This week on Keep the Channel Open, I'm talking with writer Kazim Ali. Kazim’s latest poetry collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra, uses sound to explode meaning and explore silence and voicelessness, bringing together history, philosophy, spirituality, and personal experience to create something truly profound. In our conversation, Kazim and I discussed the divine in art, what the sound of poetry can embody and enact, and the fundamental oneness of human life. Then for the second segment, we talked about music.

Here are some links where you can listen to the episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• TuneIn

You can also listen to the full episode and find show notes and a transcript at the episode page on the KTCO website.

You can purchase a copy of The Voice of Sheila Chandra directly from the publisher, or at your local bookstore. Kazim's new memoir, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, is forthcoming in March 2021 and is now available for pre-order.

It’s been a hell of a week, hasn’t it?

It’s scary enough, of course, to watch a group of traitorous insurrectionists violently take over the seat of legislative power in your country. It’s scarier still to consider that this week may only be a prelude to what’s yet to come. What’s making me feel all the more uneasy is that at least some of our leaders still seem not to grasp the gravity of the situation or the nature of their responsibility.

Look, I’m not saying there’s been no response. Nearly 200 House Democrats and more than 30 Senate Democrats have called for the President’s immediate removal, and signs are there that impeachment will move quickly in the House next week. There will be investigations into law enforcement’s inaction during the attack, and the House and Senate Sergeants-at-Arms and the Capitol Police Chief have all resigned under pressure.

Nevertheless, I’m concerned that this will pass without serious consequences for most of the people responsible. Asked in a press conference whether he thought Senators Cruz and Hawley should resign, President-elect Biden said only that he thought they should be beaten the next time they run. And this was after he spent a good three minutes praising Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney and talking about how the Republican Party is going to have a come-to-Jesus moment.

A goodly number of centrist Democrats seem to be working under the fantasy that all it will take to meaningfully change the hearts and minds of Republican politicians and Trumpist voters is a show of decency from the top. Indeed, this was the fundamental message of Biden’s campaign: unity and a restoration of decency. But if the past 10 years have shown us anything, it is that reaching out in compromise to the Republicans and giving them room to build power can only result in them continuing to destroy the institutions that we depend on for our way of life.

Joe Biden should know this better than anyone. In 2008, as now, the United States voted Obama and Biden into the White House, and Democrats into control of the House and Senate. After two years of attempting to work with Republicans and offering compromise, treating their opposition as legitimate and principled, Democrats had little to show for their efforts and lost the House because of it. Four years later, after being continually stymied by both Republican obstructionism and their own fear of overreaching, Democrats lost the Senate as well.

I’m not saying that decency isn’t important in a President, or in any politician. Indeed, the past four years have shown us exactly how necessary simple decency is. But it is not sufficient. You cannot reconcile with people who are determined to continue opposing you. You cannot unify a country while also giving power and legitimacy to people who are determined to divide it. You cannot heal when your opponents haven’t even stopped attacking you. And you cannot keep yourself and your party in office without concretely demonstrating that you deserve to be there.

Later in the video clip I linked above, Biden compared Senators Cruz and Hawley to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. The rhetorical point was apt enough, but if we are going to be making comparisons to the Nazis, we must also keep in mind the ineffectiveness of appeasement. Republicans like Cruz and Hawley—and they are far from alone either in Congress or among the public—are without remorse and are perfectly willing to continue inciting the kind of violence we saw this week. If we are truly going to restore American democracy, Biden must take care not to become the Neville Chamberlain of a second wave of American fascism.

I’ve been a bit distracted and didn’t read much this week, as I imagine might be true for you as well. And that’s okay. Still, it’s Friday—or was when I started writing this letter—so here are a few things that mattered to me recently:

1. I often find success harder to accept than failure, so I appreciated and related to Sarah Gailey's recent newsletter about their garden.
2. From Alexandra Petri's latest column: “it is amazing, after all, what you can do, if no one bothers to get in your way.” People, including her, have been saying this for years. I'm sad and angry that it still needs saying, but I am glad that people are still saying it.
3. If you want something fun and light to escape into for a minute, perhaps a Scottish sea shanty might be the just the thing.

As always, this is just a portion of what mattered to me recently. What I'm thinking about is how decency is necessary but not sufficient, and how empathy isn't the same as a lack of accountability. I appreciate all the people I've seen saying the same.

Thank you, and take care.

• Last night, J asked me, “Can you believe it’s already New Year’s Eve?” and I answered, “Yes.” She smiled and rolled her eyes, “You always believe it is the day it is.” I suppose that’s more or less true, but on the other hand sometimes I get so distracted by the weirdness of existence that I can hardly believe in days in the first place.
• After a couple of years of seeing people I like and admire talk about how much they love their Hobonichi planners, I broke down and bought one a few weeks ago. I’d been excited to start this year’s journal, but this morning as I sat down to write in it for the first time, I realized that what I actually wanted was a notebook, not a planner.
• I started off this year thoroughly insulated with a thick layer of “wearable blanket,” fluffy to the point where my arms don’t even touch my sides when they’re at rest. I feel like there’s some kind of metaphor here but I can’t quite decide what it ought to be.
• J and the kids and I played the cooperative board game Pandemic last night, losing the first two games almost immediately before finally winning a third game pretty easily. I can’t decide if this is on-the-nose or just a non sequitur.
• Usually by now I’d have decided on some goals for the year but somehow it’s just not feeling terribly pressing, at least not yet. I think there’s something hopeful about setting goals or picking a word or intention for the year, and I’ll get to it. For now, I’m feeling content just to be where I am.

(Presented in rough chronological order. * indicates rewatch. Please note, I don't actually recommend all of these.)

Movies

• Flavors of Youth (2018)
• Hell or High Water (2016)
• Uncut Gems (2019)
• To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2020)
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
  
• Onward (2020)
• Trolls World Tour (2020)
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
• Little Women (2019)
• Tigertail (2020)
• Howl's Moving Castle* (2004)
• The Half of It (2020)
• Scoob! (2020)
• The Little Vampire 3D (2017)
• 13th (2016)
• Spirited Away* (2001)
• Hamilton (2020)
• Palm Springs (2020)
• The Lovebirds (2020)
• The Old Guard (2020)
• The Truth (2019)
• Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
• Magic Mike (2012)
  
• What We Did On Our Holiday (2014)
• The Addams Family* (2019)
• The Witches* (1990)
• Over the Moon (2020)
• My Octopus Teacher (2020)
• Groundhog Day* (1993)
• Blinded By the Light (2019)
• Happiest Season (2020)
• Rio* (2011)
• Gremlins* (1984)
• Gremlins 2: The New Batch* (1990)
  
• The Santa Clause 2* (2002)
• Soul (2020)
• Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Television

• The Witcher (S1, 2019)
• Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)
• Shirobako (2014)
  
• The Good Place (S4, 2019)
• Dr. Who (S12, 2020)
• Steven Universe Future (2019)
  
• Star Trek: Picard (S1, 2020)
• My Hero Academia (S4, 2019)
• Schitt's Creek (S6, 2020)
• The Ancient Magus' Bride (2017)
  
• Free! (S1, 2013)
• Little Fires Everywhere (2020)
  
• Free! (S2, 2014)
• Free! (S3, 2018)
• Normal People (2020)
  
• Kim's Convenience (S4, 2020)
• Never Have I Ever (S1, 2020)
• Parks & Rec (S1, 2009)
• Natsume Yuujin-cho (S1–S3, 2008–2011)
• Haikyu!! (S1, 2014)
• Avatar: The Last Airbender* (S1, 2005)
• Parks & Rec (S2, 2010)
• Haikyu!! (S2, 2015)
• Haikyu!! (S3, 2016)
• Parks & Rec (S3, 2011)
• Haikyu!! To the Top! (S4.0, 2020)
• Dr. Stone (S1, 2019)
• Log Horizon* (S1, 2013)
• Mob Psycho 100 (S1, 2016)
• Avatar: The Last Airbender* (S2, 2006)
• Mob Psycho 100 (S2, 2019)
• Log Horizon* (S2, 2014)
• One Punch Man* (S1, 2015)
• One Punch Man (S2, 2019)
• Watchmen (2019)
  
• Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun* (2014)
  
• Tsurune (S1, 2018)
• Silver Spoon* (S1, 2013)
• Silver Spoon* (S2, 2014)
• Chihayafuru (S1, 2011)
• Last Tango In Halifax (S1, 2012)
• Chihayafuru (S2, 2013)
• Chihayafuru (S3, 2019)
• Star Trek: Lower Decks (S1, 2020)
• Ted Lasso (S1, 2020)
• The Queen's Gambit (2020)
  
• The Undoing (2020)
  
• Haikyu!! To the Top! (S4.5, 2020)
• Inuyasha (S1, eps. 1–24, 2000)
• Star Trek: Discovery (S3, eps. 1-11, 2020)
• Space Brothers (eps. 1–13, 2012)

Games

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Final Fantasy VII Remake
• Night in the Woods
• A Short Hike
  

(Alphabetical by author. * indicates re-read.)

Novels

• The Immortals of Tehran (2020), by Ali Araghi
• Starling Days (2020), by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
  
• Upright Women Wanted (2020), by Sarah Gailey
• When We Were Magic (2020), by Sarah Gailey
• The True Deceiver (1982), by Tove Jansson
  
• The Leavers (2017), by Lisa Ko
• Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (2020), by Matthew Salesses
  
• The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea (2020), by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Story Collections

• Love and Other Criminal Behaviors (2020), by Nikki Dolson
  
• Dark Corners (2019), by Reuben Tihi Hayslett
• Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel (2020), by Julian K. Jarboe
• Tender (2017), by Sofia Samatar
  

Poetry

• Inquisition (2018), by Kazim Ali
  
• The Voice of Sheila Chandra (2020), by Kazim Ali
• Travesty Generator (2019), by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
  
• Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), by Natalie Diaz
• Boom Box (2019), by Amorak Huey
  
• Inland Empire (2019), by Leah Huizar
  
• Claim Your Space (2020), by Minyoung Lee
  
• It's Not Magic (2019), by Jon Sands
• Homie (2020), by Danez Smith
• Cadence* (2018), by Hannah Stephenson
  
• Emergency Window (2012), by Ross Sutherland
• Things To Do Before You Leave Town (2009), by Ross Sutherland
• The Slip (2020), by Kary Wayson
  

Graphic Novels

• The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal (2020), by the McElroys and Carey Pietsch

Nonfiction, Memoir, and Other

• Lot Six (2020), by David Adjmi
• Human Archipelago (2018), by Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh
  
• Stamped From the Beginning (2016), by Ibram X. Kendi
  
• Keep Moving (2020), by Maggie Smith

Read Aloud With My Kids

• Silver on the Tree* (1977), by Susan Cooper
• Howl's Moving Castle (1986), by Diana Wynne Jones
  
• The Titan's Curse (2007), by Rick Riordan
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban* (1999), by J. K. Rowling
  

1. Lyz Lenz wrote about running through 2020, finding a new stride, and settling in for a long run.
2. Sarah McCarry's latest newsletter is about one of her shipmates and it's just a lovely bit of writing, the product of the kind of getting to know someone that comes from sharing a small space with them.
3. I recently read Kazim Ali's 2018 poetry collection Inquisition, and quite enjoyed it. One poem that particularly struck me, "The Astronomer's Son," came toward the end. In the end notes, Ali points out that some of the star facts presented in the poem are misremembered by the speaker. For me this adds an extra layer of bittersweetness to an already emotionally complex poem.
4. I finished reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series with my son recently, which made the recent Backlisted podcast episode about the series' title book particularly timely. If, like me, that series was important in your childhood, I think you'll appreciate this conversation.
5. Finally, I recently read Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s novel Starling Days. The book has some heavy themes, dealing with depression and suicide but it is sensitively done, intimate and often tender. It has one of the best portrayals of what depression feels like that I’ve read recently, and also one of the best portrayals of the feeling of infatuation. I appreciated it.

As always, this is just a portion of what mattered to me recently. I'm glad we got through last year—me, and you too. I hope something wonderful finds its way to you soon.

Thank you, and take care.

For the last KTCO of 2020, I'm revisiting my 2017 conversation with artist Rizzhel Javier. Rizzhel Javier is a photographer and installation artist based in San Diego, CA. I first met Rizzhel when we were both participating in the portfolio reviews at the Medium Festival a few years ago, and her stop-motion, flipbook-style pieces immediately caught my attention. More recently, Rizzhel was named one of the 2017 emerging artists by the SD Art Prize for her "Unmentionables" project, creating new art out of old mementos. We had a great conversation for the show about her artistic process, what she loves about making mistakes, and her experience as a teacher. For the second segment, Rizzhel chose the Philippines as her topic.

Since we recorded our conversation, Rizzhel has become the Managing Director of the AjA Project, a community arts education organization here in San Diego. You can support the AjA Project by buying one of their STEAM OnDemand workshop boxes, and for each box you buy, the organization will donate one to a student in the community. Or you can make a donation directly. Donations in any amount are appreciated, but if you can swing it, a $500 donation will cover workshop boxes for 30 students:

• Buy a STEAM OnDemand workshop box
• Donate to the AjA Project

Here are some links to where you can listen to the episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• RadioPublic
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• TuneIn

You can also listen to the full episode and find show notes and a transcript on the episode page at the KTCO website.

Today is, among other things, the last Friday of the year. It is my habit to take the end of the year as an opportunity to look back at the things I read, watched, and listened to, and I imagine it comes as no surprise that that would feel particularly necessary this year. It’s been a hell of a year—a year of anxiety, of grief, of boredom, fury, exhaustion, and of just getting through. But I’ve also had opportunity to laugh, to feel connected, to learn, to be moved. Putting this list together each year is always useful for me, and I hope it’s useful for you as well. So, here are 50 things I experienced this year that mattered to me:

1. The first movie I watched this year was an anthology anime film co-produced in China and Japan, called Flavors of Youth. It features three shorts by three different directors, all of them dealing with themes of memory, nostalgia, and coming of age. There’s a bittersweetness to each story that resonated with how I relate to my own youth. Also, it had some of the best-looking food I’ve ever seen in an animated movie.
2. Season four of the excellent documentary podcast Scene On Radio aired this year. Titled “The Land That Never Has Been Yet,” it’s a deep dive into the history of American democracy and the anti-democratic forces that have been baked into our system since its inception. I think this is a must-listen for anyone who wants to better understand how we got to where we are, and how we can do better.
3. Brandon Taylor’s short fiction is always a highlight, and that was as true this year as it is every year. I read three of his short stories, “When We Will Get What We Deserve,” “Local Economies,” and “Even If All Fall Away, I Will Not,” and all of them were exquisite. I cannot wait for his forthcoming collection, Filthy Animals. (CW: sexual violence)
4. The title of Melissa Crowe’s poem “When We’re in Bed and You Take Out Your Mouth Guard, I Know It’s On” is very funny, the poem itself is sexy as hell, and taking both together suggests a love that has grown and changed over time but is no less intense for being long.
5. I first read Dawn Davies’s poem “Mailing a Letter” back in January and was struck by the way the speaker imagines her way into a stranger’s life, and by the way the final line frames the whole rest of the poem. Reading it again now, after 9 months of pandemic, it hits a little differently. It’s amazing how much of a poem’s impact comes from what we bring to it as readers, I think. (CW: death)
6. In the first half of the year I found myself branching out a lot in my podcast listening, especially in the audio fiction/audio drama genre. One standout was George the Poet’s Have You Heard George’s Podcast?, which mixes audio drama, spoken word, hip hop to create a show that sounds like nothing else I’ve heard, and which talks about politics in the UK and Uganda, class, race, and even the creative process.
7. The quiet menace of Gabrielle Bates’s poem “The Mentor” has come back to me over and over since I first read it. (CW: sexual violence)
8. Kaitlin Prest’s 2018 audio drama The Shadows traces the beginning, middle, and end of a relationship. The writing, performances, and audio production are all so well-done and so real-seeming that at times I found myself forgetting that it was fiction.
9. Another audio fiction podcast I was introduced to this year was Paul Bae’s The Big Loop, which is an anthology show that is sometimes funny, sometimes fantastic, and sometimes tragic. The show is consistently excellent, but I think my favorite episodes were “The Studio” and “You.”
10. Andhika Ramadhian’s Instagram is full of images with striking colors and minimalist, subtly surreal compositions. I find them quite soothing, and maybe that’s something you could use a bit more of these days.
11. Carrie Fountain’s poem “Will You?” captures so perfectly the feeling of being a parent—or, at least, the way I experience parenthood: the way it is both profound and kind of annoying, the way I want both to protect my children and to turn them loose, the way I both see them and don’t.
12. I’ve been reading Monet Thomas’s Away Again newsletter since its beginning in 2018, and I think it’s great both as personal writing and as travel writing. One of her letters from February, “Vietnam, Part 2: Halong Bay,” is pretty amazing for how it collapses different moments into one, just in the way that memory does.
13. I first experienced Mary Szybist’s poem “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle” read aloud on the podcast The Slowdown, so I didn’t realize until some time later that it’s an abecedarian. What I loved, and still love, is the innocence of it, and the way that it feels like the universe is trying to reveal something to the poet.
14. I read this New Yorker feature on Deanna Dikeman’s “Leaving and Waving” series about a week before lockdown started in my city. Looking back at them now, I still find the series lovely in the same way that I did before, but it is also now bittersweet and filled with longing in a way that I couldn’t have anticipated at the time.
15. The single most joyfully satisfying podcast episode I heard this year was Reply All’s “The Case of the Missing Hit.” Just trust me on this.
16. My kids and I started watching Steven Universe together in 2016, and it’s something I’ve deeply appreciated for how it centers simple decency and gives us an entry point to talk about complex things while also being just a ton of fun. This year gave us Steven Universe Future, a 10-episode coda after last year’s finale and movie, which I found incredibly moving. Moreover, watching it with my kids sparked some conversations about mental health and PTSD that I thought were really valuable.
17. I’ve had a lot of occasion this year to think about and revisit Clint Smith’s poem “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” I expect this won’t be the last year I think about it, though.
18. It may be cheating a bit to include something of mine in this list but I hope I can be forgiven—besides which, I do think of this one as a collaboration—but a highlight of my year was getting to have a virtual panel discussion with Rachel Zucker, David Naimon, and Dujie Tahat about the craft of the literary podcast interview. I suspect I’m going to be riding high on that one for a while to come.
19. Mary Neely’s quarantine musical re-enactments were such a joy. I don’t even know how many times I re-watched them.
20. I sincerely doubt I am the first (or the last) person you will hear raving about Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but that’s okay. I have a suspicion that this is a movie that will continue to be watched and talked about for quite a long time. That the movie could have such intensity with so little action or even dialogue is a pretty extraordinary thing, I think.
21. Matthew Salesses called his novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear “the most Asian American thing [he’s] ever written.” It’s such a strange, unsettling book, in much the same way that being Asian American can be strange and unsettling. I think it’s brilliant.
22. Sarah Gailey’s YA fantasy novel When We Were Magic is wonderful for so many reasons. It’s literally a story about hiding a body. It’s got that Gailey freshness to it. It’s about taking responsibility and being held accountable. But more than any of that it is a deeply kind story about self-acceptance and many kinds of loving relationships.
23. Another podcast I started listening to this year is the BBC’s Short Cuts, which in structure you can imagine like a British This American Life insofar as each episode is a collection of segments organized around a theme. But in terms of sound design it is much more eclectic and experimental than TAL has ever been, and it is just so much more… wonderful. A few standout episodes for me: “Civil Disobedients,” “Dreaming,” and “The Interpreter.”
24. I have been a fan of Danez Smith’s poetry for a few years now and their latest collection, Homie, is both a continuation of their past work and an evolution. As in their second book, Don’t Call Us Dead, there is rage and grief. But there is a turn toward joy in Homie that both sharpens the painful parts and becomes a balm.
25. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get my arms entirely around what poetry can do. Ada Limón’s poem “The End of Poetry” seems to me to ask that question, too, and manages to be both an acknowledgment of poetry’s limitations while also being an embodiment of what poetry does best.
26. Shing Yin Khor’s comic “Of Mufflers and Men” looks at the history of a particular icon of mid-century Americana, the muffler man, as a way of understanding themself. The specific line that made me go “Oh shit” was: “I want to be touched. I want it to be slightly painful to touch me.”
27. Historian and professor John Edwin Mason wrote an excellent essay for National Geographic this year about how photojournalism isn’t neutral, how photographs can lie even while purporting to show the truth. It’s a topic that’s important for everyone to understand in our image-soaked culture, though it’s particularly urgent for photographers to understand. That the essay ran in National Geographic, a publication whose images have long had a problematic relationship to those depicted in its pages, is something I take as a hopeful sign for the future.
28. Taylor Harris’s essay “Whiteness Can’t Save Us” is about being in spaces of care that often fail to care for or about Black people, about loving her sons and also fearing for them. I read a lot of powerful and moving essays about race and America this year, and this was one that I came back to a lot.
29. Bluegrass musician Rhiannon Giddens and cellist Yo-Yo Ma released the song “Build a House” to mark the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth. It’s a beautiful arrangement with a haunting melody, and I found it particularly moving to see these two artists—one Black and one Asian American—collaborate to create this particularly American music.
30. Noah Cho’s column Bad Kimchi continued strong this year, talking about food and identity. Two that I particularly loved (not only for their titles but not not for their titles) were “Gettin’ Jigae With It” and “Kalbi, Maybe.”
31. One of the many difficult losses this year was civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis. His final op-ed, written knowing that he was near his end, was a powerful call to action, one that I’ve carried with me in the months since his passing. It has mattered to me a great deal to know that there are many people trying to answer that call and carry his legacy forward.
32. I wasn’t able to read nearly as much as usual this year, but one thing I was able to do a lot of was watch anime. One of my favorites was Mob Psycho 100. The show’s creator, ONE, is known for his satirical takes on manga genres and this one was very funny but at its core was about how power is less important than self-knowledge and emotional maturity. Over the past few years I’ve been seeing more and more pop culture embracing gentler and more sincere forms of masculinity, and I’m finding it very heartening.
33. Journalist Anand Giridharadas started up a Substack this year called The.Ink, which has featured some of the best and most interesting political and social interviews I’ve read this year. A few highlights: linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, organizer Vincent Emanuele, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and economist Mariana Mazzucato.
34. Writer Ross Sutherland has continued to do some pretty amazing things with his experimental fiction podcast Imaginary Advice, not least of which was his six-part series “The Golden House.” One favorite of mine from this year was his two-part miniseries “Ten Thousand Years,” discussing and then extending the movie Groundhog Day.
35. Writer Yanyi’s newsletter The Reading is, as I see it, an act of profound generosity for the literary community. A perfect example to get you started: “I Can’t Bring Myself to Write Anymore.”
36. David Naimon’s Between the Covers continues to be one of the smartest, best, most interesting literary shows out there. A few of my favorite episodes from this year: Garth Greenwell on Cleanness, Jenny Offill on Weather, Philip Metres on Shrapnel Maps, and Jeannie Vanasco on Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl.
37. I’ve been following photographer Jordanna Kalman’s work for a couple of years now but only recently got around to buying a copy of her photobook Little Romances. In this work, Kalman took the experience of having her work stolen by porn blogs and transmuted the anger and hurt of it into some of the most tender, loving images I’ve seen recently. I think that is an impressive and amazingly strong thing to do.
38. 2020 was terrible in so many ways, but if you were to measure it solely in terms of web videos set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” it was a banner year.
39. One piece of advice that has never steered me wrong: never sleep on any piece of music writing or podcast appearance by Hanif Abdurraqib. The latest season of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast is both of those things, and it is excellent.
40. I started reading Sarah McCarry’s future recuperation newsletter with the fourth installment, “setting sails,” then immediately went back and read all of the previous ones. I love personal newsletters, I love stories about life at sea, and I love good writing. This newsletter has all of those, so, you know, it’s a good fit for me. Maybe for you, too.
41. Kazim Ali’s new poetry collection The Voice of Sheila Chandra is three long poems interspersed with four short ones. The poems are formally inventive, playing with sound and language in interesting ways. And they do things with time and memory, layering history and personal experience, past and future, that are at times difficult to understand while also showing you that you already know them.
42. I’ve already mentioned the following at several points in this list: kindness, generosity, decency, sincerity, gentle masculinity. So it likely comes as no surprise that Ted Lasso was exactly my jam.
43. It was wonderful to see the return of Helena Fitzgerald’s newsletter Griefbacon recently. Right away she wrote about the election and the pandemic in ways that are very Helena Fitzgerald, which is to say very good and very different from how anybody else writes about anything.
44. Alexander Chee started a Medium blog this year, beginning with an essay about a black jeans. This only sounds prosaic if one doesn’t remember or know that Alexander Chee is one of the best essayists working today. (If you aren’t familiar with his essays, I would point you to his 2018 collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, which is one of my favorite essay collections, period.)
45. After several years of seeing people excitedly shouting about the indie game Night in the Woods, I finally got around to buying it this year—and then proceeded to wait five more months to actually play it. I wish I hadn’t waited so long. It’s visually beautiful and a wonderfully poignant rendering of young homecoming.
46. Lyz Lenz’s newsletter Men Yell At Me has been great again this year. Two that stood out to me were “Dispatch from a Red State” and “A Crisis of Empathy.”
47. I recently read Sofia Samatar’s 2017 short story collection Tender. Substack is telling me I’m almost out of space so let me just say: it’s great.
48. I was happy to see Rachel Zucker’s Commonplace podcast come back recently after a long hiatus, and the conversation was personal and very relatable.
49. I’ve been loving the new season of Star Trek: Discovery and I really loved getting to hear Callie Wright’s recent conversation about trans and enby representation on Trek.
50. Finally, it’s not particularly deep but watching the anime Haikyu!! with my son this year has been a ton of fun, and has made me get excited about volleyball in a way I never would have expected.

As always, this is just a portion of what mattered to me this year. I would love to hear what’s mattered to you this year, so please drop me an email or leave a comment.

There’s a thing that people say sometimes about writing as a way of finding out what you’re thinking about. I’ve known for a while that photography is like that for me, I take pictures every day, almost entirely on instinct, and it’s only in looking back over what I’ve been photographing over weeks or months or years that I discover a theme emerging. I hadn’t realized that writing could be that way for me as well, but the exercise of writing a weekly newsletter is showing me my patterns. Looking back at the titles of my last few letters—“Not If, But When,” “Irrevocability,” “The Party of Stasis”—it seems I’m on a bit of a theme here, and of course today is no different.

I spent part of my Tuesday morning pleading with my Congressman—a centrist who continues to rise in the ranks of the Democratic establishment—to use this term to push for bold changes. My fear, I explained, is that unless people see real, meaningful changes in their day-to-day lives, 2024 (and maybe even 2022) are going to be a bloodbath for the Democrats, one that this country might not survive. He, unsurprisingly, used that as an opportunity to talk about rejecting socialism. Even on climate, supposedly his number 1 issue, he downplayed the urgency of the situation, saying on the one hand that we only have ten years to get a plan in place (a misleading statement—decarbonization needs to be in full swing by then, not just beginning to ramp up) but saying on the other hand that we need to work with Republicans to pass what we can while also recognizing that people are still going to drive to work and cook on gas stoves. This is a man who claims to have read the IPCC reports, which lay out in great detail the necessity for dramatic changes to land use, agriculture, and every sector of the economy, but who still found time to scold climate activists for scaring off centrist voters by telling them that they wouldn’t be able to have on-demand commercial air travel in the future. It’s all the sort of thing that manages to be completely unsurprising while still also managing to shock me.

Yesterday morning I listened to the latest episode of the podcast Reply All. The episode was called “A Song of Impotent Rage,” and the first ten minutes or so was basically a deep dive into one of the hosts’ anxiety and depression about climate doom. This was, as you might imagine, not great for my own climate doom-related anxiety. Later, during my lunch break, I got to record a wonderful conversation for my own show, a discussion about art and poetry that was both intellectually stimulating and affirming of our shared humanity. It was lovely, but as has been happening more and more often lately, afterwards I found myself wondering how much longer I’ll get to do this.

Podcasting as a medium cannot exist without our massive technological infrastructure, of course. The way my show in particular is structured, most of the conversations are recorded remotely, with my guest and I often separated by thousands of miles. I keep the video stream disabled in order to save bandwidth, so most of the time we don’t even see each others’ faces. In a lot of ways, the show has been a lifeline for me, and not just during the pandemic. Before my show, I rarely got the opportunity to talk about art or literature at all. More recently I’ve been able to make more connections locally, so I could in theory access some of what I get from the show. But I wouldn’t be able to reach nearly the same range of artists if not for my podcast and all of the electronic interconnectivity that enables it. Already people smarter than I am are talking about a world without things like cheap, fast transportation or round-the-clock electrical power—which, admittedly, already describes life in many parts of the world. Surely in such a future, art and literature and conversation will still exist, but I have trouble imagining podcasts will.

What I mean to say is that I understand the desire to hang on. I have always had difficulty with change. Even something as simple as moving to a new house has been emotionally challenging for me; losing my entire way of life is almost more than I can bear to contemplate. So when I look at someone like my Congressman, who has hung his hat on the idea that things won’t really need to change, I get it. Honestly, I want that, too.

The instinct to preserve is something we all experience to one degree or another, and for the most part it is an instinct that served our ancestors well. Stability for our ancient forebears meant survival; change often came with the risk of deprivation or death. Holding on to our way of life is the most natural thing in the world. But when our way of life is the thing killing us, holding on only accelerates the end. When change is inevitable, it may only be in letting go that we are able to save anything.

I and my colleagues have spent the past four years in resistance. It was the right thing to do. In many ways it still is—there are people in positions of power who want to make things worse, and it’s necessary to prevent them from doing so. But I think the real work ahead of us is not in resistance but in acceptance, and moreover in finding ways to teach others to accept. The world is going to look different whether we want it to or not, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than we’re currently prepared for. The sooner we can accept that, the sooner we can figure out how to make that new world a liveable one.