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.
John Steinbeck is one of those writers a lot of people meet too early, in exactly the wrong setting. You read Of Mice and Men at a school desk. Or The Pearl, while someone tries to convince a room full of teenagers that symbolism is exciting if you say “symbolism” often enough. Or maybe The…
Herbie Hancock might be the best artist to start with if you want to dive into the world of jazz. It’s not just that “he’s important,” though obviously he is. Or that “he’s influential,” though, again, that goes without saying. The thing is, plenty of important and influential jazz artists can still feel a little…
Lauren Groff is a writer whose sentences do not sit politely in the corner waiting to be admired. They lunge. They flare and they bristle. They can be lush, but the lushness usually comes with some force in it. Bodies in danger. Children at risk. Marriage turning weird under pressure. Animals watching from the edge…
Jason Isbell is one of those songwriters people love to name drop. You know the usual praise. The craft. The detail. The literary lyrics. The emotional intelligence. The sober grown-man songwriting. The devastating line about a marriage, a bottle, a town, or a memory that lands so cleanly you have to stop what you’re doing…
Don DeLillo is often talked about like a man who had a secret antenna installed somewhere in his skull. There’s the media static. The conspiracies. The terrorism. The celebrity culture. The markets. The screens. The academic absurdity. The fear of death humming beneath the supermarket lights. Read enough DeLillo and it can feel like he…
If any discography deserves a ranking that feels slightly unstable, it’s P-Funk: two band names, one giant mutant organism, overlapping players, shifting labels and lineups, metaphysics, cartoon villains, liberation theology, and enough mythology to keep an entire comic-book imprint busy for years. Trying to turn all that into a neat ladder from worst to best…
A lot of people know Vladimir Nabokov simply as the guy who wrote Lolita, a book that many people who haven’t read it have a strong opinion about. Of course he has a much different reputation amongst big literature fans who have actually read that book and more. But it’s still a complicated one because…
Music fans usually know the name Iggy Pop, but they often know it as shorthand. The Stooges guy. The shirtless menace. The “Lust for Life” guy. The patron saint of self-destruction who somehow lived long enough to become respectable enough to narrate luxury car ads without the universe collapsing. But once you actually get into…
Thomas Pynchon has one of those literary reputations that can feel intimidating to the point of discouraging readers away rather than encouraging them in. The paranoia. The entropy. The conspiracy webs. The weird names. The historical digressions. The songs (my god, the songs!). The acronyms. The sense that somewhere around page 240 a light bulb,…
The Byrds are one of those bands people think they understand after “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn, Turn, Turn”. You hear the Rickenbacker jangle, the high harmonies, and there it is: folk-rock, done. A beautiful sound, a historically important band, a few giant singles, cue the warm glow of 1965. Not entirely inaccurate of course,…