WFH Links 12 - The Best Essays of 2021
Happy New Year, everyone!
I hope you were all able to spend some time with your families and loved ones over the holidays. I tried to send this back on December 27th, before traveling for the New Year, and it seems that it didn’t work… so before I send the links and reading list I was going to send, here it is!
Back in December I reviewed all the essays, reviews, and criticism I saved in 2021, and put together this celebration of the excellent writers I was lucky enough to find and learn from in the past twelve months. I’ve organized these essays by (loose) category and reading order. I hope you find something of interest here (heads up, if follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably already seen these).
History and Technology
1) Adam Tooze’s “Blitzkrieg Manque or a New Kind of War?” from Columbia, on the revolutionary role of mechanized firepower in modern warfare (and therefore history)
2) Martin Sustrik in Less Wrong on Jean Monnet, the “guerrilla bureaucrat”, and outsider approaches to coordination problems
3) Ada Palmer‘s “Shape of Rome” from her blog Ex Urbe, illustrating the layers and layers of historical permutations complicating the world we live in, by exploring the layers of a single Roman building (read her sci fi series too!)
4) Alexander Clapp’s wild exploration of crypto mining in the global periphery “The Electric Crypto Balkan Acid Test”, for the Baffler
5) Scott Alexander on internet arguments over the last twenty years: “New Atheism, The Godlessness That Failed”, and “The Rise and Fall of Internet Culture”
6) I was inspired by Austin Vernon’s studied, optimistic essays on the current development of various future-shaping technologies, starting with this one on the rebirth of an innovative US aero industry.
7) “Safety is a luxury that we purchased once we were rich enough,” Jason Crawford wrote, in this fascinating essay on the counter-intuitive but effective processes by which the human cost of industrialization was reduced.
Literary Criticism
The writer and critic Ryan Ruby claimed that we are living in a golden age of public criticism, and based on the year of reading I had, discovering new literary magazines, critics, and scores of books and authors, I heartily agree.
1) Elisa Gonzalez wrote an exquisite essay for The Point Magazine on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, and the long crisis of conscience for American evangelicalism at their core.
2) Back in 2005 James Wood responded to the inaugural edition of n+1 magazine staunchly defending the role of criticism, especially of the “negative” variety, from their editors.
3) The aforementioned Ryan Ruby wrote “Resisting Oblivion” for The Point Magazine on Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance, and the possibilities and failures of “political art”.
4) Christian Lorentzen took on the complacent, flattening effects of algorithmic and recommendation-engine approaches to “books” and “culture” for Harpers Magazine in his piece “Like this or Die”
5) Becca Rothfeld‘s controversial, excellent essay “Sanctimony Literature” in Liberties Journal contended with the rise of reader-relatable Good Characters with Good Politics. But for pure fun my favorite of her essays I read this year was this wonderful piece for Cabinet Magazine on the Talking Heads, Simone Weil, and St Augustine: “Same as it Ever Was”
6) Dustin Illingworth wrote a phenomenal essay on Thomas Bernhard and the long afterlife of his rants for The Baffler.
7) Willy Staley wrote a funny, incisive essay on the cultural parallels between the 90s and today, and why all the youths are watching the Sopranos.
8) Brian Patrick Eha wrote a brilliant essay on Yukio Mishima for The Point Magazine, which sent me out to start “Spring Snow” the same day: “Kamikaze of Beauty”
9) A few bonus year-end lists I liked: Ryan Ruby’s and Dustin Illingsworth’s
Politics and International Affairs
1) Mark Fisher in Open Democracy: “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle”, hands-down one of the best things I read this year. Unmatched on identitarian concerns and the ways that left liberalism can (has) become an elite bastion.
2) 2. Tanner Greer for Palladium on the ever-present, rarely realized Fear of Mass Panic, and what misplaced concern with avoiding it (rather than fixing real issues) says about our political leaders: “The Myth of Panic”
3) Will Wilkinson on the Density Divide and the Southernification Thesis: aka why Kirsten and I have seen trucks with confederate flags in every state in America we’ve roadtripped through. The retreat of American culture from the rural hinterland can’t be overstated.
4) Venkatesh Rao, long ago in Ribbonfarm on Legibility, a reflection on our tendency to violently impose order on messy reality, and such action’s inevitable failure.
5) Adam Tooze once again, in his excellent Chartbook newsletter on the economic situation of West Virginia. I chose this particular installment for the penetrating insight that a perceived good like a “growing healthcare industry” can hide demographic disaster, as a polity’s population sickens or gets poorer and requires increasing care.
6) Alex Hochuli in American Affairs Journal, with a brilliant comparison of the crises of the 21st Century with the longer-term fate of Brazil, the ‘country of the future’.
7) Thomas Meaney wrote the best (of obviously many) things I read on Afghanistan this year: “Like Ordering Pizza” for the London Review of Books.
8) David Edgerton challenged Perry Anderson’s focus on British declinism in The New Statesman - a piece which doubles as a warning of the pernicious effects on present political strategies that come from bad models of history.
9) Anton Jager for the New Left Review on Belgium’s political impossibility. While their domestic situation was completely unknown to me at the time, this piece illuminates the sense of atmospheric social tension I observed as a casual observer in Brussels a few years ago.
10) one more bonus year-in-review, from Anton Jager as well.
Culture Writing
1) Justin EH Smith wrote a searing essay “On Not Eating Meat”, reflecting on how our moral convictions can be cheapened into consumer “identities” - a piece that I think about at least once a week, most of a year later.
2) John Ganz wrote about how eager we are to flatten ourselves into categories and identity types of all sorts, or let others do it for us: “That’s Not a Personality, Sweetie”
3) Rusty Guinn wrote “In Praise of Work” for Epsilon Theory, a rousing defense of our capacity to choose a meaningful purpose and devote ourselves to it (which, incidentally, is really a manifesto for Ada Palmer’s vocateur vision of work)
4) I read many pieces by Agnes Callard this year, but the greatest was “Acceptance Parenting” for The Point Magazine. Though I’m not a parent, and have experienced only my own lifetime, her theory of the evolution from traditional to “acceptance in advance” parenting resonated.
5) John Merrick wrote a beautiful essay on the feeling of crossing class barriers from your family, and the exile-like pain of visiting them, for Soft Punk Magazine: “The Language of Your Fathers”
6) HOLD ONTO YOUR BUTTS, Rosa Lyster wrote for The Outline - its time to BUCKLE UP and learn why everything bad is the fault of some guy you’ve never heard of
Welcome to 2022 - may it be a great year in all of our lives. More newsletters to come soon, hopefully at a more regular pace in the new year…
Alex