When All Else Fails, List

The crutch of uninspired magazine editors everywhere is perhaps more ubiquitous than it seems:

Even blogs, in their traditional form, are essentially lists. Some bloggers even turn the form back on itself, working their way through other people’s canons: The New York writer Christopher R. Beha is writing a book about reading the Harvard Classics; a fundraiser for the University of Virginia named Tara Saylor is making every recipe in The Joy of Cooking; I’m watching all the movies in the Criterion Collection. And all of us have blogs.

And what are the Ten Commandments but a list?