Reflexive commentary following assassination attempt, NYT top 100 books are biased toward the early 2000s, GPT-5 delay means no intelligence explosion

Desiderata #28: links and commentary

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of interesting links and thoughts for paid subscribers, as well as an open thread and ongoing Ask Me Anything in the comments.

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1/8. The New York Times released their much-awaited top 100 books of this century. To compile the list, they polled a wide swath of established writers, hundreds of them, from Stephen King to Karl Ove Knausgaard. Here were the overall top 10 best books of the last 24 years according to hundreds of authors:

1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

2. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

4. The Known World by Edward P. Jones

5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

6. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

7. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

8. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

There was a clear bias: outside of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, every single book in the top 10 is pre-2012. Personally, I feel this to a certain degree: I just don’t think literature from 2016-2024 has been nearly as good as, say, 2000-2008. Other authors appear to feel the same. Is this a real effect, or just the bias of nostalgia?

First, to give a counterpoint: overall, there’s not a huge drop-off effect when looking at the top 100, which I plotted over years.

However, the bias of higher ratings for earlier publications becomes clearer as you go more towards the top scorers on the list.

All the way until, at the top 10, they’re clustered quite early on in the century (except for Whitehead). Why?