(Continued...)

Let's talk about the breakdown you did of covers of Us Weekly.

There's the comparison of Us Weekly and People magazines.

It's so numbing to see that stuff all together.
It's astonishing. You realize what a very small and shallow pool of celebrity in which one swims.

Shallow in every sense.
Exactly. And it's astonishing if you start counting the number of times Angelina Jolie has been on the cover—you begin to see that it's a tiny little cast. But to have an Almanac that didn't talk about this would be preposterous. Whether we like it or not, or whether we try to live in the pages of the New York Review of Books, you can't just have the highbrow. The lowbrow is part of life.

Is part of your mission to make sense of the year and reconcile all of these things?
I think a pattern emerges for me, but someone else might read it and get a completely different pattern. I think the year is a sort of grand Rorschach, because you can look at the same data and see very different things. It's very easy to make really clumsy juxtapositions of data and to play to one particular facet of the readership. I really try, I make it a tremendous ambition to be nonpartisan but yet still be sort of interesting and entertaining.

Often it's a question of finding information that might've otherwise been undiscovered or neglected or not focused uponDo you think you have a job for life now?
I hope so.

Is it exhausting?
It is exhausting. What's interesting is that you get better at it. I remember I was in New York at the beginning of the year with the Dubai ports thing/scandal/
crisis/question, and it was odd. I was there talking to people and reading papers and just getting a sense, and everyone said, "This is gonna be a huge deal. This is a mess. This speaks to executive power, it speaks about race relations, it speaks about homeland security." And I just thought, You know what, it's nonsense. It will be in the book because it did say some quite interesting things about some facets of American society.

But what's odd is, having done this for a few years, and you look at the news cycle and you just think, Yeah, here we go. This story only exists because it has to exist because of the last story. You could almost plot it—like Martha Stewart's recent troubles. There's a musical notation, and the melody has an inevitable forward movement to it. So, like a chord sequence, to sound pleasing it has to go into a certain direction. I suppose there is a narrative of news and I do think it's different in different countries, but once you get into the sense of it, you can't predict the future, but when you see the next bit of news it always makes sense. You go, But of course. Martha came out and there had to be redemption—that's the American story. It was sort of inevitable.

Do you have any desire to write in longer form or do something more narrative?
I've done some, but I will never write a novel. I can make that a firm guarantee. Seriously, I have no skill in fiction whatsoever. You only have to meet a good novelist to think, This is why I don't write novels. At the moment I'm very interested in the marriage of writing and graphics simultaneously. I think when it's done well, it changes the way I think. And there is a real sense that the way you present data does change the way you perceive data. There's no reason it has to be simple. People aren't stupid. People have the ability to take in so much more information than anyone ever thinks, if it's presented in a way that is accessible and pleasing. I think you can be entertaining, and you can be wry, and amusing and informative. You can steer a course between glib and stuffy and pompous. That's what I want to do. I'm very aware of snark and tried not to [include it] because it's so easy. And actually, you don't need it.

And that's not what's going to last. The information is what's going to last.

Exactly. I think it's easier to be snarky than it is to be decent. Anything to get a smile. It doesn't last. And actually, it does date.

Are you a very particular, detail-oriented person outside of your writing?
A bit [laughs]. I aspire to be a neat freak but it doesn't ever happen. It's the difference between the artist's studio and the gallery. The books are like the gallery—everything hung, and everything's got a place and an order and a space and a label. It tries to be as neat as possible. But the artist's studio is always filled with drunk cups of coffee and paintbrushes and general detritus. And I'm much more like that.

What will it take to get you to fully accomplish the neat freak thing?
Oh, an entirely different personality.

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