Friday, December 27, 2024
As I’ve done for the past few decades, I’m ending the year with a look back at some cultural highlights I found most fulfilling during the past 12 months: Hitting the road with the kids: 2024 was a special year for family travel — an early summer trip to stay with relatives in San Francisco (a moment from there above), then a late summer stay with my sister just outside of D.Saturday, December 30, 2023
Continuing a 23-year tradition of rounding up cultural highlights from the past 12 months, here’s a recap for 2023: 15 Books I Especially Loved This Year An Additional Batch I Enjoyed (That first hard-to-ID book is “Pentagram: Living By Design," which I had to scramble to procure before it sold out. The brown one in the middle column is “Scaling People”, a terrific book about team- and company-building. The full list of what I read in 2023 is here.Since 2000, I’ve been publishing a kind of year in review — mainly cultural highlights from the prior 12 months, along with a few personal notes. Here’s my post for 2022.
Friday, December 31, 2021
Since 2000, I’ve had a year-end tradition of sharing my cultural highlights of the past 12 months. For this year’s post, I’ll first note the major life change I had in 2021. After eight years leading comms and marketing for the nonprofit conservancy Forest Park Forever, I re-entered the agency world this summer by joining The Stoke Group, a fully distributed digital marketing and content studio that focuses on the B2B tech sector.Thursday, December 31, 2020
*Sylvie, sipping through a backyard quarantine concert by a friend and SLSO musician* Year 20 of my annual cultural-recap tradition was quite something. Thus far my family’s had good fortune amid the global pandemic, so we’re spending most of our time feeling grateful, yet exhausted, then grateful, yet exhausted. With lots of time at home, there was some enjoyable culture to take in. Here’s a look at some highlights: Books The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches & Meditations, Toni Morrison Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, George Packer Having and Being Had: Eula Biss My Parents: An Introduction, Aleksandar Hemon Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong Weather, Jenny Offill Promised Land, Barack Obama Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian Jack, Marilyn Robinson My Life in France, Julia Child Severance, Ling Ma Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson Luster, Raven Leilani Intimations, Zadie Smith Monocle: How to Make a Nation The Passion Economy, Adam Davidson These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, Martha Ackmann Wine Simple, Aldo Sohm Normal People, Sally Rooney The Lying Lives of Adults, Elena Ferrante Girl, Edna O’Brien Lurking: How a Person Became a User, Joanne McNeil How to Be a Family, Dan Kois Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece, Alex Beam The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St.Sunday, December 31, 2017
Continuing a 17-year tradition, I’m happy to share my Annual Favorites list for the year 2017: Family Let’s start with the best thing that happened to my family this year, which is the arrival of Sylvia Huremović Schenkenberg in late April. We’re still smiling at her the way Leo was above, just a few days in. Books My Struggle: Book 5, Karl Ove Knausgård Blind Spot, Teju Cole Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia RankineFriday, January 1, 2016
Continuing a 15-year tradition (though one that’s gotten briefer with age and fatherhood), here’s a roundup of some of my favorite things experienced during the past 12 months: Books My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante Lila, Marilyn Robinson My Struggle: Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgård Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi CoatesSunday, January 11, 2015
Back before Tamara and I had our son in the summer of 2013, I used to keep regular lists of my “Annual Favorites” of the year — the best books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, exhibitions and so on that I’d consumed that year. To say my rate of cultural digestion changed with fatherhood would be an understatement; that said, I still have an interest in logging the great stuff (if only for myself).Tuesday, January 1, 2013
This post is part of my Annual Favorites list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus. Favorite Books (Goodreads profile) The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages) Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choicepassages) Life Sentences, by William H. Gass Nox, by Anne Carson A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective Donald Judd Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.