Welcome to Power Rankings!
Completely comprehensive, unbiased, and accurate rankings—for everything.
Hello, and welcome to Power Rankings!
I’ll be blunt: 2020 has been a rough year. With a who-knows-what-the-hell-could-happen election, a who-knows-what-the-hell-could-happen pandemic, and just a who-knows-what-the-hell-could-happen world in general, we could all use a bit more certainty in our lives. Throw the non-recyclable styrofoam smoothie cup of social media from which you’re sipping into this dumpster fire and you have a recipe for paranoia, distrust, climate change, and complete despair. If you’re feeling this way, you’re not alone—actually, you’re probably in the majority.
Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich coined the phrase post-truth politics in 1992, which is without coincidence the year of my birth. In the culmination of Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Gulf War, our good friend Steven decided to just pull his hair out and declare the whole truth thing for what it is: pure bunk. This has widely been regarded as a bad move, chiefly because it seems like the truth has become more and more of a moving target since then.
Fear not, however—I’m here to play the shameless messiah to Tesich’s unaware prophet and remedy this quagmire of wishy-washy opinion with Power Rankings. If you’re tired of slant, spin, and mindless prognostication, you’ve come to the right place. My Rankings are 100% official, unbiased, and accurate, and come from a single source: myself.
Let me back up a bit: this newsletter is an offshoot of a Slack channel I started at work for fun; that Slack channel itself was an offshoot of a single power rankings joke I made in a second, different Slack channel at the same workplace. One day, while discussing my official Business Model Power Rankings, one of my colleagues made the grave error of actually suggesting that I set up a newsletter to propagate my pablum across the world:
Plus, I’m, well—a bit bored in my free time, really. So here are the rules of the game:
You do not talk about Power Rankings. (Actually, just kidding—share this newsletter as far and wide as you can!)
For each edition of Rankings, there’s a topic. Sometimes the topic will be a current event, sometimes it’ll be something from pop culture or sports, or sometimes, you—yes, you, you with the face!—will have suggested it in the comments. Sometimes a friend might text me one. Who knows? Anything my audience requests, I will rank. Think of me as your personal, highly-opinionated Ron Burgundy at the teleprompter.
Instead of publishing some long-winded tripe of argumentative deconstruction and rhetorical brilliance, I’ll publish a long-winded set of Power Rankings consisting of argumentative deconstruction and rhetorical brilliance. I’ll do a medium-depth dive on the topic, but far more importantly, I’ll rank the related players, characters, or other options therein.
To reiterate, because I can’t stress this enough: my Rankings are 100% pure, homegrown, unassailable fact. Any amount of sniping and griping in the comments will do very little to change my mind. (Unless your argument is really, really, really good. I’m talking Aristotle-levels of good.)
In the wholly unlikely event that your argument sways me—as in (4)—you will be showered with praise, admiration, and a callout in the subsequent edition of Power Rankings. The set of Rankings upon which you made an impression will be amended to reflect the new universal truth for eternity.
Repeat steps 1-5 until the heat death of the universe. (Or until I can go to bars at night again. Whichever comes first.)
So let’s stir the pot by not stirring the pot at all and acknowledging the truth for what it is! What are the best avenues in Manhattan, and why is the whole city grid-shaped, anyway? Which political candidate is the least bad, and why are they all terrible every time? Which of the Fast and Furious movies have the most believable stunts, and did Vin Diesel really jump a Lamborghini between two buildings?
With Power Rankings, you’ll be able to move out of the murky marshes of guesswork and into the solid, potholey pavement of fact.
The first rankings will come out later this week! Make your decisions accordingly.