Top Tens
2021 | Week 8
History of Ideas Series 2: Rousseau, Bentham, Douglass, Butler ...
Farmer grabs lynx by scruff of neck, scolds it for killing chickens
Fall of Civilizations does the Inca
Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society
Scott Ross, harpsichordist and a guide to the harpsichord
The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model
2021 | Week 7
Backlisted, a podcast on lesser-known or cult fiction
Maintaining position in a hierarchy is more important than serving one's own needs
The Death of Yugoslavia and The Trial of Ratko Mladic
The alternate-history space-race series For All Mankind, back for its second season
The Politics of a Second Gilded Age – the Dems’ constituency is now a tax-avoidant affluent suburb
Gramophone's top Mahler symphony recordings
Eric Foner – Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
The helicopter Perseverance carries on Mars and the rover’s engineering generally
2021 | Week 6
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845–1877
Kris Davis Borderlands Trio at the Vanguard
Cryptocurrencies are horrendous energy consumers
Niskanen Center’s The Science of Politics: When Partisans Endorse Violence
The Slate Star mishegas: Cade Metz, Elizabeth Spiers, Scott Alexander, Robert Reinhart
Riding on a tram through Amsterdam
2021 | Week 5
The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon
The future unemployment line gets longer: generating SQL from plain English using GPT-3
Tyshawn Sorey, Joe Lovano, and Bill Frisell at the Vanguard
2021 | Week 4
Mayor: Ramullah seen through the lens of Tati
The original Manchurian Candidate, Henry Wallace – ‘Wallace would have created an American foreign policy run by Soviet agents he had installed in the White House’
Some reasons to hope re climate change: After Alarmism
James Meek's To Calais, In Ordinary Time – Guardian review
To Counter China’s Rise, the U.S. Should Focus on Xi
New Khashoggi doc The Dissident – relatedly an excerpt of an MBS bio and the beyond-parody Line city announcement
A History of Cities In 50 Buildings
Tony Bennett and Bill Evans via Iverson
‘I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word’ via Scott Alexander
2021 | Week 3
Mike Westbrook – live performance of Citadel/Room 315
Apartment House’s Morton Feldman concerts at Wigmore Hall: 1, 2, 3 via Steve Smith
Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us
Next-level 12-string from Rob Noyes
Huawei, 5G, and the Man Who Conquered Noise
‘Every Man Has His Breaking Point’: Reagan, Brainwashing and the Movies
Excellent mix of classic Franco tunes
2020 | Week 53
Your Trip Is Short, imaginative and bizarre Dead/Phish covers by avant- and noise groups
The North Carolina Kid Who Cracked YouTube’s Secret Code – the world has become a Gibson or Stephenson novel now
Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis
Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine, truly epic black metal from Mare Cognitum and Spectral Lore
GA Sec of State refusing to carry water and/or break law
Philip Sherburne’s Best Mixes of the Month series
2020 | Week 52
A Delicate Truth audiobook, read by le Carré himself
Trickle-down economics is a scam, but we knew this
A Portrait of 19th-Century Creole Culture
Christian Wolff – Exercise 15 from Wandelweiser
The butt pajamas will follow you forever
Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell
2020 | Week 50
2020's What I Learned list from Tom Whitwell
ML reveals a previously unknown galaxy collision among the collisions forming our own galaxy, via Orbital Index
'60s European filmed jazz gigs (bonus: Paul Gonsalves nods off three times on the stand with Duke in '65)
Sometimes, by Olly Wilson via Tone Glow
Review of lesser-known GRM artists, with great links to documentaries
Monetizing the Final Frontier: The strange new push for space privatization
RIP John le Carré: the original, and by far the best, Tinker adaptation and Smiley’s People
Bandcamp's Best of 2020
2020 | Week 49
Excellent review of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
The cosmic weirdness of Magnetars
I will always associate Arecibo with GoldenEye
The environmental consequences, including poisoning, of road tires
JACK Quartet via Library of Congress playing Rodericus, Seeger, Carter, and new Tyshawn Sorey
I didn’t buy the portrayal of Welles in Fincher’s Mank, but I didn't mind – it was a terrific film
Ferneyhough’s string quartets
2020 | Week 48
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life Is Rare
Primer on mRNA vaccines via Zeynep Tufekci
Execute Program spaced-repetition courses
Romain Grosjean surviving a horrible crash
2020 | Week 47
Sibelius’ Voces intimae, Op 56 (1909)
The insane engineering of Apollo’s computers and rope memory
A lecture on Kurtag’s musical setting of Beckett’s Fin de Partie, with the premiere in French with Italian subs, its libretto in French and Italian, and the text of the full play in English
Penguin Cafe Orchestra on the Beeb in ’89
I may or may not be responsible for destroying American working-class prosperity
The Grand Unification Proposal
Finnish Radio TV Symphony Orchestra playing Lutosławski
“We are not the leader of first choice because we’re always right, or because we’re universally liked, or because we can dictate outcomes,” he said. “It’s because we strive to the best of our ability to align our actions with our principles, and because American leadership has a unique ability to mobilize others and to make a difference.”
Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine
2020 | Week 46
Excellent inside-the-NYT piece on its culture and business
Nice try, Elon – you can’t escape laws and regulations in space
From Peter Turchin – The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America
Excerpt from Obama’s memoir, on passage of the ACA
The brilliant compositional processes of Maya Verlaak
The Big Lessons from History, and regarding point 3, You Can’t Tell People Anything
Incredible visualization of the contents of a cell
2020 | Week 45
The excellent David Shor from back in July on electoral trends
Steve Potts soundtrack reissue
A Theory of Justice: The Musical!
Democrats attempt to arrest the leftward moves of the party by preventing incumbents from being unseated by progressive challengers
Terrific BBC docu-drama on Beethoven in three parts: 1, 2, 3
New dates for the nearly-cancelled Guston retrospective
Two hours of spasmodically gyrating Deadheads in the hall outside a 1987 gig
The .org TLD won’t be sold to a private equity firm
2020 | Week 44
‘Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the European Union’
Einstein’s Bridge, OOP SF by John Cramer – set at a fully-functioning Superconducting Super Collider; in our reality, the SSC was abandoned a fifth of the way into its construction (this last piece also usefully functions as a management-culture cautionary tale) and the LHC went on to find the Higgs
Private press MI music via Inzane Michigan on NTS
Counterpart, nice Cold War parable SF show
Informed crash course in the Chinese tech landscape with contrasts to the US
Interactive infographics on voting methods that are better than first-past-the-post
Hilarious deep-fake-awareness vid from the South Park guys
Younger people abandoning democracy, via Talking Politics
2020 | Week 43
More on the possibly-microwave attacks on US embassy personnel and diplomats
I never dreamed that I'd be eaten by a bear, says voter for the Freedom to be Eaten by Bears Party
Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There
Quintessence as an explanation of dark energy got some supporting evidence
2020 | Week 42
360-degree video of orbiting around a black hole
Hacking former PMs using only a boarding pass
Measurement = entanglement – relatedly the Transactional Interpretation of QM in which waves travel back and forth in time to create the present day – I think
Seeing revanchist UK political trends through the lens of Morrissey
History of the Colorado Coalfield Wars in the early 20th c
Stressed Election NYT documentary series on electoral mechanics
Trial of the Chicago 7 – has problems, and a couple of scenes really grate, but worth seeing
Lachenmann-esque Clara Ianotta on Wergo, perf. Jack Quartet
2020 | Week 41
Maybe the most insightful presentation you’ll see on the electorate in the 2016 and 2020 elections
'We fed the beast that ate us' – the GOP has been forced down a far-right populist road by its own hand
Niskanen Center on the OMB’s recommendations to expand health care – calling Medicare for All single-payer is a confounding misnomer
‘This is an emotional exchange between a human and an AI on a website with 430 million active users’ – GPT-3 bot has lengthy, numerous, undetected posts on Reddit
Breakdown of dark money in Supreme Court nominees and cases courtesy of Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI)
Terrific print of the spectacular 1970 recreation of Waterloo by the same guy who did the epic 1966 version of War and Peace
Serene Wandelweiser compilation of 9 diaphanous compositions and a combination of all of them
Excellent Feldmanesque tribute to ‘a French astronomer who had a particular talent as a comet hunter’
New Prana Crafter feels like a coherent whole rather than disparate tracks
2020 | Week 40
Turns out time-restricted feeding is a good way to lose muscle mass, not fat
Fusion might actually be happening – technical presentation from 2019, technical presentation from 2016, 2014 article on fusion and ITER
Wire survey of Tashi Dorji's excellent improv
Another terrific Tone Glow interview, this time with Eiko Ishibashi
ML-generated death metal based on metal that already sounds ML-generated
The 1968 Monk gig at a high school in Palo Alto is finally released after some licensing disputes
Why we can’t fix infrastructure
Some apropos music for the season and of the times: Adès’ Totentanz, from 2013 via Alex Ross
2020 | Week 39
Partially Examined Life on Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Part one, part two
Adding 127 states to amend the Constitution and avoid the tyranny of the minority
The horrible Expo 2025 logo may be one of the most memorable of all time
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
40 years since the Dead’s Fall 1980 run at the Warfield
Maybe the most adorable animal vid ever
'I’ve been ordered to find and destroy': the latest chapter in the insanity of Silicon Valley
Michael Sandel on the Case Against Meritocracy
Anand Giridharadas on tech’s billionaires: ‘Are they even on the same team as us?’
2020 | Week 38
Astonishing 'good girl' Saturday Evening Post illustrator Edwin Georgi
Somewhat dated and un-PC but fascinating talk by ex-KGB on subversion
Quiz showing how hard it is to spot fake social media accounts
Relatedly, a service flagging suspected fake or disinfo-promoting accounts
Wildfire smoke clearing at long last
This generation will end up as ‘fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.’
Iverson on 20th C American piano music
Gould in conversation on Schoenberg
Sublime solo Kayhan Kalhor performance
A highlight from The Heat Warps’ continuing survey of Miles electric bootlegs
2020 | Week 37
Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss, winner of the Nobel Prize
Relatedly Rob Tomlinson’s reviews of White are excellent as well as his writing on books generally
Francis Fukayama’s 2014 essay America In Decay, using the Forest Service as an example of a dysfunctional institution, via Marginal Revolution
Incredible Economist piece on viruses: 'integrated viral sequences, known as endogenous retroviruses (ervs), account for 8% of the human genome'
Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet in Atlanta in 2002 on YouTube and in Chicago in 1997 on record
Thanks to people who make comprehensive appliance review videos
Recycling plastic is diversionary marketing
Carbon footprints are diversionary marketing
2020 | Week 36
Foodman’s goofball juke/footwork house set from 2019
The note played in a 639-year Cage performance was changed September 5; the next is May 2022
Incredible illustrations from Ernesto García Cabral, from luscious film posters to classic Deco
Moving beyond the 'chemical imbalance' paradigm of mental illness and acknowledging biological, social, and financial reality – a long time coming, but a very welcome development
Bizarre rollerderby-WWE mashup from 1989; Fox now has the rights, so periodically uses episodes to fill time on its soccer channels
Information has mass (and therefore energy) – not sure if you can then say dark matter is information, but the paper's authors do via HN
Documentary on Wittgenstein and Schoenberg
The Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast series
The 2020 Italian GP, memorable madness that rescued the season from predictability
Connary Fagen’s impeccably crafted fonts
2020 | Week 35
Radio show reviewing work of Terry Jennings, early minimalist composer
Intense live gig from the Santana-McLaughlin 1973 tour
A guy who's attempting to generate music through ML has reviewed every Dead show
Website for Alice Coltrane’s devotional recordings
Erin Jorgensen does soothing Sunday broadcasts of marimba improvisations
Archives of Tom Johnson’s avant-garde show reviews from the Voice, ’72–’82
Using ML to generate images of Roman emperors – not a position conducive to a long life after Marcus Aurelius
New free jazz from Alan Braufman
Rick Perlstein doing promotion for Reaganland
A great drone piece by Catherine Christer Hennix
2020 | Week 34
Olly Chubb’s techno nostalgia shows on NTS
Feds swarming a giant yacht and arresting Bannon for grift
A story about hanging with Borges which will inevitably become a movie
The latest (and last? Say it isn't so) volume of Rick Perlstein's history of American conservatives
New Nonlocal Forecast on Hausu Mountain, evocative vaporwave reminding you of synthesizer LPs of yore
Ars subtilior, a polyphonic musical style of the 14th century, via Samuel Andreyev’s podcast with composer Jonathan Bell – a superb recording is Figures of Harmony’s 4CD set of songs from the Chantilly Codex
The Harvard Foundations of Physics lecture/debate series
Shit and Shine’s deep-fried Krautrock, which is a goofball melange of Faust/Can/Nurse with Wound/Butthole Surfers/Atari Teenage Riot
2020 | Week 33
Lost Control’s house/techno shows on NTS
New Fall of Civilizations pod, this time on Byzantium
The Bureau series 5, still adult espionage of the highest order
The Flow State Substack of focus-music playlists
Chris Dench’s Piano Sonata performed by Peter de Jager – waiting for a recording of this, I'd be happy with just the take captured here which won an award
24-bit 96kHz Pat Metheny remasters
Microtonal pop from James Mulvale
RIP Julian Bream, classical guitarist extraordinaire
1996 production of Berg's Lulu, incredible in every way, the set design is particularly fascinating; unfortunately this video is truncated and other copies of it are only French subtitled
2020 | Week 32
Line-by-line annotations for Finnegans Wake from the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury – there are other annotated references, but I prefer this layout which combines both the notes and the text
The latest new age LP from Steve Roach, A Soul Ascends
Thomas Adès’ 2008 composition In Seven Days is on a great new record from Kirill Gerstein and the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra
New Krallice, released on a Bandcamp Friday of course
Purcell’s Fantasias for Viols by Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XX
Historical montage of the Silverstone track for the 70th Anniversary GP (thanks to @Mattzel89)
Astonishing 68mm footage from 1902 of the still-running Wuppertal suspended railway
A hellishly optimized, inhuman megacity in SimCity 3000
Adam Tooze on China and a new Cold War and COVID and past economic crises
2020 | Week 31
Minnie Riperton is inescapable in Bette Gordon and James Benning’s United States of America
Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence
New Philip Guston retrospective on tour in 2021, to Boston, Houston, Washington DC, and London, COVID permitting
Lando Norris' helmet design for the 2020 British GP weekend
Paul Jacobs’ Schoenberg piano music
Sean Carroll‘s Biggest Ideas in the Universe physics lecture series
Into Great Silence, currently bootlegged on YouTube, is an incredible documentary inside a silent monastery in the Alps; as the film goes on you realize the subject of the film is not the initiated but yourself and your own thoughts and reactions
Thanks to the people who like to post how-to repair videos
Lull's 1994 'dark ambient' LP Cold Summer
2020 | Week 30
John Williams’ Butcher's Crossing
Igor Levit’s complete Beethoven piano sonatas
Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True
Phish's Dinner and a Movie YouTube series
The New Age music of Al Gromer Khan
HN thread on meditative breathing techniques
Top Ten inspired by Greil Marcus’ long-running columns