Best of 2010
Authors choose their favorite books of 2010
Dave Eggers, Wes Moore, Tao Lin and 15 others make their picks for the year -- and none of them is "Freedom"
Over the last two days, Salon’s Laura Miller has revealed her list of the most memorable fiction and nonfiction books of the year. (Her picks included Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and Emma Donoghue’s “Room.”) But everybody has their own opinion, especially people who write for a living. That’s why we turned to 18 of our favorite writers — from McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers to “Unbroken” author Laura Hillenbrand and literary bad-boy Tao Lin — to find out their favorites.
Chime in with your own picks in the letters section.
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Katherine Don is a freelance writer in New York. More Katherine Don.
My top 5 Web picks of 2010
From the cleverest blog to the best use for an iPad, here are the five things that became habits for me this year
As a person whose job it is to develop digital products, I’m online nearly every moment I’m awake (whether I’m looking at my phone, my iPad or a laptop), and I’m often asked for recommendations. Frankly, every year it gets tougher to be in-the-know. Just like there’s more and more content published on the Web every year, there are new technologies, sites, apps and devices rolling out at a breathless pace. But you don’t need me to tell you this; it’s a problem we all face on some level.
Given that, I tend to gravitate toward things that are either curatorial in nature — offering me new ways to skip past the chaff (of whatever variety) and get straight to the wheat — or that make it easier for me to do things I’ve always done. So while this is by no means a definitive list, what follows are the five things that elbowed their way out of the crowd and onto my pinned tabs or my home screen in the past year.
Karen Templer is the director of product development and design at Salon. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/karentempler. More Karen Templer.
The most memorable images of 2010
From the shocking to the hilarious to the utterly heartbreaking, our favorite photos of the year
To say 2010 was an eventful year would be quite the understatement. It was an election year, of course. Also a year of plane crashes, landmark legislation, meat dresses, flash mobs, Tea Party protests, faux scandals, Wikileaks and more devastating floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcano eruptions, factory explosions, mine collapses, oil spills and forest fires than we could even begin to count. The world cheered the Olympics, the World Cup and the return of Tiger Woods, and mourned the death of Paul the Octopus. Election disputes turned bloody. The Roma were driven out of France. Celebrities posed for their mug shots. And through it all, the situation in Haiti — which began with an earthquake on January 12 — went from bad to worse to indescribably tragic.
Continue Reading Close10 from 2010: Our favorite Salon stories
One final look back at our own work, and what we liked best
Don’t worry — the tsunami of Best Of lists is almost over. I think we’re all looking forward to the fresh mystery of the new year. And right now, our necks ache from looking back so much; we’re particularly sick of the forced remembering of Christine O’Donnell and the Trololo guy. To the annals of footnoted history, we banish ye!
But we did want to highlight the pieces in Salon that — through an unscientific staff poll — we decided we liked the best this year. None of these should be a huge surprise to Salon readers; they were all big hits with you, too. From Glenn Greenwald’s incisive exploration of WikiLeaks, to Mary Elizabeth Williams’ gripping accounts of her cancer diagnosis and treatment, our favorite stories this year run a familiar Salon gamut of world-changing importance to the expressly, meaningfully personal.
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Kerry Lauerman is Salon's Editor in Chief. Follow him on Twitter: @kerrylauerman. More Kerry Lauerman.
1. “Let Me In”
The scene of the year is a squirm-inducing stunner that manages to make us sympathize with a would-be murderer
I’m reluctant to use the word “remake” to describe strong new versions of material that was great the first time around. The directors of such films sometimes call them “cover versions.” That’s a somewhat defensive term — “I liked the original, too! This is just my version!” — but it’s more palatable and in some ways more accurate. The filmmakers aren’t presumptuously trying to fix what wasn’t broken but trying to bask in the success of a beloved work while putting their own (hopefully unique) spin on it. Any music buff will tell you that cover versions of a great recording sometimes end up being different from but equal to the original. Not always, but sometimes.
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2. “Toy Story 3″
The merciless suspense of this fateful action sequence shows why the movie franchise is so beloved
Oh, come on! They wouldn’t kill off Cowboy Woody and Buzz and Jessie and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and Hamm and Rex and Slinky Dog!
Would they?
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