Best of the Best: Year End Awards

From Best Quote for One's Own Obit, to Best Nobel/Olympic Family

Welcome to the extremely famous Range Widely year-end awards. In the first edition, I — I mean we, because there is a giant and secretive international team of highly qualified selectors — featured only the best opening lines we’d read that year.

This year, the committee decided to expand the scope of the awards. (Here at McLuhanesque Range Widely, the medium is the message.) We apologize if your favorite category was overlooked, but as the adage goes: you can’t produce a famous awards thing without breaking hearts. Please feel free to nominate a new category in the comments below the post, and it may be used next year.

Without further ado, the envelopes, please…

Best Quote Given For One’s Own Obituary

The award goes to Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s right-hand man, who passed away last month at 99. The New York Times interviewed Munger for his own obit, and the piece closed with this gem:

“I didn’t mind at all playing second fiddle to Warren,” he said in an interview for this obituary. “Ordinarily, everywhere I go I am very dominant, but when somebody else is better, I’m willing to play the second fiddle. It’s just that I was seldom in that position, except with Warren. But I didn’t mind it at all.”

Best Factoid About Our Empty World

If the nucleus of a hydrogen atom (the simplest type of atom) were scaled up to the size of a tennis ball and placed at 120th St. and Broadway in Manhattan, the electron would be orbiting through New Jersey.¹ In other words: everything is made of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty space. (Also: the diagrams of atoms you got in school are extremely not to scale.)

This fact is courtesy of a fascinating new book, The Universal Timekeepers: Reconstructing History Atom by Atom, by my former astronomy professor (and master science communicator) David Helfand, whose office is at 120th St. and Broadway.

Best Nobel/Olympic Family

This year, Katalin Karikó shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA. Karikó is the mother of Susan Francia, who won Olympic gold medals in 2008 and 2012 as part of the U.S. rowing team.

Here you can see all 11 Nobel laureates who are closely related to Olympians (including Philip Noel-Baker, who won a silver in the 1500 meters in 1920, and later the Nobel Peace Prize). Karikó’s Nobel win makes Francia the first female Olympian on the list.

Best 10th-Century Saxon Riddle

Put yourself in the turnshoes of a Medieval Germanic person and see if you can guess what this describes:

“There was a wonder on the wave; water turned to bone.”

.

.

.

Answer: Ice! … “Water turned to bone.” I like it. Water — not sunlight, not oxygen, not gig wifi — is the only thing that every life form on Earth (from cyanobacteria to blue whales) requires.² And it, and ice, are weird.

Unlike most substances, H₂O is less dense in solid form than in liquid form. This is a good thing for us. If ice were denser than water, then ice formed atop the ocean would sink; plus, water under high pressure on the seafloor (given certain conditions³) might become ice instead of staying liquid. As a result of those processes, the oceans would presumably freeze bottom up. As it is, ice forms on top and actually insulates the water below, protecting aquatic life from freezing temperatures. Ice also has high “albedo,” which just means it reflects a lot of solar radiation back to space, helpfully cooling the planet. If it sank to the bottom, it wouldn’t be much help in that department.

Best Oscar Wilde Aphorism

Ok, so this isn’t really Oscar himself, but rather Lord Henry “Harry” Wotton, a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s only novel. Harry speaks (and often thinks) in aphorisms, like this pearl:

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Harry’s gnomic insights and “nowadays” lamentations should almost never be taken at face value, as he prioritizes form over content and probably believes little of what he says. (Wilde himself played an important role in the Aestheticism art movement, which valued the conveying of beauty over the teaching of lessons.) Nonetheless, his plentiful hot takes are amusing and thought-provoking. And I gather that Wilde liked this line, because he reused it in his short story, “Lady Windermere’s Fan.”

Regarding the recycling of wit, there’s an apparently true anecdote about Wilde and the artist James Whistler, in which Whistler made a clever remark, and Wilde responded: “I wish I had said that!”

To which Whistler replied: ‘You will, Oscar, you will.”

The brilliant Wilde was well-known both for his original witticisms and his skill at deploying quips invented by others.

Best — …er, Most Striking Book Cover?

Speaking of Wilde, not sure congratulations are in order, but here’s my picture of The Picture of Dorian Gray:

Cuddly!

Most Interesting Concept for a Poem

This year’s winner is Rudyard Kipling, for his “The Conundrum of the Workshops.” The poem imagines Adam in the Garden of Eden, using a stick to scratch the first ever drawing into the ground, and admiring it with joy. At least, “Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: ‘It's pretty, but is it Art?’”

Adam, in the poem, is “The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review” of his work. It reminded me of my own favorite recent post: “Virginia Doesn’t Care.”

Most Devastating Poem

This bitter award goes to “Non omnis moriar…” (“Not all of me shall die..”), written by Polish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka.

In 1941, Ginczanka began hiding in a region that is now part of Ukraine — until 1943 when her landlady denounced her as Jewish to Nazi authorities. The short “Non omnis moriar…” was hand-written on a crumpled piece of paper and passed to a friend. In it, Ginczanka names the landlady and imagines the woman enjoying her possessions once she is dead.

Ginczanka only published one volume of poems, On Centaurs, by the time she was executed, but she was already well known, reportedly both for her intellect and her beauty. Earlier this year, the New York Review of Books published a slim volume, Firebird, that collects most of Ginczanka’s known poems.

Best Opening That Violates Elmore Leonard’s #1 Writing Principle

“Never open a book with weather,” said Leonard, the masterful crime writer. (And never carry dialogue with any word other than “said,” he said.)

This year’s award for violating that tenet in exquisite fashion goes to Virginia Woolf, for the Genesis-reminiscent opening of The Waves, a book in which the entire lives of six people are told in one metaphorical day, from sunrise to sunset:

“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”

You may argue that technically this isn’t a description of weather. So, just in case, Woolf’s co-honoree is Samantha Hunt, for the epigraph at the beginning of her novel The Seas:

“It was a dark and stormy night,
and the ship was on the sea.
The captain said, ‘Sailor, tell us a story,’
and the sailor began.
‘It was a dark and stormy night,
and the ship was on the sea…’ ”

Most Popular Range Widely Post of the Year

It was this one: “The Christmas Tree Effect.” You people and your taste. Speaking of you people…

Best Newsletter Readers

…Wait, is this the right envelope?…

It looks like Range Widely readers won this year! The competition was stiff, so I hope you’ll take great pride in this and affix it to the metaphorical fridge in your brain.

Seriously, though, reader comments, both below posts and sometimes in person, have been a true unexpected highlight of my newsletter adventure. I started this as a sandbox to do some thinking out loud, and to share half-(or one-third)-formed ideas I found generative. I didn’t expect either the quality or quantity of feedback that ensued.

Readers have frequently left comments that are more eloquent and succinct than the post they’re responding to. (That goes for both the affirming and the critical comments.) I want you all to know that I still read every comment, and respond to many of them.

So: thank you for being here. And a special thanks to those of you who chose to support the newsletter with a paid subscription, even though the content is free (save for the occasional bonus quote that now comes atop an email). I started the newsletter as an exercise for myself, but I doubt it would still be going without all of you.

If you think others would enjoy this post, please share it.

Finally — and for the last time in 2023 — you can subscribe here:

Wishing you happy and healthy holidays. Until next year…

David

1. The electron in this case would be way smaller than a grain of sand, and it would exist as a smeared cloud of probability, so if you made a field trip to Jersey to catch it, you’d probably be out of luck. But you can read on the PATH train so that’s a win.

2. Some deep-sea organisms — like tube worms that cling to hydrothermal vents (jets of hot water shooting out from deep in the Earth) — don’t need any sunlight. That said, all life is part of a complex web, and if the Sun disappeared, I think we can assume things would be pretty different. I intended this to mean that not every life form on Earth needs direct sunlight to survive.

3. This point about pressure is, of course, hypothetical. The actual process of bottom-up freezing would depend not only on pressure, but also on other factors like temperature gradients in the ocean, salinity, currents, and probably other stuff that I don’t remember from back when I studied environmental science. If any of my former professors are reading this: I apologize, but I hope we can focus on what I do remember. Glass-half-full of ice facts!