In keeping with time-honored tradition of list-making during the last week of the year I decided to put my own together. So here’s a not so-exhaustive list of the things I read and listened to this past year that really stuck out to me.
10) How to Live Under an Unqualified President
John Piper is one of my favorite contemporary Christian writers and theologians who unapologetically speaks truth:
“…I regard Donald Trump as not qualified for the presidency. But today he will become president. This is not surprising from a Christian point of view. The Christian faith was born, and has flourished, under regimes less qualified to lead than Donald Trump. The murderous Herod (Matthew 2:16) and the Christian-killing Nero (Tacitus, Annals XV.44) did not thwart the spread of a faith whose King and power and charter are not from this world (John 18:36). The movement that Jesus Christ unleashed in the world, when he died and rose again, does not depend on qualified human government for its existence or power.
The linking of the Christian church with the ruling political regime is not essential to the life and fruitfulness of Christian faith. On the contrary, such linking has more often proven to corrupt the essential spirit of Christ, who typically uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27), and whose life-saving weapons do not consist in media monopolies, commanding wealth, or civil laws.
Followers of Christ are not Americans first. Our first allegiance is to Jesus, and then to the God-inspired word of Scripture, the Bible. This is our charter, not the U.S. Constitution.
9) The Babylon Bee
The Babylon Bee is a Christian satirical website (yes, such a thing exists) and it gives The Onion a run for its money. Many of the jokes are in-house commentary on life in the evangelical church. But some of the The Babylon Bee’s conservative satire takes on liberal narratives in a way The Onion doesn’t. Here are a couple I thought were brilliant:
8) Radio Atlantic: The Manifest Destiny of Mike Pence.
I have really been getting into the Atlantic this year. There is a podcast the editors of the news magazine do over one of the monthly cover stories. It’s a detailed look at how Mike Pence ended up on Trump’s ticket last year and how a conservative evangelical politician can humbly serve and praise a man like Donald Trump.
7) How Half Of America Lost Its…Mind
This Cracked.com piece is no Atlantic but it’s a hilarious way to explain the results of last year’s 2016 election. I’m not sure if it’s an article or a meme or what (caution: language).
I’m going to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon in three movies. And then some text.
There’s this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside …
… while the bad guys are decadent[s] who live in the city and wear stupid clothes:
In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy …
… while the bad guys live in a shiny space station:
In Braveheart, the main character (Dennis Braveheart) is a simple farmer …
… and the dastardly Prince lives in a luxurious castle and wears fancy, foppish clothes:
The theme expresses itself in several ways — primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn’t exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.
6) The Gerrymandering Project (538)
When I first started teaching AP U.S. Government in 2010, a few students had heard of the idea of gerrymandering. Now almost everyone has. Gerrymandering is now front and center as more and more Americans realize that elected officials can choose their voters instead of the other way around. But after listening to half of this six-part series, I realize it’s not as simple as drawing maps. Human beings don’t live in nice convenient little patterns that make congressional districts easy to draw. We “self sort” based on who we want (or don’t want) to live next to. Translation: we gerrymander ourselves. I highly recommend the episode on North Carolina which tackles racial gerrymandering and the Arizona episode that ask the question, can there truly be an independent commission to draw districts?
5) Ponzi Supernova: Madoff Speaks
This is a fascinating and jaw-dropping account of the most crooked financial mastermind in American history, from his mouth. It’s free right now on audible. The ease at which Madoff was able to swindle investors out of literally billions of dollars made me hate capitalism for a few hours.
4) Backstory- Man of the People: A New Technology Falls Into the Wrong Hands
What do goat testes have to do with the rise of Donald Trump? Actually quite a lot. This was in my top five listens for the year. The podcast comes from Backstory Radio which feature three trained historians who dive into the history behind the headlines. This episode is actually from another podcast called Reply All which is on my to-listen to list for 2018.
Dr. John Brinkley was one of the most famous people in the country during the 1920s and 30s. He started off in Kansas convincing impotent men he could make them fertile again by a goat testicle transplant. He was quite the scam artist because no one in their right mind would admit to having had the surgery in the first place. So his miraculous claims went unchallenged. He promised the cure to all sorts of maladies and once he got his hands on the penultimate technology of the time people from coast to coast were subject to his radio program. This technology wasn’t Twitter but radio. And real bonafide doctors were powerless to stop him, even as he made a run for the presidency in the 1930s. Sound familiar?
3) Whistlestop Podcast and Book
I found this gem of a podcast during the 2016 election and have been listening ever since. John Dickerson is the host of Face the Nation on CBS Sunday Morning. During the election Dickerson produced a weekly podcast that chronicled some of the known and not-so known stories from presidential elections past. Dickerson breaks them down on a granular level explaining why that specific campaign moment was so significant then puts it into the larger historical context of the time. If you want to borrow my copy of the book, let me know. One of my personal favorites: When John McCain almost became the GOP frontrunner in the 2000 Republican primaries.
2) More Perfect
This is one of the most well-produced political podcasts out there. More Perfect started off as a spinoff of the Radiolab podcast from WYNC studios. Each episode addresses one or two Supreme Court cases and the legal questions behind each one. There are currently two seasons and I have assigned several of the episodes to my AP Government students. Because of political gridlock and partisanship many of the most important political and social issues of the day seem to end before the Supremes. More Perfect is a timely look at some of the most relevant. The one on gun control: The Gun Show is a must listen as well as Citizens United on campaign finance.
1) Cato Daily Podcast: In Trying Times, Take Lessons from the Stoics
More Perfect was my number one for 2017 until I heard this podcast the other day from the libertarian Cato Institute. Host Caleb Brown presents a libertarian perspective from the days news and politics and usually has a guest writer or speaker on. The guest the other day was Ryan Holiday who writes about the practice of stoicism in trying times. 
The APUSH GOAT 