2022 Year End Charts

Top Songs of 2022
Rank	Song	Artist	Plays
1	Crest of the Wave	Foals	106
2	Record Player	Daisy the Great, AJR	105
3	Happy Life	Judah & the Lion	103
4	How Do I Make You Love Me	The Weeknd	102
5	Very Online Guy	Alvvays	102
6	The Comeback	Zac Brown Band	99
7	Don't Go Yet	Camila Cabello	88
8	Big Dreams	The Score	87
9	Phantom Regret by Jim	The Weeknd	84
10	Call Me Little Sunshine	Ghost	80
11	Tile By Tile	Alvvays	79
12	Scream!	Judah & the Lion	76
13	If You Want Me	Royksopp, Susanne Sundfor	76
14	Brad Pitt	Coin	76
15	As It Was	Harry Styles	74
16	All Night Parking	Adele, Erroll Gardner	73
17	Less Than Zero	The Weeknd	72
18	Bam Bam	Camila Cabello, Ed Sheeran	72
19	We're Not in Orbit Anymore	Broken Bells	71
20	Skeletons	The Score	69
21	Looking High	Foals	68
22	Oh My God	Adele	68
23	Chaise Lounge	Wet Leg	67
24	Wild Child	The Black Keys	67
25	Take a Walk	Judah & the Lion	66
26	Lola	Camila Cabella, Yotuel	65
27	Strangers By Nature	Adele	63
28	Stubborn Pride	Zac Brown Band, Marcus King	63
29	Next to Normal	Lucius	62
30	Victorious	The Score	62
31	Finale	Beach House	61
32	Pink Venom	Blackpink	59
33	Prester John	Animal Collectibe	59
34	Headstone	Brothers Osborne	58
35	Can I Get It	Adele	58
36	One Night	Broken Bells	58
37	Fly As Me	Bruno Mars	57
38	Here We Go Again	The Weeknd, Tyler the Creator	57
39	My Little Love	Adele	56
40	Slow Burn	Zac Brown Band	55
41	Tied	Imagine Dragons	55
42	Fighter	The Score	54
43	Out in the Middle	Zac Brown Band	54
44	A Cookie From Space	Infected Mushroom	54
45	Fourth Figure	Alvvays	53
46	Rocket On My Feet	St. Lucia	52
47	After Last Night	Bruno Mars	51
48	Chapstick	Coin	51
49	Overpass Graffiti	Ed Sheeran	51
50	Any Day Now	Zac Brown Band	51
Top Albums
Rank	Album	Artist	Units (M)
1	Dawn FM	The Weeknd	8.2
2	The Comeback	Zac Brown Band	5.7
3	Metamorph	The Score	4.4
4	Revival	Judah & the Lion	4.2
5	30	Adele	3.9
6	Life Is Yours	Foals	3.6
7	Familia	Camila Cabello	3.5
8	Blue Rev	Alvvays	3.4
9	An Evening With Silk Sonic	Bruno Mars	3.0
10	Mercury- Acts 1 & 2	Imagine Dragons	2.8
Top Books
Rank	Book	Author	Units (M)
1	The Last Green Valley	Mark Sullivan	2.6
2	An Immense World	Ed Wong	2.4
3	The Dawn of Everything	David Graeber, David Wengrow	2.1
4	Fairy Tale	Stephen King	2.0
5	Project Hail Mary	Andy Weir	1.9
6	The Chaos Machine	Max Fisher	1.6
7	The Lincoln Highway	Amor Towles	1.6
8	Atlas of the Heart	Brene Brown	1.4
9	Homecoming	Rana Faroohar	1.2
10	Sooley	John Grisham	1.1
Top Movies
Rank	Movie		Units (M)
1	Top Gun: Maverick		14.6
2	Elvis		11.1
3	The Banshees of Inisherin		9.8
4	Thirteen Lives		9.6
5	Everything Everywhere All at Once		9.0
6	Nightmare Alley		8.4
7	Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris		7.9
8	Fall		7.8
9	Triangle of Sadness		7.6
10	Coda		7.6

Reason's Fermentation of Knowledge

     Montaigne recommended that we live in a conservative state forever adapted to cultural customs.  As a skeptic, he believed the certainty of Sebold's proofs about the validity of Christianity were no less credible than scientific theories at the time.  Because both rely on reason and reason is inherently circular, customs should be valued over scientific progress, revealing a bias for his religious beliefs.
    This reminds me of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, which showed that a "consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible" (Wiki).  Or a mobius strip, where both sides of a circular ribbon appear to be the same, paradoxically challenging the entire basis for reason.
    Yet the progress of science, I believe, is that knowledge is certainly more tangible than it would seem in times when technology couldn't reveal it.  Depending on the century, people were more certain about natural laws than not.  This dependence presents knowledge as an evolving entity, becoming more substantial as it progresses.  You wouldn't convince a snail about the astounding implications of counting any more than an ancient nomad that the Earth revolves around the sun.  It seems the mobius strip and Godel's theorems can increasingly unravel upon greater intelligence, even if they are true.

Aquinas and the Will

     St. Thomas Aquinas believed that animals do not have a will (only humans do) because they are not able to intellectualize their desires.  They do what they want because they have no choice, while humans have a multitude of choices from which to rationalize their behavior.

    Clearly the issue here is that some animals are capable of making more complex decisions than others.  Few would argue that an octopus has the same free will as an ant.  There appears to be a spectrum of intellectual complexity that corresponds to the strength of the will, and the soul I might add.   The greater the ability to reason, the greater the will and proportionately bigger the soul.

    In this manner, I agree with Aquinas that humans have a superior will to all other species, but not that inferior species are totally lacking a will.  If the sheep has no choice but to eat grass, we are similarly limited by having no choice but to eat food, even if we do have a broader selection of what to eat.  Like us, how the sheep chooses to spend the rest of its time depends on its will.

Opiate Wand

    Once, in a land called Chelci, there lived a community of deaf people.  As they could not hear, they used a type of sign language that utilized the art of dance.  But their written language was what interested scholars the most, for they wrote in the language of music: a staff of five lines with all the notes in between, meant to complement the meaning of their dance.  The only people who could understand their literature were musicians, and even they had trouble translating without the help of a choreographer.  The musicians who tried to "play" their literature were utterly baffled by how a people that couldn't even hear produced the most beautiful music in the world.

    Until one day an able-eared outsider made love to one of their women, and the woman had a baby.  Though the man left without knowing he'd become a father, the woman liked to think he would have stayed had he known.  The child grew up hearing everything, learning their invisible language with a natural perception unbefitting to outsiders.  As such, he grew to interpret the "words" choreographed in perfect harmony like no one else; when everyone around him could only imagine their spiritual significance, he heard it in full force.  The child never spoke, since there was nobody to talk with, but he did learn to make the sounds of his language with a fife that a traveler had given him.

    One day a learned woman heard him playing it, on a hill outside the village.  The sound reached far and wide, encompassing the land, diluting it with an eternal presence that exists just beyond the veil.  He was dancing like the notes possessed him, hallucinogenic magic exuded from a junior wizard, while the land painted scenes that matched his melodies.  The awestruck woman revered the specimen, surely a demigod of some sort, nothing short of a miracle, until she learned of the villagers, their communication system, and put it all together.  She fell in love that day, convincing him to travel back to the city with her, where he could showcase his talents.

    When he got there he found many pushy people trying to take advantage of him.  They all wanted to hear his astounding music, so he was pursued relentlessly for the profits he might bring.  Yet he never signed a contract, never played in front of a large audience.  The woman tried to teach him her language, but he could not quite grasp the art of talking, just as the musicians had failed to grasp his.  He left her for the mountains beyond the city, wanting to return home but going in the wrong direction.  Which was all the same, since he found much pleasure being a recluse at the roof of the world, where he came to appreciate wind as the only music to be imitated, as it was the most delicate sound on earth, those stray wispy arias frisking the trees reminding him of catatonic youth, a sound he would probably meditate on again as he neared death when he became old.  That music is the language of ghosts, traveling far and wide over the earth, a most familiar sound often ignored as background fodder.

    And that's how he spent many days, lying on a mountain with that primordial sound, until a hiker came upon him and asked the best way to get back down.  The hiker looked strangely familiar, like he'd always known him, perhaps from a previous life or the one that was coming.  Receiving no response, the hiker asked who his father was, since he looked so familiar, but all that came out were the guttural sounds of a barbarian.  Halfway back down the mountain, it dawned on the hiker just who he might have been.  And that's when he heard the music, nostalgic sounds from a different life, a life when he'd traveled to the village of deafness, sheets of symphonic jottings tearing through his mind, a rosy smile from the woman he'd laid with.  It was the same music that had seduced him into laying with her.  My son, he whispered, my beautiful son.

    He went back up the mountain to be with his son, if not forever then at least for a day.  Settling into the soil, he buried him with his eyes, eyes that seemed to know who he was.  And his son started writing in a notebook he kept, an exquisite cursive delicacy he found utterly alien.  The son was composing a story, in his language, of how he'd come so far and how it might end.  But the father could not understand it, not explicitly, though he at least divined it with his eyes, a strong intuition that only fathers know.  That's when he decided to lead his son back to his people, to find his mother and spend the rest of his days with the family he never knew he had.

    When they arrived, they found the woman who'd taken him to the city studying his people and their language.  She'd become the first person to successfully translate their sheet music into words.  As she read the son's story, it moved her to tears, for the resilience he'd shown being alone and the mistake she'd made.  She translated the story to his father and together they formed a plan.  They would stay in the village with his son, only leaving to bring their stories to the rest of the world, along with the music and dance they transcribed, so that the art-form of the village became an entirely new one for the rest of the world to indulge.  Its mind-enhancing abilities were so revolutionary that people started finding less interest in capital gains and more interest in the seeds of culture: serenity, enchantment, and understanding.