Best of 2026

Books

  • Peter Matthiessen. The Snow Leopard. 1978 (Non-Fiction: Part travel narrative, part elegy, Matthiessen recounts a Himalayan trek undertaken with field biologist George Schaller in search of the nearly unseen snow leopard, following his wife’s death. What begins as an expedition through austere mountain country becomes a record of spiritual inquiry, attention, and loss, with the outer pursuit giving way to questions of mind, impermanence, and what it means to see clearly.)

  • Morgan Housel. The Psychology of Money. 2020 (Non-Fiction: Each person’s relation to money is different. Through a series of concise stories and examples, Housel argues that financial success depends less on intelligence or market-beating skill than on conduct. The book returns to a few plain lessons: save at every age, give compounding time to work, make reasonable decisions, and learn to be content with enough.) Recommended.

  • Pico Iyer, Aflame, 2025 (Non-Fiction: In a series of meditative vignettes drawn from decades of retreats to a Benedictine hermitage above the Pacific, Iyer reflects on silence as a lens for seeing more clearly what it means to live, to attend to others, and to accept mortality with a kind of lucid tenderness. The book is a string of luminous reliquaries, inviting the reader to linger, slow the pulse, and consider how much of modern life is a distraction from the few things that actually matter.)

Movies

Series

Music

Videos and Channels

Articles

  • David Epstein, “The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness,” The New York Times, May 12, 2026 (If your decisions are often guided by the search for the best possible option, you may be making yourself less happy in the process. Endless searching tends to produce more regret, more comparison, and less satisfaction. Better to decide what is good enough, commit when you find it, and free your energy for living rather than endlessly wondering how to live.) see also Barry Schwartz. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

  • Ezra Klein, “Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen,” The New York Times, May 3, 2026 (“If you believe the story the A.I. labs are telling, it’s hard to see what stands between us and mass unemployment…People are looking at the economy as it exists and asking which tasks A.I. can do; they should be asking which jobs people won’t want A.I. doing, or which services A.I. will make us want more of…”)

  • Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either,” The New Yorker, February 9, 2026 (The neural networks used in A.I. systems, which have a layered architecture of interconnected “neurons” vaguely akin to that of biological brains… They were not programmed step by step; they were given shape by a trial-and-error process that made minute adjustments to the models’ “weights,” or the strengths of the connections between the neurons. The models matched patterns…How they did this was inscrutable. The human analogue is called tacit knowledge. [F]ew English speakers can articulate that the standard order of adjectives is opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. But we know that it sounds broken to say “the Siberian large young show lovely cat.”).

  • Dhruv Khullar. “Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides?” The New Yorker, April 6, 2026 (Peptides such as BPC-157, discovered more than thirty years ago, continue to draw wide interest despite the absence of published controlled human trials, the nonrelease of industry-funded data, and a gray market in which some products are diluted, contaminated, or falsely labeled, even as users continue to swear by the results, likely in part because the money, effort, and repeated self-injection create a strong wish to see results.)

Podcasts

Poems

  • Tishani Doshi. “A Theory on the Origin of Language.” The New Yorker, April 27, 2026..

  • David Baker, “Breath,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2026.

  • Matthew Shenodoa, “The Tomb Attendant Contemplates His Own Death,” The New Yorker, March 2, 2026 (“……There are and have been sorrows greater than mine, and joys, I imagine, too. Though who knows the inner heart beyond the song that the mouth sings? In the small call of the bird my peace is made like a braided mat, still like a palm filled with sand, to be left in the quiet, in the cool stone days.”)

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Apps

  • INTVL. For runners who enjoy gamified running.

Quotes

  • Information without action is entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but don’t confuse it with research. If you read something and it doesn’t make you think or cause you to change something in your life, it’s entertainment. Be honest about which one you’re doing. —Zeneca, “Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #45,” email newsletter, February 26, 2026.