2010 Listicle

This is some of the stuff I liked from the past year.

Best Music:

-- Album, rock: The Monitor, Titus Andronicus

-- Album, pop: Body Talk, Robyn

-- Album, R&B: The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III), Janelle Monae

-- Album, hip-hop: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West

-- Album, mash-up: All Day, Girl Talk

-- Song, rock: "Rill Rill," Sleigh Bells:



-- Song, pop: "I Can Change," LCD Soundsystem:



-- Song, R&B: "Tightrope," Janelle Monae:



-- Song, hip-hop: "POWER," Kanye West:



-- Playlist: "The Songs of the Years", Ben Greenman (for The New Yorker)

Best Movies (Note, there are some definite contenders I've yet to see like Restrepo, True Grit, and Black Swan, so this is definitely provisional):

-- Released in 2010, INPO: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The Town, The American, Black Dynamite, Shutter Island

-- Old French movies new to me: The films of Jean-Pierre Melville, many of which I watched this year for the first time (I'd only seen Le Samourai previously). My favorites were Bob le Flambeur, Le Circle Rouge, and Army of Shadows.

-- Most Overrated: The Social Network

Best TV Shows:

-- New Comedy: "Louie"

-- New Drama: "Rubicon" (Tragically canceled after its first season)

-- Most Underwhelming/Overrated: "Boardwalk Empire"

-- Also Disappointing: "Running Wilde"

Best Video Games:

-- Sports: "FIFA 2011"

-- Action: "Call of Duty, Black Ops"

(Note: I barely played this year, and didn't touch Red Dead Redemption, but I enjoyed these two. )

Best Books:

-- Nonfiction Released in 2010 (I didn't read enough non-academic nonfiction to have a ranking, so here's a list of what I liked), INPO: Hitch-22: A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens; Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, Michael Spector; Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, Anthony Bourdain; Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, John Heilemann and Mark Helperin;

-- Nonfiction Not Released (But Read) in 2010, INPO: The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics, Steven Landsburg; Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, Clive James; The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier; Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Christopher Hitchens

-- Academic (Not necessarily released in 2010, but read by me this year), INPO: States and the Emergence of Global Finance, Eric Helleiner; Capital Ideas: The IMF and the Rise of Financial Liberalization, Jeffrey Chwieroth; This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff; Domestic Processes and Financial Markets: Pricing Politics, William T. Bernhard and David Leblang; Exporting Environmentalism: U.S. Multinational Chemical Corporations in Brazil and Mexico, Ronie Garcia-Johnson; Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World, David Easley and Jon Kleinberg; Internationalization and Domestic Politics, Robert O. Keohane and Helen Milner (eds.);

Best Articles:

-- Non-Academic: "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds", Michael Lewis; "The Brain That Changed Everything", Luke Dittrich; "The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High", Jay Caspian Kang; "Why Conservatives Should Read Marx", Jonny Thakker; "Death Is Not the End", Jon Baskin; "The Cocktail Renaissance", Robert Messenger; "What Good is Wall Street?", John Cassidy; "The Japan Syndrome", Ethan Devine;

-- Academic: Too long to list right now.

(Note: I read a lot this year, so these are just some favorites, but there's plenty more.)

Best Moment:

-- Alex says it's this one. I think he's right: