Jarrett Fuller

As I’ve been doing for nearly a decade, I kept a list again this year of my favorite things that I read online. I made two conscious changes to my reading diet in 2024: 1) I tried to read more in print and 2) I tried to seek out smaller, more indie publishing initiatives whether that’s small publications or individual Substacks.

I was delighted each Sunday by the print edition of the New York Times when it arrived on my doorstep and found lots to like in small design publications like New York Review of Architecture, Mold, and Real Review, all of which I got in print. There is nothing from those publications here as I’m focused on things I read on the screen that I can point back to.

Below are a handful of essays (and a few podcast episodes) that stuck with me this year.

Last year, my favorite piece of writing was Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profile of Taylor Swift and this year, my favorite writing was also about Taylor. Tavi Gevinson’s independently published zine/novel/cultural criticism Fan Fiction was a joy to read. I’ve followed Tavi for years but this felt like she unlocked a new level for herself. Be sure to listen to her talking about in on the Longform podcast after you read it.

As I look back on my list of favorites, I realized I read a lot about artists’s bodies of work this year. As a longtime admirer of the filmmaker and photographer Chris Marker, I enjoyed this short piece in Metrograph about his films about Japan by Sasha Frere-Jones. And as a longtime admirer of Teju Cole’s brain, I found his analysis of poet Louise Gluck’s late work, delivered first as a lecture and then published as an essay in The Yale Review, to be illuminating, prompting me, ironically, to return to her early work that I was less familiar with.

Speaking of artists (and pop stars), Ian Parker’s big New Yorker story on how Kanye West bought a Tadao Ando home in Malibu and completely destroyed it is a masterful blend of pop culture, celebrity megalomania, design criticism, and personal story.

Also in the New Yorker, I loved this profile of Fitzcarraldo Editions, the London-based publishing house, by Rebecca Mead.

In the New York Times, Katy Weaver’s essay about pennies was a complete delight.

Why, in 2024, does our nation still spew out pennies like a two-liter in eternal agitation, gushing undrinkable fizz? The people I asked (government officials, numismatists, economists, scientists, scrap-metal industrialists, souvenir-elongated-penny machinists, historians, businesspeople, poverty researchers, Canadians) assigned blame widely: to an uninterested Congress; to highly interested lobbyists; to the sentimental; to people bad at math; to a populace willing to provide, in perpetuity, free private storage for pointless copper-plated tokens. (This last group encompasses every person currently possessed of at least one penny.) But the truth about why Americans are doomed to trudge eternally through a blood-scented bog of pennies-as-currency may be simultaneously the most dispiriting and encouraging reason imaginable: We may have forgotten that we don’t have to.

I found myself highlighting so much of Rebecca Solnit’s insightful and provocative essay, In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, published in March in the London Review of Books. For example:

You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability. I’ve long believed that democracy depends in part on co-existing with strangers and people unlike you, on feeling that you have something in common with them. The internet has helped people withdraw from diverse communities and shared experiences to huddle in like-minded groups, including groups focused on hating those they see as unlike them, while encouraging the disinhibition of anonymity.

Also in the LRB, I enjoyed Terry Eagleton’s new essay on where culture comes from. This paragraph, especially, gets to why I got so taken with Hegel and Marx in graduate school:

Hegel and Marx have an answer of a kind to the problem of clashing self-fulfilments, which goes like this: realise only those capabilities which allow others to do the same. Marx’s name for this reciprocal self-realisation is ‘communism’. As the Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. When the fulfilment of one individual is the ground or condition of the fulfilment of another, and vice versa, we call this love. Marxism is about political love. I mean love, of course, in its real sense – agape, caritas – not the sexual, erotic, romantic varieties by which late capitalist society is so mesmerised. We’re speaking of the kind of love that can be deeply disagreeable and isn’t necessarily to do with feeling, that is a social practice rather than a sentiment, and which is in danger of getting you killed.

Shannon Mattern’s brain works in amazing ways and her essay, published in May by Places Journal, is an example of why she’s always so great to read. The essay is about…cardboard boxes. But it’s also about media, branding, capitalism, and more.

Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” 11 And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” 12 The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them.

I continue to read widely on artificial intelligence, though I’m admittedly drawn to the criticism. Two writers have become my touchstones on the subject: journalist Brian Merchant and his newsletter Blood in the Machine, and artist Wesley Goatley. Here’s Merchant, in an essay from April, called “AI really is smoke and mirrors”:

This might well be the most fraught moment in generative AI’s young lifespan. Sure, thunderous hype continues to emanate from Silicon Valley and echo across Wall Street, Hollywood, and the Fortune 500, and yes, de facto industry spokesman Sam Altman is pursuing ever more science fictional and GDP-of-a-G7-nation-sized ambitions, heralding the coming of a nascent Artificial General Intelligence all the while, and indeed, the AI bulls blog away, insisting someone using AI is about to take your job — so don’t get left behind.

And yet. We’re over a year into the AI gold rush now, and corporations using top AI services report unremarkable gains, AI salesmen have been asked to rein in their promises for fear of underdelivering on them, an anti-generative AI cultural backlash is growing, the first high-profile piece of AI-centered consumer hardware crashed and burned in its big debut, and a bombshell scientific paper recently cast serious doubt on AI developers’ ability to continue to dramatically improve their models’ performance. On top of all that, the industry says that it can no longer accurately measure how good those models even are. We just have to take the companies at their word when they inform us that they’ve “improved capabilities” of their systems.

And here’s Wesley Goatley, in a piece I’m assigning to students this semester, called “AI Is Not A Technology, It’s A Brand”:

Artificial Intelligence is a speculative technology that has never existed outside of science fiction. The ‘AI’ that we have around us now is not a technology, it’s a brand. Like all brands, it is not a thing, it is an idea that is used to sell things: you apply the brand to a product or service, and you increase the perceived value of it because of what the brand represents or promises.

I also found Collin Jennings’s essay, published this month in Aeon, on how AI will create a linkless internet to be important and thoughtful. I’m assigning this one to students this semester too.

As always, I read nearly every New Yorker profile and enjoyed a lot from this year:

• Calvin Tompkins on Harlem Art Museum director Thelma Golden
• Jia Tolentino on director Park Chan-Wook
• Alexandra Schwartz on Miranda July
• William Finnegan on surfer Jock Sutherland
• Rebecca Mead on Gillian Anderson
• Rebecca Mead — again! — on artist Isabella Ducrot
• Hua Hus on novelist Richard Powers

The two best podcast interviews I listened to this year were David Marchese talking with Tilda Swinton on The New York Times’s new The Interview and Sam Fragoso’s interview with playwright Annie Baker on Talk Easy. I found both to be moving and personal conversations about the power of art and the importance of storytelling. I highly recommend both.