Dropping the Ball

New year, less letter; also, lists

I started writing this in the balmy late afternoon of New Year’s Eve, on a balcony in Mexico City, beneath a canopy of jacaranda trees. I’m finishing it with a cataclysmic hangover in an airport lounge to which I cadged entry thanks to my friend’s platinum card. The hangover is worth it. CDMX was delightful. I wasn’t planning on leaving the country, and it turns out that I’m not as good at international travel, nor drinking past midnight, as I used to be. But I needed to get out of my life for a while.

I was glad to say goodbye to 2025, a year that saw a lot of turmoil in my professional and personal lives, to say nothing of the general state of things. It wasn’t great on the writing front, either. I wrote a lot, but didn’t publish anything except one essay that was reprinted in an anthology.

Well, that and this Substack, if it counts. I’m not sure it should. This post marks three years of writing here. That seems like an occasion to reconsider, for a few reasons. During that time, I haven’t published much, and I’m starting to wonder if that might not be a coincidence. In my first post, I said I was doing this as an experiment, and as an alternative to social media; since then, this platform has degenerated into another form of social media, one that feels in some ways worse than its predecessors.¹ I’m skeptical of its potential value to my career—I’m not alone—and cannot imagine trying to make money here. I have less time on my hands than I did back then. And I’m sort of bored with it.

Maybe I’ll take a few months off. Maybe I’ll try a different approach. Maybe I’ll give this up entirely. In any case, I’m going to take a little hiatus in the new year to figure it out. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with two lists: a few things I liked this month, and the things I liked best in 2025.

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December recs:

• SAD lamps. Somehow it took me ten years of living in Oregon to cave and finally buy one. My sweet bright child, where have you been all my life? I bought this one, which seems good enough, though I have no frame of comparison.

• Using the word misnomer properly. It means that a name is misleading or inaccurate. You can also use it for the misapplication of a term or word, and the OED lists hundreds of years of precedent for that usage, even though I find it distasteful. Misnomer does not mean a mistake or misperception or misunderstanding that doesn’t specifically involve a name or a word, no matter how many people use it that way lately. I know I’m being a crusty old pedant, but I said nothing when the barbarians came for nonplussed, and I regret it. I might die on Misnomer Hill. (Pop quiz: would Misnomer Hill be a misnomer?)

• Sentimental Value. I loved Joachim Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World, so was excited to see this. Some stinker like Sinners will probably win the Oscar, but this might have been the best feature film I saw this year.

• The Secret Agent. Same here—I loved Kleber Mendonca Filho’s last film, the documentary Pictures of Ghosts, and also loved this one. Wagner Moura (aka Pablo Escobar in Narcos) is fantastic in it.

• I don’t have any books for you, because I’ve spent this whole month reading Crime and Punishment. Why would I decide to read Dostoevsky for the first time during a particularly grim Oregon December, the same one that finally compelled me to buy a light to shine in my face, often while reading it? Dear reader, I do not know.

• Musically, I’ve been sort of into Matt Berry (aka Laszlo Cravensworth).

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Some of my favorite things of 2025:

Books:

• I read 25 books this year, not including teaching-related reading (which is, to be fair, considerable). That’s not a great number for someone in my line of work. In my defense, it’s been a hectic year, a few of them were long and/or otherwise ponderous—Sontag, McTeague, Bucking the Tiger—and, again, one of them was Crime and Punishment. Only a handful of the books I read were released in 2025 (or very late 2024), all of which I recommended here already: Moving the Bones, Angel Sharpening Its Beak, Waterline, Lonesome Ballroom. The best old books I read were The Sisters Brothers, The Body in Question, A Visit From the Goon Squad, The Dead Ladies Project, and Newjack.

TV:

• Patriot. A few people had told me to watch this 2017 Amazon show, and I’d made it halfway through the first episode years ago, but somehow it got away from me. Recently I gave it another try, and it became an all-time favorite. It’s both one of the darkest comedies I’ve seen and a legitimately tense international espionage thriller. The dialogue, especially, is exceptional.

• I already wrote about rediscovering What We Do in the Shadows.

• I’ve also written a shameful amount here about the most important television show of our time.

Movies:

• I wrote about last year’s Oscar finalists for best documentary, most of which I watched earlier this year, in this post. And I wrote here about various other docs I taught, watched, and/or loved throughout the year. The best somewhat recent documentaries I saw this year were probably Casting JonBenet, Queendom, Cameraperson, and At the Drive-In. I didn’t see many new releases this year, because I don’t subscribe to enough streaming services, but the best doc I saw in theaters was It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.

• The best fiction films I saw in theaters this year were the two mentioned above. The best older ones I watched for the first time were First Cow, Promising Young Woman, and Nickel Boys.

Podcasts:

• One more plug for Hush, the inordinately smart and compelling OPB true crime podcast I wrote about here.

Music:

• This was either a down year for music or the year I got old. Possibly both. Whenever I listened to some well-reviewed new record, it sounded like more fungible, mumbly folk or a retread of a genre I liked as a teenager.² Meanwhile, the new stuff I listened to most all seemed to have two hundred streams on Spotify. The exception was Geese’s Getting Killed. Not an original take at this point, since this album seems to be on every best-of-2025 list, but it was my most anticipated and favorite record of the year. (Lead singer Cameron Winter’s solo record Heavy Metal was tied for #1, but that technically came out at the end of last year.)

• Spike Fuck, From Underground. Not a big live album guy, but I’ll take what I can get from a band who doesn’t put out much music, is a mystery to me, and is probably an acquired taste. But I’ve had them in steady rotation for a few years now, since I stumbled on their Smack Wave EP.

• Sepe, National Accessory. I don’t know how I heard about this low-fi slouch-rock record from an obscure LA band, but I’ve listened to this entire album a lot this year.

• Here’s a Spotify playlist of some stuff I’ve been listening to a lot in the last few months.

1. Among others, it’s populated exclusively by writers and has no word limits.

2. I was really not prepared for a post-rock revival.