Best Non-Fiction of 2023

written during this decade, not necessarily during this year.

Rebecca and I were talking about being a little dissatisfied with our library this weekend since we hosted a big party and people were looking at it, so we cleared out some stuff. It was mostly non-fiction and the dynamic of mostly reading new non-fiction while mostly reading old fiction makes me wonder if the ratio of truly memorable non-fiction to forgettable stuff is extremely low. A lot of non-fiction just doesn’t age very well, besides being not that good. Or maybe I’m just not reading the good stuff? The only non-fiction I read this year not released in this decade was Deborah Levy’s memoir of writing, The Cost of Living, which probably would come in at number 2 or 3 here. So: next year, maybe more memoirs, or at least more stuff that’s critically acclaimed, and maybe some beloved stuff from about 10 or 20 years ago that’s still beloved? I definitely grabbed the bottom three entries on this list purely from their covers at the library when I was checking something else out and that was a bad idea.

It wasn’t difficult for me to figure out my top five here. They’re all full of ideas and history or bursting with that ineffable quality of voice. The worst non fiction I read this year had almost no voice: just the facts, ma’am.

1. Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, W. David Marx, 2022.

Paul Fussell attempted something like this in his “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System,” but Marx extends his analysis beyond the U.S. to England, Japan, and other tastemaking countries around the world. The book is full of weird anecdotes, quotes from all sorts of thinkers from Adorno to Klostermann to Madonna, and a consistently funny, curious tone. Unlike Fussell, he never seems to have any contempt for any of the people or movements he’s profiling.

He convincingly shows how the desire for status helps to explain the modern predicament for artists: the desire to gain egalitarianism points through virtue signaling awareness of oppression often trumps the desire to upend basic structural or thematic norms in their chosen discipline, whether or not those norms are explicitly conservative. Marx explains the old dynamic of old-money artists co-opting the most interesting elements of lower-class artists in order to beat back boring middlebrow culture in a convincing way, and then explains how everyone became a critic through the self-imposition of a massive status and prestige system called social media. He then cogently explains how such a system stifles creativity. This status system isn’t about the dreaded c-word, and in fact explains phenomena like Jason Aldean shifting from making rap songs (“Dirt Road Anthem”) to making MAGA songs. He had topped out in the Nashville prestige ladder in a solid middle class status by playing the game of slowly integrating hip-hop and R&B into his songs, but he could ascend to an upper-middle class status, if only for a minute, by innovating into explicitly political stuff, because that lane was free. If we don’t like the players in this game, we have to change it. We have to allow for radical creativity, even if it makes us uncomfortable, while also pushing for more egalitarian structures that don’t exclude artists because of arbitrary identity categories like race and class. We have to challenge Nashville’s stranglehold over country based on mediocre songs from artists who simply check identity boxes (solo cups, pickup trucks), while also not arbitrarily elevating mediocre artists who simply check different identity boxes (most “Americana”). Otherwise we’re going to face a corporatized, boring, middlebrow artistic culture forever. Poptimism failed. Replace it with something better.

2. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, James Kirchick, 2022.

This is a brilliantly structured and consistently astonishing history of the Lavender scare. It's extremely long, and there's probably some stuff that could be cut, but I'm not sure exactly what; I think of the story of Carter’s administration, which was something of an interregnum between the terrorisms of Nixon and Re

agan, but the way that Kirchick explains the significance of the National Gay Task Force justifies that chapter, too.

 It may also be that the current gay panic on the Right (book bans, trans attacks) just feels so similar to the bullshit they've pulled for LITERALLY ALMOST A CENTURY now, and it's ALWAYS THE SAME HYPOCRITICAL BULLSHIT to trick socially conservative people into voting for lower taxes on rich people and big corporations.

When a particular administration has some particularly weird ideas about persecuting gays (spoiler: they're all Republican administrations) he spends more time on them, and when they're just a bunch of weak-kneed cowards who can't bring themselves to protect gays (spoiler: they're all Democratic administrations) he generally spends less time on them. There are exceptions: there's quite a bit here about Kennedy and Johnson because they intersected with the growth of gay liberation movements, and there's almost nothing about Ford, because duh, but overall Kirchick has an amazing eye for the most interesting stories about the slow but steady evolution of gay identity in Washington and in particular the strange way that gay social conservatives just keep damning gays in the daytime and frequenting bathhouses and movie theatres and bars at night that happen to be full of other gay men! Huh. The diamond of all of these details is the first draft of Reagan’s obituary speech for Rock Hudson that Kirchick found so outrageously, vilely damning that he actually photocopied the draft. You'll see it yourself when you read this book, but basically: he changed it significantly from that first draft, and in the most cowardly way possible.

3. The Wager, David Grann, 2023.

It's Grann, so it's good, as everyone should now be aware of after Killers of the Flower Moon and Lost City of Z. There are a lot of characters, and the vocabulary required to understand the way that a ship works is intense. It made me worried about reading Moby-Dick, but like that book, this one truly uses the sea as a lens for the whole world.

 Grann gives you enough of the vocabulary and scope of a whaling voyage in the 18th century so you can understand it and then turns his focus bit by bit on three main characters who run the action of the last half of the book. He convincingly lays out the utter cruelty at the heart of the British Empire, from impressment to the class system on board to the treatment of indigenous people to slavery.

There's not exactly a modern hook here: a ship is kind of a floating sweatshop, war continues to be useless and run by depraved and deluded madmen, Cape Horn continues to be a place that most humans don't want to visit. Grann may have just wanted to relax into a different world for a few years, and that's fine!

4. G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, Beverly Gage, 2022.

Even if It's closer to 700 pages than 850 with notes and references, 700 may also seem too steep for a biography of an unbelievably unpleasant pleasant person, and I get that this may have meant more to me as a U.S. history buff than it would to other people. However, Gage (or her editors) are not really hyperbolizing with the "Making of the American Century" bit: Hoover was in charge of one of the largest and most rapidly expanding federal agencies for nearly six decades and he ruled over it the entire time with absolute dictatorial control. The FBI was heavily involved in nearly every important event in U.S. history during that time. A rule like his never happened before and will never happen again, and Gage is brilliantly interested not in Hoover's small and terrified psyche, but the large and terrifying position of his office in relation to these world-defining events.

Hoover represents all of the dichotomies inherent in the American Century: the growth of progressive, hopeful federal power and the growth of a fanatical reactionary right wing that viewed that federal power as hopelessly in thrall to leftist invasion, the growth of a professional civil service mostly immune to the changing winds of a polarizing electorate and the growth of an imperial presidency immune to the desires of Congress, and finally the use of technology to revolutionize the expression of power to serve the public good and the misuse of technology to threaten civil liberties.

In particular, just as in Secret City, this book lays out the terrifying Great Man reality that the presidency after FDR could never be put back in its proper place as the leader of one of two major political parties. Instead, the president was now a charismatic king who told Congress what to do rather than letting them set the priorities, for better (New Deal, Great Society, ummm…Obamacare?) and worse ( Kennedy's relentless focus on looking good and doing nothing, nearly everything Nixon did, and obviously all of our presidents in the 21st century).

5. Stay True, Hua Hsu, 2022.

Hsu conjures a raw vulnerability in his teenage self that he maintains throughout his narrative. The book is somewhat slight, but that's a strength: it's more like a tightly written novella than a bildungsroman. Hsu does give you some insight into the person he was as a child and the person he is today, but he mostly wants to conjure a particular vibe, and he succeeds. He gets at his particular tranche of Gen-Xer-dom with precision while leaving the chronology to the side. If it doesn't fit into the particular formative relationship between Ken and Hsu, he leaves it out.

And he's right about this relationship: it's compelling, unique, and unrepresentative of the particular cultural trends he also wants to comment on. In other words, Ken and Hua are humans first, and representatives of their class, race, education, social position, second, but they're also both. What happens to Ken and to Hua feels like much more than a personal tragedy because of how deftly he intercuts the personal and the social. In this way, it actually feels a bit like Between the World and Me, but (gulp) much more readable. It’s going to have a much longer life as a memoir than that book did about what life was like in the nineties through the lens of an author’s personal friend.

6. The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan, 2022.

A lot of the songs he picked that I didn't know are great and I have a fun playlist now called “Curio Shop” with 20 of them on it, but someone probably should have told Bob that people don't want to hear about how men are dogs and women are fickle in the 21st century. “Detroit City” by Bobby Bare is an absolute slammer, but there’s literally no woman mentioned in the song and for some reason Bobby imports a girlfriend in there? Slow it down, horn dog. The writing here very much reminded me that Bob is both a genius and 82 years old.

In that vein, the music from the last four or five decades that he picked that I did know was often kind of meh. “London Calling” just isn't the best representation of everything the Clash do well; it's a dilettante's pick. And no hip-hop? And three women for the entire history of songs from the last 100 years? Sorry Bob, you're better than this.

7 and 8. One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Matt Yglesias, 2020 and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Fredrik DeBoer, 2023.

Both of these fellas are good writers. Yglesias is terrible on Twitter from what I understand, DeBoer did some bad things on Twitter from what I understand, I don’t feel that the current content of their writing on Substack is contaminated by whatever they get/got up to over there. If that changes, I won’t read them anymore!

I appreciate how both of them write well about interesting subjects that most other writers don’t want to touch, and they both write with passion and energy, even if their political projects are only orthogonally similar to mine. After all, none of us will accomplish our political projects in our lifetimes…

9.Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, Kashmir Hill. 2023

I’m less anti-neural nets than a lot of people I read. I don’t love how their results are a black box, but I also don’t quite buy that they can can scale up into general intelligence. Either way, they’re not going away, so applications like facial recognition are not going away, and as Hill convincingly points out, Clearview AI was just the first to the party because its founders are uniquely unscrupulous. They probably have some significant first mover advantage in that marketplace because of their continued lack of scruples about how nasty people (cops, FBI, CIA) will use their product, and because the other big tech companies that all have their own facial recognition divisions (particularly Meta and Google) and just don’t want to worry about all of the lawsuits. If you go to a protest in the future, just know that any nasty person who has a connection within law enforcement can easily figure out that you were there, unless you cover your entire face (beyond a mask).

10. Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, Kyle Buchanan, 2022

Oral histories are more difficult to organize and edit than they first seem, and this one is better than almost any others I've read. I still wish Buchanan had gotten rid of the quotes from random celebrities like Patton Oswold saying that this was his favorite movie: those quotes don't add anything to the insane story of actually making this movie, which will almost certainly never be able to be made again in the way it was made. Instead, the book could have been shorter, or he could have included more stories about Miller’s obsessive attention to detail in costuming or or makeup. The stories we do get about props and cars and the Namib desert and Tom Hardy being a dick in his method acting are interesting enough. Blank checks rarely work, but Miller absolutely cashed his.

11. Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarentino, 2022

I would probably have listened to and even enjoyed this as a podcast, which is why I am starting to think I should stop listening to podcasts, just liked I’ve stopped watching tv shows. I consume them, then I remember almost nothing about them, with a few exceptions (Soul Music, Hit Parade, You Must Remember This). 

All three of those podcasts feature extensive historical research along with anecdote, and it would have been great if Tarentino had spent any time on research, but he’s convinced his personal history with these movies is so utterly fascinating that he doesn’t need to bother. It's certainly got his voice throughout it, along with all of his preoccupations: violence, sex, Black people, how Steve McQueen is underrated, and how New Hollywood is overrated.

I just wish he wasn't so obsessed with how his mom was friends with Black people when he was a kid. You're not part Black, Quentin. I also wish he wasn't obsessed with how shockingly brutal exploitation movies are actually good. It's fine for people to hate extreme violence, not a character flaw. 

12. The Bond King:How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost it All, Mary Childs, 2022

Gross does seem extremely intelligent, and his criticisms of the finance industry and the groupthink of large corporations definitely rang true. He didn't beat the market for three decades by being dumb. But ultimately, finance is not mostly about being smart! It's about marketing the appearance of being smart, while using insider trading, monopolization, and other people’s real money made by doing real jobs to subsidize their fake jobs. The savings and loan crisis revealed this, the mortgage crisis revealed this, crypto revealed this. Gross is mad at the company he made because they want him to be a better salesman in a time when he made some bad decisions. He doesn't want to be accountable for those decisions. This makes him sound whiny and not smart.

Smart thing that Gross mentions in this book: buy the cheapest index funds you can find and hold on to them forever. Even smart people like him will eventually lose to the market, but as long as you can wait out a bad spell, you can make so much more money not paying an investment advisor and getting passive returns than you can putting your money in an actively managed fund like the ones he ran that eventually bombed.

13. It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO, Felix Gillette and John Koblin, 2022

HBO was the most interesting place for filmed narratives for about a decade and a half. They also made a ton of trash, and the reasons why both things are true are fully outlined here. Gillette takes a few too many pains to highlight how HBO sheltered a known batterer for years, especially since that same batterer (Chris Albrecht) immediately got another job at Starz after he beat up another woman and HBO finally fired him. This is why we call something a systemic issue: if everyone in the industry at the time is basically ok with Albrecht's behavior, then what he did doesn't tell us something unique about HBO's boys club and its relationship with the mostly male auteurs who made some of its best material. There’s something else going on that explains why HBO remained more interesting than its competitors besides Albrecht’s terribleness.

The last part documenting how both HBO and Netflix have become blandified by streaming is depressing. Technology will change again, someone like HBO will rise again, everyone will copy them eventually, and things will get bland again.