in this book. The first defines the primary forms of freedom.

In the United States, freedom is an empty word used primarily by people on the right to rationalize selfish acts. But Graeber and Wengrow argue freedom boils down to three things:

  • The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands
  • The freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year
  • The freedom to disobey authorities without consequence

For example, most indigenous Americans belonged to a clan whose organization went above and beyond their nation, tribe, kin, or even language. Members of the Bear clan, for example, were welcomed into the homes of other members anywhere on the continent, regardless of language or nation. “This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome.”

Next, many cultures practiced different social relationships depending on the season. Indigenous Americans on the Great Plains, for example, “created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups.”

Finally, many “chiefs” we read about in history only held power in their immediate vicinity. If you didn’t want to follow the orders of the chief, you just had to move down the road a few miles, where a chief and henchman couldn’t see you. 

In addition, to reduce the arbitrary violence of a sovereign, most societies “would try to surround the godlike personages of [their] rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces.”

The second major theory the book makes defines the primary principles of social power:

  • Control of violence (e.g., the state’s monopoly on the use of force)
  • Control of information (e.g., religious and civil bureaucracies)
  • Individual charisma (e.g., “I’m special and deserve to be treated differently”)

Graeber and Wengrow invite us to think of “the secret agent” as the mythic symbol here: “James Bond, with his license to kill, combines charisma, secrecy, and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.”

Exploring history using these notions of freedom and social domination helps us understand “where we got stuck,” and invites us to imagine what a different world has actually looked like.

Everyone should read this book.

Favorite Graphic Novel

52079617Paying the Land, by Joe Sacco

This is a nonfiction piece about the history of the Dene people in Canada. It covers a broad scope of history, but primarily focuses on the 20th century, when the Dene way of life in the Northwest territories came into conflict with the extraction of oil, gas, and diamonds. 

It tells the horrid tales of “the residential schools,” whose mass graves of dead children drew the world’s attention earlier in 2021. But it goes beyond that, exploring the rise of drug use and alcoholism among the Dene due to generational trauma and Western imperialist efforts to eradicate an entire culture. 

Sacco’s work in this book is incredible. It’s a piece of in-depth journalism that puts you in the heart of the region while empathizing with the myriad individuals Sacco interviewed and researched for the book.

An absolute must-read.

Favorite Story Collection

40600870 SY475

A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams

Each story in this collection imagines a different future for the United States. Its stories include: 

  • A bookstore that skirts the border between America and California.
  • A country where it is illegal to be non-binary, trans, or gay, to speak a language other than English, to not post to social media, or, really, to be anything other than “fine.”
  • A country where “the strongest military in the world turned on their own people.”
  • A country where librarians are the protectors of magic.
  • An entry in a history textbook about the transition from our current political and social reality and into what comes next.
  • A country where violent homophobia has become the norm (in this country, “Albany had had eighteen homophobic hate killings in the previous calendar year. Better than Buffalo, but then again, Buffalo had a 57 percent unemployment rate”), where the government filters art (the story takes place on the night Prince’s songs are added to the filter), and where “the best we could hope for was to keep our head down and find escape wherever we could.”
  • A country where a plague caused by the Doomsday Virus has taken hold.
  • A country where an unnamed but obvious President Trump is faced with an inter-dimensional time traveler caused by the success of the “MAGA Bomb,” a device which “erased a person’s racial development, resetting their genetic lineage back to their original code, called genetic cleansing.”
  • A country where Americans don’t vote with their hearts or their heads, but their fangs.
  • A country where “the full power of…bioengineering [was] not simply set loose on the world but left in the hands of…maniacal power-hoarding fiends, for them to weaponize and deploy at their will.”

And that’s only the first half or so of the stories in this collection. There’s such an embarrassment of riches in this book that I ended up using it to guide much of my reading for the rest of the year, checking out authors I first discovered here.

Favorite Book Series

Trilogy Cover

The Centennial Cycle, by Malka Older

I discovered Malka Older in The People’s Future of the United States. Dr. Older has a bachelor’s degree in literature from Harvard and  a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the School of Advanced International Studies. Her doctoral work focused on the multi-level governance and disaster responses. Professionally, she works for the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University and was the Head of Office in Darfur. She’s worked in humanitarian aid in Darfur, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali.

All of which is to say that Dr. Older knows what she’s talking about, and in this near-future trilogy, she puts it all to work. 

In her near-future, most nation-states dissolved and the world is made up of polities of 100,000 people — a centenal. Each centenal votes democratically for a particular party to lead it. Some parties are global, with designs to capture a majority of the world’s centenals and thus open themselves to more power, while others are hyper-local with no intentions of expansion.

Further, a highly regulated version of the Internet aims to be the sole provider of facts and information about the world. It might seem big brother-ish,  but it’s more like one solution to the current pandemic of misinformation. You can think of it as a mix of Augmented Reality, Wikipedia, Snopes, Yelp, and the United Nations.

Each book in the cycle furthers the timeline and the narrative while also exploring the stratification, self-interests, and outliers of Dr. Older’s society.

The result is a cohesive setting and a plot with local and global stakes acted on by interesting characters from diverse backgrounds and with various perspectives and desires. The best kind of page-turner.

The Complete List in the Order I Read Them

(I’ve bolded the books I highly recommend)

  1. Family Tree: Volume 1, by Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester
  2. The Hidden Girl & Other Stories, by Ken Liu
  3. A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams
  4. Ken State: Four Dead in Ohio, by Derf Backderf
  5. My Friend Dahmer, by Derk Backderf
  6. American War, by Omar El Akkad
  7. G.I. Joe: Hearts & Minds, by Max Brooks
  8. Code 7: Cracking the Code for an Epic Life, by Brian R. Johnson
  9. Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson
  10. Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, by Max Brooks
  11. Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller
  12. She Persisted: Harriet Tubman, by Andrea Davis Pinkney
  13. Liquid Reign, by Tim Reutemann
  14. Solutions & Other Problems, by Allie Brosh
  15. Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate, by Adam Jentleson
  16. The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley
  17. The Adoption, by Zidrou
  18. The Sacrifice of Darkness, by Roxane Gay and Tracy Lynne Oliver
  19. The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
  20. The Times I Knew I Was Gay, by Eleanor Crewes
  21. Paying the Land, by Joe Sacco
  22. The Damascus Road, by Jay Parini
  23. Piranesi, by Susanna Clark
  24. To A God Unknown, by John Steinbeck
  25. The Silence, by Dom Delillo
  26. Mapping the Interior, by Stephen Graham Jones
  27. Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz
  28. Infomocracy, by Malka Older
  29. Reason, the Only Oracle of Man {or} a Compendius System of Natural Religion, by Ethan Allen
  30. Null States, by Malka Older
  31. State Tectonics, by Malka Older
  32. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
  33. A History of the Town of Poultney, Vermont, from Its Settlement to the Year 1875, by Joseph Joslin
  34. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine
  35. Germ Warfare: A Very Graphic History, by Max Brooks
  36. The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins, by Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, and Carey Pietsch
  37. Fake Blood, by Whitney Gardner
  38. Sailor Twain {or} The Mermaid in the Hudson, by Mark Siegel
  39. Templar, by Jordan Mechner
  40. Punk Rock Jesus, by Sean Murphy
  41. Factory Summers, by Guy Delisle
  42. Two Dead, by Van Jensen and Nate Powell
  43. The Girl from the Sea, by Molly Knox Ostertag
  44. A.D.: After Death, by Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire
  45. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
  46. Walking Wounded: Uncut Stories from Iraq, by Olivier Morel
  47. That Can Be Arranged: A Muslim Love Story, by Huda Fahmy
  48. River of Ink, by Étienne Appert
  49. Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy, by Dan G. Newman
  50. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
  51. The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present, by John W. O’Malley
  52. The Awakened Kingdom, by N.K. Jemisin
  53. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe
  54. The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller
  55. Blind Lake, by Robert Charles Wilson
  56. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom
  57. The Mystwick School of Musicraft, by Jessica Khoury
  58. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow