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The bounty of hilarity published in the past 63 years made our task formidable and our criteria painfully limiting; we excluded many worthy nonfiction and short-story specialists. But we settled on a grouping that felt representative of the abundant varieties and evolving tastes of literary humorists, aware that some bits hit different now and others still slay decades later. Let us know what we snubbed, whose good names we’ve insulted with our criminal omissions. We’ll put your picks in a separate roundup — and in our reading queues. We won’t publish any part of your response without following up with you first.

Persons: hilarity, howls, we’ve, We’ll

As I read Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” I wondered how he would pull it off. Here was a scholar, determined to bring to life a school of thought (hard to do) that revolved around finicky distinctions in language (extremely hard to do). The “linguistic” or “analytical” turn in philosophy resisted grand speculations about reality and truth. Krishnan admits that even he had a hard time warming up to his subject when he first encountered it as a philosophy student at Oxford. That discrepancy is also a preoccupation of one of my favorite books this year, “The Rigor of Angels,” by William Egginton.

Persons: Nikhil Krishnan’s “, ”, Krishnan, William Egginton, Egginton, Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant Organizations: Oxford, Johns Hopkins University Locations: Oxford, Argentine

☆ How American Evangelicalism Became ‘Mister Rogers With a Blowtorch’
▼ + stars: | 2023-12-02 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to. This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States. What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”

Persons: Tim Alberta, “, thrall, Donald Trump, impenitent, Trump, Ted Cruz, Ted, piously, Jesus, Mister Rogers, ” Organizations: THE, Republican, Iowa Republican Locations: “ The, Alberta, United States

☆ A Life of Milton Friedman Seeks the Nuance in His Free-Market Gospel
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-15 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

MILTON FRIEDMAN: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer BurnsIn writing her new biography of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, known throughout his long life for his cheerful endorsement of deregulation and free markets, Jennifer Burns certainly had her work cut out for her. “As he increasingly came to symbolize a political movement,” she writes, “the nuance and complexity of his ideas was lost.”But even Burns has to admit that this attention to “nuance and complexity” was something that Friedman did a lot to discourage. The principles underlying such intricate cooperation were “really very simple,” he said. At the University of Chicago, where Friedman spent most of his teaching life, he edged out the leftist scholars clustered in the Cowles Commission for Economic Research, shrewdly getting the Rockefeller Foundation to pull its funding from the commission and finance Friedman’s workshop instead. Charismatic in the classroom, Friedman didn’t just teach students; he created converts.

Persons: MILTON FRIEDMAN, Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman, Friedman, ”, Burns, fashioning, baldheaded Friedman, Burns —, Ayn Rand —, shrewdly, Friedman didn’t, “, ” Friedman Organizations: Conservative, Newsweek, Productivity, Stanford, University of Chicago, Commission, Economic Research, Rockefeller Foundation

☆ Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-09 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback.

Persons: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, ” Walter Isaacson’s, —, ”, ” Isaacson, Musk, Isaacson, Tesla, ” Musk, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Grimes Organizations: ELON, SpaceX Locations: South Africa

☆ When Your ‘Doppelganger’ Becomes a Conspiracy Theorist
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Klein was trapped inside a hall of mirrors, and she was trying to find a way out. Before writing about her doppelgänger, Klein felt stuck. Klein told her what she was going through: “I used to fill notebooks, you know, everywhere I went. As much as Klein recoiled at what Wolf was saying, she also felt the sting of recognition. (In an email, Wolf declined to comment on “Doppelganger,” explaining that she hadn’t yet read the book, but said that some of her tweets “were poorly worded and were deleted.”)

Persons: Klein, Hurricane, ”, Biden, V, Eve Ensler, Harriet Clark, ” Clark, Joan Didion’s “, Covid, “, hadn’t, ” Klein, Philip Roth, Wolf, tweeting, Naomi, Tucker Carlson, nodded Organizations: Rutgers University Locations: New Jersey, British Columbia

☆ How Three Visionaries Expanded Our Understanding of Reality
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE RIGOR OF ANGELS: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by William EggintonChances are, if you have ever heard the story of Solomon Shereshevsky, you haven’t forgotten it. Shereshevsky’s powers of memory were so remarkable that in 1929 he gave up his job as a journalist in Moscow and joined the circus. He could recite lists of numbers, poems in foreign languages, even strings of random syllables that were called out to him from the audience. Forgetting something wasn’t a matter of passively letting it slip away into oblivion; he had to actively destroy it in his mind. As William Egginton writes in “The Rigor of Angels,” a “perfect memory” can begin to resemble “total forgetting.”

Persons: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, William Egginton, Solomon Shereshevsky, ” Locations: Moscow

☆ The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-23 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Unlike “Daughter of the Dragon” the film, “Daughter of the Dragon” the book is clearly intended as a form of reclamation and subversion. “Anna May drew attention to or even exploded the stereotype by overacting these roles,” Huang writes, not entirely convincingly. “She has to take what is offered.” Especially when she is an Asian American woman at a time when Asian roles often went to white actors in adhesive tape and yellowface. The Production Code of 1930, which banned onscreen portrayals of miscegenation and interracial relationships, was a “virtual form of foot-binding for Anna May,” Huang writes. (The only film in which she was kissed by a white man was “Java Head,” a British production.)

Persons: Huang, ”, Anna May, ” Huang, Julian Barnes, ” Wong, Wong, — “ Dietrich, Anna, Mary, Mary despaired, Pearl Organizations: Java Locations: ”, Asian American, Hollywood, British, China, yellowface

☆ How Four Female Philosophers Responded to a Dire Decade
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-02 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE VISIONARIES: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, by Wolfram Eilenberger. If hell is other people, then so, too, is this world. “Around us other people circled, pleasant, odious or ridiculous: They had no eyes with which to observe me. I alone could see.”It’s a quote that Wolfram Eilenberger uses to potent effect in “The Visionaries,” which traces the lives of four philosophers in the tumultuous decade before 1943. Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand: Each addressed the foundational question of the relationship between the self and others, between “I” and “we,” only to arrive at wildly different conclusions.

Persons: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside, Simone de Beauvoir, Otherness, ”, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand, Eilenberger, ” Arendt, Red Simone Organizations: Dark Times, Magicians, Gestapo Locations: France, Rouen, Berlin, Nazi Germany, Paris, Russian, Hollywood and New York

☆ On TV Killer Fungi Are a Horror Plotline. In This Book They’re Real.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( Jennifer Szalai | More About Jennifer Szalai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

BLIGHT: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, by Emily MonossonThere’s a scene in Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise” in which the protagonist reminisces with an ex-wife who was “ultrasensitive to many things,” as she puts it. “Sunlight, air, food, water, sex,” he says. Monosson’s book takes up the other side. Fungal infections of the skin tend not to be life-threatening; it’s when they invade the blood that they can be lethal. Being warmblooded has provided humans and other mammals with a degree of protection: Most fungi prefer lower temperatures; we run too hot.

Persons: Emily Monosson There’s, Don DeLillo’s, ultrasensitive, ”, Emily Monosson’s, “, Louie Schwartzberg’s, Merlin, Candida auris, warmblooded

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