The Top Books of 2016

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The Italian writer Italo Calvino defined a classic as “a book that’s never finished saying what it has to say.” This year, The Times’s daily critics reviewed nearly 250 titles. What follows are their lists of the fiction and nonfiction books that most moved, excited and enlightened them in 2016 — books that, in their own ways, are perhaps not finished saying what they have to say.

The New York Times has three daily book critics: Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and Jennifer Senior. Because they review different titles, it is impossible for them to compile a single unanimous Top 10 list. They have favorites, however, and are happy to have a chance to list them here. There is also a list from Janet Maslin, who has stepped down from full-time reviewing but remains a frequent contributor of reviews to The Times.

The critics have presented their lists in rough order of preference.

Google’s AI Reads Retinas to Prevent Blindness in Diabetics

GOOGLE’S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE can play the ancient game of Go better than any human. It can identify faces, recognize spoken words, and pull answers to your questions from the web. But the promise is that this same kind of technology will soon handle far more serious work than playing games and feeding smartphone apps. One day, it could help care for the human body.

Demonstrating this promise, Google researchers have worked with doctors to develop an AI that can automatically identify diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause blindness among adults. Using deep learning—the same breed of AI that identifies faces, animals, and objects in pictures uploaded to Google’s online services—the system detects the condition by examining retinal photos. In a recent study, it succeeded at about the same rate as human opthamologists, according to a paper published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“We were able to take something core to Google—classifying cats and dogs and faces—and apply it to another sort of problem,” says Lily Peng, the physician and biomedical engineer who oversees the project at Google.

But the idea behind this AI isn’t to replace doctors. Blindness is often preventable if diabetic retinopathy is caught early. The hope is that the technology can screen far more people for the condition than doctors could on their own, particularly in countries where healthcare is limited, says Peng. The project began, she says, when a Google researcher realized that doctors in his native India were struggling to screen all the locals that needed to be screened.

In many places, doctors are already using photos to diagnose the condition without seeing patients in person. “This is a well validated technology that can bring screening services to remote locations where diabetic retinal eye screening is less available,” says David McColloch, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Washington who specializes in diabetes. That could provide a convenient on-ramp for an AI that automates the process.

Pronouns {Johnson: Singular they}

FACEBOOK made quite a splash last week. Not with a new service or the announcement of some smashing financial results. Instead, the company will allow users to choose something besides “Male” or “Female” for the gender on their profile. It's a change that transgender people and others who do not feel 100% male or female have greeted with joy and relief.

Facebook’s radical move—radical in the best sense—was accompanied by another, but altogether less radical, change. If someone doesn’t want to be known as either male or female, that same person will not want to see, on others’ Facebook pages, the message “Wish him a happy birthday!” or “Wish her a happy birthday!” How should they be referred to?

When to Use “Which” and “Who”

Did you know that which has been around in various forms since the eighth century? Who dates to sometime before 900. Despite hundreds of years of use, the terms still confuse some speakers. How can you decide between these two interrogative pronouns?

Interrogative pronouns are used to form questions. Who can serve as the subject of a question, such as “Who was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?” It always refers to a person. For instance, the answer to the question above is Aretha Franklin. In the past, who was not used as an object, except in casual writing and speech. In recent years, who often replaces whom.

Which can serve as the subject of a question, too. A familiar example is “Which came first—the chicken or the egg?” The answer—the chicken, because egg shells form using a protein that exists only in the ovaries of a chicken—is a noun, a thing.

Many find it harder to use who or which as relative pronouns than as interrogative pronouns. Who is still restricted to people: The man who started the petition delivered it personally to the board. Mr. Johnson, who was my mathematics teacher in elementary school, finished first in the marathon. Which describes things. The hammer, which my father accidentally left on the roof, fell during the spring rains.

Will you be part of the first generation to master the age-old who and which? You can be, if you spread the word: Who is always associated with people. Which is used with things.

How Grammar Influences Legal Interpretations

Grammar is important, but it’s not a matter of life or death. Or is it? How does grammar influence the legal system? Researchers decided to find out by conducting an experiment. Does the wording of the description of a murder affect whether jurors classify a crime as first- or second-degree murder? According to their findings, “legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but [most significantly] limited to temporal dynamics… In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context.” In other words, grammar plays a part, but the study participants also paid attention to context when making their decisions. Is grammar as significant in real-life legal cases?