At the end of each year, I list the books that I have read during that year. Earlier years were 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. Below, you will find the list of books that I’ve read in 2024. Every year, I also include an overview of my other media consumption habits (magazines, RSS feeds, podcasts, etc.). From the 2023 edition, I’ve listed some of the films I’ve seen, and starting this year, I’ll also add some of the other arts and culture I saw.

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This year, I managed to read 54 books for a total of 13,223 pages (averaging just over 36 pages a day). This is way more than last year and about the same as the year before. I don’t know what changed in comparison to last year.

Women wrote one-third of the books that I’ve read. About a third of the books I’ve read had authors born in the US or the UK, a third were from Dutch or Belgian writers, and a third came from the rest of the world. This is about the same as last year and the year before. These seem to be patterns that stay pretty constant if I don’t intervene.

I’ve ordered the list of books into categories that make sense to me (and that are in many ways overlapping and arbitrary). These are the books that I’ve read and what I thought of some of them:

My reading challenge

2024 was the third year of my personal yearly reading challenge. Basically, I’ve tasked myself with reading a bunch of prize-winning books, mostly fiction. I was supposed to read these 20 books and only managed to read eight of them (of which I already read two in 2023).

Lynch’s book is a harrowing study of how a nation can deteriorate into authoritarianism and what that would feel like. If you have some relationship to Egypt, you should read El-Dardiry’s novel.

• Paul Lynch — Prophet Song (link)
• Ramy El-Dardiry — Tussen morgenzee en avondland (link)
• Astrid Lampe — Tulpenwodka (link)
• Edward van de Vendel and Anoush Elman — Misjka (link)
• Georgi Gospodinov — Time Shelter (link)
• Peter Venmans — Gastvrijheid (link)

B00k C7ub 4 N3rd$

The book club was in its eleventh year. We read seven books, one more than last year. Reijnders’s history of XS4ALL was a great read, and Narayanan and Kapoor incisively demystified AI. Nate Silver’s book about risk was incredibly rich and full of characters and anecdotes. Schinkel’s aphorisms on mobile phones were an interesting confrontation with my own dependency on my smartphone. Bostrom’s book was even more awful than I had imagined.

• Maarten Reijnders — De hackers die Nederland veranderden (link)
• Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor — AI Snake Oil (link)
• Nate Silver — On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (link)
• Deb Chachra — How Infrastructure Works (link)
• Willem Schinkel — Waarom ik geen mobiele telefoon heb: Aphonismen (link)
• Ethan Mollick — Co-Intelligence (link)
• Nick Bostrom — Deep Utopia (link)

(Auto)biography

I read so many works of (auto)biography that they merit their own category this year. The single book that gave me the most joy this year (by far) was the biography of Robert Moses by Robert Caro. I’ll quote my review in full:

Magisterial. And that is an understatement. I can’t remember when else I’ve enjoyed reading a book this much. I spent an entire year reading the book (each month a chunk, thanks to The 99% Invisible Breakdown), and I loved every part of it. It is hard to explain why exactly it is so great and why you should spend your time on these 1.200+ pages (I’ve tried to write a plan for how you can get hooked). The book is insanely well researched, about an utterly fascinating and genius character (Robert Moses), against an engrossing background (New York City planning from the 20s to the 60s), and intricately explains how power works. On top of that, it is written with a beautiful literary pen by an author who clearly is scrupulous, principled, and virtuous. Do yourself a favour and read it.

It is great to know that if I ever have a lot of time to spare, I can start reading Caro’s (hopefully by then) five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Herzog’s autobiography is a mindboggling collection of tall tales (I had the joy of seeing him live in The Hague last year, where he regaled many of the same entertaining stories). I had a little obsession with Roel van Duijn’s activism this year as I find his constant foresight and moving at the avant-garde very inspiring. Van de Kamp wrote a book about his growing up in poverty that shook my worldview (and should be required reading for anybody working in education in the Netherlands). Gül’s story of what happened when her family found out about her first book made the hair on my neck stand up. Overall, this was probably my favourite reading category.

• Robert A Caro — The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (link)
• Werner Herzog — Every Man for Himself and God Against All (link)
• Milio van de Kamp — Misschien moet je iets lager mikken (link)
• Lale Gül — Ik ben vrij (link)
• Riad Sattouf — The Arab of the Future 3 (link)
• David Edmonds — Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality (link)
• Marc Wildemeersch — Roel van Duijn: Een ziener in Nederland (link)
• Sarina Wiegman and Jeroen Visscher — What It Takes (link)
• Jón Gnarr — Gnarr: How I Became the Mayor of a Large City in Iceland and Changed the World (link)

Building a second brain and taking notes

This year, I started a combination of a daily journal with a Zettelkasten (using TiddlyWiki and TiddlyPWA). I read these books to help me structure things. All of them have their strengths, but none of them are essential.

• David Kadavy — Digital Zettelkasten (link)
• Sönke Ahrens — How to Take Smart Notes (link)
• Tiago Forte — Building a Second Brain (link)

Reading for my PhD

Since September, I’ve started doing a PhD on neorepublicanism and automated decision-making. I’ve read a few books related to that effort. Kirchherr has convinced me to try to write a ‘minimum viable thesis’. Schauer’s book merits a reread: I enjoyed how he showed how our decisions are profiling all the way down.

• Frederick Schauer — Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (link)
• Julian Kirchherr — The Lean PhD (link)
• Arie Altena and Florian Weigl — {class} On Consequences in Algorithmic Classification (link)
• Dan McQuillan — Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence (link)
• Gordon Rugg and Marian Petre — The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research (Third Edition) (link)
• Shannon Vallor — The AI Mirror (link)

Serbia

I went to Serbia twice this year (once for a holiday and once for a roundtable of experts). I picked up Andrić’s classic, which played a major part in him winning the Nobel prize. I loved his story about the bridge over the river Drina so much that I decided to rent a car in Belgrade and drive to Bosnia and Herzegovina to finish the final chapter on and near the gorgeous 16th-century bridge.

• Ivo Andrić — The Bridge Over The Drina (link)
• Neda Knezevic — Tito: a short biography (link)
• Filip David — The House of Memory and Oblivion (link)

Other fiction

Kobek’s book is an extremely funny take-down of Silicon Valley culture and the promise of a liberatory internet. Even though it is a bit older, it is still spot on. Coetzee still has it, although I doubt this book will stay with me for a long time.

• Jarett Kobek — I Hate the Internet (link)
• Joke van Leeuwen — Ik ben hier! (link)
• Cathelijn Schilder — De eenling (link)
• J.M. Coetzee — The Pole and Other Stories (link)
• Gershwin Bonevacia — De stad is ook van mij (link)

Other non-fiction

There are some good titles in this list. For beautiful writing and thinking, try Biss and Nelson. Hutak is required reading on gentrification, Updike is the best I’ve read about golf so far, and Danaher, Robeyns, and Klein show how public philosophy should be done. I tried to teach myself chess this year to play and try to beat the person that we would call my ‘brother-in-law’ if any of us were married. I did manage to win an early match against him, and I mainly want to credit Rozman’s surprisingly entertaining book for that. He is an incredible teacher, and the book comes with a free set of online exercises.

• Eula Biss — Having and Being Had (link)
• John Danaher — Automation and Utopia (link)
• John Updike — Golf Dreams (link)
• Levy Rozman — How to Win At Chess (link)
• Massih Hutak — Jij hebt ons niet ontdekt, wij waren hier altijd al (link)
• Midas Dekkers and Angela de Vrede — Botjes (link)
• Alda Sigmundsdottir — The Little Book of the Icelanders (link)
• Alexandra Hudson — The Soul of Civility (link)
• Bobby Fischer and Stuart Margulies, Donn Mosenfelder — Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (link)
• Ingrid Robeyns — Limitarisme (link)
• Maggie Nelson — On Freedom (link)
• Naomi Klein — Doppelganger (link)
• Tijs Goldschmidt — De andere linkerkant: links en rechts in de evolutie (link)
• Warda El-Kaddouri — Vergeet ons niet: over diversiteit en inclusie bij het Stadsarchief Amsterdam (link)
• Cal Newport — Slow Productivity (link)

My consumption of other media

I track the articles I’ve read and want to keep for use in the future via insights.hansdezwart.nl (which I programmed myself). It allows me a structured (and searchable!) view of the sources, topics and authors I read. It also powers my newsletter and fills up the Racism and Technology Center website.

My top 25 sources (in this order) for 2024 were (in brackets the number of articles that I saved from the source in the year): Het Parool (222), The Economist (132), De Groene Amsterdammer (130), De Correspondent (113), The Guardian (99), Follow the Money (56), The New York Times (48), The New York Review of Books (48), WIRED (36), Volkskrant (36), NRC (32), Jacobin (30), Vrij Nederland (26), Bert Hubert (23), Marginal Revolution (23), OneWorld (21), Tweakers (20), Pluralistic (20), MIT Technology Review (20), Bits of Freedom (19), HvanA (18), The Markup (16), Trouw (16), Rest of World (14), and The Atlantic (13).

The top 50 tags that I used in 2024 were: netherlands (404), artificial-intelligence (312), united-states (157), black-struggle (150), racist-technology (112), generative-ai (104), israel (99), education (91), eu (87), politics (80), amsterdam (79), palestine (75), privacy (73), google (66), large-language-models (63), openai (59), china (58), inequality (56), feminism (53), social-media (53), surveillance (51), russia (51), war (49), rule-of-law (46), labour (46), journalism (45), housing (45), police (44), facebook (42), open-source (42), security (41), copyright (41), microsoft (40), healthcare (37), fraud (37), capitalism (36), regulation (36), colonialism (36), poverty (35), democracy (34), anti-semitism (34), algorithmic-bias (33), covid-19 (33), climate-change (33), art (31), student-protests (31), chatgpt (30), risk-modeling (30), japan (29), and diversity (29).

These tags give a good overview of my current interests. New in the top 50 this year were: palestine, journalism, open-source, security, copyright, microsoft, healthcare, fraud, colonialism, anti-semitism, art, student-protests, risk-modeling, and japan. I’ve been following the genocide in Gaza and the reaction here in the Netherlands to that quite closely. The risk modelling and fraud tags relate to my PhD, and I am getting more desperate every year to return to Japan.

No longer in the top 50 were: facial-recognition, existential-risk, proctoring, ai-risk, machine-learning, activism, labour-rights, ethics, proctorio, slavery, educational-surveillance, market-thinking, language, and unions. This shows that existential risk was less of an obsession of mine and that the work around Robin Pocornie’s case was mostly finished.

Finally, these are the people that I’ve read the most pieces from: Bert Hubert (26), Michiel de Hoog (22), Cory Doctorow (21), Maurits Martijn (19), Jan-Hein Strop (16), Tyler Cowen (16), Tim Wagemakers (13), Marcel Wiegman (12), Evelyn Austin (11), Bruce Schneier (11), Ot van Daalen (11), Alex Tabarrok (11), Raounak Khaddari (10), Teun Dominicus (10), David Davidson (10), Randall Munroe (9), Sebastiaan Brommersma (9), Tim ’S Jongers (9), Ben Thompson (8), Josta van Bockxmeer (8), Ian Bogost (8), Matt Burgess (8), Jesse Frederik (8), Herman Stil (8), and John Naughton (7). I am proud to call some of these smart people my friends.

New on the list are: Marcel Wiegman, Evelyn Austin, Ot van Daalen, Raounak Khaddari, Teun Dominicus, Sebastiaan Brommersma, Matt Burgess, Jesse Frederik, Herman Stil, and John Naughton. And the following authors dropped off the list: Patrick Meershoek, Thijs Broer, Ewald Engelen, Nadia Benaissa, Rasit Elibol, Maxim Februari, Nani Jansen Reventlow, Eva Hofman, Lynn Berger, and Rejo Zenger. The latter mostly does not reflect my lack of interest but more likely is a reflection of how much these people have written in the last year.

The number of articles by one author does not necessarily reflect how much impact they’ve had on me. The top 3 people shaping (in the sense of innovating) my thinking the most are likely to be Jesse Frederik, Cory Doctorow, and Bert Hubert. I should, once again, give a special mention to Stephen Downes, whose summaries of all the pieces he curates for me (and for the rest of the world) often are gems of insight.

How I read and follow the news

I refuse to read (or listen to, or watch) any medium that personalises their content for me specifically. This means I avoid recommender systems and don’t go through the ‘most read’ or ‘most shared’ lists. And I’ve completely quit following or regularly looking at any social media. I consider this to be an inoculation against disinformation and manipulation, as well as the filter bubble (if it does finally turn out to be for real).

I stay up to date by following specific sources, either in their magazine form or via RSS. I go through the whole source and then pick what I want to read. I strongly prefer to keep updated through RSS instead of email newsletters (read Doctorow on why you should be using an RSS reader too). Substack newsletters can be read via RSS, but there are still a few sources that I am forced to read via email (and I actively resent those).

When I noticed that I was spending too much time refreshing my RSS client to see if there was something new, I created a new methodology for looking at my feeds. I put my feeds in three categories: morning, daily, and weekly. I check out the ‘morning’ feeds once a day when I wake up (it has the stuff you might want to talk about at the proverbial water cooler), and combine this with reading the Economist’s Espresso app, ANP press service newsletter, and a browse through Het Parool, marking the things I will likely read during the rest of the day. I then allow myself to go through the ‘daily’ feeds only once a day (and in one go) and look at the ‘weekly’ feeds only once a week, on Fridays.

Until halfway through the year, my system for keeping track of everything I wanted to read was to keep everything open on my phone. I would send links from my desktop to my phone to do that. My Firefox Mobile had so many open tabs that it showed an infinite sign rather than the actual number. I read things halfway and then abandoned them (but didn’t close them), and Random browsing tabs intermingled with the things I wanted to read, making it impossible to find anything. I wanted to fix these problems. So, I ‘scratched my own itch’ and created an opinionated read-later app. The main idea is to treat my to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. You can read more about that here.

The podcasts I listened to

Using Pocket Cast, I still listen to all new episodes of Napleiten, De Jesse Frederik Show, Against the Rules (by Michael Lewis, this season about sports gambling), the Bits of Freedom Podcast, Ondertussen (the podcast of my faculty), Stuurloos (now finished), Search Engine, and (forever) This American Life.

I’ll listen to most episodes of the Ezra Klein Show, Question Everything, and Conversations with Tyler. When the topic fancies me, I’ll listen to 99% Invisible, Freakonomics Radio, Philosophical Disquisitions, Philosophy Bites and Philosophy Books, Docs, Planet Money, Radiolab, Talk Easy, This Machine Kills, and (very occasionally) the Tim Ferris Show. I seem to have lost the time for Vos & Lommer and De Vogelspodcast.

There were a few one-off podcasting series that I listened to this year and enjoyed: Kweekje, Grijs gebied, Serial (series 4), A Sense of Rebellion, Broomgate: A Curling Scandal, The Good Whale (not the musical episode though), Mina & Mevrouw (although it also irritated me to no end), and The Wonder of Stevie (although I had a hard time vibing with its host).

Three series have earned a special mention. My favourite of the year was Opgezwolle Eigen Wereld: De Rest Is Geschiedenis. This podcast made me want to listen to this legendary Dutch rap album so badly that I just bought it together with a record player so that I can listen to a vinyl version of this album soon. The series that made me laugh the loudest was Shell Game, where Evan Ratliff clones his voice and connects it live to a large language model, allowing him to let AI pretend it is him: on the phone with his girlfriend, at work in a Zoom meeting, when picking up robocalls (AI versus AI gets very funny very quickly). Finally, I can’t recommend enough the epic breakdown of the Power Broker that 99% Invisible did. What a joy.

The films that I saw

Films are probably my favourite art form. You are transported to a different world in two hours, completely immersed and without distractions. I saw 100 films in the cinema in 2024 and 5 on a screen at home. I won’t list them all here, but I have tried to make a list of the best old films I saw, the best documentaries, and the best new films.

The Lindy Effect was in full force this year. A few cinemas in Amsterdam specialise in showing old films, and quite a few films get a rerelease after a (usual “4K!”) restoration. Watching modern classics is a sure bet to be moved or impressed by a film. Here are some examples (all of which I would watch again in a heartbeat):

• Eye did a retrospective of the films of Claire Denis. I hadn’t seen any of them, but they were all mind-blowing. My favourite film of the year was by her (I went to see it twice): Beau Travail. Next best was a movie with a lot of cock fighting: S’en fout la mort. I also enjoyed her cutting reflection on the colonial world: White Material and Chocolat. 35 Rhums and Vendredi soir were great, too.
• Hayao Miyazaki made another animated film after all, which meant cinemas showed his older works on the side. I saw three or four of his films. I liked his 1979 animation film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro the best, a sort of James Bond fairytale full of incredibly creative surprises, great music, and amazing, completely over-the-top scenes.
• I will never forget some ridiculously funny eating scenes in the Japanese 1986 classic Tampopo.
• I went to see two great films by Wim Wenders: Paris, Texas and Der Himmel über Berlin.
• The Dutch classic Spoorloos got a rerelease and was very much worth seeing. It is clear why Kubrick wanted to work with Johanna Ter Steege after seeing this film, as she is a brilliant actress.
• Because Francis Ford Coppola finally released Megalopolis (which I did see and was flummoxed by), some of his older films were in the cinema, too. For the first time in at least 20 years, I saw Apocalypse Now again (in its ‘Final Cut’ version), and I was utterly shooketh. So it was again a pleasure to see the documentary about its making: Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (which has better critical reviews than the film itself). The Conversation is a brilliant film about surveillance and its related paranoia.
• Finally, I thought Y Tu Mamá También was quite brilliant.

I love documentaries, and I saw plenty, some older and some newly released. My highlights were these:

• My favourite documentary of the year was Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, a mindblowing film (and basically a jazz concert) revolving around the independence of Congo and Patrice Lumumba. The US sent jazz ambassadors to the African continent, and these diffuse the movie. It was incredible to see the archived video imagery of people like Khrushchev, Castro and Malcolm X around the 15th global assembly of the UN. One of my favourite parts was when Castro gave away 60 tickets of his delegation to Abby Lincoln, Maya Angelou, and others to come and crash the gathering. It is a must-watch.
• Next is My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, which I saw on my laptop. Turns out that Herzog is more crazy than Kinski, which says something.
• Glas, mijn onvervulde leven was quintessentially Dutch and hilarious in its (intended) clumsiness.
• I still can’t fully believe that The Gullspång Miracle is real and wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be a(n incredibly acted) hoax after all. If it isn’t, then it is another proof that real life is stranger than fiction.
• I saw more than one film about the Palestinian predicament. The 2012 film A World Not Ours, about a refugee camp in Lebanon, was the best of them.
• Two films weirdly related to each other in their lens on authoritarian power were Triumph des Willens and Apocalypse in the Tropics. The first, by Leni Riefenstahl, must be the best propaganda film ever made. It is hard to believe she made it in 1935. Seeing Hitler in action gave me a few new insights into his power. The second is a scary and ugly look at how evangelicals put Bolsonaro into power in Brazil.
• Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (which I saw on my laptop) fed my obsession with Robert Caro and Robert Moses. It is a beautiful film about writing and editing.
• Finally, Kix was heartbreaking, following a boy’s coming of age in Budapest over twelve years.

These are the new films that were my favourites:

• Suppose I have to pick my absolute favourite. In that case, it will be between Evil Does Not Exist about gentrification and nature with gorgeous Japanese sensibilities, and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, a genius satire of the gig economy.
• I probably laughed the hardest at some unforgettable scenes in Anora, with Toros now one of my favourite film characters. I really love Sean Baker’s eye for the world and will see anything he makes.
• Conclave is a very well-made and entertaining film that should appeal to a broad audience. It is brilliantly cast.
• Sometimes, it feels like all Iranians are great filmmakers. This year, I saw and enjoyed Terrestrial Verses, Tatami, and especially My Favorite Cake.
• A few very good films took the perspective of children or young adults: Skunk (brutal), Bird, and Àma Gloria.
• Finally, Kneecap shows why the Irish and hip-hop are our current best bet for a better world.

Other beautiful or interesting things I saw

I saw 23 exhibits and went to 58 programmes (think things like dance, theatre, debate). Here are some highlights that I don’t want to forget:

• The Circusbende festival was fabulous once again (and I am not just saying that because I became their secretary of the board this year). Over two weekends, I saw plenty shows, with my favourites being Vu by Compagnie Sacékripa, Obsolete Elegance and Some Monsters by Las Corpa, Oktopus Orkestars, and Magic Tom & Yuri ZIJN COOL.
• I really enjoyed two of my favourite thinkers, Willem Schinkel and Marjolein Lanzing, in conversation with each other at Perdu. The evening about Roel van Duijn at Pakhuis de Zwijger was inspirational.
• I saw the FC Bergman play Werken en Dagen in Antwerp, which was fabulous.
• The best dance performance of the year was the incredibly moving VOICE NOISE by Jan Martens.
• To see the 80+ year-old Hans Dulfer perform in Casa Rosso in Amsterdam’s red light district was an experience I won’t forget.
• The finalists of the Leids Cabaret Festival performed their show. The clear winner of the festival, and somebody that I very much look forward to seeing again, was David Linszen. I also enjoyed the intelligence of Saman Amini’s Integratieplan and the ridiculousness and joy of Borrelnootjez: El7ebs.
• Diarree is mijn lievelingskleur was anarchy at its finest, loved it.
• Finally, here are three exhibits that you should go and see in January of 2025 (as they are still on, do it!):
  • Vladan Djoler and Kate Crawford have created an incredibly important work on an unimaginable scale: Calculating Empires, a genealogy of technology and power since 1500. You can still see it in real life (which is a totally different experience than online) at the GOGBOT exhibit at Rijksmuseum Twente.
  • Cindy Sherman’s work is brilliant and still to be seen at FOMU in Antwerpen.
  • The Polish Małgorzata Mirga-Tas makes beautiful textile tapestries about her Roma people. Go and see them at Bonnefanten in Maastricht.

What do I look forward to in 2025?

I will try (and fail) to complete my personal reading challenge for 2025; there is a lot to look forward to in these 21 books, particularly James, The Vegetarian, and A City on Mars.

I want to spend more time in the world of Willem Schinkel, so I intend to read his Theorie van de kraal and the two books that he keeps quoting and referring to: The Terms of Order by Cedric J. Robinson and Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love by Houria Bouteldja.

Finally, I want to start another big reading project where I’ll spend a year reading a book. I’ve never gotten to Marx’s Capital, so I’ll get cracking on the first part of it.