Taking And Leaving The Best And Worst Of 2023. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

12 - 16 minutes

Happy almost-New Year! Here are some things from 2023 I’d like to take with me into 2024, because they are good, as well as some things I’d like to leave in 2023, because they are bad.

That’s it. That’s the setup.

It won’t surprise any of my longtime readers that I really enjoyed American Fiction, the critically acclaimed and Oscar-buzz-generating film based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett. After all, the film is about a black English professor and writer named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who hails from an upper-middle-class family of doctors in Boston. Having achieved merely middling success, if that, writing highbrow books stuffed with references to, like, ancient Persian wars or whatever, Ellison realizes what the core audience for books (white liberals) is really into: black suffering. So he dashes off a fake memoir called My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, supposedly a fugitive gangbanger, as a middle finger to the publishing industry, and has his agent send it out on a lark, not expecting anyone to actually bite. And then. . . well, I’m sure you can guess what happens next. (Fun fact: Cord Jefferson, who directed and cowrote [with Everett] this film, wrote for a blog I helped edit almost 20 years ago at the Center for American Progress, before moving on to much bigger things and becoming one of the most highly regarded young-ish screenwriters around.)

This film hit at the perfect time. American racial essentialism has crested lately, especially since the death of George Floyd, and a rather pernicious and dunderheaded identitarianism has set in. American Fiction skewers it brilliantly, but is also a touching, humane story in its own right, since Monk has a lot more going on than just his frustrations with American race talk and his own career. It’s just a really, really good film, and in addition to treating race with the complexity the subject deserves, it refuses to turn anyone into a straightforward hero or villain, which is of course the right way to go about telling this sort of story.

Go see it! Also watch Beef on Netflix if you haven’t. Beef isn’t about race per se, but it is set among a group of Asian American characters in Los Angeles. The plot, which is kick-started by a road rage incident, actually gets satisfyingly tangled, and it’s too much to sum up here, but I highly recommend this show if you haven’t checked it out yet. The characters happen to be of certain racial backgrounds, and this comes up in various ways, but there’s very little essentialization or tokenization or haranguing of the sort often favored by white liberals. Instead, it’s just good, gripping television. This makes a lot more sense to me as a model for representation than the churning out of shows where the Korean American characters, like, stand around talking about how Korean American they are, and how worried they are about hate crimes, and so on. Most Americans’ views on race — their own and others — are much more nuanced than that. So I hope there’s more stuff like Beef and American Fiction in 2024.

Having lauded American Fiction and Beef, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a parting shot at Robin DiAngelo, the high empress of white liberal racial nonsense. One of her more ardent high-profile critics is John McWhorter, the Columbia professor linguist and New York Times columnist (not to mention the host of the excellent and fascinating podcast Lexicon Valley). McWhorter’s views on race are characteristically nuanced and definitely non-woke, and in an interview DiAngelo recently said of him: “His record [on race] is very, very conservative. I would put him with Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas and other folks like that.”

This is, of course, ridiculous, and it suggests DiAngelo doesn’t know the first thing about one of her most prominent critics. If I were DiAngelo, I’d of course accuse her of racism for lumping McWhorter in with other figures who have much different views from him (he’s an Obama liberal) simply because they, too, happen to be black. Instead, I’ll merely accuse her of idiocy.

The year 2023 was also a very bad one for Ibram X. Kendi, whose Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University fell apart amid accusations of mismanagement, including some very shady-seeming financial dealings. 

Look, I don’t wish DiAngelo or Kendi ill. But they both peddle a deeply misguided, swashbuckling form of oversimplification that does little to heal America’s brutal history of racism, and that really accomplishes little other than making more work for them and their ilk, and, very much related, making a certain type of gullible white person feel bad, and therefore that they need to seek more training, reading, and so on.

Let’s hope that 2023 is the last year these folks have much of an influence on American racial discourse, unless and until they become much more sophisticated and less grift-y in their approach. You’ll gain more intellectual sustenance out of listening to McWhorter talk about the nuances of black American English for five minutes than you will reading an entire book by Kendi or DiAngelo.

2019

One of the most urgent mysteries in American life is why breakfast burritos have not enjoyed full penetration into our culture. Even in New York City.

I was lucky to spend more time than usual in California this year, and whenever I’m there I go out of my way to eat as many breakfast burritos as possible. (Okay, not literally as many as possible, but you know what I mean.) I know what you’re asking: Jesse, what was the most satisfying breakfast burrito you had? 

Don’t worry, the answer is easy: the food truck Crazy Tacos on 9th in downtown L.A. It was September and I had decided to come to L.A. on a whim both to attend a Free Press event and to stay with my oldest friend and his family afterward. I had a nightmare time getting from LAX to the hotel, and by the time I arrived it was approximately 2 a.m. East Coast time, and I was almost as hungry as I was cranky. As I checked in I asked where I could get decent tacos at that hour and, like all good Angelenos, the staff informed me of two nearby options: the less-good one, which I should avoid, and the more-good one (there should be a word for that), which I should go to. The gooder one was Crazy Tacos on 9th.

I got a breakfast burrito and chips and salsa. Was it, by most objective metrics, an amazing breakfast burrito? Probably not. But oh my God did I need a breakfast burrito at that moment. It is one of the most comforting foods there is. This one really, really hit the spot, instantly revitalizing my jet-lagged and rapidly aging body

How is it the case that there aren’t trucks or stores selling breakfast burritos every few blocks in New York City? The situation is slowly but surely improving, to be clear — far be it from me to catastrophize — but I hope breakfast burritos continue making inroads both here and everywhere else where they are not yet entrenched parts of the culinary scene in 2024. 

Journalists, even very bad ones, are not “enemies of the people,” the latest fad theory belched out by academia is not “a threat to Western civilization,” and not every person you disagree with is a fascist, a racist, a groomer, or even a mere idiot. Not that you would know it from social media.

To quote Los Campesinos, Can we all please just calm the fuck down? If people don’t stop using such overheated language all the time, I swear to God I am literally going to explode into a trillion pieces with the power of a billion quintillion supernovas. 

It is not healthy for people to exist in a state of constant furious lather (unless that’s your kink). This is a large part of the reason so many people who spend too much time online feel burnt out, like they’ve blown several important circuits.

You see that screenshot? That’s from Talented, a game in early access on Steam. It cost me $2.17 after tax to buy on December 7 and I have played for almost 40 hours since then.

I haven’t been this into a game since Slay the Spire, which I racked up a sickening number of hours playing.

Why’s Talented so good? It’s got that classic mix of complexity layered atop simplicity. The core gameplay is very, very basic: your character can’t even move. He’s stuck there in the middle, and all he can do is point himself in one of the four cardinal directions and use his main attack (free) or one of his up to four talents (all of which cost one resource or another) to fend off wave after wave of enemies. The goal is to survive 20 nights, and while Night 1 features a pleasant, if not too slow, conveyor belt (you can actually speed things up if you want), by Night 20 you are being fire-hosed with enemies.

Luckily, if you play your cards right, you will basically be a god by then. Progression entails poking your way around a totally randomized talent tree — each night you get points to spend on it that you can use to buff your base stats (damage, chance to parry, etc.) or to gain “Talents,” basically “spells” or “abilities” or “attacks,” depending on your character class. There are four of them — Archer, Wizard, Warrior, or Summoner — with at least two more to come.

As you can see in that above screenshot, during that particular run, playing as a Warrior, I killed more than 1,400 enemies in a row and counting during one night. I had a bunch of very satisfying runs like that, which is how I was able to max out all four character classes, and even pull off one flawless run where I didn’t get hit once. The runs were satisfying because the tactics and synergies get surprisingly deep given how simple the core gameplay is. Each class has multiple types of viable builds, and you really need to respond on the fly to the randomness of the talent tree if you’re going to survive.

For now, I’m not playing the game anymore, because I’m out of stuff to do! It’s in early access, after all. There’s definitely some stuff to be ironed out: for one thing, the strongest abilities are seriously OP compared to the weaker ones. I had a couple runs where I got one of these abilities early in the game and in both cases, I was immediately like, Oh, okay, I am going to win this run now. And then I won the runs. Ideally, that wouldn’t be the case. The difficulty is also a little on the easy side, but 1) that may have been in response to early criticism the game was too hard, and 2) there’s an entire “Challenge Mode” that isn’t even unlocked yet, and using my powers of deduction I can confidently predict it will be challenging. 

I think those of us who don’t make games probably can’t comprehend how much fine-tuning goes into the process, and this game is still rather early in its development. Plus, the developers, who have a very detailed devlog, are clearly listening to the small community that has already formed around the game, and a lot of improvements appear to be on the way, including some that will address the aforementioned issues. The only reason I’m even noting these critiques is because of how blown away I am that a game that cost me two greenbacks has already delivered so much depth and satisfaction. 

I cannot wait to see where this game goes in 2024, even if it doesn’t get its 1.0 release until more than a year from now.

Via Getty (the photo, not the guy)

This is not an original observation, but Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter has been astonishing to watch.

I’ve zigzagged a little on this, because in my opinion certain doomsayers started freaking out a bit prematurely the moment he took over Twitter, before we had a clear idea exactly what was going to happen to the platform and before his takeover had any noticeable impact (other than people complaining about it). But he has just screwed up everything. I mean, maybe it’s for the best given that Twitter had been a truly noxious place for years, and one that was awfully destructive to journalism, academia, and discourse more generally, but still: I’ve never seen it this dysfunctional. I mean that in both the sense that there’s more crazy garbage on my timeline than ever before (which is saying something), and also that basic features simply don’t work. For example: I’d like to download my data, which has long been something you can do by clicking a thing and then waiting a while and then receiving an email. You just. . . can’t do that anymore? Like, you click the thing, and you wait, but you never get the link to your data. It’s a very basic functionality that’s just. . . gone.

I think there are going to be some amazing magazine articles or even books written about Elon Musk’s time at Twitter. I hope he has lost some fans about this — his behavior, every step of the way, has been indefensible, as has been just about every choice he has made. But he’s got a bit of a cult of personality surrounding him so it wouldn’t surprise me if his disciples remained loyal.

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That’s it! I hope you guys all have a great New Year’s Eve and that 2024 is a happy and healthy year for you and your loved ones. Thank you so much for reading my newsletter.

Questions? Comments? Your own takings and leavings for 2023? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image: GPT-4’s take on “a very strange new year's party, cartoon style, wide format.”