Here it is - the post I’m sure you have not been waiting for - my second annual recap of what stood out for me over the last 12 months. If you’re so inclined, you can find last year’s post here.
TV -
Get Back (Disney) - Watching this three episode documentary feels like you’re getting away with something. A magical look at the creative process that made me stop rolling my eyes and start caring about The Beatles.
The Other Two (HBO Max) - The funniest show I watched this year and if you have yet to discover it, congratulations on having two seasons to binge.
Foundation (Apple) - Gorgeous even if at times it feels more like gloss than substance. One of the few Apple TV shows not to include product placement for Apple products (yet).
Couples Therapy (Showtime) - The only thing better than therapy for yourself might be watching other people go to therapy.
Succession (HBO) - For three seasons clearly the best show on TV, although this season suffered from overwriting and what I suspect were too many notes from the studio in an attempt to broaden its audience and service fans.
Station Eleven (HBO Max) - I’ve been pleased to see HBO continue to embrace single season TV shows this year. I thought this (based on a book I hadn’t read before watching) was the best of breed (other examples including Mare of Easttown and White Lotus).
Stanley Tucci Searching for Italy (HBO Max/CNN). Stumbled over this this year and couldn’t get enough.
The Investigation (HBO) - Based on a real life story about a murder on a private submarine, I thought this six episode Swedish procedural was perfectly done.
Additional shoutouts to The Expanse (on Amazon), I Think You Should Leave (on Netflix and the most second hand anxiety I’ve felt in ages), Taika Waititi’s Reservation Dogs (on FX) and Wellington Paranormal (HBO Max), and finally to James Austin Johnson who seems to be making an immediate impact on Saturday Night Live as heir to Darryl Hammond.
Films -
Bo Burnham: Inside. Incredible not just as a pandemic art project but also as a self made film and album that has been on repeat at Hamilton-like levels in our household since it came out.
Eames: The Architect and The Painter. Released a decade ago but one of the most engrossing films I saw this year. A ton of insights for agency people and brand managers who are inevitably faced with the question of how and how much to embrace change.
Dune. What this generation’s Star Wars films should have looked like.
Road Runner. This made dumb headlines for its selective use of AI to VO some some of Bourdain’s personal correspondence posthumously in his own voice, but the film is so much more than that. A beautiful tribute to a complicated guy.
Val. A powerful film that changed my impression of Val Kilmer but was also an interesting portrait of an artist in an industry that no longer really needs or wants its actors to be artists.
The Unthinkable. A solid disaster/apocalyptic indie out of Sweden with a final plot twist I’ve been thinking about all year.
Nobody. Bob (Odenkirk) Wick. An absolute blast through and through.
Kate. Finally, a Netflix-produced action movie that felt fully baked.
Shouts out to two other Netflix films that made an impression: Fire In Paradise (originally released in 2019) which is a terrifying and mercifully concise depiction of our new climate reality and The Alpinist, a worthy successor to Free Solo.
Books -
I had a relatively productive reading year in 2021 and my favorite reads were mostly clumped into history and science fiction.
In history:
Arrian/Martin Hammond: The Anabasis and the Indica - I finally made my way through this portrayal of Alexander the Great’s expeditions and found them vivid and exciting with lots of lessons on the importance of fusing action with communication.
Eric H. Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed - has been on my bookshelf partially finished for a while but I felt compelled to pick it up again for obvious reasons. Surprise: societies not prepared to deal with migration driven by climate change had a hard time in the past; will likely have a hard time in the future.
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (which I’m admittedly only partially through) is an eye opening re-cast of human history, challenging foundational assumptions about early social structures (hunters and gatherers vs farmers) and the political ideologies built on top of them.
In science fiction:
I devoured James SA Corey’s 9-book Expanse series, culminating in this year’s final release Leviathan Falls. The last three books are, I think, the strongest in the series and I hope they’ll find a way to film them at some point, as the Amazon Prime show is set to sunset at the close of the 6th book.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is a lovely story told from the perspective of an intelligent robot, but I’ve included it here for the incredible writing that shines through in the final third of the book.
Honorable mentions to my friend Laurie Ruettimann who published Betting on You, which has a ton of lessons about how to get what you really want out of your career, and to R.M. Sainsbury’s Paradoxes which is a master class in using writing to make incredibly complex concepts clear and enjoyable to read.
Music -
In the second half of 2021 I started to try to get more out of my Spotify subscription and put together a playlist of the tracks I listened to the most in the final quarter of the year and my favorite 2021 releases overall.
Of this year’s discoveries I was particularly obsessed with Your Smith’s Bad Habit, Sleater-Kinney’s Worry With You, Elle King’s The Let Go, The Antlers’ Just One Sec, Dessa’s Terry Gross, Billy Bragg’s Pass It On, Clem Snide’s Roger Ebert, and Steve Earle’s Last Words (this last one is particularly heartbreaking).
Podcasts -
I spent less time listening to podcasts generally in 2021 and the ones I enjoyed the most are probably the least relatable to my American friends. These were The ACC’s BYC (cricket) and Agenda (NZ sports) podcasts. Other highlights in my feed included:
Lex Fridman’s Elon Musk interview. I recommended Lex’s podcast last year and have to say I’m a little disappointed that he seems to have picked up a touch of the intellectual dark webs in his guest selections (the Joe Rogan effect, presumably), but overall I’ve found his range of guests and extended conversation format to continue to be valuable. The Musk interview is the best example of this.
Fall of Civilizations. Expertly produced and wide ranging with the startling plot twist that climate change played an important role in many of these collapses, something that should probably be getting a lot more play in our contemporary conversations about how we’re adapting to “the change that has already happened”.
80,000 Hours’ career advice interview with Holden Karnofsky was excellent, as are Karnofsky’s own audio reads of his blog posts on Cold Takes.
The China in Africa Podcast: Chinese Entertainment is Finding New Audiences in Africa - a super interesting look at how China is scaling its information network internationally.
The Future of Life podcast’s Josha Bach interview on beneficial futures.
China, If You’re Listening investigates Australia’s deteriorating relationship with China and provides lots for everyone to think about, both in the south pacific and beyond.
Other shoutouts for Pivot, which I think continues to be the best business weekly and a plug for This Week Next Week, which we’ve recently kicked off at GroupM.
Article, talks, papers, threads -
On technology and the future:
Eli Dourado: Notes on Technology in the 2020s - if you want to get excited about the future, this is a great roadmap. In the same vein, I also really liked this from Prime Movers Lab.
Alex Danco: The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, World Building and the Early Internet - both of these are excellent and it exponentially scales my opinion of Shopify that this guy chooses to work there.
Pew Research: Future of the Internet 2025, 2030
Derek Thompson: America Is Running on Fumes
Noah Smith: Why is China smashing its tech industry?
WSJ: How TikTok's Algorithm Figures Out Your Deepest Desires
On communications:
Faris Yakob: Everything is PR - one of the most important pieces of the year, and underscores for me that communications is too important to be left solely to PR people.
Sean Cao, Wei Jiang, Baozhong Yang & Alan L. Zhang: How to Talk When a Machine is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI
NeuraLink: Monkey Mind Pong
On organizational innovation and creativity:
Elon Musk’s 5 Step Process for Successful Engineering
Alex Komoroske: Coordination Headwind - How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
Kevin Roose: The Robots are Coming for Phil in Accounting - good overview of Robotic Process Automation which is a term I suspect a lot of us will become more familiar with in the coming years.
Rebecca Mead: The Real CEO of Succession
On climate:
Alex Steffen: Discontinuity is the Job, Ruggedize Your Life - Alex Steffan has become one of the most clarifying thinkers in my feed about the future and the best communicator on climate change around. (Of course at this point communication can’t solve climate change, it can only help to prepare people for what’s coming.)
Sarah Miller: All The Right Words On Climate Have Already Been Said
And in AI, I found the following stood out:
Pew Research: Survey XII: What Is the Future of Ethical AI Design?
Partnership for AI: Redesigning AI for Shared Prosperity and Jonathan Stray: Beyond Engagement: Aligning Algorithmic Recommendations With Prosocial Goals, How News Organizations Use Algorithms to Decide What to Show You
NSCAI: Final Report
And on Twitter:
This thread of 2021 Twitter moments and memes is a pretty amazing way to reflect on the last 12 months
Tim Urban’s ‘Favorite Tweet ever’
Anaïs Mitchell’s pre-cellphone childhood remembrances
Websites and platforms -
Twitter continued to play a central role in my information diet in 2021. Their commitment to keeping their product locked in 2011 amber is equally admirable and frustrating. I was pleased that they evicted Trump (although I’m a Kamala Harris sympathizer on this) and encouraged by their move to begin to denote when accounts are bots - a hugely important part of the future.
I also continue to love Very Goods (even if the end of cookies seems to be undermining some of the platform’s core functionality) and am very grateful to Ben Pieratt and Fictive Kin for keeping it going.
I used Squarespace to redesign my own site. I still find Squarespace frustrating to use, but has come a long way in the last couple years (and its push into simplifying ecommerce is interesting). One of my resolutions for 2022 is to spend more time using my own site to experiment, learn, and to share stuff like this.
And finally, I recently discovered Matt Baker’s Useful Charts through his YouTube channel. Endlessly entertaining exploration of family trees and alternate histories.
Products/purchases -
A short list of things I’ve picked up this year that have stood out in way or another:
WiZ lightbulbs - Highly recommended if you want to experiment with getting your house on a schedule or push the functionality of your smart speakers beyond timers and weather updates.
Grady’s Cold Brew has become a must in our household. I get the Bean Bag Bundles.
LARQ - on the one hand, it’s obviously insane to spend nearly $100 on a water bottle. On the other, I’m finally drinking more water.
Paskho - I love every Paskho product I’ve picked up. Perfect balance of functionality and athleisure.
The Snoo and The Owlet Sock - of all the baby products we purchased this year, these two might have made the biggest difference. No need to buy the Snoo - they make it easy to rent.
Ammunition’s Gio Table Lights do not throw off a ton of light, but they look gorgeous and are one of my favorite home fixtures we picked up in 2021.
The Citizenry’s linen bedding.
Our plaster coffee table from OkenHouse Studios and low shelving unit from KROFTSTUDIO - both found on Etsy - have become a big part of our living room.
Recipes -
Eric Kim’s Roasted Chicken with Fish Sauce Butter - is probably the most delicious thing I made all year. I also tried Eric’s Cold Noodles with Tomatoes on a whim during the summer and was surprised by just how great they were too.
Molly Baz’s Skirt Steak with Red Chimichurri - this dish became our go-to for entertaining (although usually with tri-tip instead of skirt). I don’t think the recipe is available online, but the book is worth picking up.
Alison Roman’s Crispy Pork Cutlets from her Home Movies series
Grossy Pelosi’s Vodka Sawce - has also been our go-to special event pasta. Requires some significant involvement on the back end, but is totally worth it.
Sue Li’s homemade version of the filet o fish
The Gold Rush cocktail - has been a staple throughout the year but especially good in the colder months.
Moments -
Like many of us, I went into 2021 with hope that we’d see everyone pull together to get the world back on track and was pretty disappointed by how that all shook out. On a personal level, the following moments really defined the year for me:
Watching the Jan 6th invasion of Congress unfold on CNN in real time was surreal, sack of Rome stuff which rather than being a rally point to avert America’s ongoing slide, seems to be just another sad milestone on the way to wherever we’re going. Just fourteen days later, though, I found Amanda Gorman’s recital of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s Inauguration deeply moving and a reason to hope in the next generation.
New Zealand’s Cricket World Test Championship victory over India in June was incredibly gratifying for me and for New Zealanders who grew up with teams who had a hard time finding second or third gear. NZ’s cricketing turnaround over the last decade or so is a case study in leadership and culture that has put them in the finals of all three formats of the game since 2019.
In the middle of the year, Christine and I welcomed a baby into our family after a fun journey with IVF, which of course was the ultimate highlight of 2021 for us. More than a decade after my first kids were born it has been crazy to see how much baby technology has changed and the ways in which it makes childcare easier for parents. We were both incredibly fortunate to be able to take significant periods of leave simultaneously, giving us three months of overlapping leave which really defined 2021 for us and allowed us to give Madeline the best possible start.
At the close of my paternity leave in September, Christine and I drove out to NJ to spend some time with Christine’s family. I have always found road trips to be a great way to get a feel for what’s really happening in America and while the drive itself (Minneapolis to Milwaukee, Milwaukee to Detroit, Detroit to NJ and then NJ to Cleveland, Cleveland to Minneapolis on the way home) was less interesting scenically than I’d hoped, it was fascinating to see the labor shortage playing out with fast food restaurants boasting “drive-through only” and increasingly desperate “help wanted” signage. I’ll never forget the conversation I overheard outside a Pennsylvania McDonalds where one truck driver complained to another about the ‘Dumbocrats’ ruining the economy because the lobby was closed to the public.
This year I also accepted a new job and joined the communications team at GroupM. I have been thinking a lot about the increasing importance of communication to the way the world works (leadership is communication and communication is leadership) as well as the power of audience assembly and the centrality of advertising to the information environments and products/platforms that define our current era. I’m excited about having the opportunity to make a positive difference in these areas in the months to come.
Finally, it’s been a real joy to watch my older kids William and Penelope discover a love for learning music and developing as artists while grappling with being back in person at school after a year of remote learning. Will joined the percussion section of his school band and gave his first school concert performance in December and Penelope’s hard work at cello practice is paying off quickly. Both have been using iPads to develop their skills as illustrators and entrepreneurs - charging their parents commissions for requests.
A few brief observations -
As an invested New Zealand watcher, it’s been inspiring to watch New Zealand’s continued commitment to eradicating Covid and interesting to see that commitment draw its fair share of international observation and commentary. I’ve long seen enormous opportunities for New Zealand to re-embrace its core values of egalitarianism and entrepreneurialism and act as a social, political, and economic laboratory for the rest of the world. I hope its success on Covid inspires similarly bold ambition in other areas as well.
Putting aside his flirtations with childishness and marketplace manipulation, I can’t help but find Elon Musk to be a singularly interesting leadership figure for the way he combines action and communication in the service of focused ambition. His recent Lex Fridman interview was fascinating on a number of levels and I enjoyed the practicality of his advice for people who want to lead meaningful lives: Try to Be Useful. Whether it’s acceptable or not to like or admire Musk, I simply wish there were more leaders who, like him, were truly focused on the future and willing to risk everything in order to build something that matters.
2021 was a big year in space and it seems clear to me that this is going to be one of the most exciting frontiers of the next decade. Highlights included the launches of Inspiration 4 (the Netflix doc ‘Countdown’ is fantastic SpaceX branded content) and the James Webb telescope (30 years in the making!), and the continuing success of the US-NZ company Rocket Lab but there is so much to come. Starlink seems like it may be on the cusp of being enormously impactful as do companies like Hadrian and Planet Labs. China’s full on embrace of space as well as the increasing preference for politicians with aerospace backgrounds (more here) and Musk’s marriage to NASA and prediction of a mission to Mars inside the next decade is setting up an era of space competition to rival the 50s and 60s.
China’s move to cut its population off from the ideas encased in American entertainment while building its own cultural infrastructure in Africa and APAC and strengthening its military ties with Russia (I suspect these have been deeper than acknowledged for a while) is setting up a problematic future that America is unprepared to manage in its current political state. But rather than accepting another ideological cold war as inevitable, this should be when we proactively try to replace state-based institutions that fuel counterproductive interstate animosities with 21st century versions capable of supporting global culture and international action. (This is an area where I believe corporate globalization and the internationalization of communications technology platforms can play an important role in creating shared culture and values that will help us tackle the global challenges that will define this century together.)
The last two years have shown us how important communication is and how much we need to advance the field to be effective in the modern environment. We simply have to get a better handle on how to recreate shared realities in areas where they are critical to our survival and remove the incentives for bad actors and grifters to undermine them. I continue to believe that people will need to rely on technology to protect them from weaponized communications tech in the future, but in the short run I suspect there is huge potential to build and market clean information environments or information operating systems that do a better job of helping people lead happier and healthier lives.
Biotech continues to be enormously exciting, not just the introduction of mRNA vaccines, but the continued advances of DeepMind’s Alpha Fold and the potential to make a radical impact on lifespans and quality of life.
Finally, we have some important choices to make about who gets to be part of the future. Last year, I ended this post by noting we had less than ten years to create a future sustainable and inclusive enough for everyone. We did not make enough progress in 2021 and I’m beginning to accept that things will have to get worse until we find the necessary urgency. Climate, biotech, and the creation of new classes with enormous wealth - whether crypto or traditional - are setting up futures that simply have no place for today’s poor and middle classes unless we take proactive steps to ensure everyone gets to participate and benefit from the development of new technologies.
That’s it for 2021. Happy new year!
Thanks so much for your 2021 review! Found some recommendations that I need to follow up on and agreed with your opinions on The Expanse and Station Eleven.