Top 200 Drivers of 2025: The C Tier
Also what I read in 2025.
Okay, here’s the next group of 50. I have no real pre-paywall commentary since I covered all that in the previous entry. I also don’t have much new to say about my personal situation, but I did want to discuss all the books I read this year. I possibly read more books recreationally than in any year prior because I had to have something to pass the time as I visited Mom in the nursing home and I don’t have or want a smartphone. I also read a lot of books to her while I was either there or on the phone.
Opposable Thumbs by Matt Singer: A history of Siskel and Ebert. One of my big hobbies that I never talked about much was that I love reading criticism, honestly more than I think I like partaking in art (actually watching TV shows/movies/listening to music), which makes me an insufferably pretentious person. There were a lot of critics I loved reading, some more than others: Robert Christgau, Chuck Eddy, Mark Prindle, George Starostin, John McFerrin, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Chris Molanphy, Emily Vanderwerff, Nathan Rabin, and James Berardinelli. But Roger Ebert was the first. Shortly after I first got online in 1995, my dad discovered the “Roger Ebert Movie Files” (as it was called at the time), and I was already reading some of his reviews from the age of ten, hilariously at a time when the TGIF sitcoms were my favorite TV shows. So I go way back. I always connected to Ebert through his Internet writing first and never watched Siskel & Ebert while Gene Siskel was alive, but I watched many clips in retrospect, and this was right up my alley. Awesome title too.
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich: Ehrenreich was a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, who also introduced the idea of the “Professional Managerial Class” with her husband John. She was basically inspired by the Black Like Me idea to intentionally live like a poor person for several months, even though she was well off, to capture the feel of a life in poverty. I get why this didn’t get a lot of attention at the time, since it came out in 2001, when the economy was at its peak, and people still believed they were at the end of history. But this aged really well and a quarter century later, it seems a lot more relevant than it was when it actually came out.
What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank: I’ve read this before, and Frank is probably my favorite author, but when I saw it at the Rescue Mission thrift store in 2024, I picked it up, and I remember reading it on the day I fainted and went to the emergency room (thankfully, Mom caught me and thankfully, this happened months before she went into the nursing home). I made it about a third of the way through then kind of stopped reading anything when I wasn’t going anywhere, but I picked it up again as I visited Mom in the nursing home. Still good. People misinterpret this book as being an example of liberal smugness and people looking down at the Heartland, and I guess he probably did that more than he intended to. But read this in companion with the even better Listen: Liberal and you get the full picture, as Kansas? explained the mechanisms of how the Republican establishment failed the working class, while Liberal explained how the Democratic establishment did so.
The Other America by Michael Harrington: Mom actually owned this and as I was clearing out her hoarding last March and gave several hundred of our books away, I kept this and decided to read it. Harrington is the guy who founded the DSA, and this is very inspiring about what the government should do to alleviate poverty at a time when people still believed the government could do things, which I guess ties in with a couple later books on this list. I can see the influence this had on the Great Society programs that emerged a few years later, and even though I’m probably a lot less intellectual than people think I am, his passages about the intellectual poor really resonated.
Ball Four by Jim Bouton: I’ve never been a baseball fan really, even though Field of Dreams is my favorite movie ever. I forced myself to learn enough about baseball and sabermetrics so I could co-opt some of the ideas for my own purposes. I loved the Moneyball book and movie and when I was at the 2014 National Scrabble Championship in Buffalo, I convinced fellow Scrabble player Morris Greenberg (who was at the time a FanGraphs writer and later a Washington Nationals consultant and statistics Ph.D. candidate) to lend me an advanced sabermetrics book he had while at the tournament, and so while everybody else was socializing, I was reading this shit and some of it was the foundation of Racermetrics. I read a couple Bill James books too, picked up his win shares and adopted it for lead shares, etc… I first learned about James and Bouton from the aforementioned rock critic Chuck Eddy because they were both influences on him that he mentioned in interviews. So when I saw this at the same thrift store, I picked it up but I didn’t read it for years. When I did, I’m glad I did because this was a wild ride. Between breaking down the corruption of the baseball industry, gossip about other players, and his antiwar activism, this is a more sweeping portait of American life than it really should be. As good as advertised and I still don’t care about baseball.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber: I’d wanted to read him for a while because a lot of the people I also liked were into him. I’d seen people on Reddit constantly talk about “email jobs” and I didn’t even know what they were. I felt so disconnected from the professional world and so lazy, marching to my own drummer, working on my own projects, and not applying for nearly enough jobs. I was so disconnected from “conventionally employable people” that I didn’t really realize how little a lot of white-collar workers were actually working because I talked to so few people in my adulthood that I didn’t - and still don’t I guess - know what most people’s jobs are like. It made me feel a little better about my own deficiencies, and made me realize I wasn’t as lazy as I thought I was, even if I seem hopelessly incompetent at applying for jobs, landing them, and being motivated when I have vague instructions. I know some of this is autism.
The Way of Life by Laozi: I loved it, but I don’t think I’m even the least bit capable of analyzing Chinese poetry, so I’m not going to try to embarrass myself.
The Upswing by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett: If Thomas Frank is my favorite author, Bowling Alone is probably my favorite book and this could I guess be viewed as the sequel. If you forced me to pick, I’d still say Bowling Alone is better, but this is great too. A profile of how American society steadily got more communitarian throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century before it became more individualistic in the 60 years since (in every realm: political, social, and economic sense. As somebody who, like Putnam, is an economic leftist but probably a right-leaning centrist on social issues (which means I’m a family values guy, not a MAGA person), he’s basically my spirit animal. As somebody who’s constantly turned off by the edginess and coarseness of modern discourse (and seemingly the only person who still believes civility is virtuous on the Internet), I dream of the reconciliation of our society and social cohesion in general, while knowing that it will probably never happen again because it makes insufficient money for corporations.
Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman: I read his previous Emotional Intelligence, and I liked it, and I bought this at the same thrift store, and I liked this too, but I can’t say I really got much out of it, except for learning more about the impact loneliness has on physical health, which is something that people don’t seem to talk about much, even with all the annoying discourse about the loneliness epidemic. And it is all insufferably obnoxious. Obviously, the far-right is wrong that loneliness only affects men (even though I understand the idea that it might affect men worse because they have fewer social connections to begin with) so describing it as the “male loneliness epidemic” is unconscionable when I know everyone across all genders has been made lonely by addiction to technology. On the other hand, the social far left is basically just as obnoxious when it’s like, “Well, if you were just a GOOD FREAKING PERSON (TM), people would be around you, and you wouldn’t be lonely. Obviously, there must be something morally wrong with you as a person.” Mm, hmm. Yeah, right. As if there aren’t plenty of abusers who actually have great social skills to gain access to people to abuse. And also plenty of people who are just socially anxious/awkward/autistic or whatever who just entirely withdraw and end up not engaging with the world at all (the hikikomori, the NEETs or whoever, most of whom are too withdrawn from society to actually have the capacity to abuse anyone). So all that discourse is stupid on both sides, but what I haven’t seen much discussion of until this book is the impact of loneliness on physical (not just mental) health and that was useful.
When Smart People Fail by Carole Hyatt and Linda Gottlieb: Another one I bought at the same thrift store, I think like five years ago. Resonant for obvious reasons. I didn’t dislike this one, and it’s probably a better-than-average self-help book. It has some good examples of people who managed to pivot to other career fields after failure, but it also was written by a couple yuppie women in the ‘80s who didn’t seem to understand that not everybody automatically bounces back. That was probably easier in the ‘80s and ‘90s when steady, full-time, less precarious jobs were more plentiful and I’m not sure how useful it is today. Probably the worst book on this list, but I still liked it.
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: I thought I would hate this since so many of the political pundits I respect shit on Ezra Klein. I thought I’d give this a shot since not only was it one of the most buzzed books of the year, but also I really admired Derek Thompson’s writing on loneliness (which has been one of my recent obsessions, can you tell?) Honestly, it was fine. I get why most of the left hates it because the left is intrinsically anti-deregulation and Klein and Thompson (probably mostly Klein) are suggesting that deregulating certain industries like housing may increase supply and allow more construction like in China. I’m not sure whether I buy it because China has state capitalism and their construction projects are very government-centric. Obviously, deregulating the banks and the media was horrible, and I think that convinced me all deregulation was bad. But they’ve at least given me food for thought that maybe deregulating zoning laws and stuff might be good. I guess I’m not surprised I liked this more than I thought I would because we did come out of the same demographic cohort…
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt: Just finished this on Monday, and now I’m on to his earlier and more famous The Coddling of the American Mind. This book was not really “for me”, I guess since it was obviously written to discourage the parents of zoomers from letting their kids use smartphones. I’m not a zoomer, I will never be a parent, I’ve never owned a smartphone and don’t really want one, but I still identified with this. Despite being an early millennial in terms of chronology, I was a boomer in terms of my cultural tastes and I guess I was a Gen Z person avant la lettre in terms of my actual lifestyle. Call me Zoomero Uno. Constantly addicted to screens as a boy although it was TVs and computers, I never really had a play-based childhood or whatever he called it instead of a phone-based childhood both because my mom overprotected me and also because honestly, I didn’t want to go out in the world then. And back then, I still had enough social connections to satisfy me. I was about as popular in high school as a 2000s class nerd could have been, I exchanged phone numbers with people, I went to my junior prom (the only date I was ever on 24 years ago), I regularly talked with tons of classmates on AOL Instant Messenger. My mom had home health aides and advocates and a counselor coming into her apartment regularly. But throughout my life, I have watched more and more people disappear until it was just my mom and me. All the infrastructure I used to talk to people is gone. Nobody even uses phones as phones anymore, just as devices to consume “content”. It’s become so much harder to contact people locally when people are so paranoid about anybody having personal information to the point where it’s now called doxing when even I’m old enough to remember when most people’s numbers were in phone books. So we seek out online friendships that will never be as deep and can’t really help with your real world needs. Tying this in with The Upswing, one big difference between the Gilded Age and now is that even though people objectively have many more creature comforts or whatever now, they have far fewer people in their embedded social networks to help them out in times of need. So once any kind of government support is withdrawn, the social networks that would have kept people afloat even in like the Depression years no longer exist so everybody is struggling off by themselves, and then taking it out by screaming at their ideological opponents on antisocial media, which solves nothing. One of the things I admit I’ve enjoyed since my mom was in the nursing home is that finally, I have freedom to roam. There’s so much discussion about free-range kids (including in this book). I wasn’t even really allowed to be a free-range adult and I want that. I want more people in my life and fewer things. I realize what I lacked in my extremely online existence, which is one reason I was pushing so hard to get this book done, because I wanted to get offline entirely after I finish and relocate myself into a 20th-century lifestyle where somebody! anybody! will want me around. But I concede that probably won’t happen.
Besides all that, I also read most of a biography of Leonard Cohen to my mom (she had started it, but lost too much of her eyesight before she finished). Since then, I’ve been reading a murder mystery series she liked by Rita Mae Brown (the Mrs. Murphy Mysteries). I’ve been reading about one book to her a month, and I’m on the eighth. Who knows if I’ll get to all 32. But yeah, I suppose this was a weird tangent because the stuff I read about and the stuff I write about is obviously very different. There’s a weird disconnect between me writing almost entirely sports analytics content and reading almost entirely political nonfiction. I don’t know. Maybe it keeps me sharper…
