A Year In Everything: Jason Parham
Everything I read on the subway that helped to stave off the hellscape that was 2016.
I have a theory: we spend most of our lives waiting. For people. For opportunity to arise. For new experiences. For Uber. Or, if you live in New York City, for our outright dire public transportation system. A considerable amount of my week is spent riding the subway — rushing to work, trekking to visit friends uptown, traveling back to my apartment after a night out — and in that time I do the most reading (mainly via Pocket). I typically thumb through fiction, but promised myself I’d dive into more nonfiction this year.
That commitment to myself became increasingly important in a 2016 that also saw the ascension of a billionaire demagogue and the cancerous spread of “fake news.” Suddenly, it seemed, information was all around us: in tweets and snapchats, on TV, thundering at us from newsfeeds. But more information didn’t make for a more informed populace. Sadly — inevitably? — it only seemed to make us more delirious.
The line between what was real and what was malicious untruth became so muddied in online precincts like Facebook that a once-moderately informed voting bloc began to question everything. “The use of social media to spread political misinformation online is partly just a giant shell game,” Michael P. Lynch wrote in The New York Times in November. Propagandists, Lynch continued, “don’t have to get you to actually believe the penny is under the wrong shell. They just have to get you confused enough so that you don’t know what is true.”
In an effort to not completely agonize over 2016’s never-ending hellscape, I burrowed into essays, profiles, and a few good books. The following is a (mostly complete) list of everything I read on the subway in the last 12 months. Fortunately enough, they were also stories that felt refreshingly real in a year that felt like utter fiction.
The Legacy of Lynching, on Death Row
Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
To the First Lady, With Love
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, T Magazine
Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality
Wesley Morris, New York Times Magazine
Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul
James Mcbride
Seeing Stars
Alex Ronan, Real Life
Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby
Wil S. Hylton, New York Times Magazine
The Return of the Utopians
Akash Kapur, The New Yorker
Ripping The Veil
Brit Bennett, The New Republic
The Blog That Disappeared
Roxane Gay, New York Times
Who Are All These Trump Supporters?
George Saunders, The New Yorker
Diamond ‘Lavish’ Reynolds, Public Witness
Doreen St. Felix, MTV News
Why ‘Transcending Race’ Is a Lie
Greg Howard, New York Times Magazine
Invisible Man, Got The Whole World Watching
Mychal Denzel Smith
In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club
Justin Torres, Washington Post
Kamala Harris, a ‘Top Cop’ in the Era of Black Lives Matter
Emily Bazelon, New York Times Magazine
A Door to Robin Coste Lewis’s Los Angeles
Leah Mirakhor, Los Angeles Review of Books
Allen Iverson’s Crossover Appeal
Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic
My Father’s House
Reggie Ugwu, BuzzFeed
Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Authenticity and Desire: A Conversation with Darryl Pinckney
Rachel Charlene Lewis, Los Angeles Review of Books
The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, BuzzFeed
The Netflix of Africa Doesn’t Need Hollywood to Win
Alexis Okeowo, Bloomberg Businessweek
When Whitney Hit the High Note
Danyel Smith, ESPN
Fear of a Black Quarterback
Tommy Craggs, Slate
What Bill Cosby Taught Me About Sexual Violence and Flying
Kiese Laymon, Literary Hub
N.Y.C. to L.A. to N.Y.C. to L.A., Ad Infinitum
Cirocco Dunlap, The New Yorker
From The Collection:
LISTMANIA 2016