Discarded Christmas trees may be lining the streets but the happiest time of year isn’t quite over for Los Angeles. Like anywhere else, last month brought colder weather, bright lights, and looped carols at Starbucks signaling the approaching holidays, with one small addition: an overabundance of manilla Fedex envelopes, the concrete marker of what is collectively known as “screener season.”

Screener season marks the months leading up to award season in January and February, before which industry professionals of all capacities eagerly await their skinny packages, fingers crossed for screeners of the films they didn’t have time to view in theaters, or else wouldn’t mind seeing again. Free copies of the year’s best films aren’t so much a generosity as a publicity stunt: the majority of recipients are also in one of many professional guilds (Writers Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, etc.) of which members can vote in their respective guild’s awards. Which guild one is in determines which screeners he or she ultimately receives, meaning writers turn to their actor or director friends to borrow the screeners that they didn’t receive from their guild and vice versa.

While researching the Oscar process, I turned to friends and former coworkers for insight. For being such a high profile event, a great deal of confusion seems to surround the voting. Even my most knowledgable friends explained at most bits and pieces, scratching their heads at others. I even got an honest “let me get back to you” from one staff writer.

From what I finally gathered, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (comprised of roughly 6,000 members considered to have substantially contributed to the film industry) chooses the Oscar winners to announce at the February ceremony that concludes the year’s awards season. Leading up to the awards, members of the Academy nominate their peers in their subset of the industry: actors and directors obviously, but this includes sound professionals, editors, costume designers, and so on for every Oscar category. Once nominations are announced, the next step has members voting across these categories. Not coincidentally, Oscar contenders are often also winners in the various guild awards.

But more importantly, for me and my non-guild cohorts, screener season is the time to benefit from our more established friends and colleagues: “I barely got to the theater this year but I heard such good things about The Artist. Do you have it?”

Like randomly selected trading cards, screener recipients too compare notes (“You didn’t get Midnight in Paris? I’ll trade you for The Descendants.”) until the majority of local cinephiles are familiar with Best Picture nominees, at the very least. Pretentious as it may be, I am equally motivated to get in the know as I make my way to various house parties and social functions. Much like TV pilot season at the other end of the calendar, partygoers are eager to hear everyoneʼs thoughts concerning the odds in favor or against such-and-such contender.

Advertising dollars poured into these Oscar campaigns must total enough to buy several small islands. Starting before the holidays and lasting long after, Oscar-related billboards litter every other street corner. Somewhere they all feature the bolded phrase “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION,” followed by the filmʼs title and corresponding dramatic freeze frame. The screeners themselves will periodically flash this same three word phrase throughout, no doubt to remind the viewer that this copy is not the real DVD (which she should definitely buy), and it is strictly forbidden to copy, distribute, or share it in any capacity.

But that’s a frail hope, and distributers must know that. And yes, online piracy runs especially rampant during Oscar season, but the suits should also know that, frustration at flashing “For Your Consideration” text — however fleeting — is more than enough reason for most to purchase the screenerʼs real DVD. Monetary considerations aside, screener circulation creates a buzz among filmmakers and aspiring storytellers that fuels continued passion and — hopefully — recognizes the artistry of the year’s best in cinema.

And if I’m being completely honest, there’s also the fact that I get a kick out of casually mentioning to non-industry friends and family that I watch still-in-theater movies on my couch over weekends. It makes me feel less lame for missing Bridesmaids in theaters, but only slightly.

If fifty percent of marriages end in divorce (or sweatpants, as NBC’s Whitney would have us believe), then the vast majority of television shows are the bastard children of their narcissistic, money grubbing parent networks. Too harsh?

Not when you imagine the numbers. To make the math simple, if in a year fifty new pilot scripts are bought (out of maybe a hundred actually decent options), then twenty might be ordered to film. Of those twenty, possibly ten are slated to premiere that fall. By Thanksgiving and certainly Christmas, only one or two will remain. One or two out of a hundred, generously speaking. Established shows can’t rest much easier — plenty have been cut after multiple seasons and a loyal (but not good enough by network standards) audience.

But to a newbie foaming at the bit to get your hands dirty on your first real paid TV gig — even as a production office assistant (a.k.a. a glorified gopher) — no day could be sunnier than when you receive that official studio drive-on badge. You’re excited to be at the hub of the entire production process. Every department goes through your office, making this job the perfect way to learn about scripted television, even if you’d ideally rather work for the writers on a less procedural-heavy show. Not unlike a new relationship, every day on the job for the first couple of weeks yields a miraculous discovery: an endless supply of free snacks and made-to-order lunches (never mind that you’re picking them up); the far-flung and fancy homes of actors, where you deliver freshly printed scripts; and to top it off, you are now a copying, filing, and distributing pro. Do they give awards for that? You’d so win.

Even those ungodly early morning days when you stayed up late marathoning Friday Night Lights (of which multiple colleagues worked on — bonus!) are bearable when you can relay to friends and family that “the Parenthood trailers are right around the corner, and let me tell you, Lauren Graham is just as pretty in person” or “that British actor Mark Sheppard asked for my name to better personalize a request and his accent was adorbable.”

And then the other shoe drops. Silence in the bullpen as the higher ups take the call. Your supervisor tiptoes over to brace her palms and right ear against the ominous, closed door. Moments later, downcast eyes and the shake of a head confirms what everyone already suspects.

The next day a small party with clipboards and formal attire swoops through the office. “We can’t keep meeting like this,” a colleague attempts to joke with these executives in charge of determining the striking process — professional mood killers you’ll privately refer to them as.

With the holidays approaching, it isn’t uncommon to find more than a few unfamiliar faces over the last few days of production. These people are all smiles and undeniably eager, reminding you of your first days on the job, back before the ratings plummeted and it felt like the network was on your side by airing repeats on weekends to hopefully gain a bigger following. You hope the enthusiasm means your absentee colleagues found other work, but a tryptophan coma seems equally understandable.

Various art departments turn in their binders — photographic records of every costume, hair or makeup style for each scene of every episode — with the intention that if the show were ever “un-benched” a new crew would be able to pick up the reluctant pieces. Your formerly newbie self wants to believe this is possible, but you’ve wised up by now and know your meticulous filing and boxing of their contents will only collect dust.

Abandoned offices are stripped bare (leave no tack, paperclip, or pen behind!) for future productions, with the same odds stacked against their success. Coworkers in different departments finish their last days, and you hug goodbye knowing that as part of the production office you’ll still be here for weeks after they are gone, burying the skeletons of a promising and well-but-not-widely liked show.

But it’s not all negative: you have the wrap party to look forward to, where you and all your hard-working collaborators can drink on the network’s dime. It will be an event you’ll pretend doesn’t cost more than you make in a year, and to make up for it, you plan to be suitably intoxicated.

And then, with a glorious hangover, you will experience yet another existential life crisis in which, due to mourning, you can’t help but reference this past job in the second person. It’ll be alright though, because at least there’s unemployment to tide you over until pilot season, when, to ensure a steady paycheck, you intend to only accept work on a sitcom with tired gags and an equally deplorable laugh track — a surefire success.

Photo by Jason Eppink

A few months ago, I stopped reading books.

At night I crawl into bed and thumb my iPhone to life. I watch Star Trek: Voyager on the Netflix app. It’s not a bad show. But somehow it is difficult to compare the weeks it took to complete the seven-season voyage through the Delta Quadrant with Capt. Janeway and the weeks I spent reading my favorite books — thick books by Eliot, Laxness, Dickens, and Pamuk. I know there is an argument that serialized television drama is as complex and soul-nourishing as a good book, but, unfortunately, I don’t care for the shows that are usually held up as modern classics for non-readers: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. I have never seen an episode of these shows. If you want to reach me, say it with alien explosions and busty cyborgs.

Back when I was a reader, it often troubled me when friends claimed that they had no time to read. Was it possible that their lives were so full of wonders that they could not spend five minutes here or there to read? How was it that my life, in comparison, seemed to offer so many chunks of reading time throughout the day? A train ride, a late-night break, and an office wait. Through marriage, babies, graduate schools, and new jobs, I always found time to read for pleasure.

Alas, dear reader, the term “pleasure” doesn’t capture the mental and physical need for books I once had. Without a book nearby I felt bereft, purposeless, barely human. Once upon a time I lived in a far-flung foreign swamp with an extended family of non-readers. I frightened them one night when I stumbled home drunk and ransacked the house for a lost tome. A nice cousin had cleaned the house and of course she, like most people, would never feel a deep compulsion to read all of Dickens. So my book got cast off or put away or tossed to the silent frogs in the swamp. (Yes, they were silent frogs.) I screamed, “Sid, where are my drugs!” in my best, cackling Nancy Spungen voice and I laughed for being woozily hilarious to myself but could find no rest without a page of my book to send me to sleep. Books were a long-time lover whose steady weight I needed to feel in bed before sleep was possible. It turned out that the swamp heathens had used Bleak House to balance a very wobbly chair.

Books can steady a chair and a soul. The former use is not recommended for Kindle.

The last book I read was Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. That was months ago. After one day of non-reading I figured, well, perhaps some nights I can I go to sleep with visions of Neelix the Talaxian annoyer on Voyager, rather than Boethius’ prickly and combative angel of philosophy. What’s the harm? After a week of non-reading, I said to myself that I was busy. So busy. Too busy, really, to start a new book. After three weeks of non-reading, my brain felt a bit numb. I told myself that I was working so hard that I couldn’t engage with a book. I fell, instead, into a steady diet of Netlix, Hulu, Skyrim, and the NFL. Like an addict in the early stages of recovery, I felt a euphoric at being released from the bitter yoke of my addiction. As a non-reader I felt free to happily non-think all day. It was delicious. Almost animal. I craved red meat and raw sex and new episodes of Fringe.

Then I opened Skyrim and saw the following message: “48 hours played. Last played today.”

I must have some free time. Perhaps the “I don’t have time to read” line is just a cover. A way that people excuse themselves from the uncomfortable truth that they do, in fact, have time but that they would rather do something other than read with that time (such as pretending to be a wood-elf). We exalt reading as “good” like exercise and vegetables and so we are always making excuses as to why we avoid it.

After I saw that message I knew that I had taken up residence in the swamp of the non-reader. Here is what life is like in that swamp:

1. The world is flat. Not in the sense of a level economic playing field (an idea I once read about, when I read). No, the world is flat because I see no depth. I make no associations. Life unfolds as a rather dull soap opera with bathroom breaks.
2. I can no longer reason and cannot be trusted to make a decision. My brain is distracted by second-hand sensations. When the slightest complexity arises in my life, I crave the screen world – the simple goal of building a house in Minecraft or the easily dis-entangled one-hour conundrums that beset the Voyager crew.
3. I can no longer relax. My Skyrim character now has a longer to-do list than my red-flagged Outlook task-list at work. My days at work and home consist of quests and side-quests leading to more quests and side-quests. I have lost the main narrative.
4. I am empty, but not in a monkish way. I am just kind of dumb. Also, without the pleasing empathy that comes from engaging with new ideas, places, and characters, I am afraid of foreigners and easily manipulated by politicians and advertisements.
5. I have the attention span of cocaine-addled four-year old. My mind is an ’80s Scorsese montage on fast-forward. It’s all sound and fury signifying – are you kidding me? Star Wars in 3D? WTF?

My iPhone has uploaded my fiery libido into the cloud, where it is currently carousing with a Beyoncé video. I crave that cloud. The endless gamboling streams of deathless entertainment… Heaven 2.0. Oh, to be formless, streamed, and exciting. To float above the earth in multiple formats. To be downloaded occasionally into the pockets of a soma-hazed populace. To walk a moment upon the warming globe and then ride in the aether of entertainment. Finding a thrill. A thrill. A thrill and no thought. And another thrill. And no thought.

An inner voice vibrates in the addled idle of my non-reading life. Somehow the words wormed through centuries to arrive upon a still-firing synapse and spin these lines:

What win I, if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?
Or sells eternity to get a toy?

In conclusion: I started reading books again.

Photo by Kim Mason

Driving south from Seattle, the quality of radio programming drops about 15 minutes past Olympia. On a recent trip down to Portland, as soon as I hit this patch of poor airspace I asked my girlfriend to put on some music. She flipped to the music section of my brand new iPhone, only to find that I had not yet loaded a single song. We spent the rest of the drive suffering static-y, intermittent bursts of Top 40 radio.

Complaining about not having a hand-picked indie playlist to soundtrack a weekend in Portlandia may sound like fodder for White Whine. But I’d like to think it reveals a deeper fact: because this was the year my music library moved to the cloud, my listening habits — and my relationship to music — have changed in ways more unexpected and significant than any time since the arrival of Napster.

Up until this year, the latest paradigm of music ownership and consumption was based largely on iTunes. On a macro level, the program’s infrastructure for selling songs (both in album form and à la carte) had been gaining steam, with iTunes commanding the single largest market share of music sales in the US, at over 26%. On a micro level, it had become so pervasive that its users developed idiosyncratic listening habits and quirky relationships with their playlists, song counts, and genre categories. These facts suggest iTunes users feel a sense of ownership over their music libraries. Even if mp3s are less concrete than a tape or CD, each one is still roughly tangible — three- or four-megabyte clumps of data acting as little plots of real estate, forming an entire world of music, personally built and tended to represent each individual library owner.

But with the advent of streaming content, listening habits and the relationships to music they imply are changing. Streaming “radio” sites like Pandora popularized the practice of listening to semi-random streams of music without actually downloading any files. The extremely popular use of YouTube as a repository of singles saw a dovetailing of people’s wish to listen to songs individually, and to have them for free. Now platforms like Spotify and Rdio are trying to find money in these trends, by competing for users who will pay for subscriptions that allow streaming access to vast online libraries. (So far, Spotify is winning handily).

Until 2011, I was largely detached from these trends. An OCD approach to managing my iTunes song counts, years of easy access to albums in my college radio station’s music library, and an idealistic allegiance to the idea thats albums should be experienced as complete works of art all meant that I rarely bought single songs during the 99 cent-per-song era. Yet I acquired a sense of authorship over the music collection I had crafted and maintained.

But ever since getting a subscription to Rdio, things have changed in some interesting ways. First, now that I don’t feel compelled to own the music I like, I also don’t feel compelled to steal it. There is no temptation to download an album on Megaupload if it can be just as easily found (with a friendlier interface, better file quality, and accompanying cover art) on Rdio. While there has been criticism of the streaming platforms for the small amount artists actually get paid per song played, I’m in the camp that believes that for artists, limited exposure for cheap must be more beneficial than total exposure for nothing.

The other major implication of my switch to streaming is that listening to music has become a far more social experience. Even with just four friends in my Rdio network, the sense of shared discovery and enjoyment has been greater than on any other listening platform I’ve ever known. I experience a twinge of pleasure whenever an album I added to my collection then gets added by a friend. Some days I feel like a tastemaker (when I get props for adding Daptone Records’ latest afro-funk and soul revival compilation), other days a kindred spirit (who knew I was the only one feeling the latest gloomy ambience from Fennesz + Sakamoto?). I also enjoy reading the comments of other Rdio users, who are generally a troll-free group who show a level of knowledge and adoration for music I haven’t seen since the salad days of Soulseek.

It’s been months since that trip to Portland, and I still haven’t loaded a single song onto my iPhone. Save for one new album, my iTunes library lies dormant. My Rdio collection grows every day. Allow me to suggest a koan for the digital age: if an exquisitely crafted music library spins on a hard drive and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Photo by Karin Dalziel

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

By reputation, The Art of Fielding is this year’s Freedom. It’s a much-buzzed about (Harbach’s Vanity Fair piece nearly rivals Franzen’s TIME cover) lengthy, deeply American literary work. But as a novel, Fielding is Freedom‘s polar opposite. While Franzen’s tome embraced messiness — of ambiguous politics and family drama — Chad Harbach’s debut is a perfectly elliptical story, methodically paced and elegantly told.

Fielding sets its scenes on the campus of Westish College, a fictitious liberal arts school in the Midwest, where the lives of five people become complicated by a single baseball thrown horribly off course. Harbach writes with the confidence and patience of a seasoned novelist. The Art of Fielding has the feel of a classic novel, inviting you not just to read but to settle into it. — Kevin

The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper by Kate Ascher

Sometimes, the right book reaches you at the right time. For the last nine months or so, a construction crew has been building a low-rise next to my office, so I’ve been able to watch the whole thing from start to its current state of partial completion (they’re pouring concrete on the eighth floor now).

No surprise, then, that one of the books that I enjoyed the most this year was The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper. It’s a visually arresting tour of every aspect of skyscrapers, from foundation to penthouse, re-bar to glass curtain wall, architectural history to the philosophy of space layout.

As The Heights points out, we spend about ninety percent of our time indoors, many of us in skyscrapers old and new—so you don’t have to be a technology or architecture buff to find something interesting in the book. — Assistant Editor Darryl Campbell

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler & Maira Kalman

Why We Broke Up takes the form of long letter, written by the recently heartbroken Min and addressed to her first love, Ed. She’s returning a box of sentimental tokens, each summoning a bittersweet memory of their relationship. Daniel Handler (best known as Lemony Snicket) has imagined Min and Ed broadly enough to be relatable, yet specific enough to feel like people of their own. Their courtship reads like the dream; the heartbreak feels devastating and inevitable. To make the book even more precious, each item in Min’s box is wonderfully illustrated by Maira Kalman (The Pursuit of Happiness). Every young adult book is hankering to be a crossover hit, but in a year flooded by even more dystopian Hunger Games wannabes than the last, Why We Broke Up reaffirms why teen fiction is worth reading as an adult. — Kevin

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

In 2009’s The Magicians Lev Grossman wanted to show that discovering the existence of magic, a la Harry Potter, would not suddenly solve all of life’s problems. In fact, he focused so much on ensuring that his angsty teenage main character, Quentin Coldwater, learned this lesson that he forgot to make the book fun.

He didn’t make the same mistake twice. In this year’s follow-up, The Magician King, Grossman gives his magic users cool and exciting lives, and as if by some sorcery of prose, those properties transfer to the book itself. In this installment, Quentin sets off on a grand adventure, as he storms castles, chats up dragons, confronts gods, and sails to the end of the world. His narrative burden is lightened too, as the backstory of Julia, a minor character in The Magicians, takes up half the book. Her sections offer a much needed change of perspective, serving as a dark and desperate foil to Quentin’s comparatively lighthearted journey.

To its credit, The Magician King preaches no simple lessons. But this time around, the magic of Grossman’s world and the magicians who inhabit it are, more than anything, just plain interesting. And that’s how it should be. — Editor Nick Martens

Big Questions by Anders Berkhus Nilsen

Big Questions is a 600-page comic about finches who, among other things, ask a lot of existential questions. Anders Berkhus Nilsen has been working on the darkly funny Big Questions since 1999, which has appeared in part as various mini-comics. The illustrations are decidedly inconsistent, but there’s a surprisingly uniform vision throughout the book. Between the parallel story lines that involve a plane crash, a bomb, a bird lost underground, and a bullying pack of crows, there’s a sweeping tale that confronts loneliness, survival, and the meaning of life. It’s impressive how cohesive the book is, but maybe the ten years Nilsen spent trying to answer those big questions just made them all the more resonant. — Kevin

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking by Nathan Myrhvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet

Innovation is slow in the world of cookbooks. Every year, you can count on the usual crop of celebrity chef cookbooks (Martha Stewart, Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse, and someone from Top Chef), household references (Williams-Sonoma, Betty Crocker, America’s Test Kitchen), and contributions from the hot new restaurants of the year. Most of these will be pretty good cookbooks, but won’t offer much new.

Not so for Modernist Cuisine, the Plexiglas-encased, six-volume, 50-pound monster. Yes, a lot of the coverage has focused on its more ridiculous recommendations, of which there are many — the book recommends a $2,500 rotary evaporator to help you concentrate fruit juice, without a trace of irony, for instance. But Modernist Cuisine’s rigorous look at the science behind “traditional” cooking, from wok-frying to the RonCo Rotisserie Oven, will teach you a lot about topics you thought you knew about already. It’s impossible to go even ten pages without re-thinking your culinary convictions.

In short, this is no mere catalog of food trends. Even if you don’t have $650 to blow on a cookbook, it’s a cookbook that’s worth browsing — which might involve no more than a trip to your nearest college library. — Darryl

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips

With The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips has crafted a cleverly structured novel that takes place within the introduction to a fake Shakespearian play. The story is told by a fictionalized version of the author, whose father has uncovered an unpublished work by the Bard. But when Phillips starts to question the play’s authenticity, it tangles up ideas about truth, honesty, and the inherent subjectivity of written language. Beneath the wit and self-winking, The Tragedy of Arthur is an affecting family drama about a complicated father-son relationship with echoes of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. — Kevin

We the Animals by Justin Torres

We the Animals might be best enjoyed in a single sitting. Torres’s prose is swift, fierce, and often lyrical. The book opens with narrator at age 7, who speaks in the plural “we” alongside his brothers Manny and Joel. They’re inseparable, and together they witness frustrations of their working-class parents. But this isn’t simply a story about an abusive father or a broken home (though at times both appear to be true). Through the domestic chaos, Torres illuminates moments of happiness, fear, and loss in a loving and sometimes dangerous household. Over the final chapters, the “we” shifts to “I,” marking a transformation to adulthood. Torres has done an impressive thing with We the Animals: he’s reinvented the coming-of-age story. — Kevin

Orientation: And Other Stories by Daniel Orozco

Writers love to explore friendship, domesticity, and love, but the workplace is still relatively virgin territory. At worst, office fiction insists on the utter soullessness of working life, and in that respect feels like warmed-over Marxism (“in this estrangement… the proletariat feels annihilated”). But this year, there were a few notable books that broke out of the confines of soft political theory, including David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar, a collection of stories edited by Richard Ford.

For me, the standout was Orientation by Daniel Orozco. Each short story in this collection comments on one aspect of involuntary association, from the resentment of bodyguards assigned to an ex-Central American dictator to the psychosis lurking underneath the placid surface of professionalism (whether it’s played for laughs, as in the title story, or used to brutal effect, in “I Run Every Day”). Most of all, Orozco isn’t obsessed with the complaints of the white professional class: he covers a much broader swath of human experience. — Darryl

Supergods by Grant Morrison

It takes a lot of talent to make Superman interesting. He’s a bland superhero without any human weakness. But, as Grant Morrison identifies in Supergods, it’s what Superman says about us that makes him endlessly fascinating. Superhero mythologies are a reflection of the eras from which they were born (Superman, for example, was a post-Great Depression hero, built to symbolize the strength of blue-collar individualism). And perhaps nobody is more qualified to give a full history of superheroes than Grant Morrison, considered by many to be the great superhero storyteller of modern comics (read All Star Superman and you’ll understand why). I didn’t love the autobiographical rambling toward the end of the book, but overall, Supergods is a tremendous 20th-century history of comics, superheroes, and most importantly, the human race. It’s like if the Superman monologue from Kill Bill Vol. 2 was a 400-page book. — Kevin

Photos taken at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.

When The New Girl premiered, I went on and on about how much I disliked Zooey Deschanel. Her character was supposed to be ugly, which felt dishonest; her twee-ness was cloying, even in 20-minute doses. I told everyone to watch The New Girl just so they could understand what I was complaining about. But it turns out my indignation toward Zooey Deschanel had more to do with me than her.

Let’s start with the moment I think Zooey Deschanel became overexposed: (500) Days of Summer, a film that people seem to love or hate. (500) Days has a lot of things I like — a playfully unconventional structure, a quirky but unpretentious tone, aspirations to be a modern Annie Hall — but it didn’t really work for me. As much as I enjoyed Joseph Gordon-Levitt beaming earnestly for two hours, I loathed the sight of Zooey Deschanel, who in turn, offered nothing by staring back blankly with her big blue eyes. Her character was a non-character, devoid of personality or charm. She instead represented the hipster ideal of the perfect woman, meaning she had sharp bangs and listened to the Smiths. A New York Magazine profile called her the “Pinup of Williamsburg,” but she comes across more like a mannequin posed in the window of an Urban Outfitters. Or, as Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown put it, “a woman who only plays hollow, personality-free fantasy sex objects, and is your imaginary girlfriend.” And seriously, is it hard to meet someone who likes the Smiths?

Since that film, Zooey’s faux indie chic has multiplied exponentially. She married Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie; her musical side project with M. Ward, She & Him, hit mainstream radio; she started a mega-popular Tumblr called HelloGiggles, which looks like Pinterest if it was run by CollegeHumor; and of course, there’s The New Girl, where Zooey plays that same character from (500) Days with an added element of what FOX advertised as “adorkable.”

Even though I couldn’t stand the pilot for The New Girl, I kept watching it, week after week. And since I had repeatedly derided the show, I watched every new episode in secret.

A coworker asked me to articulate what I didn’t like about Zooey Deschanel. Was it because she was inauthentic? Bad at acting? Had a shitty blog? When I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a good answer.

“You know,” this coworker said, “she seems like the kind of girl you’d like.”

This was terrifying and true. In fact, everything that I hated about (500) Days of Summer was deeply relatable. I’ve liked girls with bangs, and I’ve certainly liked girls who were into bands far less obscure than the Smiths. But what do those things tell you about a person? Most likely nothing, other than that my attraction to Zooey means I am shallower than I thought, or just as shallow as Hollywood assumes I am.

Is her indie personality authentic or just the product of deliberate marketing to suckers like me? Does it even matter? I decided I’d hated Zooey to conceal the fact that I am in love with the adorkable.

I recently started a new blog, with our designer and friend David Cole, called On Tap, where we write about good games for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. David was recently tasked with ensuring the survival of a tiny human being, so I took the duties of writing up our official best of the year list.

Game of the Year

Bumpy Road (Universal)

At first, Bumpy Road seems like a simple game. Even though its central (and only) mechanic is completely novel, it’s still easy to explain. A cartoony couple drives their car on a road that looks like xylophone keys. Touch anywhere on the screen, and a bump forms in the road. You then use this bump to push the car around, like a wave pushes a surfer.

That’s it, that’s the game. You use one finger to do one thing.

But what makes Bumpy Road special is how great that one thing feels. You can hold the car gingerly at the crest of the bump to collect high tokens, you can tap below the car to pop it into the air, or you can run your finger across the screen to zip the car forward. You can also rock the car back and forth, in place, just because it’s fun. The game is structured like an infinite runner, where you score points for going far, but Bumpy Road’s core mechanic would be a joy to use in a vacuum. No other iOS game captures the spirit of “play” better.

Of course, Bumpy Road has many other lovely qualities. Its flat, French-flavored style is adorable, like a 2D Ratatouille. The game features several modes that curb monotony, and developer Simogo has updated it dutifully since its release. It even presents a heartbreaking story as a slide show, frames of which you earn by playing the game (a better incentive, surely, than “achievements”). Bumpy Road is a triumph of creativity and care, built on a foundation of pure, joyful gameplay. It is surely one of the year’s best games, on Apple’s platform or any other.

Top Ten

English Country Tune (Universal)

English Country Tune is a puzzle game that explores the concept of pushing things around to an obsessive extreme. It makes your brain twist around in three dimensions so radically that you’ll beg for the relief of Portal.

Forget-Me-Not (Universal)

In a nut, it’s Pac-Man plus shooting in randomly generated levels. But those elements combine into something superlative — a tense, strategic, and unique game designed with modern thought and retro philosophy. An absolute gem.

Fractal (iPad)

Fractal is like a puzzle game from the future. It’s perplexing and abstract at first, but once you truly learn its core mechanic — pushing groups of hexagonal tiles into groups — you’ll feel like some sort of genius wizard.

The Last Rocket (Universal)

The Last Rocket brings old-school game design to a brand new platform and loses nothing in translation. It’s a classic puzzle platformer with pitch-perfect pixel art and totally natural touch screen controls. An impressive feat.

Monsters Ate My Condo (Universal)

Monsters Ate My Condo never lets you feel in control. As you try to play a simple but compelling puzzle game with a stack of “condos,” monsters shake it, stomp around, eat stuff, activate special powers, and cause general mayhem. In other words, Monsters Ate My Condo is never not exciting.

Milpa (Universal)

Milpa‘s theme of Mesoamerican agriculture is as refreshingly original as it is totally bizarre, but underneath the game is simple. It’s a match-three puzzler where you spin your crops on a pivoting arm to swap them around. Okay, that might still sound weird, but once you wrap your head around it, the game is tremendous fun.

Quarrel Deluxe (Universal)

Quarrel Deluxe is Risk plus Scrabble, except ten times faster. Yes, it’s as awesome as it sounds; don’t let the childish and slightly obstructive presentation fool you.

SpellTower (Universal)

SpellTower combines Boggle’s word finding with a classic rising-blocks puzzle game. Its clean but information-rich visual design and multitude of smart details make this the best word game on iOS to date.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (Universal)

Sworcery looks like nothing else ever made; its lush, detailed pixel art recalls the past but eschews nostalgia, creating a setting layered with mood and mystery. Add in Jim Guthrie’s soundtrack, surely among the best music created for any game, and the result is an unearthly and deeply immersive atmosphere.

By Nicolas Sassoon

The contemporary art world, for all its cultural daring, is pretty conservative. An entrenched crew of aging tastemakers, artists, curators, and dealers hold on until they fade completely out of relevancy (watch as New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl marvels in bemused incomprehension at Ryan Trecartin in a review from this year). There’s a strict hierarchy of which collector is allowed to buy which painting from which gallery, clear from art-fair deal-making and buyer waiting lists even for young guns like Jacob Kassay. Galleries often lack strong online presences, preferring secrecy to transparency. Artworks are shipped in giant crates to be installed by hand. Art is a resolutely physical business in an increasingly paperless world — which is why it’s surprising that in 2011 the art world finally began to openly embrace the possibilities of the internet.

It’s long been a semi-shameful public admission for galleries that collectors often buy works without seeing them in person, making their decisions only on a jpeg attached to an email. But last February, the VIP Art Fair, helmed by the highly regarded New York City James Cohan Gallery, made buying via jpeg the norm. As in a physical commercial fair, galleries bought “booths” in the VIP Art Fair, paying a premium for a pristinely designed web-based selling spaces and access to attendees. Technological flaws made the first VIP fair a failure in the eyes of participating galleries, but some sales were made, and the fair will relaunch February 2012.

This year, Art.sy, a New York-based startup backed by such art-world heavy hitters as dealer Larry Gagosian and patron Dasha Zhukova that claims to be the “Pandora of the art world,” will analyze users’ taste in art and show them other works and artists that they might like — a tempting prospect for buyers and sellers alike. A series of parties and demonstrations turned the not-yet-public technology into a word-of-mouth sensation.

It’s not just commercial operations getting in on the game, either — 2011 is also the year that the term “social media art” went viral. Artists like Man Bartlett, who uses social networks like Twitter and Facebook to create performances, and An Xiao, who has turned her online presence into a kind of communication-based total artwork, hit the mainstream with countless blog posts, tweets, and a major feature in ARTnews magazine. Bartlett also participated in Creative Time Tweets, an ongoing series of Twitter-based performances commissioned by the venerable New York City art non-profit Creative Time.

Social media art’s success builds on the earlier presence of internet art, which sees artists engaging with online culture to make work that plays with the internet as a platform, remixes memes, and plumbs the depths of web design aesthetics. Internet art also had a good year. The international presence of internet art collectives F.A.T. Labs and Computers Club grew, while museums, galleries, and online media took notice.

Some added bullet points in the Year of Art Online: The Metropolitan showed off the knowledge and tastes of its world-class staff in a series of curated online videos called “Connections.” The Museum of Modern Art launched a comprehensive site redesign while the Walker Art Center’s own redesign was heralded as a huge step forward for art institutions, turning the museum website into something more blog than brochure. Internet artists Ole Fach and Kim Asendorf’s GIF Market got buyers to pay for ownership of animations publicly hosted on the internet, free for anyone to download. Tumblr became huge as a venue for artists to publish and share their work. Facebook even banned users for posting 19th-century painter Gustave Courbet’s titillating Origin of the World on their profiles — the admittedly explicit image constituted pornography, the company determined. On the other side of the spectrum, Tumblr has become the go-to platform for visual art blogging with its emphasis on big pictures and allowance of nudity, from Courbet to your favorite black-and-white hipster erotica blogger.

This year, conquering the internet, next year, actually making a living at it? The chief problem art online still faces after 2011 is how to get people to actually pay for it on a sustainable scale, something physical galleries are still far and away the best at.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Mirror Traffic

This record makes me feel old. I get inexplicably angry that people don’t seem to like it more. “What’s wrong with these kids,” I think. “Don’t they realize that no one else makes music like this?” I can’t understand why Pavement is canonized while Mirror Traffic, which is just as good as Terror Twilight or Wowee Zowee, passes mostly unnoticed through the culture.

Mirror Traffic is Malkmus’s best post-Pavement record. It shows him at his most energetic, on “Senator,” most reflective, on “No One Is (As I Are Be)”, and everywhere in between. His guitar work is sharp and eclectic, ranging from dreamy and melodic on “Asking Price” to fuzzy and punkish on “Tune Grief.” And his lyrics are as strange and funny as ever. “Forever 28″ contains some of his finest lines to date, as he sings, “such a buzzkill/yes I am/I kill momentum/when I can/there’s no parade I/cannot rain on with my poison eyes.” If you claim to like Pavement but can’t get into Mirror Traffic, well, then I have no idea what’s going on in your head.

Alright, glad I got that off my chest. Wait, one more thing: Malkmus is great in concert. Like, really, really good. That’s all. Now get off my lawn and go appreciate this album more. — Editor Nick Martens

Beyoncé – 4

Adele’s “Someone Like You” may be the ballad of the year (and deservedly so). But often over looked has been “1+1,” the first song on Beyoncé’s 4. It shows the same kind of tenderness as Adele’s single, but with a dimension of wisdom that reveals a new maturity in Beyoncé’s songwriting. 4 is a move from arena-pleasing pop to tempo-relaxed R&B that exhibits shades of ‘70s/‘80s soul. There’s no shortage of Beyonce flexing her vocal muscle throughout the album, but the best moments cut back on the instrumentation and production to find the singer at her most vulnerable. 4 is likely Beyoncé’s least accessible album to date, but patient listeners may find that a singer more than 21-years-old has more worthwhile things to express. — Editor Kevin Nguyen

Destroyer – Kaputt

Dan Bejar’s latest (and perhaps final?) record under the Destroyer moniker continues the band’s trope of cramming self-referential lyrics and liberal use of the syllables “la”, “dee”, and “dum” into miniature opuses of inscrutable free-association. What sets this album apart from the rest of the Destroyer catalogue is the soundscape that serves as the palette for Bejar’s mad loquacity. In a word, Kaputt is jazzy. Well, actually, smooth-jazzy. In a year where M83 and Bon Iver used the saxophone to add un-ironic flourishes to albums otherwise unconnected to such a suave sound, Destroyer embraces the instrument’s inherently swanky mood, and compliments it with subtle dashes of electronic, ambient, and new wave. What results is a mellow 50-minute glide, asking little of the listener to mellow out, slink into the the nearest lounge chair or backseat of a car driving at midnight, and open up to the suggestive embrace of the sax. — Contributing Writer Daniel Adler

Atlas Sound – Parallax

Bradford Cox’s output over the past five years reminds me of the Tim Tebow’s performance since week seven of the 2011 NFL season. Both do improbable things on such a consistent basis that their results no longer seem surprising, even though they should. Although perhaps Cox is more like the Broncos’ defense, since he’s actually talented.

Parallax is Cox’s sixth excellent album since 2007, which is simply ridiculous. And he does it without repeating himself. Parallax retains some of Cox’s signature dreamy haze, but also introduces a bright, acoustic-guitar-driven optimism to the mixture. Such a tonal shift might be a concern with a less skilled artist, but “Mona Lisa,” probably Cox’s sunniest song to date, puts those worries to rest in about twenty seconds.

I could gawk in disbelief at how someone could be so prolific and so good, but at this point I think it’s better not to question it. Bradford Cox releasing a new album full of beautiful music is my favorite annual tradition. — Nick

Eleanor Friedberger – Last Summer

I always assumed that the talented half of the brother-sister duo the Fiery Furnaces was Matt Friedberger, whose experimental and technical musicianship seemed to be the backbone of the band’s jerky prog pop. But it turns out I’ve always liked Eleanor more. Matt is in the midst of releasing eight solo LPs, each featuring a different instrument, that are successively harder to listen to. Meanwhile, Eleanor took the opposite approach with Last Summer, a nostalgic, singer-songwriter-y album composed of simple melodies, guitar and piano, and Eleanor’s colorful vocals. She comes across as flighty but endearing. “My Mistakes” finds Friedberger playfully stuffing as many syllables as she can into each line; In “Scenes from Bensonhurst,” she sings about compulsively checking her email. Last Summer may seem less ambitious than a Fiery Furnaces album, but it retains the same kind of precision and methodical musicianship. It’s just a lot warmer, and a lot more relaxed. — Kevin

Braids – Native Speaker

Watching Braids play “Lemonade” live is one of those concert experiences I’ll never forget. My attention perked up when I heard its fluttering opening notes, and then I just stood there, slack-jawed, enraptured, with shivers exploding through my body as the song poured over me. When it was over, I felt dazed.

Native Speaker opens with that track, followed by six other less ambitious songs, which mostly expand on concepts from “Lemonade.” That might not sound like a strong endorsement, but this is a young band’s first real effort. Besides, the inverted pyramid structure makes the album fantastic to play on repeat. You get to hear the song you’re most excited about first, followed by a calmer reflective period, and then, hey, there’s that amazing song again.

There may have been better crafted albums this year, but few reach a higher high, and none show more promise. — Nick

M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Anthony Gonzalez, the Frenchman behind M83, says that his albums serve as the soundtrack to imaginary movies. There’s a cinematic arc to the band’s impressively consistent double album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which continues M83’s shift from shoegazer electronics to sweeping ‘80s synths. Hurry Up brings to mind romantic neon-lit cityscapes and a fondness for slushy teenage angst.

Only M83 can close out a song with an un-ironic sax solo, as on “Midnight City,” the album’s first single and one of the year’s best songs. Even while doing his best David Gahan impression, Gonzalez is unabashedly sentimental. Maybe that’s why Hurry Up sounds fresh even though it’s deliberately nostalgic. So many albums, movies, and books today are self-consciously winking to themselves; M83 is boldly earnest and emotional. More than any other album this year, Hurry Up makes you remember that time in your life when you weren’t afraid to feel that way. — Kevin

The Field – Looping State of Mind

Alex Willner, who records as The Field, doesn’t do intros. He drops you right in the middle of one of his hypnotic electronic loops and tells you to get used to it. If you like what you hear, then you’re in luck, because you’re going to get a whole lot more of it.

As musician (and Bureau interviewee) Robert Ashely tweeted, “The thing about great repetitive music: If you can hear a loop 400 times in a song without getting bored, you can hear that song 400 times.” Looping State of Mind pulls off this trick perfectly. Willner’s loops somehow balance between propulsive and soothing, making it perfect background music for anything that requires an active mind.

But the album is more than just a soundtrack for work. When you give it your focus, you notice the level of craft present in every second of Willner’s music. Barely perceptible notes emerge from the background, sounds stutter in precise patterns, and emotional arcs reveal themselves. The energy of the album is so pure that it feels effortless, but the reality is just the opposite. — Nick

Shabazz Palaces – Black Up

In 2009, when Seattle-based duo Shabazz Palaces released its first two EPs, an indie hip-hop savvy friend of mine expressed disappointment in the group’s work. His grievance was that their mystical, tribal image belied the content of their lyrics, some of which centered around the standard hip-hop guns/girls/tough guy fare. Fast-forward to 2011 and the release of their full length Black Up and sure, frontman Palaceer Lazaro (neé Ishmael Butler) still talks tough and praises the female form. But I’d argue the rhymes are compelling, as they come cloaked in an unconventional mixture of metaphysical awe, mellow-as-hell carousal, and subtle wavering between existential fear and supreme self-assurance. And the backing sounds? Totally engaging. Songs swerve mid-track between echoey funk, industrial sci-fi electronics, and minimalist yet muscular beats. Black Up is the rare hip-hop album that’s as fitting for head-nodding as it is for spacing out. -Daniel

tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l

This album shares structural characteristics with Destroyer’s Kaputt, but the sound of the music couldn’t be any more different. While Kaputt charms with steady, murmuring seduction, w h o k i l l hits with a visceral and eclectic barrage of kitchen-sink sounds and cultural criticism. Like the work of Destroyer, w h o k i l l feels driven by a singular vision – in this case, the gaze of tUnE-yArDs’ (so hard to type!) frontwoman Merrill Garbus, who looks askance at the ways we treat our bodies, lovers, and countries. Looping, sampling, distortion, scat-rapping, cooing, and even some honest to god balladeering jostle amongst the crammed real estate of this album’s brief runtime. There’s even a fair amount of saxophone, but here it’s used in the service of afro-funk breakdowns and kaleidoscopic spasms. These sounds are slapped together without regard for anything as hierarchical as stylistic consistency within an album or even a single song. That would betray the feeling I think Garbus is trying to portray – namely, that we live in a beautiful yet flawed world populated by beautiful yet flawed people, all perched on the verge of a freakout – or perhaps we’re already in its midst. — Daniel

All photos taken Everyday Music in Seattle.

In 2011, millions of people decided they’d rather spend time in bleak, cold, war-torn, socially backwards fantasy worlds than their own.

HBO’s Game of Thrones told us “winter is coming,” odd for a show that debuted in the spring. But in the the world of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of novels on which the show is based, seasons can last many years, and it certainly feels like our own world has been stuck in a kind of winter for some time. Perhaps it’s better to escape to a place where the snows have yet to descend from the north than to remain where the blizzards have already blown in.

Now, escapism comes in many shades, and much of what gets labeled with the term is hardly so. Harry Potter retains our reality, offering only a hidden facet for a chosen few. World of Warcraft and other consuming social games rely on interactions with real human beings. Both distract from this plane of existence, but never truly abandon it. A television show, which occupies an hour a week and invites social viewing, can’t offer real escapism either. But a series of thousand-plus page novels surely can.

The Game of Thrones show not only served as prelude for this summer’s release of the hotly anticipated A Dance with Dragons, the fifth novel in the series, but it also enticed droves of viewers (me included) to start reading the books from the beginning. The fantasy epic is a phenomenon, giving rise to memes, theories, forums, and fan fiction. The fanbase maintains a tense relationship with its author, hoping he won’t kill off a favorite character or die himself before he can finish the series.

But what most makes Ice and Fire remarkable is the vastness and depth of its setting. Each book rivals the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in page count, and since narration occurs through the eyes of roughly ten characters per installment, readers get a grand tour of the continent of Westeros and the lands beyond. Each character explores a different aspect of Martin’s world, submerging readers in as much of its culture and history as possible while still advancing the plot.

They reveal an image of a grim and largely hopeless place. Thousands die at the behest of lords who care less for their subjects than for titles. The honorable lose everything while the devious prevail. Magic exists, but causes more suffering than wonder. For all its dragons and zombies, Martin’s world operates mostly like our own.

And that only serves to strengthen the illusion; once you suspend your belief to the standard degree for fantasy, Martin asks for little more. Reading Ice and Fire is an intensely isolating experience because it’s so easy to lose yourself in the setting. During my reading, when I could pull myself away from the actual text, I found myself thinking about the books constantly. I tried to discern the motives of duplicitous characters, untangle the web of alliances between noble houses, decipher the significance of historical events, and predict what might happen next. I got mad when I couldn’t find good maps of the eastern continent. The series’ huge and energetic online community shows I’m not alone. Martin’s imagination may be a dark place to reside, but it doesn’t matter: these books invite total immersion. And that, apparently, is exactly what people want from their fantasy.

In its first weekend of release, Bethesda Softworks’ role-playing videogame Skyrim sold seven times as many copies as its predecessor . Its visual similarity to HBO’s Game of Thrones is striking, as both emphasize a cold, snowy, mountainous north. But the more salient connection here is the elaborate level of detail in the province of Skyrim, where the game takes place.

Players can follow a main quest line, but Skyrim is at its strongest when you simply venture off in a random direction and let the game surprise you. It surely will: its world is dense with towns, dungeons, camps, and ruins, all full of characters, quests, and treasures. Accounts of such adventures proliferate online, like a fight with a dragon that concludes with, “so awesome,” or an encounter with Artificial Intelligence that illicits a “ho lee shit.”

The scale and complexity of the Skyrim province befits a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, where thousands of players inhabit the same world at once. But massive though it is, Skyrim is offline and single-player. Every instance of the game’s world is meant for one person only. That’s why players feel such a sense of ownership over their charcter’s actions, to the point where they write about their character the same way they would their real life. All these factors — the free-form adventuring, the density of content, and the solipsistic setting — make Skyrim extremely absorbing. Players sink dozens of hours a week and hundreds of hours total into the game, and still leave stones unturned.

The worlds of A Song of Ice and Fire and Skyrim are rich, vivid, expansive, and solitary. They offer whole new realities to explore for hour after countless hour, but only alone. But such is the price of true escapism. When our reality loses its appeal, all of it must be left behind to find a new one.