Best-of three: our country, books and games of the year

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm Jon Fassman. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Every year, The Economist's Culture Section reviews hundreds of books. Our correspondents read hundreds more in the course of their work. Here are our favorites from 2022.

And rounding out the Best Of series, we take a look at the best video games of the year, from the fantastical to the historical to the, well, to the world's first trombone-based rhythm game. But first, December is littered with celebratory events. End-of-year work parties, Christmas, New Year's. But one event towers above them all: The Economist's Country of the Year contest. See, every year our global staff of correspondents and editors asks which country has improved the most in the previous year. There are often several countries in serious contention, and choosing between them isn't easy. This time around, though, things were different.

Every year around about this time, the staff and editors of The Economist get together and debate which country we think deserves to be named Country of the Year.

Robert Guest is The Economist's foreign editor.

So most years we have a vigorous debate about which country deserves the honor. This year, it was incredibly easy. I mean, there was simply no one who didn't think that Ukraine deserved it, even if that meant thinking about the award in a slightly different way from how we normally do.

Thinking differently how?

Normally, we're thinking, what is the country that has improved the most in the past year? And with Ukraine, obviously lots of things have gotten much worse. The cities have been flattened, millions of people have fled the country, tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people have people are shivering in the dark. Life has gotten much worse in Ukraine. Nonetheless, it was clear that it was the winner because it had simply proven itself this year in a way that no other country had.

So talk me through the ways in which Ukraine has proved itself.

There are 4 things that Ukraine has demonstrated this year. One is heroism, and I don't use that word lightly. Most people thought that they would be very quickly crushed by their much larger invading power, Russia. They stood and they fought and they accepted large casualties and they pushed the invaders back. That was an extraordinary act. Secondly, they've shown ingenuity this year in their military tactics, in learning how to use complicated new kit fast, in targeting the invaders' fuel and ammunition supplies to put them off balance, in devolving decision-making powers to the lowest level possible in the army so that units in the field are quick and responsive and able to outmanoeuvre the Russians. That was incredible to watch. Watch. Then there's their resilience in daily life. In many cities, you see, there's often no power at home, so people go to shared offices with generators to get heat and light during the day. And these places also have, you know, bomb shelters underneath them and a week's supplies of bottled water there. They're finding ways to cope, and that's just really impressive.

Okay, heroism, ingenuity, resilience. What's the fourth?

So this is the inspiration that we're seeing from Ukraine. Their courage in standing up for democracy, standing up against bullies, is an inspiration to people all around the world who also would like the courage to stand up to bullies. And it's a deterrent to bullies around the world, showing that even if you think you're a bigger power, you might get a bloody nose here. Or if you're a dictator and you think you can get away with pushing people around, well, there's a limit to how far you can push people. And it punctured the big lies. A lot of Vladimir Putin's war was built on an architecture of propaganda, on his ability to say to the Russian people, we have to intervene in Ukraine because they're Nazis and they're preparing to invade us and they're making biological weapons, just completely untrue things that he was saying. And that's been punctured. People just, for the most part, don't believe these things. And if it's showing the limits of how far even a very unpleasant despotic regime can go in altering people's understanding of reality, that's a wonderful thing if the Ukrainians can manage that.

With that inspiration in mind then, what lessons do you think other countries can take from the example that Ukraine has set this year?

I think the principal lesson to draw is that you have to stand up to bullies. That if, as has happened in the past, you make large concessions to them, they just want more. Okay, the rest of the world, you know, the West is helping Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian invaders. But also Ukraine is helping the West because if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will go on to the Baltics or Moldova or Georgia. I mean, I think the neighbours really understand how important it is to stop an imperialist power like Vladimir Putin's Russia from trying to ride roughshod over people. So they're putting their lives on the line to defend not only democracy, but also the very important global principle that you don't try to change borders by force of arms. And that's an absolutely crucial part of the architecture of global peace, and it's worth defending.

And insofar as it is quite an international conflict in that way you described, did any other countries appear on, near the shortlist simply for their own reactions to this war?

Yes. I mean, I think it started before the war when the American intelligence services particularly, but also the British, were very on the ball with seeing what Vladimir Putin was planning to do at a time when almost no one even in Russia believed that he was planning to do it. They were saying he's going to invade, It's not a bluff. This is where it's going to happen. This is how it's going to happen. And they were warning the rest of the world. They warned the Chinese government, which didn't believe them. They warned the Ukrainians, they're going to attack Hostomel Airport. You might want to be there to prevent that. So the Americans were very ahead of the game in providing intelligence. They and the Europeans have been very good in terms of supplying weapons to the Ukrainians and money to keep Ukraine afloat. So that's been very commendable. Then we've seen that the places that have taken refugees, Poland, which is not previously known for its extraordinary hospitality to people from other parts of the world, has been very, very hospitable to Ukrainian refugees. And the whole of Europe has made it quite easy for them to move temporarily to live there and to go to school and work. So there's been a lot of pulling together there. A lot of the rest of the world has tried to help here. But the people closest by, the people with the biggest stakes in it, so that's the Europeans and the Americans, I think have done a pretty good job.

International help aside, Ukraine is still, as you say, rightfully and unanimously our country of the year for 2022. Given all those qualities that you mentioned, how do you see things going in 2023?

Well, I think this war is going to be a long haul, as you can see from the interviews that we did with President Zelensky and with his top generals, they're expecting another Russian big push early next year. Russia's still very big, they are able to commit really large numbers of conscripts to the battle, and Putin clearly doesn't care how many of his own side get killed so long as they can keep pushing. He's terrified of being embarrassed by launching a big war and then failing to win anything, which would be a very bad look for a despot like him. So he's probably going to keep pushing. And it is essential that the West continues to help Ukraine defend itself. I don't think there's any doubt that the Ukrainians have the will to keep fighting, but they do need the means as well. At some point, with luck, the Russians will get exhausted, but we're a long way away from that point. And we're a long way away from a point where any kind of sustainable peace can be negotiated, because Russia's starting point is that you have to give us a large portion of your country, and the Ukrainians just simply won't accept that because they'll know that that's a staging point for taking even more in the future.

Robert, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Authors help us make sense of the world we live in, or at the very least, to escape it for a little while. And in 2022, there was a lot to make sense of. Our culture team has compiled a list to help you do just that.

We enlist the help of all our correspondents to recommend the books that they've most enjoyed this year, in particular those related to their areas of expertise.

Andrew Miller is our culture editor.

We also look back on the reviews we've published throughout the year, the ones that have been most favorable, and then we put together a list that ranges across styles and topics—fiction and nonfiction, history, the economy, science, and so on.

Annie, let's start big and broad. Were there any books that could help our readers make sense of the year's biggest news stories?

Well, in our current affairs section, John, there was a book we recommended that recounted the history of economic sanctions in the 20th century, and it could help readers understand one aspect of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The book's called The Economic Weapon, and it was recommended by Rachna Shambhogh, our business affairs editor.

This year I read The Economic Weapon by Nicholas Mulder. It's an economic history of the use of sanctions during the period between the First and Second World Wars, and provides an assessment of how successful sanctions are in preventing military aggression. The book was fortuitously timed. It came out mere weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and thereby became the target of a whole host of sanctions from the West.

Another book that comes to mind has a rather broader perspective. It's called A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher, and it's a sprawling history of oil from the Paleolithic era to the First World War. It explains how oil has always been as much a curse as a blessing for the people on whose land it's been found. It's a compelling read and also an immensely valuable guide to what is a great and terrible industry.

So Andy, those both sound like books that use history to help readers understand contemporary society. What about contemporary society itself, sociology, books that can help readers understand sort of day-to-day life better?

Well, John, we do have a category for culture and ideas, and one of the books we recommend there was suggested by Tamara Jogues-Bohr, our US public policy correspondent. It's called Of Boys and Men, and it's by Richard Reeves.

Richard Reeves's new book, Of Boys and Men, flips the gender gap upside down. Reeves manages to highlight the uncomfortable fact that men are underperforming in many areas of life relative to women. He does this without falling into conservative or progressive traps. Young men are in trouble, yet few policymakers will listen. This book may be the key to finally being heard.

And what about business and finance? That's always a big topic here. Are there any books our journalists recommend to readers this year?

Well, John, that's a pretty crowded category, as you'd expect. But one of the books we recommended is called Butler to the World. It's by Oliver Bulow, and it was suggested by Matthew Valencia, an 1843 editor at The Economist.

Kleptocracy and dirty money have become a hot topic over the past decade or so, and even hotter still, I would say, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. There were several books in 2022 on the topic, and I think the best of them is probably Butler to the World by Oliver Bulow, who's an investigative journalist based in London. It's well-researched, it's riveting in parts, it looks into lurid detail at how Britain has become a repository for oodles and oodles of dirty dollars and how London has arguably become the money laundering capital of the world.

And Andy, sticking with what we consider the back half of the magazine, meaning business, finance, science, are there any science books that our journalists recommended?

Well, a different way to look at the world is available in a book called An Immense World by Ed Yong. It's a book about animals' senses. And how understanding them can reveal the hidden depths of the world around us. It was recommended by Alak Jha, our science correspondent and host of Babbage, our science and technology podcast.

In this book, Ed Yong, what he does is to try and help us understand how much information there really is in the world by taking us through the senses that animals have and how they perceive the world. So people might know, of course, that bats can see, in inverted commas, by emitting sound waves and analyzing what comes back. Bees, it turns out, can sense electric strict fields around flowers so they can get to the right places to pollinate and bring food back to their hives. And in this book, what you get is a series of really colorful characters— animals, people, scientists— who just reveal what's essentially a multi-dimensional world that is all around us, but something you don't think about, and it remains hidden to you until you've read a book like this.

And finally, Andy, what was your favorite book this year?

Well, John, one of my favorite books of the year is a novel called The Trees by Percival Everett. It's a funny and satirical and deadly serious book about racism and the legacy of injustice. It's got a crazy conceit at its heart. The plot involves a series of murders in the town of Money, Mississippi, which, as you know, is infamous as the location of the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Two hard-boiled detectives head down to Money to investigate, and it seems at first that this crime spree is connected to that lynching. But then the circle of comeuppance widens, and it becomes a much broader look at the legacy of racism.

All right, well, that's quite a holiday reading list. Readers who want to know more about what's on our list can find them at economist.com in the culture section. Andy, thanks very much for stopping by today. Thanks for having me, Jon.

2022 was an atypical year for games, mainly because so many of of the blockbuster, so-called AAA games that we expected were delayed, almost certainly because of the pandemic.

Colin Campbell writes about video games for The Economist.

These games take years to produce. They usually have hundreds of people working on them. So clearly they're going to be impacted. And I think the biggest two AAA games of the year were, first of all, Elden Ring. A follow-up to the Dark Souls series, which are often set in like claustrophobic dungeon-type situations. But this time the game was more free-flowing. You could move around in an open country. I think it introduced that kind of very difficult combat game to a whole new audience. The other AAA game came much later in the year, and that was the PlayStation 5 showpiece, God of War Ragnarok. It's based on the world of Norse gods, lots of exploration, puzzle solving, and combat. But unlike a lot of games in that genre, there was a lovely human story at the center of it, which is between the father Kratos, the God of War, and his beloved teenage son Atreus, who understands that his destiny is to fight. Those two games are single-player games, but I've also enjoyed some multiplayer games this year. Foxhole is something special. It's been around for quite a long time, but this year was its full release. It's kind of a massively multiplayer game set in a sort of mid-20th century war scenario. So imagine the kind of weapons you would expect from World War II or World War I, and everybody and everything in the game has to be created from scratch. Every battle is fought against real people. It's a massive achievement. At the other end of the scale, I think, in terms of ambition is Marvel Snap. It's a free-to-play digital card game, really fun to play against opponents on PC and mobile phones, and if you like the Marvel Universe, you'll get a great kick out of it. 2022 was also a good year for puzzle games. Sam Barlow, a British game designer who's made his name with Her Story and Telling Lies, which are brilliant detective yarns in which players have to sit through a jumble of video clips to find clues and construct a timeline, came out with Immortality, which develops this format further and in more interesting ways. It's about a famous actress who's been missing for decades, and players must scour behind-the-scenes footage and video from her movies to find out what happened to her. Elsewhere, from Germany, there was a really interesting, calming, peaceful puzzle game which I think of as kind of a jigsaw puzzle and a landscape building game where you create pretty scenery using hexagonal pieces loaded with topographical features such as trees, rivers, houses, or pastures. A different kind of puzzle game is a point-and-click adventure, much more of a narrative experience, and two of them which I enjoyed greatly this year are Norco and Pentiment. Very different. Norco is set in a kind of dystopian pixel arts near future in the oil refinery town in Louisiana of the same name. And it stands out for a beautifully crafted script and its evocation of the quiet desperation of post-industrial life for people who are stuck in those towns. Pentiment is another game in which it's all about a murdered nobleman in 16th century Bavaria. But what I liked about this, not just the beautiful art, which evokes the period very much, but also the historical detail and the design, which really gave us a feeling for late medieval Europe. And I think gives games a real sense that it can tell great historical fiction. And there were a couple of quirky games as well this year. Stray was a big hit. It's a story of a cat, and you play as a cat, and you prowl around a high-tech city trying to figure out various puzzles using cat-like skills such as jumping and pawing and scratching. Perhaps the weirdest game of the year, the weirdest hit of the year certainly, was Trombone Champ, which came out of nowhere. It was advertised amusingly as the world's first trombone-based rhythm music game, but it became a viral hit after its release in September. Players rushed to post silly videos of themselves trying to provide trombone accompaniment to old songs such as Auld Lang Syne and God Save the King. I think this year showed the elasticity of gaming. You know, on the one hand, you've got something that is deep and rich like God of War, and on the other hand, you have something that's you know, fairly silly, like Trombone Champ. And I think it shows the range of gaming and how far it is broadening as the years go by.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcasts@economist.com.

And you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.