Interviews by Hayden Higgins
Katie Kadue
The voiding of meaning online feels like part of a larger process by which significance is being iterated out of existence.
One of the many distorting effects of being very online is that what’s most important (news and images coming in from Gaza, for example) gets flattened on the social media timeline with what’s least important (AI videos that represent different countries as gangster animal cyborgs, for example). Events that seem like they should change the course of history fade in the collective memory while memes stay evergreen. Still, ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be on the computer a lot, and not even Elon Musk buying Twitter in 2022 could make me lose my faith in the power of the virtual public sphere to produce meaning, however messily, like Milton said in Areopagitica about bad books: The cognitive exercise of sorting out what’s important from what’s not, or finding the important hiding in the unimportant, is also a moral and aesthetic exercise. This year, especially after Trump’s election, I stopped feeling that way, and started feeling what a lot of people who don’t live their lives according to a 1644 polemical tract have felt since around 2016, that the internet is bad now. I still have fun and learn things and find community online, but it’s one thing to have people maliciously misread you when you go viral, and another for thousands of blue-checks to spew generic AI-generated comments at you. The degradation of my social media user experience is obviously not the most important thing that happened this year, but that shift from the distortion to the voiding of meaning online feels like part of a larger process by which significance is being iterated out of existence. For example, the least significant thing that happened this year was that, in thousands of essays conceived by ChatGPT or the ChatGPT-ified brains of college students, a poet used vivid imagery.
Katie Kadue is a literary critic. She teaches English at SUNY Binghamton. / katiekadue.com
Aurielle Marie
Every tear you shed this year was the most important one.
Most important: Which is more important? The last words of a five-year-old surrounded by her dead relatives in a burning car who waited on medical support that would never come? The journalist who watched his family be slain one by one—a wife, a son, another son, a mother—each disappearing by American-made missiles as he reported the news, despite? A viral picture of the medical director of the last standing hospital in Gaza disappearing slowly behind the tanks of Israeli soldiers who refuse to release him now? How does one choose a single name from the flowing throng of martyrs? I won’t. They are each most important. Every tear you shed this year was the most important one. Every song you sang, every lesson you learned. Every commitment you made, too—to remember those who shouldn’t be forgotten. To call your congressman or phone your grandmother back when you miss her. To water your neighbor’s plants. To sleep with the woman you love when she comes home. It is important that you were alive this year, that you are alive now. It is important that today, on the last day, you make it count for something.
Least important: Voting for president in a country that gerrymanders every polling district, allows corporations to choose political candidates, and funds a genocide against the will of its constituents.
Aurielle Marie (@YesAurielle) is a Black and queer cultural worker who writes about sex, systems, and the South. / auriellemarie.com
Joanna Kavenna
Reality became unreal.
Most important: Many important events from 2024 feel like a dream, or as if I read them in a novel by Philip K. Dick.
Did a quorum of billionaires really blast into space in ever-more tumescent rockets, piously informing us that this was for the greater good? Who will be the first among them to lasso an asteroid and become a space-trillionaire? Watch this space (or that space) in 2025.
In this year’s big AI news: Did the same/slightly different billionaires tell us to be very, very afraid of AI while, er, developing masses of AI? Did AI companies really steal everyone’s copyrighted stuff while claiming this wasn’t stealing but “training” instead? Did ChatGPT solemnly inform me that Sylvia Plath wrote a poem in 1958 called “My Cat Learns to Use a Cat Flap”:”‘one of Plath’s most delicate works, exploring the tensions between comfort and transformation?”
None of this could actually have happened so perhaps the most important event in 2024 was that reality became unreal.
Least important: My cat (not Plath’s) learned to use a cat flap. It has taken him three years to fathom this esoteric art. This really happened—I think.
Joanna Kavenna is the author of ZED (Random House) among other novels. / joannakavenna.com
Bijan Stephen
You’re fucked, and you don’t even know it yet.
Most important: First, the re-election of Donald Trump. Enough ink has been spilled; all I’ll say is: It’s going to be far worse than the predictions, and nobody will care until it’s personal. The Democrats are not an opposition party. It will be easier to just look away.
Second: the genocide in Gaza. It’s been more than a year of Israel killing children. This is the kind of thing that makes an atheist want to believe in eternal damnation. May God have mercy on our already damned souls.
Third: Generative AI. We’ve officially lost the fight against the demon machine. Leaving aside the plagiarism, it is very obviously a Faustian bargain. If the boosters are successful, it’ll be humans for me and robots for thee. You’re fucked, and you don’t even know it yet.
It always feels like the bad years are easier to talk about than the good ones, doesn’t it?
Bijan Stephen is a writer at Compulsion Games and a music critic at The Nation. / bijanstephen.blog
Matt Webb
We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, perhaps.
Most important: That Clark Kent haircut. All the teen boys I know have the exact same one. I watched the new Superman trailer and there it was. Fluffy curls, short back and sides. Clark Kent is now Gen Z. The baton has been passed!
I love Gen Z. I love how they grapple with the world—politics and identity and fashion and all the rest. Infectious energy.
Least important: Technology has gone a bit Douglas Adams hasn’t it? Like, AI. It is absurdly improbable that you can hoover up the internet, shred it, then talk to the resulting mulch pile and it talks back.
A weird time. And yet… for all the breathless, strange developments in robotics and chatty chatbots and trying to talk to whales, and the fears too, day to day 2024 went off pretty much any other year.
We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, perhaps. In the meantime the world keeps turning, magical and mundane, neither singularity nor shipwreck, we keep on keeping on, muddling through. Maybe that’s just how the future is. Long may it last.
Matt Webb is manufacturing a clock that writes a new poem every minute. He writes at Interconnected and lives in London.
Nick Jackson
My urchin is unbothered by anything but the algae in its path.
Most important: The most important thing to happen this year is that I got into saltwater reefkeeping. Hear me out. I’m not entirely sure how it started, but one day I found myself on an old-fashioned forum and, six months (and hundreds of hours) later, I’m already setting up my second tank, complete with a protein skimmer and CO2 scrubber and UV sterilizer. I don’t necessarily encourage you to follow me into this world, but I do encourage you to pick up a new hobby. Find one that forces you to slow down, one that distracts from the chaos of the day-to-day, one that rewards repetition and care and attention. When work ends, I turn to the tank. My urchin is unbothered by anything but the algae in its path. My snails trek across the glass, one unhurried inch at a time. And my fish just keep swimming.
Least important: The death of cable. If you follow the media industry, it’s a constant storyline, one that’s blamed for increased polarization and the end of monoculture. Everyone’s moving to short-form platforms; streamers are snatching up sports rights; the conglomerates are spinning off assets saddled with debt. But that’s not death—it’s evolution. And none of it really matters unless you’re an executive looking for an exit. Polarization exists, no doubt, but saving CNN’s talking heads won’t save the country. The problem isn’t what we’re watching or how we’re watching it (most of the time)—it’s the incentives driving the content itself. Focusing on the industry’s specific models distracts from the larger issue: a system that rewards outrage over nuance and attention over connection.
Nick Jackson is the editor-in-chief of Atlas Obscura, and former editor-in-chief of Pacific Standard and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. / nbjackson.com
Margaret Howie
Let Hawk Tuah girl secure her bag with a scammy crypto hustle and skedaddle.
Most important: Elections took place in 50 countries this year and wasn’t that fun. I voted, and I voted out of spite, and I think maybe I wasn’t the only one. I haven’t got stats to hand on spite, but I have an inkling that it drove a lot of poll results. I usually use my Most important section to talk about the climate, but 2024’s final score is Spite: 1, Climate, -100.
Least important: Crypto and NFTs. How quaint! Yes, memecoin enthusiasts are still around, gnawing up energy and patience with their stupid libertarian Pogs, but while the NFT aesthetic was lousy it was often handmade. Now we are sinking under tsunamis of AI slop chundered up by an even more pernicious load of tech grifters, with an even bigger carbon footprint, even more fashy ideology, and it’s all so much uglier. And say what you will about bitcoin but I didn’t open up my work laptop every day to a Microsoft Office prompt to use it more, unlike the plagiarism-junkie LLM tentacles being thrust into every crevice of once-functional software. So let Hawk Tuah girl secure her bag with a scammy crypto hustle and skedaddle, it’s as good a coda to 2024 as any.
Margaret Howie is an editor at Space Fruit Press and teaches at Illume Pilates in beautiful South East London. / @threeweeks.bsky.social.
Katie Brigham
Maybe everyone in every nation is just as susceptible to the prevailing ideological winds of the times.
Most important: For me, the most thought-provoking, big bummer realization was that global trends are inescapable and Trump 2.0 is much more than a reflection on the unique American condition. Globally, incumbent parties in wealthy democracies—on the left and right—lost big this year. Far-right populist parties have been surging for years. People everywhere are mad about the economy, immigration, cultural change, and the elites who aren’t listening. So sure, perhaps Kamala Harris would have won had she gone on Joe Rogan, been less woke, or reincarnated as Bernie Sanders. But also there’s a really good chance it wouldn’t have mattered, because maybe everyone in every nation is just as susceptible to the prevailing ideological winds of the times, just as frustrated, just as complex, and just as capable of change.
Least important: On Love Is Blind season 7, a manager at the climate policy think tank RMI who works on heavy industry decarbonization fell in love with a quantum physicist! Clean energy world loved it and I do too.
Also maybe COP29 in Azerbaijan, where the host president referred to fossil fuels as a “gift from God” and as per usual, the conference’s outcomes and vague commitments were underwhelming.
Katie Brigham is a climate tech reporter at heatmap.news. / @kbrigham.bsky.social
Jane Borden
The FTC announced that if compensation is primarily derived from recruitment, rather than sales, an entity would be considered a pyramid scheme.
Most important: After decades of allegedly colluding with the scam artists behind multi-level marketing “companies”—in which one in six Americans participate and 99 percent of participants lose money—the Federal Trade Commission in March changed course. It announced that if compensation is primarily derived from recruitment, rather than sales, an entity would be considered a pyramid scheme.
Cases brought by the FTC are decided by judges and juries, not the FTC, and new FTC members could reverse the stance at any time. Still, the organization’s current membership is beginning to suggest the emperor might be nude.
Least important: Donald Trump being found guilty on 34 felonies. It has meant nothing.
Jane Borden’s pop-history book Cults Like US: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America will be published in March 2025 by One Signal Publishers. / janeborden.com, Instagram @janeborden
Meg Miller
I had a lot of conversations this year about political hopelessness and how we can’t afford it.
Most important: Something that’s been on my mind lately is the passing of poet Nikki Giovanni [NYT gift link], a national treasure and also a local one in southwest Virginia, where I grew up. I moved back to the state earlier this year; when I lived here last I was a student at Virginia Tech, where Giovanni was my professor. She meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but many in this area remember her for a speech she gave the day after the Virginia Tech shootings, when we had filed into the basketball stadium to commemorate our classmates. “We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid,” she said to a crowd quiet with shock and grief. “We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness.”
I had a lot of conversations this year about political hopelessness and how we can’t afford it—conversations with friends and colleagues and students about not letting violence and tragedy keep us from imagining and questioning. That is true for Gaza and the West Bank, as was shown by students at Tech, VCU, and around the country, also important events this year. One thing that strikes me looking back on the convocation in 2007 is how everyone turned to a poet to make sense out of the senseless. I want to carry into 2025 this notion that language does matter a great deal to making meaning out of struggle, for articulating demands, and for shaping our reality.
Least important: I’m going to cheat and name something that hasn’t fully made its way into public consciousness but that I personally find really fascinating. Among artists and designers invested in the web, there’s an increased concern about the physical infrastructure of the internet—undersea cables, enormous data centers—and how much energy it uses. Two projects that I wish had gotten more attention: Laurel Schwulst’s “ultralight websites,” a workshop for building websites that are quick to load, accessible, and use less energy and resources. And Solar Protocol’s network of solar-powered servers, which routes internet traffic “according to the logic of the sun,” and won an Ars Electronica prize this year.
Meg Miller is a writer, educator, and editorial director at Are.na. / megmiller.world
Rob Horning
The object of the game is to forget it is a game.
What mattered: Treating generative chatbots as companions is like playing a game of solitaire that is trying to turn itself into a Ouija board. The object of the game is to forget it is a game, and to believe that one is conversing with another spirit and not a set of algorithms. This year, there were several prominent cases in which chatbots were accused of encouraging users to commit crimes or harm themselves, a harbinger not of the growing diabolism of a technology supposedly becoming sentient but a society increasingly deficient in care, structured so that it becomes more expedient to project emotion on a shadow than to expect it from another person.
What didn’t: In his 1988 novel Libra, after Lee Harvey Oswald shoots at but fails to kill right-wing agitator Edwin Walker, DeLillo has David Ferrie, one of Oswald’s alleged co-conspirators in the Kennedy assassination, say this to him: “No one listens to Walker anymore. Your missed bullet finished him more surely than a clean hit. It left him, hanging in the twilight. He is an embarrassment. He carries the stigma of having been shot at and missed.”
Rob Horning writes the newsletter Internal Exile, about technology and social life.
Anna Merlan
That part I suppose we can argue about for at least four years.
Arguably, the least important event that occurred this year was Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race and being replaced with Kamala Harris. It felt like an absolutely seismic shift at the time, but, well, clearly it wasn’t. Why didn’t it matter? That part I suppose we can argue about for at least four years.
The most important event, in my view, is the ways that the attacks on disinformation research came to fruition. Politicians and tech titans alike have spent the last few years attacking researchers who study mis- and disinformation, subpoenaing them, killing off tools that academics and journalists used to track the spread of this content on platforms, all while scoffing at the very idea that disinformation even exists. During the presidential election, about half of Americans struggled to determine what was true in what they were reading about the race. As we face down both a new administration and, with bird flu cases ticking up, the looming threat of another pandemic, Americans are arguably less clear than ever about how to figure out what’s true. This is a dream scenario for politicians, conspiracy peddlers and hucksters of all stripes, and it couldn’t come at a worse time.
Anna Merlan is a journalist and author. / annamerlan.net
Tim Sahay
Little wonder, then, that Beijing is viewed more favorably than Washington in the global South.
Most important: The total collapse of global cooperation and multilateralism in favor of the law of the jungle and “might makes right.” For decades, the US has led what it termed the rules-based international order. The legitimacy of this order has been under threat at least since the global financial crisis; with the destruction of Gaza—met, in galling contrast to the invasion of Ukraine, with insouciance from the G7—that legitimacy is beyond repair.
Evidence of this phenomenon can be found in nearly every aspect of the global order. The World Bank in October pointed to Covid as chief among a “polycrisis” of “multiple and interconnected crises occurring simultaneously, where their interactions amplify the overall impact.” Development gains have almost halted. Extreme poverty has increased overall in low-income countries since 2014, after decades of improvement.
Global South nations, lacking representation at the IMF and World Bank, brought their calls for reform of the international financial architecture to the UN. The G-77 bloc of developing countries is also leading efforts to negotiate an international tax at the UN to deal with profit-shifting and tax avoidance tactics of multinational corporations. But the US and its close allies have opposed these processes and have refused to engage productively in negotiations, confirming that their support for multilateralism is limited to those places where they can still call the shots. Little wonder, then, that Beijing is viewed more favorably than Washington in the global South.
Least important: The narratives around the collapse of the dollar. The dollar remains king, despite America’s political dysfunction.
Tim Sahay co-edits the Polycrisis newsletter exploring intersecting crises with a particular emphasis on the political economy of climate change and global North/South dynamics. He co-directs the net zero industrial policy lab at Johns Hopkins University. / X @70sBachchan
Nathaniel Gallant
Christianity’s complex legacy need not be the only reference point in the US for leftist futures.
Most important: A dearth of writing offering new ways to relate to the politics of spirituality and religion. After 2021’s QAnon shaman-filled coup attempt and a series of conservative legal victories under the banner of “religious freedom,” there is renewed suspicion on the left in the US about both institutional religion and the slippery edges of “spirituality.” Yet elsewhere, Simon Critchley’s Mysticism and Byung-Chul Han’s Vita Contemplativa address the politics of rest accessible in Christian mysticism, Western philosophy, and Zen as, among other things, anti-capitalist critique. We might turn to decorated poet Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, or Chenxing Han’s writing and activism around the Buddhist community, which show that Christianity’s complex legacy need not be the only reference point in the US for leftist futures that do not abject the irrepressible presence of religious and spiritual life.
Least important: The new efforts to re-mythologize bitcoin. It all feels like a dumb sales pitch, attempting to re-graft Japanese philosophy onto what is effectively now digital gold bullion (which was much more interestingly explored several years ago as an art project by Paul Chan, anyways). The pot stirred by Money Electric, the recent HBO documentary exclaiming to demythologize the still unconfirmed identity of bitcoin’s original designer, someone going by the handle “Satoshi Nakamoto,” testifies largely to how little has changed. There was scant ever more than lip service, in a low key of orientalism, paid to our collective political futures in crypto discourse.
Nathaniel Gallant is a writer and translator based in Washington, DC. / nathanielgallant.com
Jake Romm
The genocide will inaugurate a new world no matter how it ends.
Most important: So many people still don’t seem to understand: The genocide in Gaza—along with the expansion of the Zionist war machine into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Iraq—is a break in history. All of the productive forces of the West, the technological advancements of the last 80 years, post-World War II political and legal order: They led to this, and this genocide reveals history’s true face, its true potential. The genocide will inaugurate a new world no matter how it ends. The only question is whether our life in this new world will be one worth living.
Least important: The US presidential election. See above.
Jake Romm is a New York-based writer and the associate editor of Protean Magazine. Free Palestine, from the river to the sea. / jakeromm.com
Marco Giancotti
Earthling plants breathed an amount of CO2 that, if you froze it into a cube of dry ice, would be seven times taller than the Burj Khalifa.
Most important: In 2024, three trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion photons emerged from the surface of the sun. They were produced over thousands of years by the fusion of five Mediterranean Seas-worth of protons, but only managed to escape the plasmatic bowels of the star in 2024. Finally unimpeded, most of those photons began an eternal flight into the cosmos. But a handful of them—merely two billionths—crashed into planet Earth within seconds. There, a quintillion leaves were poised to capture those stray photons and turn them into nutritious glucose.
A side effect: In 2024, Earthling plants breathed an amount of CO2 that, if you froze it into a cube of dry ice, would be seven times taller than the Burj Khalifa. A third of that carbon became plant fiber, which was ingested by cows, grasshoppers, shrimp, gorillas, parrots, zooplankton, deer, bacteria, ants, tortoises, mushrooms, snails, and two or three million other life forms prowling the Earth for greens.
Those creatures, in turn, competed and cooperated, and built, and were eaten—they sustained a stupendous web of balanced interactions and interlocking feedback loops that defines everything we know about our world and desperately need to live our lives.
Least important: Some people clashed—enraged.
Marco Giancotti is a writer and thinking-tool artisan. / aethermug.com
Ryan Broderick
We’re all beginning to experience the same things again.
Most important: After our post-Covid cultural free-for-all, where no one knew what was going on in pop culture or what any of it meant, I think we can finally say that monoculture is coming back. Brat Summer, The Eras Tour, Wicked, Deadpool & Wolverine, huge singular video game moments like Black Myth: Wukong and Palworld, the frenzy around suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione—we’re all beginning to experience the same things again. And even if American monoculture isn’t totally back like it was pre-2016, there’s clearly an interest in it. And I think the second Trump era is going to supercharge it. Only this time, it won’t be cable news or SNL skits that lead the way, but the chaos of social platforms dribbling down into the rest of culture. It’s going to be a mess, but I think it might be kind of fun.
Least important: It’s time to admit TikTok doesn’t matter. The Harris campaign went all in on TikTok this summer and dominated the platform heading into November, only to watch none of that really mean much at the polls. This has been a question for years—do the memes and trends we all see fragments of in our For You pages mean anything? And the answer, it seems, is no. And it makes a certain amount of sense if you think about it. TikTok is not a singular experience, the way Facebook or X is. This was the most-liked video on the platform this year. Have you seen it before? Do you even recognize the account it came from? The core of the issue is that Americans have assumed for years that TikTok was a social media platform, but it isn’t. It’s Amazon with a personal Netflix jammed between product listings. And this should be a real wake-up call for brands and agencies (and politicians) who have been treating the platform like a divining rod for the Gen Z psyche. All that slang and fashion? It’s disposable and it’s only there to distract you long enough to watch a guy review a waterpik.
Ryan Broderick is a freelance writer and podcaster who writes the Garbage Day newsletter about internet culture and technology. / @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social, X @broderick
Erik Baker
Biden stayed on the ballot, thanks in part to Kamala Harris’s refusal to distance herself one inch from his monumentally unpopular reign.
Most important: The commencement of the Israeli offensive against Rafah in early May. The onslaught—which killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians and displaced over a million people—flagrantly violated a “red line” drawn with much fanfare by Joe Biden. That this breach of the United States’s purported standards for its conduct did not in any way weaken American moral and material support for the Israeli military confirmed to Benjamin Netanyahu and his lackeys that they could continue to prosecute their genocide with impunity for as long as they desired. The reckless aggression with which Israel subsequently expanded its war into Lebanon and, most recently, Syria, stems ultimately from its success in calling the US’s bluff on Rafah.
Least important: Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race. Many observers reasoned that because the decision was dramatic and unprecedented it had to be significant. But in the end Biden stayed on the ballot, thanks in part to Kamala Harris’s refusal to distance herself one inch from his monumentally unpopular reign. In 40 years only history nerds—assuming they’re still making them then—will remember that it was technically Harris, rather than Biden, that Trump trounced to win his second term.
Erik Baker teaches history at Harvard. He is Associate Editor at The Drift and the author of Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, out in January from Harvard University Press.
Allison C. Meier
New federal regulations bolstered the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
Most important: As a culture writer who probably spends more time in cemeteries and other death spaces than most, I’ve been following the slow changes in how human remains are treated in museums. There is still a long way to go, especially in reckoning with the history of how the remains of the powerless have regularly been desecrated as objects to be collected and displayed. One of the most significant shifts this year was the implementation in the US of new federal regulations that bolstered the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which led to many museums finally removing stolen remains and funerary objects from view and involving Indigenous communities in their repatriation. To quote Sean Decatur, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”
Least important: Anyone who has justified needing to possess human remains of marginalized people who were not given respectful care after their death. Why this year are publications still profiling bone collectors for Halloween-timed content without questioning the ethics of it?
Allison C. Meier is a writer, editor, and cemetery tour guide based in NYC. / allisoncmeier.com, Instagram @allisoncmeier
Brian Judge
On June 28, Biden was exposed as the dying body of American liberalism.
Most important: The CNN presidential debate on June 28. Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies explores the dual nature of medieval kingship where the king has both a physical, mortal body and an immortal body politic. On June 28, Biden was exposed as the dying body of American liberalism. The tension between the Biden campaign’s image of the president as a steady and empathetic leader capable of “restoring the soul of America” and what Special Counsel Robert Hur described as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” could no longer be sustained.
Least important: COP29. 2024 is very likely to have been the first year exceeding the 1.5-degree warming threshold set in the Paris Climate Agreement. Also, for the second straight year, the UN’s flagship climate event was hosted by an oil exporter proclaiming fossil fuels to be a “gift from God.” Despite the multilateral pageantry, COP29 produced nothing commensurate with the urgency and scale of the problem. Like in many other areas, private technological solutions to global warming become the default alternative to coordinated political action.
Brian Judge is a policy fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley. His first book, Democracy in Default, was recently published with Columbia University Press.
Ted Scheinman
The US needs a labor party.
Most important: In 2024, it became clearer than ever that the US needs a labor party. Let the gerontocrats keep the capital-D party, let the neoconservatives hollow it out to make themselves a home; leave the whole mess to the C-suite male allies and the third-house feminists and the dwindling supply of Never-Trump Republicans. Biden got the legacy he earned through his towering vanity. There’s no reason to leave something so important in such a man’s hands again!
Least important: Science and philosophy desert me at the holidays, and I can’t discuss politics with family, so please forgive me for Being Political again: least important was Kamala Harris’s promise to appoint a Republican to her cabinet. American voters, it would seem, are unpersuaded by half-measures.
Ted Scheinman is the author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan (FSG Originals, 2018). / @scheinman.bsky.social
Sophie Lewis
Over 675,000 people have likely been annihilated in Gaza since last October.
This year, those of us listening to The Lancet realized that over 675,000 people have likely been annihilated in Gaza since last October (some calculations suggest 1.125 million). The International Criminal Court called for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in the face of this, and the Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories unlawful, but more tangible effects may have been accomplished—at least in the short term—by groups of activists all over the world who blockaded and sabotaged arms factories that help fuel the genocide, such as Elbit. Ireland kicked out its Israeli embassy, and the global BDS movement forced Puma to end its sponsorship of Zionist football. Meanwhile, on the domestic plane, the United States health insurance industry faced (for the first time) consequences for its actions when the CEO Brian Thompson got killed. Two other assassins, however, missed their shots at a different member of the ruling class who was subsequently re-elected to the presidency. The last thing I’ll mention, though, is that long-term research in the Antarctic found evidence of blue whales saying—at least, this is what the scientists think they are saying—“here I am. I am here. I’m still here.”
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. / @reproutopia.bsky.social, Instagram @reproutopia, X @reproutopia
Nadine Smith
There is always someone whose suffering is unfathomably worse than yours.
As I reflect on 2024, I try my best to zoom out and consider the big picture, but it has been difficult to see beyond the turmoil of my own life. This past summer, I spent two weeks in the psychiatric unit of Woodhull Hospital in New York City, after being involuntarily committed due to a severe manic episode that I could not see beyond.
As I sat in a windowless room, waiting for a stern and unsympathetic doctor to decide my fate, the TV blasted news of Gaza. As I considered my own fate, I found the strength and resolve to survive in the faces of Palestinian children. If these souls—who have not only lost every creature comfort and human right I have ever taken for granted, but in many cases never even had them to begin with—can continue to fight back and speak up against a world order that so desperately craves their silence, I can too.
So that’s what defined this year for me: perhaps less of an important event, and more of an essential lesson that I will carry with me to my grave. There is always someone whose suffering is unfathomably worse than yours, whose wounds are deeper, whose life is more carelessly discarded by the state. But that is not a reason to minimize your own struggle: It is a reason to keep going, because you will never know what you can endure until you’ve gone through it.
The most important thing that happened in 2024 is that I’m still alive, and you are too.
Nadine Smith is a writer, critic, and native Texan currently based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in publications like Texas Monthly, Pitchfork, The Fader, and the Los Angeles Times.
Susannah Breslin
Marrying the brain eraser was me reclaiming the life of the mind.
Most important: This spring, I got married to an eraser in the shape of a brain. I was at Luna Luna, this amazing art amusement park that was set up in downtown Los Angeles, and they had this wedding chapel where you could marry anyone or anything. I was single, so I brought the brain eraser with me. The previous year I’d published a memoir where I’d felt like I’d made a lot of compromises. Marrying the brain eraser was me rejecting that and reclaiming the life of the mind. I wouldn’t say it was romantic, but it was gratifying.
Least important: In June, I visited the set of an adult movie. I drove east that morning, as the shoot was in a small town outside of Los Angeles. When I got there, I realized they were filming in a building that was across the street from a library that has a statue of Mark Twain out front. I hadn’t been on the set of an adult movie in some time, and I wondered if I would find the experience interesting or boring. Mostly, it was, like usual, a mix of both. “As performers, we are like athletes,” the male actor told me before the shooting started.
Susannah Breslin is a freelance journalist and the author of Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. / X @susannahbreslin
Jo Lou
Cookbook clubs have become this year’s most heartwarming trend.
Most important:
1. The ongoing genocide in Palestine is one of the greatest evils of our time. The Israeli government has, deliberately and systematically, wiped out multiple generations, murdered aid workers trying to deliver food, and reduced hospitals, schools, places of worship to rubble. An entire people are being starved to death and ethnically cleansed. It’s bitterly ironic that the act of calling for peace, for an end to the bombing of civilians, to demand accountability for war crimes, has been contorted into accusations of anti-semitism. Every one of us should reckon with the questions of whose lives we deem as expendable, whose suffering is acceptable and which genocides we choose to acknowledge.
2. Gisèle Pelicot’s trial created a revolution, shedding light on the difficulties of prosecuting rape cases and the stigma involved. It’s a harsh reminder of how rare it is for rapists to face any accountability and the ways in which victims are disbelieved, gaslighted, and shamed. The repeated refrain of “he could never” or “he’s such a nice guy” reveal how deeply ingrained denial and misogyny is in our culture. The perpetrators of sexual violence are rarely the monstrous caricatures we expect, but often ordinary people, from friends and colleagues to husbands and neighbors, who we might like and even trust.
3. The death of United Healthcare’s CEO is tragic, but so is the disproportionate influence insurance companies wield over the lives of Americans. Insurers hold too much power over medical treatment, and their refusal to cover care has pushed countless individuals into impossible and devastating situations. We all know that insurance companies will always choose profit at the expense of human life.
4. Cookbook clubs have become this year’s most heartwarming trend, thanks to Stephanie Lau’s dedication to building community through a shared love of food. For me and many others, these gatherings—where people come together to share a dish they’ve made from a chosen cookbook—have been such a wholesome source of joy and connection.
Least important: The resurgence of cringe-worthy first-person essays, published to provoke outrage and ridicule at the expense of young female writers. The change.org petition about the welfare of Lucky the Cat. The Kate Middleton conspiracy theories. And lastly X, let’s just all collectively agree that it sucks, sever the cord, and move on.
Jo Lou is the deputy editor of Electric Literature.
Nick Van Osdol
Shift your energy to concerted efforts to bring the things you want to see in the world to life.
The only prediction I can confidently make is that most predictions will be wrong. The most important things that happened (or didn’t) in 2024 were ones prognosticators got wrong. Trump won the popular vote! Global solar deployment beat even the rosiest estimates for the 20th year running!! Say it with me: We don’t know wha’s gonna happen. My invitation for most people, including myself, is to spend less time planning and prognosticating (or paying precious attention to prognosticators) and to shift your energy to concerted efforts to bring the things you want to see in the world to life.
Nick van Osdol is a Brooklyn-based writer and investor who covers underpriced stories in climate and energy at keepcool.co and enjoys reading and writing short fiction, too.
