Danny Crichton

Every year, I read thousands of articles, essays and profiles (Reeder, which replaced Pocket for me, tells me more than 2,000). It’s always hard to qualitatively summarize “the state of the union”, but this year felt more repetitive, what with endless reporting on the War on Ukraine and the U.S. midterm elections sapping the bandwidth of already mentally-strained reporters and writers.

Alas, I wish I could say that it is a golden age of writing, but this year — while there were dozens of very solid pieces — I really felt our collective writing output failed to match the vertiginous moment that we are approaching as a world community. I’m biased as an editor, but the editing of articles (to say nothing of Hollywood’s flabby blockbusters these days) leaves much to be desired, with so many words finally arriving at middling conclusions and narratives.

It’s really a question of economics: the media world has just been wrecked in the post-Covid world. Crippling layoffs abound. Coupled with the more limited contacts between journalists and sources in our work-from-home era, and I am starting to see a general decline of that unique insight that comes from observing a subject and a story as closely as possible.

Negativity aside, this is the best of what I read in 2022 in terms of articles (also check out my best books of 2022!)

First Place: How Miami became the most important city in America by Joel Stein

2022 was a year of shocks and disappointments, but it was also a year of bullshit craziness, bookended by the supposed rise of Miami as a tech hub and the crash of Twitter led by none other than that wisest of tech elder, Elon Musk. In regards to Miami, how do you cover the

This year, I wrote 43 issues of the “Securities” by Lux Capital newsletter, a dozen or so articles for Lux Capital’s website, published 37 podcast episodes of “Securities” with my producer Chris Gates, and wrote about 6-7 pieces on my personal blog (yes, Lux absorbed the vast majority of my writing time!) Then there’s the unpublished work: my intellectual journal has another 65,000 words of thoughts that at some point will hopefully marinate enough for publication.

So to that end, I compiled a “best of 2022” list of “Securities” newsletters and podcasts, which is hosted obviously enough on the “Securities” blog. That list includes 7 newsletters and 6 podcasts that I thought best exemplified the range of ideas we are trying to build with the publication. Among the big topics were the future of science, disasters and chaos, and industrial policy and progress.

Outside of formal writing, informal writing (aka Twitter) has taken a serious plunge as the social network fell into chaos the last few months. At least to me, the value of communications there almost instantly declined upon the ownership change — my timeline has no one I actually follow anymore, replies are a mess, and overall engagement at least in my circles seems to be at a nadir. So I have barely tweeted these past three months as I just observe the new patterns of engagement.

Maybe 2023 will be different. Somehow though, I feel that the gravities here have their own universal constants that will continue in the years ahead.

This year, I read 51 books, including 3 novels in French and 3 graphic novels in Korean. 2022 was a blistering year, what with Putin’s war on Ukraine and the seismic financial crises sweeping across tech, crypto, trade, and semiconductors. So my reading this year weighed heavily on both the chaos emanating from across the globe as well as existentialist books on how to thrive as wave after disastrous wave smashes into our daily lives. Plus, a bunch of classics, since it’s actually calming to just depart our world and head into the past every once in a while.

First Place: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is an absolute classic and Ishiguro is now a Nobel Prize winner, so I already had high expectations before reading the novel. I was nonetheless floored. When I think about aesthetic excellence in fiction, few works get closer to the ideal than The Remains of the Day, a book that somehow manages to bury us in the thoughts of a singular narrator — a butler named Stevens in the declining estate Darlington Hall — while creating a propulsive plot laden with the weight of memory and history.

The book may be a microcosm of a butler and the home he upkeeps, but it’s essentially a layered and universal novel of identity. What does our labor add up to? What happens if the projects we work on we later find out weren’t worth the cost? What does singular and exceptional devotion to work preclude from our lives? What does it mean to live as an individual within a decaying institution?

It’s perhaps the latter question that makes the novel so enriching. While it is an extraordinarily empathetic account of a person, it’s also a loupe by which

I last did a review of my writing in June and since then, I’ve published two dozen new “Securities” newsletters and podcast episodes. Here’s a recap.

One blockbuster piece that drove a lot of email was on a theme I dubbed “Vaporware Skepticism,” partially inspired by a line from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (“And that’s how they know what’s going on inside a person’s head — by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance”). The piece explored the well-financed hopes of new technologies including decentralized finance, nuclear fusion, and lab-grown meats, arguing that VCs flush with undisciplined capital are investing earlier than the science in these fields allows. We all want progress of course, but there is a pace to these innovations that capital often can't accelerate.

The year of 2022 has been a tough one for optimism — a deep economic recession in tech, Russia’s war on Ukraine, China’s unending Covid-19 lockdowns, de minimis progress on climate disruption — but that doesn’t mean there were no developments showcasing the enlightenment of humanity. In Scientific Sublime, I explored the James Webb Space Telescope and the broader impact of new scientific instruments on optimism. Progress certainly feels like it has been halted, but wondrous sci-fi moments remain possible when the best of global humanity comes together to push the frontiers of knowledge forward.

This has been a year of falls downward and somehow upward for a variety of notorious founders, politicians and bureaucrats. Reputations are rebuilt as past failures subside from minds. So where does reputation end and truth begin? In “Truth and Reputations,” I briefly surveyed the landscape of our fallen "heroes" to explore what really lies below the sheen of some of the most spotlighted people in our society.

One of the bywords

I haven’t done a writing review in a very, very long time (almost 6 months)! So I figured it was time to aggregate my collective output and highlight some of my favorite pieces.

First of all, most of my writing energies these days are devoted to the “Securities” by Lux Capital newsletter, and the identically-named podcast series, which is produced by Chris Gates. I’ve been covering science, technology, finance and the human condition since we officially launched in January, and so far, I’ve published 23 weekly newsletters and 20 podcast episodes.

I’ve covered a huge amount of ground given the openness of the overarching theme, but among my favorite newsletter issues:

• American Civil War 2.0 — on the perilous state of civil society in the United States and why a new Civil War seems to be closer than it appears.
• AI, dual-use medicine, and bioweapons — on the complexities of regulating technologies in the biotech space, and why bioweapons are so hard to stop.
• Easternization of media — on the massive growth of media emanating from East Asia these days to the West, from pop music to manga.
• The ESG Mirage — on the multiple scandals that the Environmental, Social and Governance investment management industry is facing right now, and why quantification in the industry is a lost cause.
• America’s gambling fetish — on why online sports betting, crypto, decentralized startup investing and more have taken American culture by storm.

Meanwhile, over on the “Securities” by Lux Capital podcast, we’ve had a star-studded list of guests and some great conversations. Among my favorites are:

• A four-part series on “Risk, Bias and Decision Making” with Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman, famed securities and portfolio researcher Michael Mauboussin, and World Poker champion and cognitive psychologist Annie Duke.
• We had a great

How does one experience an era? How much can we “feel” the time and place we are in? In the post-Covid world, it feels as though we live in a time of fear, a time of caution, a time when the future is diminished and each day is a fight through some path-dependent consequence of the last two years of pandemic-induced change.

It’s also a time of decadence, for those inclined to certain strains of analysis such as Ross Douthat’s 2021 book The Decadent Society. There’s a feeling of listless purposelessness, of everyone walking on autopilot from one Saturnalia to another, all while the core foundation of a strong nation is left unattended to crumble. Or so Douthat’s theory posits, along with a whole wing of the bookstore haranguing the intentional decline of the once great nation of America.

Of course, it’s interesting to describe the zeitgeist of a country of 330 million people. Who determines the zeitgeist? Where is it centered? Does it apply to the urban centers or the hinterlands on the periphery? Just exactly how do you “average” the feelings of so many people? In much the same vein as Benedict Anderson famously described a nation as an “imagined community” since no one can meet everyone else in the nation, is there such an imaginary as zeitgeist? Does this “feeling” or “sense” of an era have any purchase?

I recently read Joseph A. Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, and while the 1988 book is mostly on societal collapse per its title, one aspect of his analysis that I felt was sizzling was his denunciation of any of these squishy feelings of zeitgeist, which he assails as “mystical factors.” In his analysis, such factors are completely undefinable, and entail value judgments

The syllabus — when properly written — is one of the greatest instruments of human knowledge transfer available. Syllabi can turn an impenetrable pile of papers and books with similar-sounding titles and synthesize all of it into a well-structured hierarchy and prioritization of knowledge. It’s an important enough construct that William Germano and Kit Nicholls even wrote a recent book on the subject titled, appropriately enough, “Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything” (part of the excellent Skills for Scholars series from Princeton University Press).

So it was something of a treat to grab a copy of Megan Walsh’s new book “The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters.” It's a brief overview of the Chinese literature scene, including everything from the Nobel Prize-winning works of Mo Yan and the “fan fiction” on sites like China Literature (阅文集团) to the edges of literature like worker's poetry and LGBT writing.

At 136 pages, it’s a Herculean task to compress thousands of years of literary history and the world’s largest literature market into a slim volume. Walsh does am admirable job though, compiling what ultimately is an extended syllabus that structures many of the patterns and trends that affect Chinese literature today.

Throughout the book, there are capsule summaries of many different works, plus the occasional extended commentary on a topic of interest. While brief, Walsh has among the most sophisticated takes I have seen in print on the opportunities afforded by China’s comprehensive surveillance and censorship state, and the contours of where the lines are drawn (or just outlined since no one ever really knows where the lines are). Such constraints, while deeply disconcerting, offer room for creativity, or at least propel Chinese authors to explore other genres overlooked in the West.

Necessarily, The Subplot

I’ve always been a believer in the quip that “America has three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” It gets at the uniqueness of some terrains and urban centers and the infinite monotony of others. Having grown up in the Midwest and later moved to the coasts, I find the quip stands up extremely well.

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Miami for the first time. It’s a dichotomy of a city — a place unique in culture and people and history and its attachment to Latin America, but with an architectural style and urban plan that is just brutally, concretely, boring. And frankly impossible to use — every single trips around the city ended up requiring an Uber, and every single time that Uber was surging 2.0x or above. A single two mile trip downtown that took about 9 minutes cost $26 with fees, tax, and tip. This is a fanciful place.

The weather was absolutely pristine and enviable though, and I can see the allure. April sells Miami unlike any place I have ever been — the music, the breeze, the beaches, the polyphonies — just the vibe. I get it.

Connected to the trip, I delayed read Mario Alejandro Ariza’s recent book “Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe.” Given a lot of the work I have been doing around disaster response, it seemed the perfect antidote to the positivity that emanates from the Magic City.

It’s a negative if not dreary book, and positively among the global warming library, it tries to expand the panorama of people who are acting and reacting to the rising tides that threaten to subsume Miami back into the swamp. Given Ariza’s cultural background from the Dominican Republic, we