Good morning. President Trump presided over a Congo-Rwanda peace deal yesterday, as his administration was being questioned about potential war crimes. And in an emergency ruling, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Texas Republicans to use their gerrymandered map for the midterm elections. We have more news below. Let’s start, though, by talking about the best stuff we experienced this year.
Take your bestThe lists are coming. The lists are here. Spotify and Apple Music pushed out their “wrapped” lists this week, telling users what they listened to most this year. YouTube did something similar yesterday. It can be a shock to see a dispassionate account of how you spent your time. A lot of Big Thief, wow. The Times makes lists, too. Already we’ve published the best books of the year, the best movies, the best TV shows and the best cookbooks. Many, many more are coming — The Morning will have a few of our own. Best albums dropped today: Geese made the cut. So did Effie, Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen and Rosalía. Debate our critics in the comments. I used to oversee our culture and lifestyle coverage, and I was and remain a big proponent of these catalogs. They’re fun to read and digest and discuss. They’re popular, too. Also, they can be dizzying. Do they help us make decisions, or validate ones we’ve already made? Can we really measure one artist against another, when what they create is so categorically different? Playboi Carti vs. Smerz? Really? (I’ve worked as a critic, too. That’s a fun part of the job.) What is the exercise actually about? Maybe it’s part of our compulsion to tabulate and optimize every part of our lives? I knew the right person to ask. Making a canon
The fates were aligned. When I found him in the newsroom yesterday afternoon, Wesley Morris, a critic at large for The Times and host of the “Cannonball” culture podcast, was listening to a playlist of the 885 greatest covers of all time, as chosen by the listeners of WXPN in Philadelphia, his hometown station. He was interrupting a list to talk to me about lists. He laughed, pointing that out. For Wesley, an inventory can be revealing — “a way to have the year explained to me through a list, a story I can have a conversation with, a story that’s yearbookish, a record of what transpired,” he said. The ones made by critics do that and more: show us new music, new books, new art. Sometimes these lists can appear disordered, strange in the aggregate — here is a horror film, a documentary, a hip-hop track, a grief memoir, a Caribbean restaurant. But that, too, tells us about our culture. “You want a mess,” Wesley said. “Because the mess is the truth. These compendiums of artistic feats that accrue over the year? Even if you haven’t experienced them yet yourself, they tell us something about … us.” What’s goodYou can’t explore new worlds from every list, though. The “wrapped” accounting tells us only about artists we already know — or artists that recommendation algorithms think are similar. “It’s like going to the doctor for a test,” Wesley said, “and this is the result. ‘You eat a lot of peanuts, friend. How about a cashew?’” Wesley prefers the best-of lists created by his colleagues, people who spend their years consuming art for a paycheck. Their work is a rebuke to how the digital entertainment ecosystem operates, he says. What critics can do is tell us about our art, our year, our culture, ourselves. The right list can tell us a story about all that. And it can raise high what’s best — so we can talk about it, so we can experiment and learn. “The algorithm can’t canonize,” Wesley said. “The algorithm doesn’t know what it’s recommending.”
Our On Politics newsletter recently asked readers for questions about immigration and invited reporters to answer. Read the chat. Here’s one question: When an immigrant is deported and sent somewhere other than their native country (for example to Uganda rather than El Salvador), what happens to them? — Angela Mack, Branford, Conn. Julie Turkewitz, our Andes bureau chief, writes: A group of about 300 migrants sent to Panama were locked in a hotel in Panama City, then in a jungle-side detention camp, before being freed. Some agreed to return to their home countries, while others were granted temporary legal status in Panama. A group of more than 200 Venezuelan men sent to El Salvador spent four months in a maximum-security prison, where many of them endured abuse that experts said met the definition of torture. In July, the men were sent back to Venezuela. A few of them were detained by the Venezuelan government, which has declined to comment on their whereabouts. In other cases, migrants have also been detained in third countries, like Eswatini, before ultimately being sent home. More immigration news
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New York City’s public transit system lost nearly $1 billion to fare evasion last year, officials say. More than 150 million riders hopped, ducked or dodged subway turnstiles. The state’s transit agency is testing tools to stop the free rides. They include jagged metal partitions and taller turnstiles — as well as a few less obvious changes to how the fare gates work. See the efforts here.
China’s former one-child policy has left the country with over 30 million more men than women. Violet Du Feng follows a dating boot camp meant to help Chinese men find love. If an A.I. bubble popped, it would force tech companies to do more with less, Carl Benedikt Frey argues. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
Who’s that snake? Gary Goldman is an old Hollywood hand who in 2017 sued Disney for copyright infringement. He said the studio had stolen ideas from him that became the film “Zootopia,” a billion-dollar hit. He lost. Then came “Zootopia 2,” which opened last week. One creature in it is a one-fanged snake named Gary De’Snake, an amiable character with a specific point of view: He has been ripped off. That was unsettling for Goldman. While he told The Times he didn’t have much appetite for another legal action, you never know. De’Snake is very Goldmanish, his friends have told him. “I do have one fang left,” he said. Village people: The two men lived around the corner from each other for almost half a century. But a sidewalk bump led to a shove, the police say. Now one is dead. It’s really December: Two bursts of Arctic air could send temperatures plunging in the central and eastern U.S.
70 billion— That’s how many dollars Meta’s Reality Lab, which builds the hardware and software for Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual-reality goals, has lost over the past four years.
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