Interviews by Hayden Higgins
Nadine Smith
What stands out to me in reflecting on 2023 is a newfound feeling of community amongst my primary group of peers: music writers.
Most important: So much of what I focus on in my work or otherwise devote extensive periods of my time to is, in the grand scheme of things, not very important, and there are a thousand more pressing issues that I could and should probably devote this space to. But what stands out to me in reflecting on 2023 is a newfound feeling of community amongst my primary group of peers: music writers. While there are plenty of reasons to wallow given the perpetual freefall of corporate media, lately I’m more energized about the state of music in general and music criticism specifically than I have been in a long time. Maybe I’ve just been getting out more, but I feel like there’s a newfound momentum amongst those of us freelancers who engage in an inherently alienating line of work, as increasingly the answer to the bottoming-out of legit publications is to take matters into our own hands. So much of the most vital music criticism this year came from an emergent blogosphere of sites like No Bells and Tone Glow, or completely independent underground raconteurs like billdifferen, who have reminded me that sometimes the only way to really get shit done and influence the culture is to do it yourself.
Least important: Probably all the time I wasted arguing with people on the internet about professional wrestling.
Nadine Smith is a writer, critic, and native Texan currently based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in publications like The Fader, Pitchfork, Texas Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times.
Megan Marz
We would do well to stay as alert as Amazon reviewers of the infomercial-y Hutzler 571 banana slicer.
Most important: The actions and words of people in Palestine and around the world against the unconscionable war on Gaza.
Least important: Underbaked AI applications that solve fake problems or fail to solve real ones. I keep remembering an analogy I love from Adrian Daub’s book What Tech Calls Thinking (2020). A lot of “disruption,” he points out, is like an infomercial: predicated on goofy promises that sound best when you’re slumped in front of a screen, half-comatose. In our current technological environment, we would do well to stay as alert as Amazon reviewers of the infomercial-y Hutzler 571 banana slicer, who make fun of its pointlessness in what Daub calls “one of the greatest works of collective satire of the internet age.” The top review begins, “For decades I have been trying to come up with an ideal way to slice a banana. ’Use a knife!’ they say. Well…my parole officer won’t allow me to be around knives. ‘Shoot it with a gun!’ Background check…HELLO!”
Megan Marz is a writer living in Chicago. / meganmarz.com
Bijan Stephen
I’ve never seen more people I know grieve in public and in private.
Let me start by saying: what a year. By turns infuriating, demoralizing, and humiliating. It has felt like the beginning of an end; like the suspicious green calm that descends on the world just before the tornado arrives. Genocide is in the air, documented in real time by brave Palestinian journalists who just somehow keep getting shot by soldiers. I read about people being buried alive inside hospitals, and I think about the relative value of 20,000 human lives.
And yet the year has had a dreamlike quality, a kind of unreality that makes witnessing the horrors easier. I don’t just mean on the news. I’ve never seen more people I know grieve in public and in private, and I can’t think of any other explanation of how we’ve all gotten through the year. It must be a dream of some kind, or else how would we stand it?
Anyway. I’ve been keeping notes that occasionally turn into poems, though lately I haven’t been able to manage much beyond disjointed phrases. The other day, I found this: “Softly spoken magic spells / There’s no bottom to suffering and yet we all of us endure.” Another year is quickly approaching, and it feels like a threat.
Bijan Stephen is a writer in New York. He’s currently a contract writer at Valve and a music critic at The Nation.
Natasha Balwit-Cheung
Insisting on life, and building and rebuilding the networks that sustain it, seems very important to me.
Most important: Brushing up against transformation and going through with it. Memory without brittleness. Generosity at the time it is required—not after. Witness. Anything that goes against the callous, greedy, tightening logic that renders life and everything else in the world disposable.
2023 was the hottest year in recorded history. For millions of people and billions of animals each year, extreme temperatures mean death. Our buildings and technologies grant humans a layer of protection, but their protections aren’t universally afforded, and as temperatures increase, the limits of our current infrastructure and housing stock will be continually exposed.
The decimation of buildings and infrastructure in Gaza as a weapon of war shows how the destruction of place becomes a stand-in for the destruction of life. Insisting on life, and building and rebuilding the networks that sustain it, seems very important to me. Life for fish, mosses, children, everyone.
Least important: In a Grace Paley story, a young man avoiding marriage but seeking continuity is “drenched in the fizzle of his modest expectations.” I wanted to find a way to include that effervescent phrase in my answer, because it seems perfect for a least important thing, but I can’t think of a situation to match it. Something I hope will diminish in importance, or fizzle out, or become drenched in its own irrelevance, is the idea that Israel is a solution to the question of safety for Jewish people worldwide, or an exception to anti-colonial and anti-apartheid consensus, and that Jews are of one mind. It never was; and as the strong-willed and life-filled speakers in Paley’s stories make clear in their conversations and asides, they (we) never were.
Natasha Balwit-Cheung is a writer, researcher, and city planner. Her current research centers on ground-source energy systems and shallow geothermal heating and cooling for buildings. / balwitcheung.com
Tim Sahay
High on the meeting’s agenda were multilateralism, reform, and sustainable development.
Most important: Developing countries are not passive victims of the polycrisis; they are actively trying to wrestle some control over their destinies and the direction of the world order. BRICS is one arena in which these countries can operate.
On Aug. 24, more than 60 leaders of the largest developing countries met at the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, chaired by South African President Ramaphosa. High on the meeting’s agenda were multilateralism, reform, and sustainable development. Brazil’s President Lula Inácio da Silva, who founded the BRICS group in 2009, bluntly summarized: “We cannot accept a green neocolonialism that imposes trade barriers and protectionist policies under the pretext of protecting the environment.” By the summit’s end the group had announced six new members: Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
Tim Sahay co-leads the Polycrisis, a newsletter and a series of essays and panels exploring intersecting crises with a particular emphasis on the political economy of climate change and global North/South dynamics. / @70sBachchan
Jacqui Shine
Have you ever noticed how much of our time and attention are spent on following the exploits of rich people?
Least important: the Titan submersible catastrophe. The centering of what felt like the world’s attention for the four days of the search-and-rescue operation felt, and feels, obscene. On social media particularly, there was a relentless insistence that sympathy be expressed in a particular apolitical and context-free way, which is now thrown into high relief: People dispute every single day that Gazans in the middle of an actual hell deserve any sympathy at all. Have you ever noticed how much of our time and attention are spent on following the exploits of rich people? All day long we hear and watch and read news about people with incredible wealth and never talk about that wealth. Is it because we want to believe we’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires who will soon take our rightful place up there? Sorry, my guy: Our deaths, like our lives, will be much smaller.
Most important: This one piece of the destruction of Palestine and the forsaking of Palestinian lives I want to name is heritage destruction, an unambiguous war crime. Gaza City’s main public library and a library at the Rashad al-Shawwa Cultural Center have been destroyed. The central archive has been destroyed. More than one hundred heritage sites—museums, mosques, churches, cemeteries, monasteries—have been destroyed. (The full report by the NGO Heritage for Peace is here.) Eradicating Palestinian pasts is one way of destroying Palestinian futures.
Jacqui Shine is a writer and historian.
Ryan Broderick
I think AI is a big deal, but, contrary to all the hype, I have not felt the ground shift yet.
Most important: It feels simple to say it was TikTok, but it was TikTok. It’s not that anything necessarily new happened with TikTok, but we’ve clearly entered into a new relationship with it. And it’s making everyone lose their minds. There is a new moral panic centered around a TikTok video almost every day now. I assume it’s a mix of normal old sexism—we tend to do this with all new technology popular with young women—and the fact we just aren’t good at processing video content. Like as human beings. I think our brains genuinely are very bad at dealing with video. So hopefully we figure that out fast because the web is now a video medium and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Least important: All right, I’m going to throw a bomb here. I think it was AI. I think AI is a big deal, but, contrary to all the hype, I have not felt the ground shift yet. It still feels like something that’s coming, but has not arrived yet. I’d say the biggest AI thing to happen this year was the fake AI pope, but I hesitate to say it had any real lasting impact beyond the immediate novelty. Which I think is the issue with AI content. The minute something new is generated it’s immediately dated and, more importantly, immediately replicated thousands and thousands of times. It basically means all AI content arrives over on arrival. And I’m not sure how you fix that to be honest. Maybe the AI bros will crack it next year!
Ryan Broderick is a freelance writer and podcaster who writes the Garbage Day newsletter about internet culture and technology. / @broderick
Ted Scheinman
No number of dead children will ever be enough for such people—but lo, ’tis Christmas, and I shan’t say anything about it.
Most important: Israel’s war against the Palestinians in Gaza, and the monstrous refusal of the US to facilitate a ceasefire.
I shall not say what I think of the leaders who allow and encourage this war; the charity of the season and professional self-preservation have united to seal my lips—for the most part. Anyone can see, though, that the conflict is a crucible for nearly all the other slippages that have marked our regrettable recent history, from the weakening of democracy worldwide to violent right-wing extremism encouraged via social media (have you SEEN what pro-occupation Israeli families are posting on TikTok?!) to the continuing catastrophe in Yemen to the lessons never learned from the Iraq War. Rhetorically, the only way Israel can justify its slaughter of Palestinians is as a war of preemptive retaliation for an imagined future genocide. Logically, this is nonsense, so it’s no shock to see many IDF backers of late abandoning moral arguments in favor of undisguised brutality. No number of dead children will ever be enough for such people—but lo, ’tis Christmas, and I shan’t say anything about it.
Least important: Grok. Congrats to our increasingly fash-pilled and increasingly haggard-looking techno-overlord for releasing an AI brave enough to say the N-word or whatever. Next up: SmartCalipers™.
Ted Scheinman is the author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan (FSG Originals, 2018). / @Ted_Scheinman
Matt Webb
It could have transformed energy transmission and made quantum-locked floating sneakers, and so forth, and on closer inspection, nah.
Most important: Computers got good finally. I’m a midwit engineer and an amateur designer and it turns out (according to Ethan Mollick et al) that what AI is good for is taking left-side-of-the-bell-curve people and dragging them up to the norm. So now the dumb ideas in my head, I get to build. I made a personal iPhone app that shows a compass arrow that always points at the center of the galaxy! I can’t even write iOS code. Coding feels like flying now, and it makes me laugh out loud. Long live these AI seven-league boots.
Least important: LK-99 turned out to be a bust. It could have transformed energy transmission and made quantum-locked floating sneakers, and so forth, and on closer inspection, nah. Oh well. I have this fantasy of a glitch in the universe. That we’ll stumble across a peculiar combo of mirrors that for some reason we don’t understand can propel us to the stars. Just… the unpredicted doorway. For a couple weeks with LK-99 I could indulge that, and so did many others, and I find it heartwarming that we all found joy in the collective imagining of What If.
Matt Webb is manufacturing a clock that writes a new poem every minute. He writes at Interconnected and lives in London.
Rob Horning
We are on the cusp of being overwhelmed with conversation from all sorts of inanimate objects imbued with natural language processing, and all this talk will likely only modulate our experience of loneliness into something more recalcitrant.
Most important: In May 2023, the US Surgeon General’s office released a report called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” What seems important about this is not the idea that loneliness, a universal and inevitable aspect of the human condition, has finally been uncovered as widespread and suboptimal, identified as a quantifiable health risk, complete with the obligatory comparison to smoking. (If “the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” as the report claims, is being a social smoker actually beneficial to my health?)
It’s more that the medicalization of loneliness typifies a broader framing of the problem that blames individuals, stigmatizes solitude, and invites technological fixes likely to exacerbate feelings of disconnection. We are on the cusp of being overwhelmed with conversation from all sorts of inanimate objects imbued with natural language processing, and all this talk will likely only modulate our experience of loneliness into something more recalcitrant. At the same time, we are already awash in technologies that mediate social connection only where it is economically exploitable, turning loneliness into a form of labor refusal. The space for simply being together, beyond the concerns of productivity and normativity, has been almost completely enclosed; the Surgeon General report’s grimly programmatic suggestions for how to enjoy friendship testifies to its obsolescence.
Least important: Any expression of concern about so-called x-risk—the possibility that artificial intelligence will exterminate humanity of its own accord—whether it manifests as open letters, histrionic interviews with the press, boardroom drama, or an excited undertone of ghoulish anticipation that marks otherwise sober scientistic assessments. Humanity has been on the course toward self-extinction since at least the advent of capitalism, but projecting capitalistic imperatives onto machines as if they came up with them won’t help instigate any sort of course correction.
Rob Horning writes the newsletter Internal Exile, about technology and social life.
Tim Herschel-Burns
To appropriate a quote sometimes attributed to Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget—and I’ll tell you what you value.”
Most important: Most people who experienced 2023 live in the Global South. What stories were important for them? Rising debt depleting their governments’ already miniscule health and education budgets. Mounting climate impacts they did little to cause. A sputtering and unequal multilateral system. The good news: 2023 brought a resurgence of unified Global South action, forcing the issues that mattered to them up the global agenda. Global North governments insist that they are taking these calls seriously, but they have yet to back up the ambitious rhetoric with strong policy changes, especially funding. To appropriate a quote sometimes attributed to Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget—and I’ll tell you what you value.”
Least important: The Titan submarine implosion, which, while tragic for the five people aboard and their families, prompted an extensive search and rescue operation costing millions of dollars and received wall-to-wall coverage. Five days earlier, European authorities received an alert about a ship carrying refugees and migrants that was in distress in the Mediterranean. They watched it struggle for 13 hours before it capsized, killing over one hundred times the number of people on the Titan.
Tim Hirschel-Burns is Policy Liaison for the Global Economic Governance Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. / @TimH_B
Sophie Lewis
The only way to stop capitalism from rendering the planet uninhabitable is to destroy capitalism.
Most important this year was, obviously, the courage of Palestinians.
Least important—not unrelatedly—was the emissions agreement presided over by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company at the 28th UN climate change conference. I don’t know what to tell you. Back in 2009, I was among the thousands of activists beaten by riot police outside the 15th one, in Copenhagen. Maybe we thought that that one, somehow, might be it. Well, every year the toothless deals pile up. Most of us still contrive to deny the obvious: that the only way to stop capitalism from rendering the planet uninhabitable is to destroy capitalism. Maybe soon we will begin.
Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer and ex-academic living in Philadelphia. Her next book, Enemy Feminisms, will be published by Haymarket in February 2025. She is the author of Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.
Maggie Lieu
It felt like we were sending a sleuth into space, armed with the latest technology to pry into the universe’s darkest secrets.
Most important: As an astrophysicist, I was most excited about the launch of the Euclid space telescope in 2023, this is a mission I have been involved in for a decade! This groundbreaking mission aims to map the distribution of dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious forces that make up most of the universe. It’s like getting a detailed 3D blueprint of the cosmos! My excitement when Euclid was finally launched is undescribable. It felt like we were sending a sleuth into space, armed with the latest technology to pry into the universe’s darkest secrets. The mission will survey billions of galaxies, peering back over three quarters of the entire history of the universe. It’s like having the ultimate time machine at our disposal! The data from Euclid will not only provide us with a better understanding of the cosmos but could even challenge or refine our current understanding of the universe’s very expansion!
Least important: Now, on a completely different note, there was the Hollywood strike. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) went on strike in July 2023, but the strike was finally resolved in August after both sides reached an agreement on a new contract. While the strike was disruptive to the entertainment industry, it was a temporary blip in the entertainment industry, and it didn’t have any lasting impact on the world as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, I understand its importance in the entertainment industry, and I certainly believe in fair rights and compensations for workers. But from an astrophysicist’s perspective, it didn’t quite stir the same level of excitement and barely registered on my radar.
Dr. Maggie Lieu is an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham working on Machine Learning & Cosmology and making YouTube videos. / maggielieu.com
Nicholas Jackson
They gave us all something to look forward to, to talk about, to participate in—a shared culture in a time of increasing division and distrust.
Most important: Barbenheimer. Sure, the Airbnb partnership to place someone in a life-size Barbie Malibu DreamHouse was a little much; so too, Cillian Murphy’s line reading of Hindu scripture as J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” But it was the story of the summer, Margot Robbie donning pink, sky-high heels in Greta Gerwig’s audacious take on an American icon opening in theaters against Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus, a doorstop of a book. Both films were big and bold, offering modern, thought-provoking takes on consumerism, representation (or lack thereof), and power—but who would win? Both, it turns out, as audiences expected to attend one or the other ended up seeing both. They gave us all something to look forward to, to talk about, to participate in—a shared culture in a time of increasing division and distrust.
Least important: The persistent idea that escapism isn’t worthwhile, or that there’s no place for it in difficult times. That it doesn’t have very real psychological benefits—even (or especially) as bombs are dropping, strikes are ongoing, and wildfires are burning. Or even that the things we often escape to (literature and art and film, unstructured time with friends and family) don’t have value if they don’t improve our personal productivity, or if they distract from having an opinion about The Story of the Day. This feeling seems to be growing, at least among those willing to share it on social media (or the user base of X has changed so dramatically that it’s shifting my perception). This is the same group, I think, that insists on listening to everything at 1.5x speed, and only consumes threads of learnings and takeaways from self-help books. Get away from them. Go to the movies.
Nicholas Jackson works in media, publishing, and tech; as a newsroom leader, he has served as editor-in-chief of both Pacific Standard and Atlas Obscura. / nbjackson.com
Margaret Howie
Frankly, let the polar bears swim over and eat us all, we deserve it.
Most important: A 19th-century judge once said of the residents of Uxbridge, a town on the edges of London established between the seventh and 12th centuries, “They will steal the very teeth out of your mouth as you walk through the streets.” Contemporary Uxbridge’s reputation is now decidedly worse—the borough is a traditional stronghold for the ruling Conservative Party. While the Tories have been busy stripping the country’s teeth from its head, their popularity has wavered to the point that a recent by-election in Uxbridge had an uncommonly narrow result, with the Conservative candidate squeaking in a win with 495 votes.
Those 495 extra votes were quickly attributed to backlash to an anti-pollution scheme. The reaction from the Tories was swift. Head ding-dong PM Rishi Sunak started barking about “the war on motorists” and Tory ministers leapt into “anti-green” policies. This is presumably a big reason as to why the government has moved away from the Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050 goal. Not that some handy petroleum industry money may not have played a part, either. But the combination of stupidity, shortsightedness, and selfishness to get a little extra power (a combination just as evident over on the Labour side), is why we ended up with a burning planet in the first place. And there are Uxbridge moments everywhere. Frankly, let the polar bears swim over and eat us all, we deserve it.
Least important: Movies are not dying because of superhero fatigue or overpriced tickets or the use of mobile phones, movies are dying because the lighting is terrible: Please someone stop the gray sludge look that has spread like the Blob across every goddamn prestige picture, stop color grading to a tone of “mildewed shower curtain,” fuck outta here with the “natural lighting” bullshit, if I wanted natural I’d be outside of a cinema looking at normal, non-movie star people. If we could all work out ring lights and decent angles during the pandemic you can show me actors’ faces not doused in shadows [ahem RIDLEY SCOTT] I am not a crank, turn the lights on.
Margaret Howie is an editor at Space Fruit Press and teaches at Illume PIlates in beautiful South East London.
Nick Van Osdol
Million-year-old miracle technologies, i.e., trees, deserve as much wonder and attention as AI or whatever else will be in vogue in 2024.
Most important: Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell significantly due to more stringent enforcement of environmental policies under Lula’s admin than Bolsonaro’s (34 percent in the first half of 2023). We’ll see where the full year nets out. I answer this way because while most of the attention (and often, investment) in climate efforts swirls around renewable energy, electric vehicles, global conferences, or activist stunts, some of the highest-leverage impact lies in enforcement of existing policies and good ol’ conservation. It’s easy to get tunnel vision on new, exciting technologies. But million-year-old miracle technologies, i.e., trees, deserve as much wonder and attention as AI or whatever else will be in vogue in 2024.
Least important: My answering this question. I’ll throw myself before the sword here because I can’t otherwise bring myself to deny the potential ripples and reverberation of anything else under the sun. One of my favorite Zen koans explains why:
A Zen master named Gisan asked a young student to bring him a pail of water to cool his bath.
The student brought the water and, after cooling the bath, threw on to the ground the little that was left over.
“You dunce!” the master scolded him. “Why didn’t you give the rest of the water to the plants? What right have you to waste even a drop of water in this temple?”
The young student attained Zen in that instant. He changed his name to Tekisui, which means a drop of water.
Nick van Osdol is a Brooklyn-based writer, media operator, and analyst primarily covering the intersection of business and climate at keepcool.co.
