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Enough Lists! A Look Back At 2012 In Complete Sentences

Carissa GoodNCrazy
/
flickr
We avoid the list of year-end lists. Just barely.

You might have noticed that The High Five loves lists. Heck, TH5 was born as a list! But today, to celebrate the year's finale (and to buck the tide of journalistic year-in-review listaholism), we present a selective look back ... in paragraph form.

Our friends at the Texas Tribune managed to avoid the traditional roundup. A year-end video mixtape collects the Trib's bravest newsgathering moments via stepped-up multimedia coverage. Reporters fielded Ted Nugent's polarizing comments on the Trayvon Martin case and Obama's then-imagined reelection; the video of his no-holds-barred vitriol went viral. And don't miss Aman Batheja's attempt to drive down the fastest highway in America when it opened in October:

Shortlisting the human experience has become an epidemic on Twitter. This year, on Election Night, President Obama transcended that with what became the most popular tweet in history. It was a photo of the First Couple embracing, captioned with "Four more years." But Twitter enabled productivity beyond glowy victory laps around the internet in 2012. Michelle Martin of Tell Me More  looked at how Twitter catalyzed political conversations in the minority community this election year with Keli Goff, correspondent for TheRoot.com, and Viviana Hurtado, blogger-in-chief of The Wise Latina Club. 

The arts weren't exempt from the lightning-fast pace of news and production, as NPR's Maura Johnston explains in her piece about music writing and where it's headed. Vinyl collecting seems to be the antithesis of #rhiannaplane, and Dallas' A&R Records contributed to its rise in a big way.

But the hugest advance of the year for the vinyl form comes from Swedish band The Shout Out Louds, who performed a feat of backlash to the easy, unphysical ways we experience art and music now, in the last few moments of 2012. They made a working record from ice. To listen requires effort. And its disappearance with subsequent plays is poetic.

So what belongs in lists? Trivia, of course. The BBC comes through with 100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year, smart cocktail-party-ready bits mined between the lines of 2012's news in the UK. And lest you find us Anglophilic for including this list from across the pond, consult this fact relevant to KERA'sever vigilant snow coverage this holiday season:  "Fans of snowdrops are known as galantophiles." 

Well, oops. You'll still find five links in there somewhere. Happy New Year, folks.