The top ten two-beer arguments that I hope (probably in vain) not to have to keep having with friends/acquaintances/enemies/family members in 2011:

Whether environmentalism is a religion, and global warming is a hoax. Whether, whatever Obama’s faults and failings, his attempts, such as they are/were, to raise tax rates on rich people and maybe curtail some of the swinishness on Wall Street make him a socialist. Whether everything is the Republicans’ fault.

3a. Whether everything is the Democrats’ fault.

3b. Whether anything is my fault.

Whether football isn’t really football unless, at least once a game, a player, preferably a wide receiver or a tight end, can be seen twitching on the ground, apparently paralyzed or dead, one arm sort of jutting out of his chest like an alligator’s, while even opposing players frantically wave for the trainers. Whether “Boardwalk Empire” was any good. Whether “Treme” was any good.

6a. Whether it made any sense for John Goodman’s character, who, sure, had writer’s block but did not, in any narratively developed way, seem depressed, to commit suicide, outside of the writers’ apparent desire to reference Kate Chopin.

Whether it is futile to continue to act as though Facebook and Twitter do not exist. Whether, if, as you insist, America is the Roman Empire, then pursuing more or less the same policies that brought down the Roman Empire will have any different result this time around. Whether time is actually accelerating or it just feels that way, insofar as each segment of time, be it a week or a year, must always seem smaller in relation to the ever-increasing quantity of total time experienced. Whether we should have one more beer.

Read more from The New Yorker’s 2010: The Year in Review.

Photograph: Flickmor via FlickrCC.