Salon.com > Best of 2012 http://www.salon.com Fri, 04 Jan 2013 03:27:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Talking with Daniel Mendelsohn about the year in literary criticism http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/talking_with_daniel_mendelsohn_about_the_year_in_literary_criticism/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/talking_with_daniel_mendelsohn_about_the_year_in_literary_criticism/#comments Mon, 31 Dec 2012 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13157545 "Waiting for the Barbarians," Daniel Mendelsohn's new collection of criticism (much of it originally published in the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker), testifies to the author's wide-ranging and omnivorous tastes. With his background as a classicist and his track record as a one-time weekly reviewer for New York magazine, he's as authoritative (and as happy) writing about Herodotus and "Avatar," pop culture's fascination with the Titanic and Susan Sontag, Noël Coward and Jonathan Franzen. There could be no better partner for a conversation about the surprisingly tumultuous arguments about the state of book reviewing in 2012.

Our theme is the year in criticism, and there's plenty to talk about, but first I have to express my astonishment over what we didn't see this year: I can't recall any memoir being exposed as partly or wholly fictional!

I know! It's very disappointing. There was a while there when it seemed like every time you opened a newspaper there was a new one. There was the girl in L.A. who said she grew up in a gang when she really went to a prep school, and the lady who fled the Nazis and went running with the wolves. I've decided that the phony memoir is my favorite genre.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/talking_with_daniel_mendelsohn_about_the_year_in_literary_criticism/feed/ 12 Ermahgerd! The year in memes http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/ermahgerd_the_year_in_memes/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/ermahgerd_the_year_in_memes/#comments Mon, 31 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13156154 To be honest, any year that doesn't have a Nyan cat in it is a bit of a comedown. But 2012 nevertheless provided its own special viral charms — some of which didn't even involve felines. So we say thanks to Ridiculously Photogenic Guy and Overly Attached Girlfriend, and to all those other viral stars we couldn't get out of our heads if we tried.

Shit Girls Say

It began as a Twitter feed in 2011, but it was in 2012 that Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey's devastating drag parody of feminine phrases truly took over the world. Though blowing the lid off the Twinsies!-peppered world of chick vernacular earned Sheppard and Humphrey their share of critics, it also inspired a treasure trove of witty imitations, notably Chesca Leigh's also-gone-viral Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls. It even went old school and became a book. Shut UP! 

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/ermahgerd_the_year_in_memes/feed/ 6 10 pivotal moments for digital art in 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/10_pivotal_moments_for_digital_art_in_2012/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/10_pivotal_moments_for_digital_art_in_2012/#comments Mon, 31 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13157434 Hyperallergic 2012 was a great year for digital art. As Tumblr rocketed over 25 million hits a month and Instagram became a new venue for creative expression, artists continued to traverse the internet’s sprawling landscape and confront us with the weirdness of our own experiences of virtual space. In this end-of-year roundup, I’ll look at 10 events, moments, and trends that marked these past 12 months in digital art.

Here’s my top 10, in no particular order.

Exhibitions at 319 Scholes
As Brooklyn’s premier technology-art space, 319 Scholes knocked it far out of the park this year. Following up on late 2011′s excellent Notes on a New Nature from Nicholas O’Brien came Big Reality, critic Brian Droitcour’s intensive look at video game-influenced art, and editor Francesca Gavin’s E-Vapor-8, a celebration of rave culture that launched with a fittingly awesome opening party. With 319 director and curator Lindsay Howard refining her work through a residency at Eyebeam, the year ahead should be even better (if that’s possible).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/10_pivotal_moments_for_digital_art_in_2012/feed/ 0 The year everything went mobile http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/the_year_everything_went_mobile/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/the_year_everything_went_mobile/#comments Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13149183 Packing for Christmas vacation, I contemplated my laptop, a MacBook Pro that weighs down my briefcase like a lead brick. Why bother? I wasn’t planning to work over the holidays, and my iPhone could easily handle all my routine Internet needs. It just didn't make sense to lug the old thing around. As the truth sank in, I felt liberated. For the first time this century, I would leave my laptop behind.

A simple story, maybe, but in that personal shift you can hear the echo of 2012's biggest technological transformation. Call it the year of the great untethering: In 2012 "mobile" triumphed. We've seen this paradigm shift rolling down the pike for a long time. Now it's here. The decline of the PC is no longer subject to debate.

And that's a big deal. The changing sales figures for desktops and laptops versus tablets and smartphones signify more than just an interesting tech business trend. This is a story about the reconfiguration of society around the small screen, a development that has implications for the media, entertainment, and advertising industries; for our privacy and our economy; for business and politics. If you're not figuring out how to play in what the tech industry likes to call the "smart connected device space" then you have already lost. And if you are not paying attention to what these devices will do to us as well as for us, then you are criminally negligent. Society is changing fast as we get more mobile. Can we keep up?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/31/the_year_everything_went_mobile/feed/ 20 The 10 best (and worst) tweets of 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/12/28/the_10_best_and_worst_tweets_of_2012/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/28/the_10_best_and_worst_tweets_of_2012/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:09:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13150073 You can learn a lot in 140 characters. Twitter, for all its tyrannical and inflexible brevity, unfailingly reveals the gamut of human nature, the wonders and horrors of the world. There are now a mind-boggling 200 million or more tweets going out every day. But these 10 represent our choices for the ones that, for better or worse, sum up the year 2012.

 

After years of playing coy, the dapper newsman Anderson Cooper finally officially came out of the closet in an open letter to Daily Beast writer Andrew Sullivan on July 2. But though it came as zero surprise, a few remained undeterred by the news.

When Aetna informed doctoral student Arijit Guha, just as he was in the midst of stage-4 colon cancer, that he'd reached his insurance coverage cap, the 31-year-old took his story to Twitter and found himself engaged in a public conversation with his insurer's CEO, Mark T. Bertolini. He wound up getting full coverage – and making the debate over health care intimate and urgent.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/28/the_10_best_and_worst_tweets_of_2012/feed/ 2 Celebrating Anonymous: The hackers’ big year http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/celebrating_anonymous_the_hackers_big_year/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/celebrating_anonymous_the_hackers_big_year/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13150375 "I love Anon."

The comment, written by a teenage boy at Berkeley High School a few days after the Sandy Hook shootings, came in response to a Facebook post made by my own 15-year-old son.

My son was passing along the word that the hacker collective Anonymous had declared war against the Westboro Baptist Church, that clan of deranged religious fanatics who routinely seek to turn the misery of others into their own grandstanding opportunity.

Outraged at WBC's plans to protest at the funeral of Sandy Hook Elementary's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, on Dec. 19, in order "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," Anonymous proceeded to expose the personal information of WBC members -- home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc. -- and started acting as a coordinating center for anti-WBC counter-protests. For teenage boys at Berkeley High, Anonymous' direct action was the epitome of cool.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/celebrating_anonymous_the_hackers_big_year/feed/ 29 Anonymous reflects on a “frantic and historic” year http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/anonymous_reflects_on_a_frantic_and_historic_year/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/anonymous_reflects_on_a_frantic_and_historic_year/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13154308 As the year draws to a close and perfunctory 2012 reviews fill the quietened news agenda, one presence seems an almost constant accompaniment to 2012's major news events. When Israel launched a military assault on Gaza in November, while the Assad regime rained airstrikes against the Syrian people, even when the Westboro Baptist Church's  planned a predictably vile response to the Newtown massacre -- Anonymous was there.

As Wired's Quinn Norton extensively detailed earlier this year, 2011 and early 2012 presented the sprawling hacker collective with challenges both practical and existential. Hector Xavier Monsegur -- best known as Sabu, a central member of LulzsSec, the arm of Anonymous responsible for the famed Stratfor hack -- was arrested last year and revealed as an FBI informant in March 2012. Dozens of "Anons" across the world were outed by Sabu and picked up by the FBI and Interpol. Sabu's flip to informant not only lost Anonymous some of their most talented hackers, but also eroded the idea of Anonymous as an unbreakable, unfathomable legion.  Other faces of Anonymous emerged alongside the cold, grinning Guy Fawkes mask; real, human, flesh-and-blood faces of young men -- like 27-year-old Jeremy Hammond, a social justice activist from Chicago who could face life in prison for his alleged involvement in the Stratfor hack.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/anonymous_reflects_on_a_frantic_and_historic_year/feed/ 3 2012: The year we all got high http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/2012_the_year_we_all_got_high/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/2012_the_year_we_all_got_high/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:40:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13155716 If liberalizing marijuana laws becomes the next big social issue, we will have 2012 to thank for it, as this was the year that the issue finally moved from the fringes to the center of American politics.

“In the now nearly fifty-year-old effort to end cannabis prohibition laws led by non-profit citizen advocacy groups, 2012 must be viewed as a watershed year for cannabis law reformers,” said Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of NORML, a leading marijuana reform group.

Tom Angell, the chairman of Marijuana Majority, agreed. "This was the year that we broke through and succeeded in getting prominent political observers and the media to pay attention to the fact that this is quickly becoming a mainstream issue.”

The biggest victories for advocates, of course, came in Washington and Colorado, where voters approved ballot measures to legalize cannabis for private recreational use. Washington’s law has already gone into effect, while Colorado’s will soon. Advocates hope that if all goes according to plan, other states will see there’s nothing to be afraid of and follow the example.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/2012_the_year_we_all_got_high/feed/ 20 Andrew O’Hehir’s 10 Best Movies of 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/andrew_ohehirs_10_best_movies_of_2012/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/andrew_ohehirs_10_best_movies_of_2012/#comments Tue, 25 Dec 2012 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148130 Well, listen – the next time the movie beat gets boring I’ll write another essay proclaiming the death of film culture. Apparently that was all it took to perk things up! Actually, the widely misinterpreted point I was trying to make, which was that film no longer holds the position of cultural centrality it once did, on either the highbrow or mass levels, remains valid. Even amid the undoubted richness of this fall and winter season, you can find examples of this: While films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Michael Haneke’s “Amour” pile up rave reviews and critics’ group awards, they don’t resemble what the general public thinks of as a movie, and the number of Americans who pay to see them in a movie theater may not exceed the audience for a single episode of a hit cable show. (My No. 1 pick of the year, which will no doubt be described as an eccentric choice, failed to gross even $100,000 in the United States. That’s more like the audience for a cable-access show. In Polish.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/andrew_ohehirs_10_best_movies_of_2012/feed/ 57 12 for ’12: The year in politics http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/12_for_12_the_year_in_politics/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/12_for_12_the_year_in_politics/#comments Tue, 25 Dec 2012 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13153873 To close out 2012, I’ve looked back at each month and selected one individual who loomed large in the news and whose story tells us something significant about the year in politics. This is an admittedly imprecise exercise. Not all months are created equally. There are some months when multiple people could have been chosen; in other months, the pickings were slim. And in some cases, the names I’ve chosen offer a reminder that in political journalism, what seems vitally important one day can seem trivial the next.  Anyway, on to the list:

January: Newt Gingrich

To anyone who’d just been teleported from the year 1999, the scene in Charleston, South Carolina on the night of January 21 had to be impossible to fathom: There was Newt Gingrich, the man who’d been marched off the political stage by his own party after a disastrous four-year run as House Speaker, declaring victory in a Republican presidential primary. And not just any primary: South Carolina, a historically pivotal early contest. And not just a victory – an absolute landslide.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/12_for_12_the_year_in_politics/feed/ 10 Salon’s ultimate book guide http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/salons_ultimate_book_guide/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/salons_ultimate_book_guide/#comments Mon, 24 Dec 2012 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13149859 Need a last-minute gift? Or sitting on a gift card and need a great book to read over the holiday break?

You could check out our What To Read Awards for the top-10 books by our Laura Miller as well as our favorite critics. Or, you could get some recommendations straight from the authors of some of our best books of 2012.

As part of a long-standing Salon tradition, we asked the authors of the books that we loved most this year to tell us about a 2012 book they read and loved. Junot Diaz, Gillian Flynn, Lauren Groff, Andrew Solomon, Tana French, Victor LaValle, Jess Walter, Maggie Shipstead and more contribute their picks below. Take the whole story shopping.

David Abrams, author of “Fobbit” (Grove Press, Black Cat)
“Breed,” by Chase Novak (Mulholland Books)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/salons_ultimate_book_guide/feed/ 5 What To Read Awards: The Salon Book Critics’ Poll http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_the_salon_book_critics_poll/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_the_salon_book_critics_poll/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13151468 .articleContent a img:hover { opacity: .5; }

We live in a golden age of top-10 lists -- that is, if you really like drowning in year-end rankings.

That's where the first annual What To Read Awards come in. We wanted to bring some clarity to the barrage of bests. After all, top-10 lists should be a chance for readers to get a sense of what was really important over the last year. That's what Laura Miller does every week with her What To Read column, by selecting the one must-read book that she can really recommend as worthy of your attention.

And that's the goal of these awards. We surveyed almost 20 of our favorite critics, both print and online, veterans and newcomers. We aggregated their top-10s to generate a consensus of what the smartest critics see as the most essential titles of the year. The results are below.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_the_salon_book_critics_poll/feed/ 3 What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_top_10_books_of_2012_slide_show/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_top_10_books_of_2012_slide_show/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13152203 http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_top_10_books_of_2012_slide_show/feed/ 0 The What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/the_what_to_read_awards_top_10_books_of_2012/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/the_what_to_read_awards_top_10_books_of_2012/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:58:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13151319 For Salon's first annual What To Read Awards, we surveyed our favorite book critics, both print and online, from high-profile publications to the hottest literary blogs. We asked for their top-10 books of 2012, and then tabulated the winners by assigning 10 points for a No. 1 selection, 9 for No. 2, all the way to 1 point for No. 10. Some critics did not want to rank their top-10; we assigned a fixed value to those ballots. Our voters' top-10 is below.

"Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, the Rumpus

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/the_what_to_read_awards_top_10_books_of_2012/feed/ 3 What To Read Awards: More winners http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_more_winners/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_more_winners/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:57:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13151430 Debut of the year, Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forever" and Kevin Powers' "The Yellow Birds." A new fiction writer and a brilliant reporter tied for the best first book. Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" was named the best book of the year, and four of our judges also named it the year's strongest debut. But four voters also went for a lyrical debut by an Iraq War veteran, Powers' "The Yellow Birds." In naming it one of the year's strongest titles, Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor called it a "vivid and haunting portrait of friendship and war as a young soldier remembers the death of his teenage friend." Other books with multiple mentions included "Girlchild" by Tupelo Hassman and Ben Fountain's "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_more_winners/feed/ 0 What To Read Awards: How they voted http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_how_they_voted/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_how_they_voted/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:56:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13151306 .articleContent a img:hover { opacity: .5; }


















Back to the What To Read Awards

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_how_they_voted/feed/ 0 What To Read Awards: M. Rebekah Otto http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_m_rebekah_otto/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_m_rebekah_otto/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148553 M. Rebekah Otto is the books editor of the Rumpus.

M. Rebekah's Top-10

1. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso
2. "HhHH" by Laurent Binet
3. "By Blood" by Ellen Ullman
4. "Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine"
5. "NW" by Zadie Smith
6. "Between Heaven and Here" by Susan Straight
7. "Tiny Beautiful Things" by Cheryl Strayed
8. "The Lifespan of a Fact" by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
9. "How to Get Into the Twin Palms" by Karolina Waclawiak
10. "Hang Glider and Mud Mask" by Brian McMullen and Jason Jagel

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_m_rebekah_otto/feed/ 0 What To Read Awards: Eric Banks http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_eric_banks/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_eric_banks/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148577 Eric Banks is the president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Eric's top 10:

1. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” by Katherine Boo
2. “Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story” by Jim Holt
3. “At Last” by Edward St. Aubyn
4. “Bring Up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel
5. “Far From the Tree” by Andrew Solomon
6. “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia” by Pankaj Mishra
7. “Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights” by Marina Warner
8. “The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy” by David Nasaw
9. “HHhH” by Laurent Binet
10. “The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 3 (1926-27)” by Valerie Eliot and John Heffendon (eds.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_eric_banks/feed/ 0 What To Read Awards: Roxane Gay http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_roxane_gay/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_roxane_gay/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148600 Roxane Gay's criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.

Roxane's top 10:

1. “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” by Ayana Mathis
2. “How Should a Person Be” by Sheila Heti
3. “Battleborn” by Claire Vaye Watkins
4. “Beautiful Ruins” by Jess Walter
5. “I Am a Magical Teenage Princess” by Luke Geddes
6. “NW” by Zadie Smith
7. “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich
8. “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn
9. “Forgotten Country” by Catherine Chung
10. “How to Get Into the Twin Palms” by Karolina Waclawiak

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_roxane_gay/feed/ 0 What To Read Awards: Lev Grossman http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_lev_grossman/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_lev_grossman/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148607 Lev Grossman is the book critic for Time magazine.

Lev's top 10:

1. “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green
2. “Bring Up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel
3. “My Friend Dahmer” by Derf Backderf
4. “The Casual Vacancy” by J.K. Rowling
5. “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” by Ben Fountain
6. “At Last” by Edward St. Aubyn
7. “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There” by Catherynne Valente
8. “Are You My Mother?” by Alison Bechdel
9. “Building Stories” by Chris Ware
10. “Code Name Verity” by Elizabeth Wein

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