The Top 5 articles of 2023
Happy New Year!
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week - but for all of 2023. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. These are our favorite articles that made us think, learn, and occasionally, cry, this year. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 Articles of 2023
“The Ones We Sent Away” (The Atlantic)
Because recent Pulitzer winner Jennifer Senior uncovers her own family’s experience with an old practice: sending away young disabled sons and daughters and siblings to care homes, and then forgetting about them. It’s some of the most beautiful writing we’ve seen this year.
“ChatGPT Is a BlurryJPEG of the Web” (The New Yorker)
Because this is my favorite article of the year as Ted Chiang opened the year with a humanistic approach to considering AI that would be necessary in 2023…and beyond.
Sometimes it’s only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas. Some might say that the output of large language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I
“What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate” (The Atlantic)
Because this is Melissa’s favorite article of the year - an excerpt from McKay Coppins’ book, Romney: A Reckoning.
“Divided by Politics, a Colorado Town Mends Its Broken Bones” (NYT)
Because Jonathan Weisman looks at the town of Silverton, Colorado and how it went through heated political division and polarization, and how it has sought peace since civility broke down.
“How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith” (The New Yorker)
Because Casey Cep wrote a beautiful profile of one of our greatest living poets.
Word by word, Wiman resuscitates ancient ideas, from being to spirit, leaving our faces pressed hopefully against the here-and-now window of the poem. Its covenantal rhymes can feel as though they are moving us toward an assent of some kind, and that’s how Wiman says he was feeling when he wrote them: led in ways he did not comprehend or control. The poet Ilya Kaminsky, a friend of his, notes that Wiman’s ease in asking theological questions sets him apart from other poets and public intellectuals. He describes Wiman’s work as “a record of spiritual weather, a barometer.”