The end of the year

Well, here we are.

A lot of this year was really hard, though a different kind of hard from last year, and always with a matching good thing. Longed-for stability, financial and otherwise, still eludes me; then again, I have a really good job that I like doing and incredibly grateful to have earned that spot. We faced a bunch of big, weird disappointments and losses in my household this year, but we also had some really gratifying, delightful experiences. I pushed myself, some: I’m proud that I managed to go from run-walking two miles with some difficulty back to medium-distance running with relative ease (8 miles this morning!). I am glad that I got to take a whirlwind solo research trip through some of Europe in May — Paris, Cannes, Milan, Vienna, Prague, Berlin. I had 182 bylines at the New York Times, a wild sentence to read. I taught a couple classes and will be teaching more in the spring. I ate great meals and drank great martinis. I read some good books and saw a ton of theater and dance and art. I finished the final touches on my own good book.

Also, as the year moved forward I spent more time with friends, something I was missing acutely this time last year. A number of them got married, which was delightful. We cooked dinners and saw shows and had picnics and went hiking. I went to a lot of book parties and watched friends who make art succeed wildly. I am hoping for more of that — both new friends and old — this year. Sometimes I’m very aware that life is running past me at top speed, and the only way to reach out and grab it is make sure I am paying attention. I am always thinking about paying attention now.

I have a lot of hopes for 2025, which at least right now looks both totally uncertain and also holds the possibility for abundance. I have ideas for new books, new projects, new classes, new articles, new dinner party menus. Having a book come out that’s being supported by the publisher is so novel and thrilling. When the world is chaotic, the solution is to ground down into the real.

Here are 13 (+1) articles I loved writing this year. Remember: you can always find everything I write on this page.

• This close-read of the opening moments of “The Taste of Things,” which I wrote for our Oscar issue, resonated with a lot of the audience and was an absolute delight to write.

• I also went in close to think about the moral weight of sound as it was used in “Oppenheimer” and in “The Zone of Interest,” two of the best movies of 2023.

• I wrote a lot about documentaries this year; this piece on “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus” was one of my favorites.

• The excellent new Netflix series “Ripley” gave me an excuse to think about all the many cinematic Tom Ripleys, and what they mean.

• I found Ethan Hawke's film “Wildcat,” about Flannery O'Connor, to be rich ground on which to think about O'Connor's work and what the film got so right.

• The new “Planet of the Apes” movies are perhaps the best blockbuster filmmaking of their kind — ever — and also the smartest. I explored!

• The whole weird dust-up with Scarlett Johansson's voice and ChatGPT was surely a harbinger of things to come, but it turns out we've been there before.

• Part of my job is writing appraisals of people when they die; I banged out this one on Donald Sutherland in about two hours and I love it.

• One of the year's most incredible, innovative, and misunderstood documentaries was “Eno,” and luckily I was well-versed in the tech behind it. So I loved reviewing it.

• People really responded to this exploration of “The Matrix” (on the occasion of its 25th anniversary). You can thank my former life as a postmodernism professor, I guess!

• Just an absolute delight to get the assignment to review “Anora,” one of the most exhilarating experiences in a cinema of the year.

• I was also so glad to review “Blitz,” which is doing something marvelously subversive to the WWII film tropes. I felt like I really got this movie.

• To my utter delight, I got to return to the interviewer's chair and talk to Robert Eggers about “Nosferatu” and death and beauty and maggots and a lot of other things.

• Bonus, because this was for the NYT Book Review (which is technically a whole different department): I wrote the Essential Guide to Joan Didion.

Also, one more thing: I was on TV twice over the holidays to talk about movies. Here I am on CBS News, and here I am on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

See you next year, friends.