Intro
Wow! 2023 was one for the books. Quick headlines: got TWO new jobs, moved into a new apartment, finished grad school (after 3.5 years)……and, oh yeah, we had a baby!
Silas Harry Grant joined us in May this year and he’s wrapping up 2023 as a healthy, happy, cuddly little boy. We love him and we’re pretty sure he loves us if smiles are any indication. Maya was an amazing trooper through a rough pregnancy and some curveballs near the end of term (the little guy didn’t want to stay in one position). She delivered our little dude at just under 7 pounds and we spent our first nights as parents overlooking Central Park.
Parenthood has been how I expected it…..in the sense that it couldn’t be anything like how I expected it. Full of little moments of immeasurable joy and long hours of exhaustion. The first few months kicked our butts at time, though we were running on new-parent energy. Then we crossed our fingers and did what we could to get him to to sleep and nap regularly. And once he did, and we established a bit more of our routine through the days, things started to get easier. And then new challenges came—teething, ear infections, etc…But he’s also learned a whole slew of new tricks like smiling, rolling, scooting and, his favorite, watching our cat Rizzo do her zoomies around the apartment.
It’d be impossible to extricate anything that happened this year from becoming a parent, the highs and the lows. Everything seems to have been a mirror off of that, and Maya and I couldn’t be happier with how things look as we end the year. There’s so much growth ahead for Silas and for us as parents. I think I’m only beginning to understand the transformation that parenthood has had on me—so lots to explore in years to come.
As I wrote in the lede, I did have two new jobs this year—which I’ll write a bit more about in the ‘Professional’ section below.
And I got to end the year with another big accomplishment: finishing my Masters program. I graduated officially on December 15th and found out that I got an ‘A’ on my final project—a 29-page paper analyzing advertising performance based on customizations. A real way to wrap up the three-and-a-half-year journey of learning Data Science, and really getting back into mathematics. Super happy to have done the intense Learning journey, and even happier to be done.
A very memorable year for my family and me has nearly come to a close—and we’ll get to see that closing on the beach in Puerto Rico! Wishing you (whoever is reading this) the best in the year ahead & beyond.
Categories
Travel – Cooperstown, Florida, Puerto Rico, Chicago, Washington D.C., Chicago, Rhode Island, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico
Writing – I wrote a few professional articles this year and the aforementioned paper for the last class of my Masters program. Now that grad school is over, I’d like to use some of the extra time (and brain power) to put toward some writing projects. Just gotta figure out what those will be!
Reading – As always, you can see the full list of books I read this year here.
Professional – Well it was a year of movement. Just a week into the year I found out that my team had been cut at Coinbase. I was upset (naturally), mostly because I found the work to be super interesting and had grand plans for the new year and beyond. It would have been a tough job to do with a newborn, however, so perhaps it was a blessing.
I landed at The Trade Desk and started in March, just months before we had Silas. That was a great place to be for a new parent, very supportive, but ultimately wasn’t the job that I wanted to be doing.
I had been put in touch with some folks at Figma—an amazing online design tool—and when a job opened up I started interviewing there. I was fortunate enough to get an offer to join the team and decided to do so, running the Learning & Content team in their Product Support org. I started at the end of the year and am very excited for what 2024 brings.
Favorites
Favorite New Thing of 2023
Silas Harry Grant
See above. The epic everything-ness of bringing a child into this world. Silas has been everything we could have hoped for and more. Here’s some pics through 7 months of the boy we call bubba.
Other favorites: Jittery White Guy Music blog (honorable mention for this—I’ve struggled to find many folks who have a similar musical overlap as I do and then I found this blogger, a 60s-something retired lawyer. So that’s cool, I guess). Also, the Neighborhoods Substack –exploring NYC one neighborhood at a time.
Favorite Book Read in 2023
The Wager
David Grann’s newest book is about shipwreck, murder, and mutiny…And, as many of his books before (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Lost City of Z) was a great read, particularly in my most landlocked and early morning walking weeks (would highly recommend the audiobook).
I told many people about this book which has a great plot headline (was there really a mutiny after a British naval ship wrecked off the coast of Chile?)—but the book was packed with incredible details about the powerful Navy, how much of naval life has stuck in our vernacular (toe the line, pipe down, etc..), and the details of life aboard a ship, or marooned on an island.
Other favorites: The Devil in the Grove, All The King’s Men, The Grapes of Wrath, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant
Favorite 2023 Movie
Oppenheimer
I loved Oppenheimer and thought Nolan did a great job capturing the complexity of the figure—finding his place in modern science, in political circles, in leadership, and in the many years after the bomb where he was one of the most famous men on Earth. Cillian Murphy did an excellent job portraying all of the above—and the rest of the cast was solid.
The scene with the bomb will be one of the most memorable in film history I think (at least this period) and I found it to be a more emotional movie than one might expect (though Nolan’s filmmaking usually tries to put humans at least in line with its plots).
Most of all, it felt important that Nolan (or anyone with enough clout to make a longform movie) made this movie about the figure (felt similarly to Killers of the Flower Moon being made for exposure, what a story! It just wasn’t as good of a film for my money). Oppenheimer’s complexity is a perfect thought experiment for those achieving infamy by pushing the bounds of science (a theme extended in one of my favorite articles of the year on Thomas Midgley Jr.)
Other favorites: Past Lives, The Killer
Favorite 2023 TV Show
The Bear Season 2
Chicago’s own The Bear had a killer, albeit brief, season one breakout (was probably my runner-up last year)—and Season 2, thank goodness, came quickly after. It brought back its great characters, great shots of the city, great soundtrack (for me, anyway)—but Season 2 took its stories outside of the restaurant and deep into the lives, problems, and histories of its chefs (and non-chefs). This season of The Bear kept me on my feet, never knowing what each episode would bring, or even the format, location, or length of each episode. It set a high bar for a Season 3, and was my favorite show in what I found to be a fairly low quality TV year.
Other favorites: Party Down Season 3 (especially this episode), Beef, How To With John Wilson Season 3
Favorite 2023 Article
The Trillion-Gallon Question (Christopher Cox, NYTimes)
If the visual at the top of this article doesn’t intrigue you, I don’t know what to say. It’s amazing—and puts the sheer power of water at the center of this. For many years, we’ve tamed the power of that natural resource, through dams and other infrastructure. But is that infrastructure ready for the heavier and more powerful storms that we’ll likely see in the next decades?
You’re right if you said “No” and so this article plays out much like another favorite from years ago on the big earthquake eventually coming for the west coast. On the dam front, we have made some moves like adding spillways and extra capacity into systems, but there’s also a long trail of bureaucracy to getting these things done, and millions of people who may be forced to evacuate homes if we can’t figure out alternative ways to keep water back after massive storms. A scary article—but an important one.
A note: You’ll see below I’ve added eight other favorites to this category—and that list seems to grow each year. Longform journalism is really incredible—for those that like to read books, often these are just as intensely moving and impactful as the best of longform nonfiction, consider reading more! You can start by paying for an indie publication like The Atavist!
Other favorites: The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story (Andy Greenberg, Wired), The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes (Steven Johnson, NYTimes Magazine), Emergencies, Frameshifts and What They Tell Us About Our Place In The World (Spencer Scott, Substack), Dead Reckoning (Robert Kolker, The Atavist), Who Killed The Fudge King (Tom Donaghy, The Atavist), The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer (Robert Kolker, NYT Magazine)
Favorite 2023 Album
Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert
This almost feels unfair since it’s a covers album—and not just any covers album but a song by song remake of one of the most infamous live performances ever, Dylan Going Electric. Cat Power, who herself has several covers in my top whatever of songs all-time, does them serious justice, particularly the Side A which is the acoustic set before Dylan changed (his) music forever.
Cat Power uses her voice to take the songs beyond simple covers and convey some of the emotion that Dylan often does live but that gets tumbled in the rag and bone shop of his own voice. It’s a joy to listen to a sort of modern incarnation of the set and it’s the only album this year I pre-ordered months before it came out.
Other favorites: the record (Boygenius), Hackney Diamonds (The Rolling Stones), The Window (Ratboys), Rat Saw God (Wednesday), The Price of Progress (The Hold Steady)
Favorite 2023 Song
Boygenius – ‘Satanist‘
Probably the runner up for album of the year (plus the EP that followed), Boygenius had like four songs in my Spotify wrapped but none got as much play time as ‘Satanist’ (‘Cast Iron Skillet’ by Jason Isbell was my top played 2023 song for whatever that’s worth—though this song was my top played overall in 2023 by a mile).
Satanist is a little pop punk ditty with some shredding guitar (see Julian Baker go off here on the SNL performance)—and one of the few Boygenius songs that has writing credits for all three ‘boys’, with each takes turn singing a verse. The lyrics are playfully darkly romantic, catchy, whimsical, etc….all backed by a few power chords and good enough to call in Dave Grohl for occasional drumming duties.
Other favorites: Jason Isbell – ‘Cast Iron Skillet’, The National – ‘Once Upon a Poolside’, Youth Lagoon – ‘Rabbit’, The Hold Steady ‘Grand Junction’, The Gaslight Anthem – ‘Michigan, 1975’
Favorite 2023 Podcast Episode
The Six Triple Eight (Memory Palace)
The amazing story of unlikely heroes in WWII—a group compromised almost entirely of black women who were deployed to Birmingham in the middle of the war to help sort mail. Which sounds easy—except that sorting had been disregarded for years and millions upon millions of letters sat in a warehouse completely unorganized. The group was given six months to sort through what’s estimated to be about 17 million pieces of mail.
Working at a sorting pace of 65,000 pieces of mail a day, including things like homemade bake goods that had gone bad and letters address to “my brother” or “Private Smith”, the unit had to keep up with where soldiers had been moved to in order to get the right mail to the right people. Everyone considered it impossible to get this done in the 6 months they were given…..and yet they got it done in 3.
An amazing story about some of the heroism and hard work that often goes overlooked with an operation like a war, and the people who never got the honor or respect or accolades they deserved for factors like race and gender.
Other favorites: Revisionist History’s 6-part series on guns in America (particularly episode 6), Finn and the Bell (Rumble Strip Vermont)
Favorite 2023 Place Visited
Cooperstown, NY
We didn’t make it to a ton of new places this year, but the few new places were fantastic. We went out upstate with friends at the beginning of the year and did a Satruday in Cooperstown, a nice little upstate town, edged out by a big lake. It would be like the hundreds of others of that type if not for the Baseball Hall of Fame—and the town’s frank obsession with the sport. Everything in Cooperstown (at least in the downtown area) is baseball—from the coffee shops to liquor stores—and I couldn’t get enough. It’s undoubtedly worth a trip for the fans among us—and Maya and friends were nice enough to indulge me.