The Books, Videos, Movies, and TV Shows That Changed Me Last Year

Evan is still off hiking in the wilds of New Zealand, and he wrote this piece before embarking on his trip. It’s a fitting companion to both his accountability scoring for his 2023 predictions and his exhortation for builders to acquire cultural taste. Let us know what pieces of culture you loved last year and/or what you’re planning to consume this year in the comments. –Kate

As 2023 closed out, I argued, “The problem you solve for customers is increasingly one they can’t even articulate for themselves. The ones that are easy to understand have already been built and funded over the last 20 years. Building something of true excellence will require a hungrier engagement with the world—and that will have to start with developing superior taste.”

One of the best ways to develop great taste is to, well, taste stuff. Engaging with a variety of media, cultural artifacts, and content helps you develop a sense for quality. This aesthetic muscle allows builders to engage with their customers in a fundamentally more empathetic way. 

The natural next question is with what content to start. What is excellent, and why? 

2023 was one of my favorite years for content ever. There were so many films, books, and videos that meaningfully affected me. So I examined my databases where I track all the TV, movies, and books that I consumed last year and pulled out the ones that changed me as a person. I evaluated my selections on three criteria:

1. Recall: You know how your teenage crush consumed you? Every little thing would make you think of them and sigh longingly? The best content does that, too. It worms into your brain and pops up over and over again, long after you first watched or read it. I wanted to optimize for content that I couldn’t quite keep tucked away in the back of my mind. 
2. Before-and-after factor: This list focuses on content that instigated a distinct change in my personal life or creative practice. It is, admittedly, an imperfect measure, as I actually think that much of the value of consuming quality is an overall intellectual and spiritual uplift, but these works made an impact.
3. (Mostly) fiction: I have and will continue to review non-fiction work for readers. Last year I particularly enjoyed McKay Coppins’s Mitt Romney biography; Ben Smith’s Traffic, which profiled Buzzfeed and Gawker; Make Something Wonderful, published by the Steve Jobs Archive; and Rick Rubin’s guide to creativity. But I already wrote tens of thousands of words of analysis on these books! Go read those if you want nonfiction. The point of this list is to expand your horizons, not just recommend the same stuff as every other tech publication.