This February, I began obsessively making lists. Songs with cellos. Every book I read or every documentary I watched this year. Different things that you can eat with ginger-scallion sauce. Stories involving balloons. I don’t usually make lists, although I will generally risk malware or worse to read other people’s rankings. (Top ten N.F.L. draft busts. Worst movies set in Boston. Fifty songs from the sixties that anticipated eighties techno.) Right now, many critics are compiling their lists of the best movies or songs or books of 2020. Most years, I tend to retain only a hazy grasp of my cultural diet, and it’s been possibly a decade since I contributed in any meaningful way to a ranked best-of poll. Instead, I have an unaddressed e-mail draft where, every few months, I type things that I recently heard and liked, should anyone ask.
