The Top 12 Things I Read on the Internet This Year

I read shamefully few books this year, but to be fair, there were extenuating circumstances – chaos in my professional life, a cross-country move, my first semester in an extremely demanding graduate program in social work. So in between my packing and endless readings for school, on trains and buses and in waiting rooms, I read articles and blog entries: shorter, manageable pieces that made profound impressions on me. Here (IMHO) are some of the best.

12. Edith Wharton: A Writer’s Reflections by Roxana Robinson (The Millions)

Wharton’s deepest concern was morality. She wrote about the struggle between the body and the mind, that battlefield from which morality emerges. Central to her work are stifled and illicit passions, manifested in divorce, adultery, incest, and illegitimacy. Her writing was stylistically decorous but socially transgressive: her prose is so elegant that her message comes as a shock, like a sword wrapped in satin.

11. Learning to Eat Like Julia Child by Tamar Adler (The New Yorker)

It’s hard to make something truly wonderful if it’s not something you deeply love and long for. Theoretical ideals are a bugbear for a craftperson. They are hamstringing—imagine trying to make a good chair never having seen one, or write a melody without having heard one. But if you love clear flavors and teach yourself to taste them, if you love sweetness only in complexity—if you stick to a path with a sense of purpose, as Julia did, and allow your palate to ripen, then food being “good” becomes all of a piece.

10. Dance Dance Revelation: On “So You Think You Can Dance” by Sarah Blackwood (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Like the high art dance tradition (ballet in particular), reality television is a disciplinary genre: it bends its subjects to its will. The question then emerges: what happens when this will claims to generate, unexpectedly, “unique personal and artistic expression”? The dancers of So You Think You Can Dance, on their way to being crowned Favorite and presumably most individual or unique, submit to the rules of reality television, “growing” and shedding tears at all the right moments. But what we also see is how the body precedes and actually shapes the expression that the show itself assumes is primary. Chip through the layers of sedimentary narrative that structure the twenty-first century culture industry — personal growth, a soft-focus on “social” issues, a consumerized vision of success — and you find the bedrock underlying them all: the body, inarticulate, at work, and joyful in its inarticulate work.

9. Book Keeping by Susanna Hislop (The Junket)

To my mother, libraries smell of a Britain waking up from rationing, and induce an extreme and horrifying existential anxiety. ‘Here is Everything You Will Never Read’ shout the dusty tomes. For me, ever the optimist, libraries represent the blissful, undestroyed promise of Everything I Am Yet To Discover. Lucky enough to be born to middle class parents in the golden era of the local library, before they were transfigured by CDs, cappuccinos and cuts, libraries have always felt like my birthright. (Actually I was quite excited when our library got CDs, since it coincided with that other golden era of my youth, that of the mixtape.) I was lucky enough to be in the library before I realised it, immersed in Meg and Mog on a leaking bean bag (the exquisite smell of those mysteriously half matte half shiny pages). Before the soupy physical world of childhood (long since lost to my conscious brain) hardened and froze, only to thaw and resolve itself into a series of tactile fetishes. And then later, I was lucky enough to be left alone by open minded, open-toe sandalled librarians, as I avidly flicked through the pages of The Rachel Papers (I still haven’t actually read it) for the sex bits.

8. A Tale of Three Coming Out Stories by Roxanne Gay

LGBT people are the victims of hate crimes. There is the young lesbian couple in Texas, Kristine Chapa and Mollie Olgin, who were both shot in the head by an unknown assailant and left to die. In Lincoln, Nebraska, a lesbian was attacked in her own home by three men who carved the word “dyke” and other slurs into her body. A gay couple in northeast DC were attacked two blocks from their apartment by three assailants who were shouting homophobic slurs. One, Michael Hall, remains in the hospital. He has no health insurance and has a fractured jaw. In Edmond, Oklahoma, a gay man’s car was vandalized with a homophobic slur and set on fire. In Indianapolis, Indiana, there was a drive-by shooting of a gay bar.

These incidents have taken place within the past month. Hate is everywhere.

It gets better, sort of. It gets better unless you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes the wrong place is your very home, which is the one place where you should be able to feel safe no matter what the world is like.

7. Lost & Found by Shana Naomi Krochmal (Out Magazine)

Perks is how kids like Miller, wounded teens who barely made it out of high school alive, refer to their tattered copies of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a novel about Charlie, an achingly lost and lonely high-school freshman and the older band of outsiders — —Sam, the out-of-his-league girl, and her confident gay stepbrother, Patrick — who help save him.

To a decade’s outcasts, Perks belongs on a shelf next to The Catcher in the Rye. It pays tribute to that classic indictment of adult hypocrisy, but also tells an updated, unflinching, uncensored story about how many childhoods were not so much the setting of a happy home video as they were fodder for a future PostSecret confession.

6. The Writing Revolution by Peg Tyre (The Atlantic)

For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

5. True Londoners are Extinct by Craig Taylor (New York Times Magazine)

True Londoners are extinct, another person told me. Foreigners can’t be Londoners, a British National Party campaigner said one Saturday afternoon on Hampstead High Street, before recounting a moving story of his own father’s journey from Cyprus to London and the way this shell-shocked man was welcomed into the city. A true Londoner would never support Manchester United, I was told. “The only thing I know” — and this was uttered in a very loud pub in Cricklewood — “is that a real Londoner would never, ever, ever eat at one of those bloody Angus bloody Steakhouses in the West End. That’s how you tell,” the man said, steadying himself with a hand on the bar. “That’s how you tell.”

4. San Francisco Turned Me Straight by Anna Pulley (Salon.com)

S.F. author Stephen Elliott wrote recently that “San Francisco is this great drug and you sit on top of Bernal Heights and watch boats named ‘Opportunity’ and ‘Raw Ambition’ and ‘Your Worst Self’ sail by so far off you can’t read the red paint on their hulls, and throw your head back and open your mouth in the shape of a cloud.”

San Francisco taught me that a lot of things in my life had to end before I could begin again. It also taught me that there are no right or wrong ways to conduct your life, only honest ones.

3. Welcome to Hell: Philadelphia Has a Serious Case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Steve Volk (Philadelphia Magazine)

Between January 1, 2001, and May 29th of this year, 18,043 people were shot in Philadelphia. That equates to about one shooting every six hours. In that same time period, there were 3,852 murders—a new body yielded up for disposal nearly every day. The entire length of the conflict in Afghanistan hasn’t produced as many dead Americans as we’ve picked up off our city’s streets.

Unfortunately, political debate over urban violence reduces to opposites: On the left, politicians blame economic factors, bad schools and ineffective, even racist law enforcement; to the right, conservatives preach personal responsibility, citing out-of-wedlock births, absentee fathers and the welfare culture. But many decades of violence—equivalent to a protracted shooting war in neighborhoods like Kensington’s Norris Square—have yielded a more pressing problem. According to some medical experts, a diagnosis we most commonly associate with troubled military combat veterans now fits many thousands of people in our poorest neighborhoods: post-traumatic stress disorder.

2. Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games by Rebecca Solnit (Guernica Magazine)

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that. Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen—Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one—who refuses to be disposed of.

***1. What Does Obama Really Believe In? by Paul Tough (New York Times Magazine)

By far the best and most important article I read this year. On the persistence of urban poverty, the policy gap and a President afraid to talk about what he cares about most.

When Obama ran for president the first time, urban poverty was a major policy focus for his campaign. Senator Obama gave speeches on the issue, his campaign Web site had a dedicated poverty section with a variety of policy proposals, and in his platform, he committed his administration to “eradicating poverty,” pledging that “working together, we can cut poverty in half within 10 years.” But the official poverty rate has continued to rise under Obama. In May, Bob Herbert, the former New York Times Op-Ed columnist, castigated the president in the online magazine The Grio for his failure to address publicly the “catastrophe” of children growing up in urban poverty. “Barack Obama can barely bring himself to say the word ‘poor,’ ” Herbert wrote.

What are some of your favorites from 2012?