When I was young, I thought sports — and especially school sports — were mostly pointless. A waste of time and money that could be better spent on other things, like more resources for education and the arts. I think this is a common stance for bookish teens, like I was back then, who cling to any ways in which they can feel superior to those who are actually good at sports.

But as an adult I grew to recognize that sports play a valuable role in culture, too. They’re a communal experience that unites people across dividing lines in shared rituals and a mutual pride in their cities. There’s a reason sports have been around since ancient civilizations. We may have invented basketball, but cheering for the home team is timeless.

My feelings towards sports in general evolved along with a growing love for my favorite sport, college football, which if you’ll quickly indulge me, I believe is objectively the best because:

One, It’s a lifelong loyalty that you personally decide to opt into, which is at least theoretically based on some set of attitudes or ideals, versus being determined purely by birth or proximity.

Two, college football is a precious limited resource. There are only about a dozen games per year, with maybe a few more if your team does well. That scarcity means that each game is a special event. Something to be relished. It also means that being a fan doesn’t come with the huge time commitment of any other sport. It’s a win-win for people with other interests, like, say, film or literature or the outdoors.

Three, football games are broken down into a series of discrete decisions that play out with a mix of strategic planning and luck, action and reaction, which to a nerd like me makes it the sport that’s most like a board game. Every play has clear intent behind it, with a setup and a resolution, and every game is a series of plays that add up to success or failure, making each contest exciting on both the micro and macro level.

Then this week I found out that, for the first time in my adult life, my favorite sport is just… not happening this year.

So whether I like it or not, I’m going to have to put that time and energy somewhere else until 2021. Which has me thinking again about my old idea… do we really need sports?

Especially when you zoom in on what also makes college football the most problematic of the major televised sports, it’s worth examining seriously: Here we have young, unpaid athletes risking permanent damage to their health for the enrichment of a league that exploits them, under the guise of school spirit and raising funds for educational institutions.

Is it not worth wondering if there’s a better way to entertain ourselves?

In favor of sports, of course, there’s the economic argument: that sports is an engine for billions of dollars and millions of jobs, from athletes to shoemakers, security guards to hot dog vendors. And there’s the local and cultural argument: that cities need something to rally around and cheer for as a collective. A logo to put on a hat to show civic pride. A broadly approachable common interest to bond over with neighbors.

And of course it’s obvious that we love, and maybe even need, competition. Humans have always wanted to root for their city, region, or country to win at things. But are there other things we can compete in that both provide entertainment, but also contribute more to life in our communities? Without all that money, manpower and attention directed to the massive sports leagues of today, what else could we turn into sports that leaves us better off?

Could we replace baseball teams with squads of aspiring restauranteurs and make Top Chef a seasonal sport, where its participants go on to build up their city’s culinary industry? What could we create if we cheered for debate teams the way we do basketball players, while setting up rising stars to succeed in local politics? What if groups of young coders and engineers competed in an innovation challenge that we treated with as much importance and celebration as playoff season?

It’s a crazy notion, I know, but in a year where everything’s changing against our will, maybe it’s worth considering what we rebuild in the years that come after.

How would your life, and our society, change without sports as we know them today?

What would be a more productive alternative that still fulfills some of those same cultural needs?

If you could only keep one sport alive, which would you save, and why?

Like most people in the sports-starved world of 2020, I devoured every episode of ESPN’s 10-part series, The Last Dance, as they aired over the course of five weeks. 

Especially if you grew up in the 90’s (like I did), and extra-specially if you spent those years in the greater Chicago area (like I also did), this was a glorious nostalgia-bomb that beautifully captured the thrill of witnessing one of the most exciting dynasties in sports history.

But after the thrill of all those championships fades, and the more I think about the story of Michael Jordan — Michael Jordan the man, the human being at the heart of this documentary — the more I’m amazed. Both that this series exists, and by its message about what it takes to be the best at something.

To give it credit, the series admirably highlights the contributions of players like Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Steve Kerr, legendary coach Phil Jackson, and even maligned GM and strange little man, Jerry Krause, who in their own ways all propelled the Bulls to their historic dominance. This show knows, and says explicitly, that you can’t achieve greatness alone.

But the central theme the series keeps returning to is Jordan’s compulsive competitive drive. It shows up in games, in the locker room, how he treats teammates at practice, and in his love of gambling — all the way from big money golf games to quarter-flipping contests with his security guards.

Jordan didn’t just want to win, or like to win. He needed to win, and crucially, to beat everyone else. It’s important to keep in mind, Michael Jordan’s own company helped produce this film. It’s built on archival footage and interviews he willingly participated in, and probably even blessed to a certain extent. That means The Last Dance is not an expose; it’s the story that Jordan, at least in some ways, wanted to tell about himself.

And again and again, that means rewinding to pivotal moments in his career, and not just focusing on what he achieved, or how hard he worked, but why. What motivation did he draw on to push himself harder than anyone else?

More often than not, in his own words, it came down to petty rivalry. Jordan’s desire to prove some doubter wrong, bury some opponent who’d talked trash, or show a world who might consider someone else his equal that he could blow that player out of the water.

THAT’S what seemingly pushed Jordan to all his highest heights. And they were higher than anyone’s.

A charitable way to frame this is that he just cared that much more than any other player. He talks occasionally in classic sports mantras, like wanting to give the audience the show they paid for, or how there’s no point in playing at all if you’re not going to leave everything on the court.

But the show, quite purposefully, is not content to live within those kind of cliches. It goes out of its way to build up these grudges and then connect them to his moments of greatness.

Michael Jordan is compelled to compete above all else. Winning consumes him. Winning is all that matters. He wanted to defeat every opponent, demolish every obstacle, destroy every record.

And once he did, he was finished.

The other, subtler theme of The Last Dance is an undercurrent of sadness. The loneliness of fame. The solitude at the top of the mountain. The stats, the highlight reels, the posters and ads and collectible sneaker line…Michael Jordan changed the world. He left his mark on the universe, no doubt about it.

But this show doesn’t feel like a celebration of greatness. Not entirely. It feels like a reckoning with the cost of a life lived only for competition. After the trophies are kissed, what comes next? Once the records are broken, what do you choose to build?

The series leaves us not with images of what happened afterward — a happy family, charitable works, business success, or lifting up a new generation of players — but, like another story of a man whose only drive was to win at all costs (no, not the 45th president, I’m thinking more Daniel Plainview).

It ends with a man, alone in his castle, wondering what else is left once you’ve supposedly won everything there is to win, and vanquished your last opponent.

And at that point I can’t help but wonder: do I want to “Be Like Mike”? Should any of us? After watching The Last Dance, I’m not so sure.

What about the world we live in makes compulsive competition such a winning trait?

What might the world look like, for better or worse, if more of us were so totally driven by our sense of competitiveness?

What’s a personal flaw of yours, like Jordan’s compulsive competition, that might actually work to your advantage in some situations?

In 2019, Sally Rooney’s coming-of-age relationship novel, Normal People, easily made my top books of the year list. But at the time I only wrote a few sentences about why I found it so page-turning and powerful. Now only a year later, Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation has debuted on Hulu, bringing a whole new audience to the story of Connell and Marianne.

Reading descriptions of either the book or the series, it’s not hard to imagine people jumping to the conclusion that this is a work of teen melodrama, and not for them. I should know: after seeing the trailers, I almost skipped the show DESPITE loving the book, because the marketing didn’t feel enough like the story I’d read and loved. On the surface, the series appeared exactly like the sort of schmaltzy romance the book did such a good job dissecting.

I’m pleased to report that the show, like the book, achieves something much more special. Something more complex and with greater depth than a will-they-or-won’t-they courtship drama. Though pretty quickly in, you find out they definitely will, then won’t, then will again, a lot, on and off for years. Which is more to the point of the project.

Sure, there’s a bit of that youthful tendency for the characters to think every setback is earth-shattering, or to make basic relationship mistakes that frustrate the more mature among us to no end. ( SWEET DANGLING CHAIN, CONNELL, JUST TELL HER WHAT YOU REALLY WANT.) But both the show and the book capture the unique intensity of first loves with such sensitivity, and then interrogates what t means to us so skillfully, that it becomes much more than a question of whether two characters get their happily ever after. Because as most of us know: they won’t. That’s not how life works. Rarely does a first great love become a lifelong one, even if at the time it feels like losing it means the end of the world.

What makes Normal People so smart and so powerful is that it’s not really about whether two people end up together. It’s more interested in how certain people — whether loves, or friends, or family (or that one asshole you’re not sure why anyone keeps inviting to parties, JAMIE) — these people leave their marks on us. They unlock something we’ve felt we had inside ourselves just waiting to be discovered, and they shape the people we eventually become.

It’s specifically not a love story for the ages, because these are Normal People. Normal People feel weird and misunderstood until finally someone sees us. Normal People fall in love for the first time (even if it’s not always romantic love), and they feel changed, even if that love doesn’t last, because it’s normal to screw it up. And in most cases, Normal People move on… past the loves and friendships lost, and toward an uncertain future, as best as they know how.

Who are the people that changed you the most, or set you on the course to who you are today?

What parts of who you are now would you attribute to those past relationships?

How might you be different if you’d never had those people in your life?

Two of this year’s biggest, shiniest, mind-bendiest sci-fi series, Alex Garland’s DEVS on Hulu, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s WESTWORLD season 3 for HBO, cover nearly identical themes, while sharing several plot devices.

Both tell stories of emotionally scarred billionaires with god complexes, who both run seemingly unstoppable tech companies, which both create giant evil supercomputers (though one is a pulsing sphere, the other a glowing cube). And who both use that limitless data processing power to make machines capable of predicting the future, in order to “fix” what they see as wrong with the world.

And yes, in both we follow defiant young women (though one is technically a robot) who refuse to buy in to the future these algorithms predict (while with the help of frequently confused male sidekicks), sacrifice themselves to destroy both the machines and their creators. 

Where they diverge are their respective takes on how predicting the future is achieved, and what doing so might mean for humanity.

Quick critical aside: They also diverge in quality and clarity. 

Though Westworld seems a lot more fun on the surface, what with the futuristic vehicles, gunfights, explosions, and super-robots doing cool martial arts, the show relies so much on surprises and reversals, it’s hard to know what’s ever really going on. 

What are these characters really trying to achieve? Are they succeeding or failing? What am I rooting for, exactly? Which makes Westworld hard to care about as a story, even if as a show it’s all very enjoyable to look at.  

Devs, on the other hand, takes a more moody, atmospheric tone I certainly wouldn’t call “fun”. It’s weird and gorgeous and unsettling; very stoic, and largely philosophical.

But despite its galaxy-brain core concept, it tells a clear story — where each characters’ actions make basic sense based on their desires at any given time — while untangling the show’s surprises clearly advances our understanding of the larger ideas the show wants to explore. 

If you only watch one for both aesthetic pleasure and discuss-ability: Devs is the clear winner.

OK, back to the discussion-worthy stuff.

Like the best sci-fi, both shows extrapolate out from real-world ideas. But as I said before, they depict different paths to how we arrive at these dystopian technologies.

In one, our prison is our own creation, in the other, it’s something we discover.

Westworld suggests that if we had enough people’s full behavioral data, we can basically know the course of the rest of their lives. From there, we can optimize society as a whole. 

This isn’t too far past some shady experimentation Facebook has done, where they’ve shown “happy” or “angry” posts to different sets of people to measure the results. A little tweak here, a little tweak there, and eventually you get to control.

This is a man-made version of determinism, enabled by AI.

Devs on the other hand goes all the way down to the molecular level. This, too, is based on real physics. Essentially, if the entire universe is molecules reacting to one another, that’s no different for our bodies, or even our brains. It’s just one big wind-up toy playing out its course.

This is backed up by neuroscience which shows that, *technically*,  our bodies take an action nanoseconds before our brain “commands” them to. In fact, the feeling that we’ve made a decision may be just a thing we evolved to make sense of the world.

So according to Devs, we didn’t build a thing that took away free will. Because of the deterministic nature of the universe, we never had it to begin with. We finally just built a machine powerful enough to prove it — and show us what comes next.

So of course, it makes sense that these two versions of determinism lead each show to a different outcome, once people discover what these machines can do.

In Westworld, the populace riots against the tech giants imposing control. In Devs, the few characters who fully reckon with living out a pre-determined future gain a Zen-like calm, but also seem hollowed-out and lifeless.

But in both, our heroes are compelled to destroy this technology, even if it means their own end. Because they both see that life with this kind of power in the world may not be livable — whether we stop it from being true, or just decide to live in blissful ignorance of our pre-determined reality.

How would you as an individual, or we as a society, react to a truly, provably deterministic world?

How could we go on living normally once we know free will is an illusion?

If either of these technologies really existed, what, if anything, could be done to harness that power responsibly?

Same intro as 2018, but more emphatically for 2019. Man, I hate pre-list philosophizing, and it was even worse with end-of-decade lists.
Every site writes a too-long preamble to their year-end top-whatever lists, so I won’t. But I will say that I particularly like constricting lists to top 5 because a) they fit well on Twitter, but also b) for the sake of conversation. Whittling your list to 5 makes it hurt a little bit. Which it should! Especially when we talk about what really, truly impacted you, personally, and is gonna stick with you long after the year ends.

#2019TOP5 MOVIES

1 – THE BEACH BUM – This bonkers movie veers from sleazy to beautiful, ridiculous to philosophical, lodged itself in my brain, and made me rethink my own life between the WTF moments. Isn’t that what great art is for?
2 – JOHN WICK 3 – A marvel of technical skill, visual style and artful choreography. Combined with, honestly, how many times I’ll gleefully re-watch these vs ‘higher-brow’ fare, this series deserves more recognition.
3 – PARASITE – A masterpiece of precision camera and character work that dances between comedy, drama and thriller all while landing a resonant political theme. Weird, wild, and impressive — top to bottom (wink).
4 – MARRIAGE STORY – The raw emotion of the year’s two best performances definitely floored me, but the way the turmoil is tempered with wit and tenderness made it feel even truer. Deep, powerful stuff.
5 – LITTLE WOMEN – Gerwig took a century-old book for teen girls, injected it with energy and humor, and restructured the story to reveal timeless, relevant ideas the original only hints at. A genius script and a total joy.

NEARLY MADE IT – Jojo Rabbit, High Flying Bird, Standoff at Sparrow Creek, Last Black Man in San Francisco, Knives Out
DEFIANTLY ABSENT – The Irishman (merely overrated), Rise of Skywalker (massively disappointing), Uncut Gems (ugly, loud, dull), Joker (an outright disgusting travesty)

#2019TOP5 TV SHOWS

1 – WATCHMEN – It’s hard to believe this show even exists. So ambitious in its storytelling, complex in its exploration of the original’s themes in today’s world, and written, shot, scored, acted, and edited on another level. Damn.
2 – FLEABAG – I thought the first season was an expert bit of writing and acting, with one of my favorite characters on TV. The second deserves all the credit it’s getting, but the supporting cast in particular really stepped up.
3 – CATASTROPHE – My favorite couple on television. They’re not perfect, they’re not even always likable, but damn do I get it, and love watching the funnier version of all our inner thoughts brought to life with real heart.
4 – SUCCESSION – Filmed things that feel like plays are a weakness of mine, as are Shakespearean dramatics, so of course a beautiful show that’s mostly dialogue about the fall of rich assholes does it for me. Also, hilarious?
5 – DEAD TO ME – Though it’s just shy of trashy, I actually loved seeing two outstanding female actors work through friendship and grief while a murder lurks in the background giving everything an extra dash of tension.

NEARLY MADE IT – Veep, Barry, Mindhunter, Unbelievable, Better Call Saul (Was that even this year? Who cares, I love it.)
DEFIANTLY ABSENT – Game of Thrones (no surprise), The Mandolorian (very enjoyable! not that remarkable)

#2019TOP5 BOOKS

*note: I do not read fast enough to make book lists by year of release, so this, like most normal people’s I imagine, will be books READ this year instead.

1 – IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER by Italo Calvino – A daring feat of meta-story telling, this nested-doll novel — about the search for the end of another unfinished novel — explores what it means to write, to read, to tell stories, and to live. I couldn’t get enough of its pleasures or its insight.
2 – THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead – Few books feel bound to be classics the next generation will be reading in school. This blunt yet heartfelt story of forgotten boys who’ve been through hell deserves to be.
3 – NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney – Emotionally my #1, because reading about two nerdy outcasts, who grow up feeling out of place in the world and only really themselves around each other, pierced my core.
4 – EXHALATION by Ted Chiang – Every story does what the best sci-fi does: poses a mind-bending question and explores what that means for normal, frail, limited human lives. Each one could be its own post here.
5 – SECRET EMPIRE by Nick Spencer – I’m all for the political turn taken by Captain America’s latest alternate-reality, exploring the tension between heroism and fascism. This crossover felt big, but focused on a worthy idea.

NEARLY MADE IT – WALKING: ONE STEP AT A TIME by Erling Kagge, OUTLINE by Rachel Cusk, FRIDAY BLACK by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
DEFIANTLY ABSENT – GOLDEN STATE by Ben Winters (great start, terrible end), LANCELOT by Walker Percy (painfully mysogynist, do not read)

#2018TOP5 GAMES

*similar note applies because damn are almost all games too long, meaning one can only play so many the year they’re released.

1 – OUTER WILDS – Like 2018’s #1 (Obra Dinn), this wasn’t close. A combat-free mystery, solved by discovering and decoding clues, while visiting weird planets, trapped in a time loop, in awe of the lonely universe. Wow.
2 – BATTLETECH – A must for fans of XCOM and the like, because once your squad are giant mechs, the tactical strategy foundation gains a layer of attrition, adding survival-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth drama to every battle.
3 – CELESTE – This simple-looking platformer hides tons of mechanical depth and challenge, and a sweet, sad story about dealing with depression, all set to a wonderful soundtrack — and I don’t even love platformers.
4 – OBSERVATION – Creepy, gorgeous, mysterious sci-fi that feels like playing 2001 with a bit of a dash of Alien and a little BioShock thrown in. And it’s short enough to play in a day! More games should be like this!
5 – CONTROL – Not enough big action games are cool with being weird. The 3rd-person action delivers a satisfying X-Men power trip, but the Twin Peaks-y, X-Files-ish world made it a far more memorable one.

NEARLY MADE IT – The Outer Worlds, Apex Legends, Jedi: Fallen Order, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
DEFIANTLY ABSENT – Also Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, because I really liked it but it was so punishing I gave up halfway through, which is a huge shame.

#2019TOP5 ALBUMS

1 – BE GOOD by Off With Their Heads – An almost platonic mix of burly riffs and melodic vocals that took me back to indie/punk favorites from my youth, in a year where I needed some loud guitars and angsty energy.
2 – ON THE LINE by Jenny Lewis – It comes on pretty gently, but spending time with this album reveals this rich warmth of sound and feeling that really wrapped its arms around me over time.
3 – MALIBU KEN by Malibu Ken – The trap style that’s so popular in current hip hop doesn’t do much for me musically, but this gonzo collab between lyrical master Aesop Rock and trippy fuzz-god Tobacco sure goddamn did.
4 – PURPLE MOUNTAINS by Purple Mountains – This forlorn, twangy plunge into regret stuck in my brain and moved my soul even before Berman left us — I even had tickets to the tour. Now, it’s etched in history.
5 – SOUND AND FURY by Sturgill Simpson – Rarely does such a departure make me love an artist even more, but the giant guitars and seething anger were a big swing that paid off. Bonus: the Netflix full-album anime video.

NEARLY MADE IT – I,I by Bon Iver, OPTIMAL LIFESTYLES by Pkew Pkew Pkew, DEAD MAN’S POP (REISSUE BOX SET) by The Replacements, and I think Lizzo is mandatory, right?
DEFIANTLY ABSENT – I didn’t listen to enough new music this year to be that disappointed in anything, though the latest New Pornographers seemed to be missing some magic.

So, what were your #2019top5 picks?