This is a list of my favorite reads of 2023. I’m writing them here so that a few things may catch your eye, and you can have a delightful read. (Many of these came out in 2023, but that’s not a requirement to make the list.)
A wonderful, thoughtful reflection on partnerships.
In 6 posts, Erin Kissane outlines the role that Meta played in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. To me, this is an absolute must read. It captures the modern role of the United States abroad, particularly outside a military context, and it describes how genocide and oppression are occurring in the modern era.
After Sumana Hariharesware’s mother passed away, they wrote a thorough review of things they learned around caretaking and end of life logistics.
I’ve long been thinking about resources for folks to help their partners who have a chronic health condition navigate the healthcare system in the United States.
I can’t express enough gratitude to Sumana Hariharesware for writing this. It helped me better understand how I can support others and helped me navigate my partner’s health issues over the last year and their surgery.
The Scholomance Trilogy is the best fiction I read this year.
The best non-fiction I read this year. I don’t understand how Maggie Nelson can write so aggressively and delicately at the same time. I never feel like she’s shying away from a hard issue, adding unnecessary nuance, hedging, any of those things. I admire it and want more of it in my life.
A big theme of 2023 for me was thinking about websites. What are websites, when should they exist, how should they be structured, and so on.
One key event that made me really think about websites was when the British Columbia Transportation Ministry was blocked by Twitter from posting during the British Columbia wildfires in July 2023:[^1] their twitter account reached its post rate limit while tweeting out wildfire road information that was essential for residents.
This continued a conversation that was big in 2022/2023: is Twitter, and social media at large, an essential service? I’m leaving 2023 thinking that even if Twitter is an essential service, it really shouldn’t be, and it’s already become less of one over the last six months. It’s dangerous to rely on private pipes to delivery essential information, and we should build more resilient information delivery systems.
The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral discusses ideas like this. Mike Caulfield describes the internet as a stream, where we contribute to the flow of the stream and we watch the stream as it flows by. And this is contrasted with the image of a garden, that grows and is adjusted in-place over time.
What is a website and what can it be? Can we expand how we think about the internet beyond something that we post to, something we scroll, and something that we use for work & navigation.
This piece helped me think bigger.
This is the single best resource I’ve found on Kombucha. It goes over how kombucha breaks down its starting sugar and tea into a delicious beverage, including how the different compounds contribute various flavors.
Navigating the internet is challenging. I’m not sure that it’s ever been easy, but it’s become such a large part of our lives that it deserves attention and skill-building.
“We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.”
This paper got me started down this journey of trying to learn how to use the internet more effectively. One of my favorite concepts in the paper is lateral reading.
Lateral reading begins with a key insight: One cannot necessarily know how trustworthy a website or a social-media post is by engaging with and critically reflecting on its content. Without relevant background knowledge or reliable indicators of trustworthiness, the best strategy for deciding whether one can believe a source is to look up the author or organization and the claims elsewhere (e.g., using search engines or Wikipedia to get pointers to reliable sources).
…
Instead of dwelling on an unfamiliar site (i.e., reading vertically), fact-checkers strategically and deliberately ignored it until they first opened new tabs to search for information about the organization or individual behind it. If lateral reading indicates that the site is untrustworthy, examining it directly would waste precious time and energy. Although this strategy might require motivation and time to learn and practice, it is a time-saver in the long run. In the study just mentioned, fact-checkers needed only a few seconds to determine trustworthiness of the source.
This is a classic piece in the Web world that introduces the concepts of responsive web design. I love how big Ethan Marcotte is thinking in this, considering websites as so much more than things we read on our current devices
[^1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/twitter-policy-change-hampers-drivebc-1.6894793
I think one of the deep weirdnesses is that lots of us we know what we don’t want, which is more of whatever thing we’ve been soaking in. But I think many—maybe all?—of the new-school networks with wind in their sails are defined more by what they aren’t than what they are: Not corporate-owned. Not centralized. Not entangled in inescapable surveillance, treadmill algorithms, ad models, billionaire brain injury. In many cases, not governable.
I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, “I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say”; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.
- Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey, page 77