The Top 10 Things I Consumed in 2020
As I look back on 2020, a year that will be written about as long as humans have memory, I feel an immense sense of privilege and gratitude. I have been spared the major hardships so many others have faced during this pandemic year; my family and friends are healthy, I have a good job that allows me to work remotely and safely, and a comfortable apartment in which I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time. While there have been struggles and sorrows, missed milestones and friends, I am lucky to be able to turn to 2021 by first reflecting on the year that was in a positive light.
With that in mind, I’ve attempted to catalogue the ten best things I consumed this year. I’ve defined consumption broadly and write this in the hope that it might inspire you to sample some of these experiences or perhaps feel a small amount of the joy that they brought me in 2020. These are arranged in roughly chronological order as I experienced them.
From Our Own Correspondent: My favorite podcast of the year predates not only the smartphone and Apple, but also the internet. From Our Own Correspondent, produced weekly by the BBC, began in 1955. Each week, the BBC’s overseas correspondents write and read short, 5–8 minute essays about the countries they live in and report from, the stories they cover, and their own lives. Every time I listen, I learn something new in a medium that emphasizes concision, wit, insight, and the humanity of the correspondents and their subjects.
While I’ve enjoyed every episode, two specific stories from this year stand out for very different reasons. The first, inevitably, is about Covid. On February 13th, Andy Bostock, an English teacher in Suzhou, China, submitted an essay about living under lockdown. He detailed many of the quotidian and extraordinary challenges that Covid would bring, from separation from his family to remote learning to the sense of alienation, which in China at least, turned into a sense of shared purpose, of universal mask wearing.
I listened to this episode while driving into New York City for a weekend with my girlfriend, and replayed it for her when I picked her up. Despite a sense of foreboding, we had a joyous weekend of dining in a tiny restaurant in Soho (now sadly permanently closed), going to museums and drinking with friends. While I was definitively on the early side of worrying about Covid, I had no idea that this would be my last weekend out in New York City. Three weekends later, I drove down to New York on a warm Sunday and picked her up from an apartment we would not see again until moving out in August. Listening to this essay now is like listening to a dispatch from the future.
The second story stands out as the epitome of why I love From Our Own Correspondent. Hugh Schofield, the BBC’s France correspondent, delivers an essay about having to take a French driving test. The story is a 6-minute look into the heart of France through the lens of its byzantine regulations like priorite a droite and the bemused but committed people who administer them. Schofield delivers the essay with good humor and joy that is evident to the listener.
Juliet — Bean Zine: The first weeks and months of quarantine were a struggle for many reasons, including having to cook every meal I ate for the first time in, well, ever. I had limited experience cooking (although much more experience in baking) and a limited pantry given the runs on staples in March and April. Luckily, our favorite restaurant in Boston, Juliet, was there to help. Juliet, and its sister restaurant, Peregrine, are beacons of excellent food and kind, caring people.
As part of their Covid response, even before takeout was open, the chefs and staff of Juliet put together three short cookbooks tailored for Covid pantries; they were entitled Bean Zine: Cooking in the Time of Corona (and can be found, for free, here). The recipes included many childhood favorites and ranged from simple to elevated, with very helpful hints and substitutions for a restricted pantry. Most importantly, they came with whimsical descriptions and just enough vagueness to allow for experimentation. Juliet’s core principles of authenticity, sustainability and flavor, flavor, flavor at every step shone through. I wholeheartedly recommend checking these out and trying some of the recipes; they made my 2020 much better than it ought to have been.
The “March Madness Classics” Youtube Channel: Anyone who knows me or my brother William knows how much we love basketball, especially college basketball. If you follow me on Twitter, you do it because of or in spite of my basketball posts. The timing of the pandemic reaching our shores coincided with the climax of the college basketball season; in fact the last public event I attended was the Harvard-Yale basketball game on March 8th (in retrospect, a bad idea). Covid first canceled the Ivy League tournament, an act viewed as overkill for about three days until NBA players started testing positive and the entirety of March Madness was canceled shortly thereafter.
In those first few weeks of sheltering in place, I felt a tremendous distance from my brother. Prior to Covid, we had eaten dinner together almost every Sunday night for the last eight years and had shared many bonding experiences over March Madness, including trips to Spokane and Jacksonville to watch Harvard play. Suddenly, I couldn’t see him in person, let alone go to dinner or a basketball game.
Luckily, the NCAA made perhaps its only good decision in recent memory and posted a huge archive of classic NCAA Tournament games on Youtube, commercial-free. William suggested that we watch some of the classics together. So we hooked our computers up to our monitors, called each other, synced up pressing play, and watched Illinois come back against Arizona in the 2005 Elite Eight and Steph Curry fall just short against Kansas in 2008, amongst others. For those hours, I forgot the inhumanity and distance enforced by the pandemic and connected with my brother. For that, I am grateful.
David Shor’s Interviews with Eric Levitz: I am an unabashed news junkie, but the amount of political news and discourse I consumed this year borders on unhealthy. This election cycle felt like the most consequential of my short lifetime. It also felt like it lasted a lifetime (remember when Michael Bloomberg spent $100MM and appeared to be a potential front runner before being eviscerated by Elizabeth Warren in two debates? That was 10 months ago). I read a lot of fascinating analyses, both qualitative and quantitative — David Roth, Nate Cohn, Seth Burn and the Dan Bongino song deserve shoutouts here — but the two pieces that changed the way I look at politics were Eric Levitz’s interviews with David Shor.
I don’t agree with everything Shor posits, but his arguments about the decline of ticket splitting, the incoherence of many voters’ political views, and thus the importance that issue salience plays in convincing “swing” voters were novel and persuasive to me. His assessment is somewhat disheartening, but level-headed, empirical, sociological and hangs together as a prescription. I’m eager to see whether his views take hold and how they play out.
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk: Whatever this fascinating piece of Man Booker Prize-winning literature is, it is not, as Amazon claims, the #7 General Travel Guide to Poland (it also isn’t really Magical Realism, either). Olga Tokarczuk is Polish and Flights is nominally about travel, but that’s where the categorization ends. Tokarczuk uses travel, not just the experience itself, but the edifice, infrastructure and psychology of it, to reveal her character to herself and to reveal something deeper about human nature. The structure of the novel, fragmentary short stories, essays and vignettes with common themes, demands the reader’s precise attention, matching Tokarczuk’s treatment of the airports she moves through and the pioneers in embalming and the preservation of tissue-themes that fascinates her.
Why do we yearn to travel and see new places? How do we do it? What are the implications of our travel on the places we visit, the people we love, and ourselves? These questions took on new meaning and importance in 2020 when much travel was forbidden to us. I don’t have the answers (and neither, I think, would Tokarczuk presume to claim that she does), but this book and its funny, absurd and at times searing examinations is worth reading.
Nashville (1975): In 2020, my nights out were frequently replaced by movies. Our movie choices were semi-random and went in runs — we enjoyed the Mel Brooks phase, the Humphrey Bogart era and the John Huston epoch, among others. While many of the movies we watched were new to me and highly recommendable (shout out to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Time for Burning and Shirkers, to name three), the one that has stuck with me the most is Nashville. Robert Altman and Joan Tewkesberry’s rambling look at the music business of Nashville and the America of the mid-1970s is epic in scale and feels unbelievably current. This review from October does a good job of capturing my feelings upon watching Nashville this summer. This movie demands concentration (and in my case, subtitles), but rewards with a viewing experience and soundtrack that stuck with me all year.
The Cape Cod National Seashore: In September, we were lucky enough to move our WFH setup to Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown sits at the end of the Cape and the end of the Cape Cod National Seashore, a 40-mile stretch of beachfront and massive dunes facing the wild Atlantic Ocean. The National Seashore was created in 1961 by a bill championed by President John F. Kennedy, who had both the power of eminent domain and the self-belief to assume that the beaches where he grew up were good enough to be preserved, “for the inspiration and enjoyment of people all over the United States.” Luckily for us, he was absolutely correct in his assessment.
After Labor Day, when the crowds have started to disperse and the winds turn colder, the beaches of the Outer Cape became the perfect spots for social distancing. From Race Point Beach, the only place on the East Coast where one can watch the sun set over open water, to Head of the Meadow and Long Nook beaches in Truro with their 80–120 foot dunes, to Cahoon Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, home of the Beachcomber, the best beachfront bar in the world, we found space to spread out an enjoy the outdoors after spending 6 months in a masked, tightly-packed city with no private outdoor space. Those experiences were nourishing and soul-restoring. We will be back, and if you can make it to this wonderful stretch of the world, I urge you to, too.
The Republic For Which it Stands — Richard White: The last book I read in 2020 (and technically have not quite finished yet) is Richard White’s fascinating history of America from 1865–1896. This period encompasses the failure of Reconstruction, the armed conquest and settlement of America’s West, the industrialization of America, the growth of cities and immigration, and the excesses of the Gilded Age.
White pulls off the feat of treating an exceptionally broad subject area with an appropriate amount of detail. He informs his history with a mix of qualitative and quantitative descriptions, covering the cultural, economic and political spheres and the interactions between them. White’s book runs to 872 pages, but he needs every one of them and I was eager to read each page — how else would I have learned that Western cattle companies hoodwinked investors in the 1870s and 1880s with the concept of “book cattle”?
The themes of social upheaval, the failed promise of the Civil War and Reconstruction, rapid technological change, widening income inequality and the failure of political coalitions all feel exceptionally relevant today. The seeds of reform and innovation of the Progressives and others in the 1900s were sown in the sometimes successful, more often failed efforts of reformers in the Gilded Age. Perhaps there is an analogue in our time, too.
The Shotgun Start: With the exception of my girlfriend and perhaps our immediate families, the voices I listened to the most this year were those of Brendan Porath and Andy Johnson on a facially silly golf podcast. Don’t let the hosts’ self-deprecation and claims of unseriousness fool you: The Shotgun Start is a model for sports (and potentially other) media to succeed in the 2020s. They, and a couple of other similar endeavors in sports media, are living up to the best of the Deadspin motto of covering a sport without access, favor or discretion.
Brendan and Andy both bring subject matter expertise and a knack for translating that expertise for both the hardcore fan and the lay audience. They have connections in golf, but sit as an independent voice in an era where the vast majority of golf outlets are outright owned by or heavily influenced by companies and golf organizations, like the PGA Tour, that have a vested interest in positive coverage. This state of affairs is not unique to golf and not unique to sports.
They bring a sense of joy to their coverage, unafraid to call out ridiculous or hypocritical behavior when they see it, but delighting in the great stories that sports bring to the fore. They also delight in their many errors of pronunciation, geography and general knowledge. Their audience delights with them. They’ve built a loyal, organic community through their authenticity, humor, character and earnestness. As on occasional contributor of stats to the show, I am likely biased, but I believe that they’ve earned it.
“Yoga with Adriene” Youtube Channel: What can I say that has not already been said in 2020 about Adriene Mishler? The biggest yoga star on Youtube was unknown to me before quarantine, but Naomi Fry’s March 25th New Yorker blurb acquainted me. After trying out a couple of videos, my girlfriend and I were quickly hooked. “Yoga with Adriene” became a morning routine as we settled into work from home, helping me, a notoriously inflexible person, get ready for many stagnant hours on Zoom.
Adriene’s yoga is both free and accessible for beginners like me, but retained challenge and discovery as I became more accustomed to the various poses. It is clear how much thought she puts into her 30 Day series and issue-specific videos, and her respect for her virtual audience is repaid in full. I believe I understand my body better at the end of 2020 than the beginning. That is a gift I did not know I wanted, and “Yoga with Adriene” is a large part of that journey.
