End-of-Year Self-Congratulatory Gala
The best posts of 2023 along seven dimensions 🏆
Counting this post, I published 52 articles in 2023 — exactly one per week, just like in 2022 and 2021. I went from 783 to (as of writing this) 2,507 subscribers, a 220% increase, and from 0 to 16 paid subscribers, which is a more modest rise in absolute numbers but technically an ∞% increase!
For the benefit of all of you who joined along the way, and because being on holiday is apparently the best way for me to have no idea what to write about, let’s take some time to reflect on my work this year. I’ll do it in the shape of a gala with various awards, which is nice because I’m guaranteed to win all of them.
Substack Audience Award
Substack allows us to to sort posts according to the “Top” criterion, which as far as I can guess is some aggregation of views, likes, and comments. (I don’t know how the formula works, but I’m curious, if anyone has a clue!) These are also the posts that show on the “Most Popular” column to the right of my home page.
Which 2023 post takes the cake of popularity? This won’t be particularly suspenseful since the answer is literally displayed on the main page, but the nominees are:
(Honorable mention to Nothing is Literally Obvious, which should have been in the top 3 but is disqualified because that was a remake of a post from 2020.)
And the winner is… The Figurative-to-Abstract Art Pipeline! Aided by being published later in the year when I had more subscribers, but also by a “level three”1 mention from Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution, it earned 8,730 views, 69 likes, 64 comments, and apparently gave me 115 new subscribers and fifty bucks. All of this from a post that felt like one of the easiest to write, since it mostly involved copy-pasting paintings. Still, I’m quite fond of the post and the aesthetic point it made. I do want to share the credit with open cyclops on Twitter, who came up with the original idea, which I simply extended it to more artists.
Most Under-Appreciated Post
The posts mentioned above are high-quality, and everyone noticed, which is why they’re popular. What about the posts whose high-quality was barely noticed? Which one is the hidden gem (according to me, anyway)? The nominees are:
And the winner is… our friend the gold-plated man! This was perhaps my shortest post all year — I remember writing very quickly, late at night, after deciding that what I had been working on that day wasn’t publishable. It came together beautifully, making what I think is a good and elegant point, with no fluff, and amazing cover art by Gustav Klimt. One of my top blogging experiences, yet one that received relatively little attention compared to almost all other posts of 2023.
Post I’m Least Proud Of
Writing weekly necessarily means that some weeks, what you publish will be crap that you will forever cringe when you look back. I haven’t written anything I’m really ashamed of, and nothing that garnered very negative reactions or needed to be taken off from the blog, but there are several posts I don’t like much at all.
(I guess this is the one award I’m going to win against my wishes. So it goes.)
The nominees are:
The winner is the first one, which was about the rationalist movement. I realized over the course of the year that I hate most of what I end up writing about that topic, as well as adjacent ones like effective altruism or ethics more generally. I’m not sure why that is — I write about them because they’re interesting topics and I feel like I have something to say, but it’s never a satisfactory experience somehow. Expect less of those topics in the coming year.
Best Unpublished Draft
I have about 40 drafts in my dashboard. Most of them are little more than a title. An idea I once had but never liked enough to turn into a full-fledged post. Examples include “Annoyances That Are Good, Actually” and “Is Substack Ugly?” I like to keep them around as a kind of archive of my thoughts, even though I don’t expect to ever write them.
Some drafts, however, received a much larger amount of effort. They’re nowhere near being publishable, but I tried getting them to that point, and hopefully I eventually will. For now, you only get to see the tentative titles of the following nominees:
How Expensive Is Architectural Ornamentation?
Beauty Is the Original Solution to the Alignment Problem
The Great Showdown!! History vs. Science Fiction
The architectural ornamentation one is like half done, but suffers from me being totally unable to answer its central question. The beauty post is supposed to be a crowning achievement of my investigations on aesthetics, but crowning achievements tend to be daunting things, so I’ve never felt like working on it ever since I wrote the draft last January. (Also that draft holds the distinction of being handwritten in a notebook somewhere.)
But the winner for Best Unpublished Post is the history vs. science fiction one. It was meant to be a quick and fun post for The Classical Futurist, back when that was a thing. It ended up being neither quick nor fun, and I soon stopped editing The Classical Futurist altogether. So I thought I would recycle the draft here. On at least three occasions, I decided to publish it, worked on it seriously, and then gave up. It’s written in the manner of… a pro wrestling match. It’s silly. It should make an important point in a lighthearted way. And I’m manifestly incapable of ever finishing it. Maybe in 2024. Fingers crossed!
Best High-Effort Post
A “high-effort post,” for the purpose of this category, is one that requires a significant amount of research in order to answer some interesting question. These are my ideal type of post, but the constraints inherent to writing weekly in addition to working full-time mean that I can’t produce a lot of those. I’m nominating all seven of the ones I wrote in 2023:
That last one on Jane Jacobs’s 1980s books is a strong candidate, since it was a winner of the Astral Codex Ten book review contest, but my personal favorite, and therefore the laureate for this category, is… A Song of Proto-Industrialization! Continuing the tradition of writing about proto-industrialized societies that began with Bengal in 2022, this post allowed me to learn a lot about Chinese history, and brought together lots of fun ideas about progress, technology, and economics. Plus I’m really proud of the clever pun in the title.
Which proto-industrialized civilization will I write about in 2024? Stay tuned!
Best Cover Art
As you may know, I make a point of picking great art for each post. That was even the topic of last year’s end-of-year review. Since then, I am happy to report that this blog has featured art from a variety of new places and times, such as the Ethiopian Empire, Magna Graecia, Habsburg Bohemia, and the Paracas culture of the ancient Andes.
Sometimes I’m really happy with the art I picked, both because it’s beautiful and because it fits the post particularly well. The nominees for this award are:
All of these are strong candidates. Gustav Klimt’s knights of gold leaf, are, like I mentioned, part of the source of the gold-plated man metaphor. The drawings by Kay Nielsen for 1,001 Nights are just wondrous. You couldn’t wish for a better way to illustrate the Song dynasty than Emperor Huizong’s delicate paintings. And the vibe in Edward Hopper’s Automat is exactly what I was going for in that sad, wistful essay on the consequences of artificial intelligence.
But I must award the prize to Preamble to a Psychofauna Bestiary, and its collection of pieces like these:
I’m still in awe that this painting genre from Mughal India exists. Demons leading creatures made of animals and people. To illustrate the metaphorical psychocreatures than are made of all of us, and that run the world, they’re incredibly perfect.
Best Post of 2023
And finally we get to the last category, the most prestigious one. Which of 2023’s posts was the best, according to the subjective judgment of the gala’s selection committee, i.e. me?
I nominate the following posts as, broadly speaking, my favorites:
I hesitated quite a bit before awarding this prize. The runner-up, you could say, is The Opposite of Squishy Is Ghostly, a post that still haunts me most weeks. I think writing it genuinely made me a better person, by realizing how incredibly important it is to be reactive to the people around us.
But in the end I’m just really happy with how the 1,001 Nights post turned out. It’s aesthetically and narratively so rich, and it was a lot of fun to understand the complexity behind one of the most influential pieces of fiction out there. Also, reading the book and mulling over the post I was going to write also ended up taking a big chunk of 2023, so it feels appropriate to crown it as the best post of the year.
That’s it for this gala, thanks for joining! If you made it all the way here, do let me know what you would have picked as your personal favorite. I always love hearing from readers!
I’ll see you next year. Enjoy the last remaining bits of 2023!
I enjoyed reading you this year! Continue putting art in your post, please 🎨
The texts that I remember most are the proto-industrialisation, the cemetery poems, Jane Jacobs reviews, the French cuisine, the beautiful/ugly hospital and 1001 nights.
I look forward to read you in 2024! (Specially the text on science fiction😉)
will read all of these!