How Lists Became Our Greatest Defense Against Endless Slop

In his 1996 essay “I’ve Got a Little List,” the novelist William Gass identified our predilection for rankings as an “obsess[ion] with hierarchies.” But while our capacity to categorize and rank is a basic feature of human cognition—determining favorites and preferences is a standard part of childhood development—the current glut of best-of rankings indicates a specific pathology unique to the internet era. With so much information to wade through, it’s become difficult to discern what’s worthy of attention and what’s slop, what’s meaningful and what’s superfluous, what’s essential and what’s shit. When everything just exists—often on a subscription service that places items alongside one another without any real orientation of human refinement—a desire for hierarchy and order naturally emerges. In 1952, Jorge Luis Borges argued that it was in our nature to outline provisional “human schemes” given “the impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe”; now we are seeking to penetrate the not-so-divine scheme of Netflix or Spotify. More than ever, we turn to rankings to extract a signal, even a disagreeable one, through a torrent of ear-splitting noise.

It’s no wonder that, amid this madness, various cultural institutions and media outlets have tried to stake their claim as the leading list-makers and rankings crafters. So far this year, the Times has published at least two lists that aspire to be definitive: the thirty greatest living American songwriters, in April, and the century’s hundred best television shows, at the end of September. The Times’ quest, as the purported paper of record, to create canonical rankings has rankled those who deemed the lists to contain glaring omissions, overratings, and biases. The lists themselves, however, have proved to be enormous successes for the Times, which recently appointed a “Canon editor” to oversee the publication’s list-making ventures. “Our lists are hardly casual affairs,” the Times wrote in a June press release announcing the position, which is held by Gilbert Cruz, previously the editor of the Times Book Review. “They are based on statistical rigor, data analysis, shoe-leather reporting, in-house expertise and industry voices. They have each sparked conversation, delight and debate while guiding our audience to new favorites.” They have also, presumably, spiked traffic and boosted subscriptions.

The Times’ best-television-shows list was fairly middle-of-the-road in its choices, though it still generated plenty of discourse. (People, as it turns out, have strong opinions about TV shows.) Other outlets that have prioritized list-making in their editorial coverage, such as the music website Pitchfork, have benefitted from more divisive ratings systems, often championing the niche and spurning the mainstream. Sean Fennessey, the senior talk strategist at the Ringer, a podcast network and website partly known for its power rankings, drafts, and lists, has argued that the best ones “provoke” and surprise: “It’s not good editorial strategy if you don’t throw a curveball.” The reader dissatisfaction that follows whenever an established critic or institution publishes a ranked list can often be attributed to these intentionally pitched curveballs. When the Times excluded Billy Joel from its list of best American songwriters but included Young Thug, for instance, some readers were perplexed, even angry. If this list was truly to be the definitive list of American songwriters, how could the paper permit such an offensive oversight? (I am team Thug, for the record.) The vitriol, the engagement, the uproar—it’s every list-maker’s dream.

A key reason that self-canonizing lists tend to be publicly begrudged is that they are not our lists—they belong to the people upstairs, not the ordinary person. Readers are often encouraged to make their own lists on a poll conveniently connected to the publication’s rankings, but this can feel like a ploy given that the real list has already been determined, and published. Luckily, a surfeit of apps and websites allow users to log, sort, rate, and, yes, list whatever they’d like, in any way they see fit. Letterboxd has become the de-facto meeting place for cinephiles and casual moviegoers alike to track what they watch through ratings and reviews, while categorizing films in any number of customizable lists. On other sites, such as Goodreads, Rate Your Music, and IMDb, users can log and rate what they read, listen to, or watch, publishing it for their followers and friends to see. These platforms are not without power; Goodreads can dramatically affect book sales, and IMDb is the closest thing we have to a crowdsourced canon for cinema. With so many ways to rank stuff, it is perhaps easier than ever to dismiss the role of the professional critic, and the outlet that employs them. If the critic’s work is relegated to list-making, or short-form-video reactions, little separates them from anyone else on the internet, because the challenging work of careful aesthetic judgment has been reduced to its crudest form: a number, a blurb, a data point, a thumbs up or down, a shareable asset, an S.E.O. play—an ever-changing, always negotiated spot on a list.