1) Gun rights advocates should probably stop arguing that more handguns would have a preventative effect. The data are not on their side. The American Journal for Public Health released a UPENN study in a late 2009—unique in that it explored a gun-holder’s safety and/or risk at the time of a shooting—that found “people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.”

2) Representative Giffords was shot while engaging in an event that gets close to the ideal of democracy—the hyper-local, issue-based community meeting. A suggestion: for one week, representatives of both federal chambers, with a member of the opposite political party present and engaged, should hold policy discussions with their constituents. The President and our new speaker, John Boehner, should set the tone by answering questions about health care, the budget, Afghanistan, etc. in front of  citizens of Ms. Giffords’ district. Don’t televise it. Don’t beem it over the radio. Don’t tweet about it. Just talk. Rationally. Together.

3) I don’t want to try to glean the motive of a young man who unloaded multiple rounds into that crowd on Saturday. Nor do I want to suggest that his underlying mental health condition (I was one DSM subcategory away from diagnosing him with Schizoaffective disorder simply from anecdotes—tendency to wear bright clothing, persecutorial delusions, etc—about him in a NYT article) can or should wholly explain this crime. But any constituent of a Republican house member should realize what repealing the Affordable Care Act would do to Mental Health support in America. Linked here is a list of provisions that the ACA includes to help reduce the stigma and improve the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Tell your congressperson that we need to not just keep these reforms on track, but continue to explore new ways to improve this specialized care modality.

4) Diagnosis and monitoring remains the toughest aspect to treating psychiatric disorders, so my last suggestion is directed at Google and Facebook: Use all that private profile information, partner with national mental health professionals to establish algorithms that could flag accounts that have profile-updating or search patterns consistent with the behavior of those effected by specific mental illness, and design some sort of outreach to these individuals.

To Hear: Phillip Gourevitch, from a early episode of This American Life, discussing how Rwandan Hutus, while running from a genocide they committed in the early 90′s, used humanitarian aid groups to recast themselves as refugees and victims.

To read: Clancy Martin’s narrative essay on AA. It is exceptional for many reasons, foremost among them Martin’s ability to present all of the sides of the AA debate (concerning the efficacy of AA’s method, or its religiosity) not as a meta-analysis of alcoholism, but as a personal struggle to accept that the message or support he receives from AA shifts from meeting to meeting. Indeed, the meaning of sobriety comes in forms as diverse as the chain-smoking, coffee-chugging men and women that sit beside him.

To Jam out to: The first two singles off of the Smith Westerns’ Dye it Blonde. “Weekend” and “All Die Young” are just unfairly blithe—perfect pop-rock beemed down from some past or future summer, just in time for the coldest days of the year.

These aren’t really “fries,” per se. If you cut them the size of large-ish baby carrots, they will keep their rigidity.

What you’ll need:

3 chinese eggplants, salt, garlic, olive oil, red pepper flakes, apple cider vinegar, creamy peanut butter, ginger, anise seed.

What you’ll do:

1) Preheat the oven to 350.  Slice each eggplant length-wise into 6 slender wedges. Salt generously and let sit in a bowl. Some of the eggplant’s bitter juices will seep out. After 10-15 minutes, rinse and pat dry.

2) While waiting, make your dipping sauce: dump a thumb-length of fresh, peeled ginger; 2 tbs of apple cider vinegar, a glug of olive oil, and several dollops of peanut butter into a blender. Blend until smooth. Refrigerate

3) Throw eggplant wedges into a plastic bag. Add 2 glugs of olive oil, and shake to coat the vegetables evenly. Add minced garlic (2 cloves), anise seed, and red pepper flakes and shake again to evenly distribute the spices.

4) Place the wedges on a baking pan. Bake until golden on both sides (flip halfway through the 20 minute baking time. Dip.

There are two presidents, still, in the Ivory Coast. The elected one, Alassane Ouattra, continues to watch diplomatic envoys shuffle in and out of discussions with the former one, Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo considers his divine right to the presidential palace as “non-negotiable” and sends roaming militias out to harass UN peacekeeping forces. Ivorians left watching this multi-state spectacle, and Gbagbo’s nationalistic rhetoric on state TV, must wonder if their sovereignty, as expressed in December’s election, has been ignored by both sides. Gbagbo could always just form a personally-selected 5 member court to reverse what UN elections observers confirmed—as Hamid Karzai has done in Afghanistan. Not content with the last parliamentary election, Karzai and the ethnic Pashtun majority he represents are trying to gain seats through judicial decree. It’s easy to write this development off, as most hawks do, as another example of a crazy tribal country that needs a continuing American presence to get anything done. But a more subtle reading reveals a different and perhaps more serious divide emerging in this embattled country: in the (relatively) safe cocoon of Kabul, the thinking of the capital’s politicians and  gov’t apparatchiks has become severed almost completely from the daily fears and struggles and violence faced by their constituents. Developing public faith in government can not, and should not, come from an occupying force. // President Obama looks like he may use a signing statement to get around congressional restrictions on Gitmo detainee transfers. Congress voted in Dec. to defund any attempt to move enemy combatants to US courts or prisons (= Habeus corpus only for those who can pay for their own plane ticket and prison accommodations). The restrictions were part of a larger Military spending bill—past iterations of which helped fund the production of the queer-baiting videos of (now former) Capt. Owen Honors.

Benoit Pioulard // “A Coin on the Tongue” – In which a new dance style is invented: the drunken convict.

Twin Sister // “All around and away we go” – In which jazz hands are returned to their proper usage: 80′s-style post-disco electronica.

The Smith Westerns // “Western” – In which downing Slurpees suddenly looks like a not only palatable, but perfect, way to spend a Friday night.

Perfume Genius // “Lookout lookout” – In which the camera breaks up with its subject, and gets the silent treatment for the remainder of the video.

The Very Best // “Warm Heart of Africa” – In which Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend proves that white men should simply not try to dance…ever—and you can never have too many clips of water buffalo in a single video.

Broken Social Scene // “Meet me in the basement” – In which TV is revealed as a perpetual apocalypse countdown extravaganza.

The Black Keys // “Tighten Up” – In which I realize that half a donut could’ve made my grade school interactions with girls a lot less awkward.

These New Puritans // “Attack Music” – In which bodies seem to defy time and basic physics.

Kanye West // “Runaway” – In which ballet simultaneously remains the purest form of dance and subverts its own suffocating formalities. (start at 13:46, the great stuff is at 20:00)

“You have to test your hypothesis against other theories,” Holbrooke said. “Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.”

- from “The Last Mission,” George Packer’s meticulous profile of the late US special representative for the Af-Pak region. As the article attests, Holbrooke faithfully tried to follow his own advice in his dealings with Hamid Karzai, David Petraeus, and the President—but, with a wisdom that will hopefully be carried forward by our leaders, he also never lost track of the irrevocable human costs of military/political hypotheses.

Turning the middle east into a laboratory for the testing of neocon theories or humanitarian ideals doesn’t just dehumanize the people of Afganistan; it doesn’t just trivialize the struggles of a rebuilding Iraqi populace. In the grand tallying of fatalities and enemies caught and civilian “collateral,” these experiments also strip from the stories of sacrifices made by our soldiers or Afghani citizens any sense of what unique perspectives and ideals war has forced its individual participants and observers to reexamine.

A Good Fall / Ha Jin

Blame / Michelle Huneven

Censoring an Iranian Love Story / Shahriar Mandanipour

The Unnamed / Joshua Ferris (!)

Changing my mind : Occasional essays / Zadie Smith

There once lived a woman who tried to kill her neighbor’s baby : Scary
fairy tales / Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Remainder / Tom McCarthy

The Privileges / Jonathan Dee (!)

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men / David Foster Wallace (!)

Chronic City / Jonathan Lethem

2666 / Roberto Bolano

The Imperfectionists / Tom Rachman

Saving God: Religion after Idolatry / Mark Johnston (!)

Freedom / Jonathan Franzen (!)

C / Tom McCarthy

Room / Emma Donaghue

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet / David Mitchell

Collected Stories / Lydia Davis (!)

2. / 1. Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me / Owen Pallett’s Heartland - What happens to the idea of self when you create something through someone else’s voice? On Have One on Me, Joanna Newsom is the woman of 1000 voices—channeling ancient princesses (the title track), medieval songstresses (“Kingfisher”), and, to a heartbreaking effect, a past version of herself (“Does Not Suffice”). We see in the album’s ever-shifting melodies, time signatures, keys, a representation of the transience of a single version of the past—and a reminder of the ways memory both strengthens and corrupts the very real relationships that form our concept of self. Newsom makes you wait for the revelatory moments of beauty on Have One on Me, but is kind enough to weave echoes of these melodies throughout the album’s epic 18 tracks—little reminders of a past still not understood.

The 12 songs of Owen Pallett’s Heartland speak to the listener in the first person—but the “I” is not Owen Pallett, per se: Our narrator is a character created by the man (Owen) soundtracking his life (with the most intricate and evocative pop compositions of the year). And this “I” is not content with Owen speaking through him or for him: He acts out (violently—an iron spike is plunged into an eye at one point) against the other characters that populate Heartland, and seeks consolation in the untouchable chaos and impregnable order of nature:  ”Whizzing off the clifftop, / listening for the splatter 30 floors below,” he sings in the gorgeous “Tryst with Mephistopheles.” It all adds up to the question: Do our creations—our songs, pictures, stories—seize something like self-agency when we let them populate someone else’s mind? Owen Pallett’s excellent record provides the best argument for letting these alternate personas, these created voices, run free: they may just surprise their creators.

10. / 9. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” / Das Racist’s Sit Down, Man – DR: “Call me Dwight Shrute the way I eat beets(beats)!” KW: “Choke a Southpark writer with a fish stick.” While most of this year’s hip hop tended towards the cinematic, the two best rap albums of 2010 drew their format from the small screen. Through this lens, West’s Fantasy is like a HBO miniseries—dripping with elaborate pop production (“All of the lights”, but not scared to experiment (“Monster”);  filled with a star-studded cast, but inevitably carried by a single, and singular, performance (ie, Mr. West). Sit Down, Man adapts the successful “Daily Show” model of pop-culture/political skewering (“Return to Innocence”) and self-deprecating humor (“Hahahahaha J/K?”). And these albums both point to and (importantly) question a creativity-diluting meta-cultural shift: the line between the internet and TV has been irrevocably blurred—when it’s all one continuous meme, what happens to originality? Fantasy and Sit Down, Man set out (and succeed) to prove that music need not follow in the same direction.

8./ 7. Caribou’s Swim / James Blake’s CMYK & Klavierwerke EPs – How do you create music like this? The answer might be easier for Swim, the latest from Dan Snaith’s ever-evolving group. On tracks like “Bowls” and “Sun,” you can hear the Caribou frontman’s mathematician brain (dude has a PhD) at work—even as melodies spiral to unexpected places and the intricacy of the the beats builds, there seems to be a higher order to it all. Snaith corralls the dark and emotional and chaotic, and—amazingly—channels this energy into something downright danceable. James Blake, the young british producer, is a harder nut to crack. His music seems beamed down through multiple radio stations, scrambled like a kid with ADHD had a hand on the tuner, with gaps and static filling the spaces between gorgeous riffs and haunting dub-step. “I don’t know,” an ethereal voice sings in the beautiful Klavierwerke standout “I only know (what I know now)”—and maybe that’s the point of Blake’s two brilliant debut EPs: these fragmented and propulsive beats, these other-worldly melodies, suggest that there’s always more beauty in potentiality, and perhaps it’s the artist’s job to suspend our understanding of a fully-formed musical idea.

6. / 5. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs / LCD Soundsystem’s This is Happening – Both of these bands last released albums in 2007, and their respective efforts (Neon Bible, Sound of Silver), while often enjoyable, seemed a little too constructed—they sounded afraid of having a single note out of key, or single lyric not witty or referential enough.  Their shared strategy for The ’Burbs and This is… could be described as: put a mic in a room and jam out. These are not mini best-of albums—both drag a bit on their second halves, but pull out superb set closers.  What’s revelatory about these veteran bands’ 2010 albums is that James Murphy & Co, as well as the Win Butler Nonet, have finally learned how to take some of the songwriting weight off their frontmen. The result is two of the best group efforts of the year, and two unique treatises on how to reinvigorate (w/o reinventing) a band’s sound.