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List Processing: Why We Never Have to Read End-of-Year Lists Again (But Why not Make Some?)

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

I’ve been busy cleaning up the champagne corks after New Year’s Eve, and this post was meant to be a light-hearted romp through a ubiquitous genre, but then I got thinking. I don’t know who invented the “Year End List,” but it’s been ubiquitous since at least 2012, from back when Tumblr was a thing:

In recent years, actually, the list-as-article – blame the Internet – has elevated itself to a genre of its own, with sites like Buzzfeed, Complex, the Village Voice blog and Paste’s list of the day helpfully totaling up the top cute-animal tumblrs, things you didn’t know about Jay-Z and jazz albums to hear before you die, among many, many other things, with impressive frequency and breadth of topic. (For the best dogs in popular culture history, go here; alternately, the top ten Homer Simpson musical performances are here.)

(Note that the list-as-article is a different genre from the listicle, a mere sequences of screens to click though — “Idiotic New Year’s Resolutions You’ll Never Actually Keep” — although both genres share the pleasing characteristics of being clickbait and producible by interns.)

The end-of-year list is not a mere list, either. An example of the latter, from “52 things I learned in 2022“:

Older travellers use airport toilets to hear flight announcements, because acoustics are much clearer. [Christopher DeWolf via Ben Terrett]

(Try not to do this, for obvious reasons.) In addition to being curated, end-of-year lists are classified and ranked. It follows that the commodities — or celebrities and politicians, assuming all these to be different — must be sufficiently differentiated for classification and ranking to occur; Monongahela steel ingots, for example, are unlikely to appear on any list, since an end-of-year steel ingots list is unlikely to be created. (Readers, feel free to provide counter-examples to this facile generalization.)

In practice, most of end-of-year lists aggregate music, movies and TV, and reading matter; all eminently classifiable and rankable. A list derived from my cursory sampling, starting with Music: TOP 100 Songs of 2022 Spotify, The 25 Best K-Pop Albums of 2022 (Billboard); Movies/TV: Best Movies of 2022 Ranked (Rotten Tomatoes), The 33 best films of 2022 TimeOut, The 10 Best TV Shows of 2022 (Esquire); Reading Matter: The Ultimate Best Books of 2022 List (Literary Hub), The Best Books of 2022 (Esquire), Best Opinion Pieces of 2022 (Teen Vogue), Top 25 Stories of 2022 (Rolling Stone), Our 10 favorite comics that captured 2022 (WaPo); Celebrities and Politicians: The Most Influential People of 2022 (TIME), This ‘superstar loser’ tops the list of 2022’s biggest losers in politics (FOX); and Other: The 50 best video games of 2022 (Polygon), These 20 stocks were the biggest losers of 2022 (MarketWatch), Top 10 of 2022 (Wine Spectator), and Nick DePaula’s Top Sneakers of 2022 (Boardroom).

I’m not recommending that you actually read any of this stuff; these are just the results I got from searching on “‘end of year’ list” for the last month. I got pages and pages, and everything was like this.

In indeed, the end-of-year list genre is so ubiquitous that it’s spawned its own genre: The list-of-lists, the meta-list (for which, I imagine, the list of three items I am about to construct is itself a meta-list, hence a meta-meta-list). From one meta-list site, “Year-End Lists“:

As you can see, the classifications for a hand-curated list (“Highlights”) are much the same as that for my search.

From a second (!) meta-list site, “Make Lists, Not War,” we see the same classification:

(We’ll get to the highlighed “consensus” below).

And we have a third (!!) meta-list example, a post, if not site — it’s an annual event — from Barack Obama himself. “My 2022 End of Year Lists.” The classification is exactly as we would expect: Books, movies, music. It’s possible that Obama’s choices show more originality of mind than his classification; but somehow I doubt it.

From defining and considering the genre, let’s look in a little detail at four end-of-year lists that at the very least weren’t produced by interns. These lists are sophisticated enough to have a subtext beyond “the default subtext,” which I will look at below. The four: WaPo (“In-Out”), the BBC (“Deaths”), Popular Science (“Innovations”), and the Associated Press (“notable quotes”).

1) “The List: 2022” Washington Post. From the introduction:

Things have to get better eventually, right? Maybe we can look to the Ever Given’s example: In mid-December, the ship returned to the Suez Canal, passing through without incident. Until we, too, can wriggle free of our impediments, join us for a booster dose of the List.

Story continues below advertisement.

(Love the plug for boosters, along with the jaunty meliorism.) This article is one of the ugliest and stupidest articles I’ve ever read. It’s the old “hot or not” dichotomy, but made cellphone-friendly, so you’ve got to scroll for miles to stumble on a nugget of value. Here’s one of the items, and there are many more like it, all equally… whatever the humor is. Sub-dad? Anyhow:

(The scrolled-from item is “quirky wallpaper”/”house murals”; the scroll-to item is “Diana”/”MJ”.) You can see. This one should have been left to the interns, but no. The editors had to make it interactive. Don’t interact. There’s no reason to.

Subtext: Thinking is binary thinking.

2) “Notable deaths 2022″ BBC (and the most Brit headline ever[1]). The story is in the classes and their ordering, because — this being the UK — isn’t it always. First come the deaths of Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Emeritus Benedict. Then comes, in this order, the following classification scheme:

A) Stage and Screen

B) Music

C) Politics

D) Writing, Journalism and Television

E) Comedy and Entertainment

F) Achievers and those who left their mark

G) Sport

Subtext: The commanding heights of the UK’s political economy, as seen by its owners. The BBC begins by hammering home the primacy of the British class system, and then gives its own, more detailed version of familiar trilogy of music, movies and TV, plus celebrities. I love that “achievers” are below the salt at #6! (Oddly, one thing the UK is really good at — intelligence plus other clandestine imperial services and dirty tricks, like defenestrating Corbyn — isn’t even mentioned. Unless it’s comedy. Or sport. Or spooks are immortal, like ghouls.)

3) “The 100 greatest innovations of 2022” Popular Science. We need only look at two items under Health:

A) Paxlovid by Pfizer: The first take-home treatment for COVID-19

B) Bivalent COVID-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech: A one-shot-fits-all approach

Here, as throughout the article, Popular Science uses the formula Innovation = Product [“Paxlovid”[2]] + Corporation [“Pfizer”] + Catchphrase [“The first take-home treatment for COVID-19”]. Obviously, something genuinely innovative like the Corsi-Rosenthal box wouldn’t be classifified as an “innovation,” because there’s no corporation to fill that slot in the formula.

Subtext: Innovation is corporate innovation.

4) “Zelenskyy quip, Trump conspiracy top 2022 notable quote list” Associated Press. From the Introduction:

A tart retort by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a U.S. offer of help and a call by former U.S. President Donald Trump for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution top a Yale Law School librarian’s list of the most notable quotations of 2022.

The list assembled by Shapiro is a supplement to The New Yale Book of Quotations, which is edited by Shapiro and published by Yale University Press.

There are two quotations from Trump, who apparently still lives rent-free in Shapiro’s head. Here’s #6:

6. “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” — U.S. President Joe Biden, calling out for deceased Congresswoman Jackie Walorski, White House conference on ending hunger, Sept. 28.

Personally, I would have put this at #1:

1. “This pandemic is over.” — U.S. President Joe Biden, 60 Minutes, September 18, 2022.

But what do I know? I’m not from Yale.

Subtext: What Yale thinks it’s not OK to talk about.

From defining the year-end-list genre, giving typical examples of it, and doing a closer reading of a few of the more egregious high-value cases, let’s finally turn to the views of those who create these lists, who do the curation, the classification, and the ranking. Why, other than paying the rent, do they do it? Various theories are proffered. From Pop Matters: “In Defense 0f End-Of-Year Lists“:

The art of compiling a set of things and ranking them in order from worst to best or best to worst is one of the most entertaining ways to incite discussion and analysis among both critics and fans alike. They assign quantity and judgement to things that are meant to be perceived as abstract and personalized. This, in turn, almost always calls for an awfully intriguing form of debate that is predicated on difference in taste. And as we all know by now, if there’s one thing that we as human begins hate to hear, it’s that our own interests and tastes are somehow wrongly conceived and inferior to another human being’s interests and tastes.

(“Taste” — the “consensus” spoken of above — and its origins, and why people might have different tastes, is considered entirely unproblematic.) “Discussion and analysis” translates readily to a business case for — at the baseline — clicks, but also time spent on the page, comments, recirculation through being quoted, etc. Circulation, in other words. Note that a unity of interest between reader and writer (or, as we say, “journalist”) is presumed, in terms of advancing “taste.” The New Statesman inverts this view, in “Why I Hate End of Year Lists“:

Lists, I have decided, are bad.

We think of lists as a glimpse into a person’s taste, but they’re more revealing of how that person wants to be seen. They’re less a way of sorting through and finding meaning in what we’ve consumed, and more about how we’d like a person to see our politics, our sense of humour, and where we locate beauty. The very act of list-making reorganises our personal encounters with art into a consumer guide for others.

For the New Statesman, end-of-year lists and the discussions swirling around them are, albeit taste-making, performance, and hence to be deplored.

Mashable, in “Our obsession with end-of-year lists is reining in again; is it even useful to us anymore?” marries taste-making (performative or not) to both keeping “the masses” in their place while enabling them to discover their “identities”

Humans tend to create chaos, but they also need to bring some order to the mayhem. As a result, the end-of-year lists by critics or connoisseurs weed out the average material for the masses. Speaking about this further, Susan A. Gelman, Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, says, “Year-end lists are one more manifestation of our deep urge to impose order on experience. But sorting out movies and albums does more than impose order on material goods; it also imposes order on the social world.”

Gelman further adds the list helps many to conclude who we are. With each year, we discover a new trait or characteristic about ourselves, adding to the existing layers of our personality. So when we create a list of what we like or see the kind of music or movies we appreciate on someone else’s list, we begin to form a sense of our identity.

For my part, I think French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his absurdly obsessive detailed discussion of a similar genre, “hit parades,” has the right of it:

Bourdieu, from Forms of Capital, pp 46-47…:

[B]ehind the apparent object of the ranking [“top ten” –lambert] list, the real object is the establishment as judges of those people who are listed.

That is, the point of the Bordieu’s “top ten” list is not the philosophers at all, but who gets to be one of the experts picking them.

What I want to do is comment on the body of judges [I said “experts”–lambert] constituted. A constituent body is a body assembled aned named by an act of nomination; for example, the Conseil d’Etat [State Council]….. This constituent body is disguised by the product of its actions; your attention is drawn to the ranking list and diverted away from its authors, for whom the very fact of drafting it renders them legitimate drafters of ranking lists. In other words, there is an operation of self-legitimation by the list drafters, and this, it seems to me, is the real issue… If we accept what they are doing, it is because there are ranking list drafters in other areas too (for example, they tell you: “These are the top ten films”)

Or, in political journalism, the leading candidates.

Or, in end-of-year lists, the top N items in lists of music, movies, reading matter, etc.

It is always the same operation; the judges are self-legitimized and forbid you to ask who has the right to designate the judges.

Self-legitimation by the creator is, then, the default subtext in all end-of-year lists, tastemaking and other social functions being overlays. Self-legitimation is how you keep paying the rent. That also explains why we don’t need to read end-of-year lists any more. Why do we want to help these people legitimate themselves?

But speaking of self-legitimation…. Recall that one example of an end-of-year list was sneakers. Well…

Has ChatGPT[3] self-legitimized “itself” with this list? Sneaker mavens? And, if so, what does that say about the future of the genre?

* * *

Readers! What kind of lists would you make for the end of the year 2022?

NOTES

[1] Bourdieu would really make a meal out of “notable,” because “notable” is, or was, one of the things you had to be to get a Blue Check on Twitter.

[2] “Why Not Everyone Should Take Paxlovid” Time. Not how the story started out!

[3] “List processing” in the headline is a joke: LISP, the original language for AI, stands for “list processing.”

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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24 comments

  1. Sub-Boreal

    An unexpected splendid bonus on New Years Day! Thank you.

    How appropriate and just what I needed as a break from dismantling the picked-over turkey carcass prior to soup-making: finding the last little bits of meat on the bony remnants of the year just finished.

  2. John B

    Fascinating article and a real challenge to those of us who enjoy reading lists, collecting lists, and making them. I started making meta-lists of end-of-the-year “best of” lists back in the late 1990s for these reasons:

    (1) I wanted to spend less time watching bad films, reading bad books, and listening to bad music.

    (2) The enormous amount of material (movies, books, albums) out there and my limited amount of time meant that I had to come up with a method for selecting which items to watch, read, and listen to.

    (3) I found that if I just went with my own ideas or things friends recommended, I tended to stay in a pretty small range of tastes. By going to the critics’ lists, I expanded my range enormously.

    (4) The system works: I find myself engaging with works of art (film, literature, music) of a high caliber that I enjoy and learn from. I consistently get outside my safe/comfort zone and expand my range of cultural experiences because I use these lists to guide me.

    (5) I realize that the critics who make the lists have agendas, and biases, etc. But the cool thing is that they watch movies, read books and listen to music for a living, and that matters to me. I still have some faith in expertise, unlike so much of the US population. Plus, looking at the aggregate of many different critics means that some of the biases, agendas, etc. cancel each other out.

    (6) It’s not just expertise – On a practical level, how are you going to discover new things unless you can connect with people (like critics) who review them for a living? Wait for your friends or family to recommend another book you won’t like, or another movie you hate? Or follow bot-created “if you liked this, you’ll like that” recommendations, that will keep you in a tiny little box of sameness?

    For example, the movie on the most lists this year was Aftersun. I had never heard of it, and none of my friends or family have heard of it. I went out and saw it the other day – it was phenomenally good. That amazing kind of cinema that stays in your head for days afterwards, that raises more questions than it answers, that dares to be challenging. If not for my meta-listing, I’d never have experienced this dazzling work of art.

    2. Lee

      Thanks. I’ve added Aftersun to my list of movies to be seen. From what I just read about it, although we are in different stages of life than that depicted in the movie, it seems to resonate with and might usefully inform my growing appreciation for my relationship with my adult son.

      In spite of it being on Obama’s list of favorite books from some previous year, I wholeheartedly recommend that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future be added to anyone’s list who has yet to read it.

  3. ilpalazzo

    Lambert

    I’ve seen you posting paintigs with very good taste. If you liked Rembrandt i recommend checking out Velasquez (link to gallery on wikipedia):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez#/media/File:Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez_Autorretrato_45_x_38_cm_-_Colecci%C3%B3n_Real_Academia_de_Bellas_Artes_de_San_Carlos_-_Museo_de_Bellas_Artes_de_Valencia.jpg

    Also Courbet is worth attention (link to gallery on wikipedia):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Courbet#/media/File:Gustave_Courbet,_photograph_Atelier_Nadar,_c._1860s.jpg

    Possibly nsfw images.

    1. Lambert Strether Post author

      > I’ve seen you posting paintigs with very good taste.

      [lambert blushes modestly.]

      Courbet was an interesting figure:

      Image of the People is far too dense in historical information and art-historical analysis and evaluation to lend itself to comprehensive treatment in a brief review. However, it seems to me that Clark’s interpretation of Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, which the artist labeled Tableau historique, is the fulcrum of his study, and one wants to see how effectively it balances his hook. The most striking result of Clark’s analysis is his reversal of Meyer Schapiro’s famous 1941 study, “Courbet and Popular Imagery” in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute. Schapiro, possessed of an unmatched familiarity with 19th-century political thought and an uncanny intuition of how this thought sifted into artistic consciousness, was able to show that Courbet’s allegedly inept composition, reductive space, and puppetlike figures were an intentional and integral part of his identification with the people, and his corresponding enthusiasm for popular art. This enthusiasm, in turn, was closely allied to, and stimulated by, the esthetic and political thought of his friends, Champfleury, Proudhon, and Max Buchon. Schapiro suggested, in conclusion, that the placid rural setting and ritualistic flavor of Burial indicated that Courbet, soon after the tumult of the Revolutions of 1848, had settled upon the image of society in its peaceable, “inert” aspect.

      Clark accepts all of Schapiro’s findings, except his concluding remark. For Clark, Burial was an iconographic provocation, a veritable silent conspiracy against the forces of calm and order. In fashioning this original interpretation, Clark discovers and analyzes many important new sources, such as: Max Buchon’s exhibition notes for Courbet’s out-of-town shows preceding the Salon of 1850–51;1 the critical commentaries on Courbet’s Salon entries for 1850–51, including the most obscure and bizarre; and the political intelligence reports compiled for the Minister of the Interior by the procureur général (an officer equivalent to our Attorney General).

  5. The Rev Kev

    There’s two sorts of people in the world.

    1) Those who write and use lists.

    2) And those who don’t.

    1. VK

      Add a second dimension to the list and you’ll get scales and hierarchies, a very effective tool to captivate and direct thought and imagination of masses of people. Authors like Steven J Gould or Michel Foucault said some about that.

  7. Steve H.

    Janet and I do a ‘what worked and what didn’t’ yearly roundup. Consistent over the years for what worked is the infrared thermometer. Big newcomer is the birdfeeder. Hopefully nitric oxide, if it lives up to the hype. On the Nope side, live online theater no longer works so well.

    A shout-out to Esquire’s ‘Dubious Achievement Awards.’ Faded as the internet took over with Darwin Awards and Florida Man memes, but a trailblazer in its time. Named Dick Nixon ‘The Dubious Man of the Millennium.’

      1. Martin Oline

        Well, he did reject a proposal by the intelligence agencies to mandate a remotely controlled ‘on’ switch be installed on all new TVs. It was pushed as a way to warn the public of nuclear war but he was informed it could also be used as an eavesdropping device by the government. That was going too far so he rejected it. Would that happen today? Ask Alexa.
        When I owned a used book store in Des Moines, Iowa during the caucuses of 2000 I found a couple of old Nixon bumper stickers. I visited all of the Republican candidate offices to get their advertisements, placed them in a pile in the front window, and put the Nixon Now More Than Ever bumper sticker on top of them.

  8. Taurus

    The present day internet consists of lists. We swim in them daily. That’s what the algorithm does – ranks shit for us and serves them up. Top 10 cat dog videos of the last 6 hours! Top dash am videos of the last 12 hours!

    My prediction for 2023 – Lists will continue until morale improves.

  9. DataHog

    Lambert, thank for drawing my attention to this list phenomenon.
    Is it an art form? Are you curating it?

    It is cultural journalism that portrays an immense diversity of choices that we had available to us while residing in the cultural context of planet Earth in 2022.
    Do we take this immense diversity of choice for granted?
    It is in our nature to evaluate relative merits of at least some of those choices.
    I’m suggesting that in addition to evaluating such relative merits, we take a larger view to appreciate the richness of the diversity available to us.

    When I view this phenomenon from entirely different (imagined) points of view…far from where I sit and read your excellent daily NC offerings,…it gives me a profound appreciation for the richness of choices available.

    For example, imagine a point of view of a peasant farmer living sometime in the Middle Ages in Europe. Imagine giving that farmer a miraculous way to see the choices his great, great, great, etc. grandchildren will have living in that 2022 context.

    Or, imagine a far, far more orderly point of view than we have, say that of a visitor from a far more advanced civilization visiting from an extremely distant planet. Would that visitor appreciate the chaos of diversity we have available to us?

    I’m saying I see an immense richness of creativity. I’m deeply grateful for that richness. I appreciate having so much creativity available to perceive and experience. I’m thankful for you reminding me of it.

  11. John Mc

    How about a list of deep state events after WWII with poor explanations?

    McCarthyism
    Domestic Assassinations (JFK, Oswald, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, G Wallace, LeTellier-Moffit, Lennon)
    Foreign Assassinations (Arbenz, Trujillo, Lumumba, Hammerskjold, Castro/Sukarno, Allende, Hussein, Gadaffi)
    Warren Commission publishes its volume on the JFK assassination
    MK Ultra, Operation Northwoods, Operation Paperclip, Operation Mockingbird
    Gulf of Tonkin Incident
    October Surprises (1968, 1980)
    Watergate
    Iran-Contra
    2000 Election (Bush v Gore) – Florida
    9/11 (Massoud Assassination)
    Anthrax Letters
    Weapons of Mass Destruction, Afghan/Iraq War and Iraq-gate
    Paul Wellstone Plane Crash
    2004 Election (Bush v Kerry) – Ohio
    Terror Alerts (Color codes which ran parallel to presidential popularity)

    Just a to name a few — in honor of the recent death of Dr. Lance DeHaven-Smith who wrote the book Conspiracy Theory in America and introduced us to the idea of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD’s). Here is a list he offered in 2011 during a presentation.

  12. JCC

    One list of headlines I came across a week ago was in David Collum’s 2022 Year In Review (titled “All Roads Lead To Ukraine”) – Part 2. Hopefully I’m not breaking any rules posting this, or going against the purpose of the above post. I just thought the list was interesting and a pretty obvious example of how propaganda and influence in MSM functions, as noted by Lambert today.

    After seeing countless stories in US and EU MSM about evil Russian troops and the War Crimes they’ve committed, and countless stories comparing Zelensky to Churchill and no stories about Ukrainian soldiers kneecapping Russian prisoners of war before they shoot them, I thought this list was refreshing. Particularly since some comments I’ve made to friends about the massive change in headlines over the last year have fallen on deaf ears, or worse, then being called “unpatriotic”.

    So here goes (and I’ve verified as many as I possibly could – a couple seem to have been deleted or made unavailable to general searches within the sites mentioned). The list is a little hard within the confines of tags here, it was originally in two separate columns, so bear with me (and the all CAPs words were also in the headlines of the news items I verified, so I’m assuming they are all accurate)

    Before the Ukraine Crisis:

    1) From The Guardian – “Welcome to Ukraine, the most CORRUPT nation in Europe”
    2) From Reuters – “Ukraine’s neo-NAZI problem”
    3) from VOX – “A Ukrainian comedian-turned-president is embroiled in Trump’s impeachment MESS”
    4) from NEWEUROPE – “Ukrainian president’s rule becomes increasingly corrupt, AUTHORITARIAN”

    After the Ukraine Crisis:

    1) from The Guardian – “The fight for Ukraine is a fight for liberal IDEALS”
    2) from Reuters – “For foreign fighters, Ukraine offers purpose, camaraderie, and a CAUSE”
    3) from CNN – “Ukrainians are giving two LESSONS in democracy that Americans have forgotten”
    4) from The Washington Post – “Zelensky: the TV president turned war HERO”

    1. Adam Eran

      “You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows” – from the “Favorite Bob Dylan quotes list”

  13. Adam Eran

    Excerpt: “— Millions of Americans on social media realized — it took them a while, but they finally got there — that nobody wants to know how they did on Wordle.

    — For the 13th consecutive year, the New York Yankees failed to even get into the World Series.

    — Best of all, the looming apocalyptic threat of catastrophic global climate change was finally eliminated thanks to the breakthrough discovery that the solution — it has been staring us in the face all this time — was to throw food at art.”

    from Dave Barry’s 2022 in Review — always worthwhile reading, except for the hand wringing about national ‘debt’

    “

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