The year in fiction: Our favorite 2018 novels

The year in fiction. Peruse our favorite 76 novels from the past year at the 2019 Tournament of Books long list.

The Morning News

Nothing happened for 10 years. One day, I declared my love. And it happened. I left my house. Even after we had slept in the same bed for a month, I was still calling her ‘Madame Dufeutrel.’

A photographer took a road trip across France collecting love stories—love found, love lost, love savored.
↩︎ The Guardian
Aug 9, 2018
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A mind-bending CGI by Maxim Zhestkov of "dark and brutal geometric monoliths...dissected by invisible 3D objects to reveal the layers of the colorful and emotionally vibrant inner structures."

13h
The White House just halted NIH's procurement of new human fetal tissue, which labs need to develop HIV drugs.
↩︎ Science 13h
When you think of cryptocurrencies as "lottery tickets that pay off in a dystopian future," they're not at all worthless.
↩︎ Project Syndicate 13h

The sound of Martian wind, recorded by NASA’s new InSight lander.

Andrew Womack

Last year NASA put together a playlist of space sounds, many of which are radio waves or other brief encounters. Nothing quite as astonishing as, oh, hearing what it would sound like if you were standing on the surface of another planet. But still fun:
 

 
13h
People who are good at self-control don't use an incredible amount of willpower—they don't experience temptation, or avoid it.
↩︎ Vox 15h
Ever since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified 70 years ago, humanity's ethics have converged, more or less.
↩︎ NPR 15h

Maybe my father, and the thousands of people who have bonded over their self-perceived status as targeted individuals, are a kind of indirect warning system experiencing a kind of collective dream—canaries in the digital coal mine.

It’s not a CIA conspiracy, but those with paranoia may “see through to the nuts and bolts” of a surveilling web that manipulates.
↩︎ WIRED
16h
From testing needle retention to avoiding coning: the science of growing the perfect Christmas tree.
↩︎ WIRED 16h

Those with extended lives will not have the same sense of transience that we have. They will be able to indulge themselves without worrying that they are wasting precious years, since they can expect plenty of time ahead in which to get around to less frivolous things.

Extending human life will create a new form of inequality: those who have time, and those who do not.
↩︎ Aeon
16h
Researchers won't divulge the location of a massive, unexplored cave in British Columbia, fearing tourists would soon overrun it.
↩︎ Quartz 16h
Paul Ryan's legacy will be a $343 billion federal deficit increase, proving his reputation as a budget wonk was far overblown.
↩︎ Vox 16h
How one family found the time to do more: by designing a household based on microeconomic theory, and creating more slack.
↩︎ Aeon 16h
In its holiday specials, Netflix continues a proud Christmas entertainment plot point: dead parents.
↩︎ Vulture 18h

Anyone who can avoid these hollowed-out institutions on which so many working-class people rely is acting quite reasonably in doing so. They are carceral and dangerous—sometimes filled with literal toxins, as if this country needed more symbolism.

In the struggle for mental health care, New York City hospitals are the deadly embodiment of “separate but equal.”
↩︎ Alex Press
18h
The numbers are in, and US voter turnout in 2018 was the highest in a midterm election in more than a century.
↩︎ Vox 19h
Evaluating Trump's allies in DC by those he made bad, versus those who were always bad, and he merely revealed their awfulness.
↩︎ The Atlantic 19h
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