Best of 2024
5 minutes to read — 945 words
It took me a while to get around to it, but here’s my roundup of my best moments and favorite things from 2024.
Culture
Under 10k
11 minutes to read — 2255 words
A deep dive into songs I love by artists with 10,000 or fewer monthly listeners on Spotify.
Best of 2023
4 minutes to read — 795 words
I rang in 2024 from a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by family and friends. It was a pretty great New Year’s Eve, and now it’s time to look back on 2023.
"The Bear" by Andrew Krivak
3 minutes to read — 438 words
I’m not generally a fan of post-apoctalyptic fiction. I enjoyed The Last of Us for the acting and some of the human drama, but it wasn’t really my thing. Andrew Krivak’s remarkable novel is different, and I enjoyed it much more. It’s not a fast-paced story, but it’s short, and I tore through it in a day. It’s a truly beautiful novel about a father and daughter who happen to be the last two humans on earth.
Best of 2022
6 minutes to read — 1131 words
I spent the last days of 2022 with my family in the lovely southern California town of Oceanside. As 2023 begins, I’m taking a look back at the best of 2022, from my favorite books, movies, and music, to my best travel and culinary experiences.
Slow Horses
3 minutes to read — 486 words
Apple TV+ is on a roll. Its content strategy seems to be the opposite of Netflix’s; whereas Netflix produces a ton of shows and movies and gives directors and writers essentially free rein, hoping something popular will happen, Apple TV+ is going for a much smaller, much more carefully curated selection. It seems to have paid off, with the first Best Picture Academy Award for a streaming service going to CODA and the universally beloved Ted Lasso.
"Countdown to Zero Day" by Kim Zetter
2 minutes to read — 335 words
Countdown to Zero Day is an account of the Stuxnet worm, widely regarded as the world’s first cyberweapon. It was a computer worm that most cybersecurity analysts believe was designed to target Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. Stuxnet sparked an intense debate of the use of cyberweapons and our vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.
"This is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth
3 minutes to read — 430 words
Nicole Perlroth is The New York Times’s cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter, and This is How They Tell Me the World Ends is her definitive account of the shady market for zero-day exploits. A zero-day exploit is a software vulnerability unknown to those responsible for fixing it, and zero-days are crucial tools for hackers, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement.
"The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright
2 minutes to read — 317 words
Lawrence Wright’s authoritative history of Al-Qaeda and the lead-up to the September 11 terrorist attacks is one of those books I should have read a long time ago. I finally got around to it, and it was fantastic. It’s non-fiction, but its subjects are presented so compellingly, and the action is described so vividly, that it reads like a novel. Wright’s style calls to mind Peter Hopkirk (The Great Game, Trespassers on the Roof of the World) and Stephen Ambrose (Undaunted Courage).
"Too Like the Lightning" by Ada Palmer
3 minutes to read — 529 words
This book was interesting. “Interesting” can be used to mean a lot of things, and frequently to dissemble. But in this case I mean it simply—it was an interesting book because Palmer creates a fascinating world that the novel spends most of its time exploring. The book is also unflinchingly pretentious, very well-written, and quite slow. It’s often described as political science fiction, because the futuristic setting is mostly a vessel to explore how society and politics have changed.