Best reportage
James Fallows, “Living With a Computer,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1982
This article from 28 years ago was meant as a kind of primer on acquiring – assembling, really – a personal computer avant la lettre, but serves now as an astonishing window into what we know now to have been the earliest dawn of the Internet revolution. Fallows is as amazingly right about many things as he is understandably wrong about some other things.
Best video
Sean Stiegemeier, “Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010”
Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.
Best non-fiction essay
“A Mind in the Water: The dolphin as our beast of burden,” by D. Graham Burnett
Tursiops truncatus—a slate-gray, slick-skinned net thief, which coastal fishermen of the late nineteenth-century Atlantic sometimes called the “herring hog” in disgust—would, by the 1970s, leap in the vanguard of the Age of Aquarius, enjoying an improbable secular canonization as the superintelligent, ultrapeaceful, erotically uninhibited totem of the counterculture. And to this day, for many, the bottlenose—mainstay of aquatic ecotourism, beloved water-park performer, smiling incarnation of soulful holism—represents a cetacean version of our better selves.
Best Music
Ametsub, “The Nothings of the North” – hypnotic electronic music that sounds like what would happen if Brad Mehldau got ahold of stray tracks from Radiohead’s Kid A sessions
Ametsub – Repeatedly from lucio arese on Vimeo.