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The Best of 2022: Part I - by Jared Young - Tolstoyan

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The ancient human tradition of list-making, ranking, and trying to make sense of everything that ever was.

“There is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language.” —Michel Foucault —when Ramses IX was running the show in Ancient Egypt, it was decided that all the knowledge of the universe should be written down. For posterity, for promotion (or maybe a little of both). The result was a papyrus document known as the Onomasticon of Amenopĕ, which was a list of 610 unique things, all separated into categories and ranked, that was meant to…

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