I am the worst when it comes to lists. Absolutely the worst. Grocery lists, errand lists, lists of things I liked over the past year, which is the task presently before me: My mind is just not organized that way. “Why can’t I make myself pull this off?” I asked my Best Wife of 2024 (an easy call, that one). She threw out some words: “chaotic,” “disorganized,” “forgetful.” I chose the more flattering ones: I love things the best that feel intense in the present, but leave no record behind. So that makes the flotsam that did snag in my memory these past 12 months especially special? Maybe so. Here are some, in no particular order:
Best waking dream. I canvassed for the Harris-Walz ticket in the suburb of my youth, and was miraculously assigned turf at the exact center of a triangle formed by my two childhood homes and my grandparents’ house, none more than a mile apart. The doorbells hadn’t changed. The roads had the identical texture I remembered beneath my feet. My three favorite childhood sledding hills, and all the houses, were different: much smaller. And how did I ever manage not to realize what a magical name is “Fairy Chasm Road”? Good reminder, I suppose, not to take the magic of childhood for granted.
Best book. A more conventional entry, this one. I have to shout out Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. The honesty, intensity, and craft with which Klein was able to observe and convey what makes politics in this moment different from anything experienced in the past blew my socks off. I found it beyond all clichés and received categories of analysis, which is the kind of writing we need so much more of now.
Best day. I flew to Washington, D.C. I rented a car and drove to a neighborhood with lots of horses, with a broadcast studio tucked away behind a barn, and recorded an interview for a documentary about the 1981 PATCO strike. I drove to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and thought about John Brown while listening to a profound podcast episode about how the love of music can be passed down from generation to generation. I visited my cousin Noah, one of the most soulful people I know. This I recommend to you for 2025: Identify the most soulful person you know, and visit them often.
Best director. Mike Mills didn’t have a movie out this year, but does that matter in an age where you can find most movies you want to watch while sitting on your couch? The big screen is still the best way, of course, and that was how I experienced Mills’s picture C’mon C’mon when it came out way back in 2021. I especially loved its creativity in melding form and content, both visual and auditory tools, to convey how hard it can be to communicate emotions, but how healing that communication can be. One day this year, I realized that it was the best movie I ever saw, so I did a deep dive into all his features, and found each to be a minor existentialist masterpiece.
Best YouTube jazz find. I hold the controversial position that recorded music is at best a necessary evil, the Plato’s Cave of aesthetic experiences, certainly if you’re a jazz fan. The greatest accomplishments in the genre happened without ever having been recorded: In the early 20th century, when recording was rare, and the genre was invented in spaces too low-down to be seen as worth the expense; and during the recording strike of the early 1940s, and liberated from restraint, the masters felt free to invent a music that mattered, at first, to no one but each other—bebop. The most satisfying stuff to listen to likewise conveys what it sounds like in a certain place and time when creative people are trying to solve the problem of collective improvisation in ways never quite heard before. A new recording of drummer Jack DeJohnette discovered in his archives from 1966 when he was 20, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Henry Grimes on bass, and Joe Henderson on tenor sax is just such a one. Released by Blue Note as Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’, it bottles musicians improvising at the midpoint between order and chaos, threatening to fall into the abyss of entropy for good—just like the world outside. Not for the faint of heart.
Best café conversation with strangers. Not the usual thing, in my yuppie Chicago neighborhood, to hear two guys swapping stories about landing muskies, the toothy and legendarily evasive “fish of 10,000 casts”; more the way of the world in the vicinity of my cabin in the woods of Marshall County, Illinois. So I introduced myself as a fellow angler and joined the conversation—which was how I learned that one was a professional demolition derby driver. I told how bored I’d become with the annual one at the Marshall-Putnam County Fairgrounds, where the main event always ends in 20 minutes of tedium and all the thrills of a stalemated chess match. He explained to me that this is what happens in the cheap promotions that don’t kick people out for defensive driving, without big enough prizes for the “mad dog”—the most aggressive driver in every heat. Then he set me straight, which is why on March 19 you’ll find me in Madison at the Badger State Nationals. “Over $150,000 in prize money!”
