Pantheon of reads from 2019

Looking through my notes and research on this last day of 20-frikkin-19. Of everything I read this year (written this year nor not), these articles, threads, and stories took me someplace new. My own personal pantheon.

  1. The Spy who came home: Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop
    By @bentaub91, New Yorker, May 7, 2018 issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home

    (A visit with the remarkable @SkinnerPm)

  2. Greta Thunberg's remarks at at Davos
    The Guardian, 25 Jan 2019 https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate


    "Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope.' But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic… And then I want you to act"

  3. The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
    By @brookejarvis. NYT Magazine, Feature. 27 Nov 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html


    "The most disquieting thing [was] the deeper worry…that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing"

  4. Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
    By @NathanielRich, NY Times, 1 August 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html


    "Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours."

  5. See No Evil
    By @miriamkp, @logic_magazine, Issue #4, Scale, Spring 2018 https://logicmag.io/scale/see-no-evil/


    [About the pernicious effects of supply chains]

    ”supply chains are murky—just in very specific ways. We’ve chosen scale, and the conceptual apparatus to manage it, at the expense of finer-grained knowledge that could make a more just and equitable arrangement possible.”

  6. Danna's Explainer On Why Pundit (Analyst) Panels Are Bad
    By @dannagal, Dr. Danna Young, 26 November 2019 https://twitter.com/dannagal/status/1067070003986530304


    "The game frame pits parties and groups against one another in an artificially constructed battle that fails to engage with the underlying issue."

  7. How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
    By Douglas Rushkoff, The Guardian, 24 July 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity


    "The future became… a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."

  8. How Social Media Took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
    By @zeynep, Zeynep Tufekci, MIT Tech Review, 14 August 2018 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/


    “How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression & discord?”

  9. Raúl Carrillo on the failure of The Big Names
    @raulACarrillo, 5 March 2019 https://twitter.com/RaulACarrillo/status/1103020064494768128


    "at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning economics from the Big Names…But the Big Names do not know -- or refuse to acknowledge -- what’s actually going down."

  10. “25 Years of Wired Predictions: Why the future never arrives”
    By @davekarpf David Karpf, Wired, 18 Sept 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/


    “The notion that the future of politics might, with the internet, become less rational and more dogmatic was scarcely explored.”

Looking back on it, it's a pretty dark list — but then again I think we're in a pretty dark place. (If you want some light, pay attention to people like @SkinnerPm, mentioned above, and follow their example.) I'm grateful to the many thinkers, writers, and doers who are helping all of us understand and think more clearly about the world we're living in — and who are giving us the courage to act.

Bonus Material