2005 in Review

(Photo from NPPA's best photojournalism of 2005 -- link below.)

Plato quotes Socrates as saying the unexamined life is not worth living, so nHumanities pauses at the start of 2006 to review 2005. Online, one of the best ways to gaze at our collective navel is by reviewing end-of-the-year lists.

Lists:2005 from Fimoculous.com provides an aggregate of all 2005 lists, including such gems as

• 25 Dumbest Quotes,
  
• Time's Top 50 websites,
  
• The New York Times Magazine's year in ideas (yep, the Anti-Rape Condom made the list),
  
• the 2005 American Architecture Awards,
  
• Ms. Magazine's Top Ten News Stories for Women in 2005,
  
• 100Notable Books of the Year from The New York Times,
  
• PublishersWeekly.com's Best Children's Books of 2005 (Hooray! The Problem with Chickens made the list)
  
• Salon.com's Beyond the Multiplex: The Best of 2005 ("It was the year of the penguin and the gay cowboy -- but don't forget the Chinese theme park and Syrian bride." Free registration required to view article.)
  
• The Worst Jobs in Science from Popular Science (being a science teacher in Kansas . . . pretty bad)
  
• New York Magazine's Culture Awards 2005: Art,
  
• The 10 Best Music Videos of 2005 posted by Entertainment Weekly,
  
• Top 10 Political Humor Videos of 2005, including Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Global Warming
  
• The 100 Best Companies listed by Working Mother (criterion: policies which make the companies family-friendly),
  
• Wired News's 2005's 10 Sexiest Geeks (no, that's not an oxymoron),
  
• PCWorld.com's 100 Best Products of 2005 (including, as product of the year, Firefox -- if
  you haven't switched browsers yet, do it now!)
  
• ModFabulous: Best Television of 2005,
  
• Top 20 Games of 2005 from jay is games.com (Warning! this webpage will eat hours of your time -- we're already embroiled in the BBC's Death in Sakkura),
  
• Sports Illustrated's Pictures from the Year,
  
• The Best of Photojournalism 2005 from the National Press Photographers Association,
  
• a slideshow of the year's best political cartoons from Newsweek,
  
• The 40 Best Albums of 2005 from SPIN.com or -- alternately -- the The Least Essential Albums of 2005 from The Onion/A.V.Club, and
  
• Top 10 from grocerylists.org (a collection of other people's grocery lists which have been found).

Bonus list: Top Ten Archive from The Late Show with David Letterman -- CBS created the archive of Letterman's trademark top ten lists because "The Smithsonian has asked us to do our part to organize and preserve our nation's precious comedy heritage."