Sometimes it’s fun to argue about lists. These rankings tackle novels, albums, and artists with both seriousness and play—countdowns that spark conversation as much as they offer perspective.
Elizabeth Strout can fool people for a while, I was one of them at first. The sentences are clean. The settings can look ordinary. A town in Maine. A mother and daughter talking around something ugly. A divorced man carrying old shame. A woman remembering childhood poverty. From a distance, the books can seem modest….
Even if you’ve never listened to a Bilal album, there’s a very good chance you’ve heard Bilal. He’s one of those artists who keeps showing up on other people’s records and instantly enhancing everything. Kendrick Lamar, Common, Jay-Z, Mac Miller, Robert Glasper, The Roots, a long list of people with excellent taste and working ears….
Ranking Tears for Fears feels simple for about five seconds. You put Songs from the Big Chair at number one, The Hurting at number two, and everyone nods with the satisfied air of people who have not yet made the conversation interesting. Someone hums “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Someone else says something about…
Barbara Kingsolver is one of those writers I’ve sometimes heard people talk about as if she’s good for you. That’s true, in a way. She writes about poverty, ecology, labor, addiction, colonialism, motherhood, science, Appalachia, migration, land, and the kind of moral blindness that usually arrives wearing very nice justifications. But the best Kingsolver novels…
Mac Miller’s catalog is very easy to try to make a nice, tidy narrative out of. You know the version. The goofy Pittsburgh kid makes bright internet-era mixtapes about weed, girls, skipping class, and being young enough to think momentum might last forever. Then the backlash comes. Then the music darkens and he becomes the…
Let’s face it, Yukio Mishima has one of the worst biography-to-book ratios in literature. Before most readers get near the novels, they already know the body-building, the politics, the theatrical self-creation, the nationalism, the spectacular death, the whole impossible legend. It all arrives first, loud enough that the fiction can start looking like evidence in…
Sturgill Simpson has never seemed especially interested in making things easy for anyone. Not for Nashville or country radio. Not for fans who wanted him to keep making the same record. Not even for people who wanted a clean narrative about what kind of artist he was supposed to be. That is part of what…
James Baldwin is a writer who’s hard to get a full handle on because he refused to stay in one role long enough to make the job easy. Call him a novelist and you miss the essayist who could take apart America sentence by sentence until the whole national performance started shaking. Call him an…
Gorillaz are one of the few big pop projects that still sound like they should not have worked at all. A cartoon band with Damon Albarn hiding inside an animated universe. Records built out of guest verses, rap cameos, sad synths, punk energy, old soul, cheap electronics, high-concept visuals, and a permanent feeling that the…
I am not a classical music expert. That feels important to say right away, because classical music can trigger a certain kind of tone. Suddenly everyone’s speaking in very careful paragraphs about sonata form, motivic development, historically informed performance, and whether some conductor in 1978 took a repeat you apparently now need strong feelings about….