Best of 2025
Here’s my compilation of the best moments and my favorite things from 2025.
Culture
Best of 2024
It took me a while to get around to it, but here’s my roundup of my best moments and favorite things from 2024.
Under 10k
A deep dive into songs I love by artists with 10,000 or fewer monthly listeners on Spotify.
Best of 2023
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
I’m not generally a fan of post-apocalyptic 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
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 …
Slow Horses
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, …
"Countdown to Zero Day" by Kim Zetter
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 about the use of cyberweapons and our vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.
"This is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth
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
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).