Welcome to the Winter Syllabus™ for 2016. I’ve gone with ‘Winter’ this time, in honour of my change in hemispheres.
A very interesting year in digital journalism. I loved Nieman Lab for its commentary on journalism, Quartz for being consistently good, Shortlist Daily was masterful, Reductress was hilarious and even Meanjin was no longer crap (just in time to lose its funding). And through it all, Apple News continues to suck as if trying its hardest to be terrible.
Laurie Penny pictured here being younger and more talented than you
Some stand out pieces for 2016 are ‘Fear of a feminist future‘ by Laurie Penny in The Baffler, ‘Get mad and get even‘ by Eleanor Robertson in Meanjin, ‘The arrangements‘ by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie in The New York Times (though it was perhaps more poignant before the Turd Astroid hit the US), ‘Uncanny valley‘ by Anna Wiener in N+1, and the ‘Voyeur’s Motel‘ by Gay Talese in The New Yorker. And one more, because I can’t help myself: ‘The Unbelievable tale of Jesus’s wife‘, by Ariel Sabar in The Atlantic.
As always, the pieces are listed if they made me think differently about something but I do not agree with everything that is written. This is a syllabus, not a manifesto! For those who want more, you can read up on 2013, 2014 and 2015 by following the links.
Academia
- How not to write: 14 tips for aspiring humanities academics
- The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists
- Tom Wolfe’s Reflections on Language –
- UChicago’s anti-safe spaces letter isn’t about academic freedom. It’s about power.
- Can the Academic Write? — Part I — The Awl
- How to read a scientific paper
- Why Most Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers
- Is it ethical to be passionate in academia? Passion is a central concept for understanding academic labour.
- Getting a Ph.D. Will Turn You Into an Emotional Trainwreck, Like Me
- How Journalists Can Help Hold Scientists Accountable
- She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’ – NYTimes.com
- Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals
Architecture and design
- Letter of Recommendation: The Nakagin Capsule Tower
- Hong Kong In The 1950s Captured By A Teenager
- Bad Housekeeping
- The Minecraft Generation
- Stop Trying To Be Creative
- All the Songs Are Now Yours
Biography
Brexit
Children and parents
- Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?
- What Danes consider healthy childrens’ television
- My adolescent daughter and the mirroring of myself – Marina Benjamin | Aeon Essays
- Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work?
- A Journey to the Medical Netherworld | Hazlitt
- 10 Dark Parenting Truths We Never Talk About – mom.me
- Games to Play With Your Child in Which You Barely Have to Move or Talk | The Ugly Volvo
- When your child speaks a language you don’t
Ethics and the examined life
- Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self
- The myth of self-control
- You probably know to ask yourself, “What do I want?” Here’s a way better question
- On Pessimism
- Sex, fear and marriage
- Thinking positive is a surprisingly risky manoeuvre – Gabriele Oettingen | Aeon Essays
- Learning to be kind to yourself has remarkable benefits – Mark Leary | Aeon Essays
- If you want to be a better person, find something to do outside of work
- Making House: Notes on Domesticity
- An Updated Ten Commandments
- NYC blue: what the pain of loneliness tells us – Olivia Laing | Aeon Essays
- The luxury of tears
- On Being Unintentionally Hurt
- How to declutter your life by not giving a fuck
- Add Your Own Egg | The Point Magazine
- Therapy wars: the revenge of Freud | Oliver Burkeman
- The Partner as Child Theory
- What’s wrong with infidelity? (a profile of Esther Perel)
- Melissa Broder: Thoughts on open marriage and illness
Ethnography
- The Countries Where Smiling Makes You Look Dumb
- Uncanny Valley
- 7 German Habits You’ll Pick Up (Against Your Will) When You Move To Germany
- The Voyeur’s Motel
- Advice to Japanese kamikaze pilots during the second world war
- What Life Was Like in Taylor Camp, Hawaii’s Legendary Hippie Haven
- Sail (Far) Away: At Sea with America’s Largest Floating Gathering of Conspiracy Theorists
Feminism
Funny
- 7 Politically Correct Role-Plays to Spice Up Your Sex Life
- It’s 2016. Are We Really Still Not Having Sex With Me?
- The profile Vanity Fair refused to publish
- Lord Byron’s “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”
- Lord Byron’s “To A Lady”
- 6 Myths About Female Sexuality That We Need To Stop Spreading In The Middle Of This Active Hostage Situation
- [Aristotle], <i>On Trolling</i>
- Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties – The New Yorker
- CIA live-tweets: Why stop at bin Laden?
- I Like All Types of Music, and My Sense Of Humor Is So Random – The New Yorker
(Post-)politics
- The second coming
- The Practical Utility of Identity Politics
- Four Futures | Jacobin
- The smug style in American liberalism
- The Theology of Consensus | Jacobin
- Identity politics doesn’t deserve Lionel Shriver’s contempt, but it can be limiting | Nesrine Malik
- Lionel Shriver’s full speech: ‘I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad’
- Neither Pauline Hanson nor the Greens wanted to win anyone over: that wasn’t the point
- What Is the Left? | Jacobin
- I’m With The Banned — Welcome to the Scream Room — Medium
- Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech
- The Westeros Wing – The New Yorker
- Superdiversity and the neoliberal conspiracy
- Helen Razer: political correctness has gone mad – Crikey
- Guy Rundle: how radical gender theory hijacked Marxism
- Conservative Futures (I don’t agree with a word of it but so good to see a dyed-in-the wool conservative make an effort to articulate some kind of forward vision)
- The Necessity of Political Vulgarity | Current Affairs
- President Obama Speaks His Mind
- Bernie’s Right—America Should Be More Like Sweden
- On Keane and Razer: why pointing out the stupidity of others is seductive | Jason Wilson
- The Pessimist’s Guide to 2017
- A debate over identity politics, with Mark Lilla
- On optimism and despair—Zadie Smith
- The age of humanism is ending
Robots
Trump
- The Key To Trump Is Reading Him Like A Celebrity
- America has elected its own Berlusconi. Now it’s about to repeat Italy’s biggest mistake
- Yanis Varoufakis: Progressives must use Trump’s victory to humanize globalization
- Autocracy: Rules for Survival
- Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
- Bonfire of the narratives
- How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
- Trumpism: The Fight Ahead | Dissent Magazine
- Online surveillance will give Trump a lot of information on us
Writers, writing
- Is It Story That Makes Us Read?
- On Pandering | Tin House
- ‘The Arrangements’: A Work of Fiction
- Black Box
- But then I found myself describing them with words they would not use, and could not tell the way the drummers held the line
- Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable – The New Yorker
- Enemies by Wendell Berry
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