The Top 10 Reasons to Make (and Love) Top 10 Lists Illustration by Tom Gauld The position of Arts and Entertainment Co-Editor of The Tower Times carries a certain amount of responsibility. When I filled that role at my Wisconsin high school, there was one task that I treasured above all else. I got to write an end-of-year Top 10 list. And so, as the spring semester of my senior year began, I sat on the floor in my room, combing through my CDs to pluck out the 10 Best Albums of 1991. There was one problem: I'd been able to buy music with only the $3.45 an hour I earned at a frozen-custard stand, so I owned only eight albums from 1991. Though as a 17-year-old I had great faith in my own taste, even I had to admit this seemed a bit sketchy. Which is why I blew an entire month's worth of paychecks on a trip to Musicland, where I bought two more CDs that looked pretty good, ignoring that one new album that the kids wearing flannel at my high school were all talking about, the one with the baby and the dollar bill on the cover. I'd backed myself into a corner. The CDs I bought made it on my list. None of them were "Nevermind." In 2011, of course, list makers who write professionally about culture do not face the problem of scarcity. It's like extra Christmas up in here, with screenings of awards contenders every night and DVDs arriving every day by U.S.P.S., FedEx, U.P.S. A music-critic friend has 1,961 songs in her "2011" playlist. Most magazines struggle to find space on their bookshelves for all the galleys they get in a year, much less read them. So it's a given that these lists are culled from an immense amount of material, and therein lies their utility for many readers. If you view a critic as, essentially, a recommendation robot who draws a salary - as many, many media consumers do - then the year-end Top 10 list is perfect, coming as it does just when you're looking for gifts to buy and movies to see. As it happens, the end of the year is also a great time for advertisers to hawk their products in newspapers and magazines, and so the great wheel of commerce rolls merrily along. In the introduction to her 2007 year-end roundup, the Times film critic Manohla Dargis pointed out that the most valuable function of the year-end Top 10 list is that it's "a public ritual" - a laying down of cards by a writer, showing you hers so you'll show her yours. But if the list itself is a public ritual, so, too, is the denouncing of list-making by some of those same critics - like Dargis herself, who calls lists "artificial exercises, assertions of critical ego, capricious and necessarily imperfect." It's a common complaint: that the act of making a Top 10 list is, for critics, an intellectually dishonest necessary evil. The readers demand our lists; our editors wait, itchy to transform our lists into click-accumulating slide shows; and the publicists who have sent us free stuff expect our lists so they can print them out and deliver them to their department heads. The laments sounded loudly in the last months of 2011. The New Yorker's TV critic, Emily Nussbaum, recently wrote a blog post titled "I Hate Top Ten Lists." The A.V. Club writer Tasha Robinson said on Twitter, " "Year-end top 10 film list" season sometimes feels like a game of "Compare every apple and orange you ate this year. Be specific." " And they're right. Take two films I'm considering for my year-end list, "Bridesmaids" and "Melancholia." How do you compare those movies - a sharp, funny ensemble comedy about female friendship and an operatic aria about depression and the end of the world? But nevertheless! I love making lists. I've loved it as long as I can remember. If, as a child, I'd made a Top 10 list of the perquisites of being a culture writer, making Top 10 lists would have been No. (No. 1: getting to see movies before they came out, instead of four months later when they finally reached Milwaukee.) To make a Top 10 list, it seemed, was to join in a great cultural conversation - a conversation that, stuck in high school in Wisconsin long before the Internet, I desperately wanted to be part of. By freshman year I was making lists of my favorite records, the best movies of the year, the top 10 cars I most wanted to own someday, the five girls I'd never gain the courage to approach.