Every year about this time I do a roundup of the best things I’ve written over the last 365 days or so. I usually write somewhere in the neighborhood of a post a day during the year, give or take, so I probably published in the neighborhood of 350-400 pieces in 2015 (not counting writing for HU and/or work for hire.) I never remember everything I’ve done, but below are some of the pieces I was proudest of. They’re not in any particular order.
On Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home and why utopias can’t tell a story.
On The Man in the High Castle and making America safe for Nazis.
On radical feminists and the effort to shame Laverne Cox.
A ranking of every character in every Tarantino movie (before Hateful Eight.)
On Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me as a work of hope.
My interview with activist Mariame Kaba about Black Lives Matter and reimagining justice.
On the documentary Hot Girls Wanted and the sadism of anti-sex work documentaries.
On how neo-Nazis try to leverage American anti-black racism against Jews.
On why we need to abandon electronic fetal monitoring.
On why indie music is so white.
On Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left.
On slave Leia as a confused vision of sexual awakening.
On soap opera tropes in Orphan Black.
How Indiana’s public policy sparked an HIV crisis.
On the boondoggle that is quality television in the golden age.
Skimming online articles rather than reading books makes you smarter.
On conservative political correctness.
Are cozies morally reprehensible?
On Rolling Stone, Eden, and how the media loves sensational stories about sex work.
How Daredevil treats torture as a virtue.
On the prejuice against male Syrian refugees.
On how I want to write for Buzzfeed.
Everybody wants to kill baby hitler.
So that’s the year that was. If you’ve got a favorite piece of mine that you think I missed, let me know in comments. And/or, if you have something you wrote this year, you’d like to share, please put that in comments too. Have a good new year, all!
I fear I’m getting a little annoying as I catch up on your twitter feed and Hooded U. and your other writing, but I want to say that your raking of Tarantino’s characters is fantastic.
I don’t know what it would look like if you slid the Hateful Eight characters in but the craven and utterly amoral Chris Mannix could be a contender. Poor old O.B. deserves a respectable spot, and bit players like Minnie and Six-Horse Judy ought to make the low-middle numbers. Michael Madsen’s character who just does the Michael Madsen thing until you are thoroughly sick of it, should definitely be near the bottom.
Thanks! There may be an update adding Hateful Eight. I don’t think Michael Madsen annoyed me as much as you; he just seemed like a placeholder. Chris Mannix is definitely one of the best ones…and Daisy’s a good character. I don’t think any of them will make it into the very top, and none in the very bottom; most floating around the mdeiocre to pretty good.
Thanks for all the great writing this year, Noah! Another piece of yours I enjoyed was about gun control, about the feeling of being a hero in a personal apocalyptic narrative that may be a big motivation for those who feel passionately about owning guns. In particular, I enjoyed the Emperor-wears-no-clothes paragraph exposing the “mass gun ownership is a check on government tyranny” argument for the preposterous soap bubble that it is! As in, that may have been a viable argument in 1790 (maybe?), but has no hold on reality now. As in, a bunch of citizens with guns are not going to defeat the most radically weaponized military in the history of the known universe if it doesn’t want to surrender to them for its own reasons…
Happy 2016! Go HU! :)