“He” is me. Move over Santa—I too shall be making a list. Multiple lists, in fact. I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about lists recently. Here’s an excerpt from a New Yorker piece (archive link) from last month about lists:

As an archetype, the list is eternal, an indelible “part of the history of art and literature,” as the writer and philosopher Umberto Eco put it, in 2009. Eco, who called lists “the origin of culture,” traced their function to our most basic human desires: “to make infinity comprehensible” and “to create order.”

I like that. It’s very highfalutin, but I like it. Lists have also been top of mind because people were recently sharing some fun ones: The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century via the New York Times and The 9 Games That Shaped Who I Am. Speaking of highfalutin (or at least ...midfalutin), I personally think the naming of that games list is a little much, but whatever you want to call it, it’s still a fun exercise. Here are my lists for those two:

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My plan is to add a page on this site for all sorts of random, low-stakes lists and also to occasionally take one to use as a design exercise—thinking of fun and interesting ways to convey and organize information.

One more excerpt from that New Yorker article that spoke to me:

Ranking and listing the things I cared about was an easy way to think more deeply about them, to clarify myself to myself, to establish a sense of taste and perspective when I was still figuring out what, exactly, I was drawn to. The list was not the be-all, end-all, and it still isn’t, but it can serve as a portal into a more complex, vast world of contemplation and curiosity.

P.S. I also thought about titling this post Lisztomania because of my weakness for puns. Even though I ultimately did not go with that name, the Wikipedia image goes too hard not to use.