writing about 2024
Mary Turfah: Have somewhat embarrassingly kept a diary since high school. I was flipping through this year and a lot of my entries start with some iteration of I’m tired, which is true. I think about Gaza and Lebanon all the time. I’ve been wondering whether there really is a meaningful collective called “humanity.” Like, biologically, genetically, yes, sure, obviously. Still, I look at most people around me and don’t recognize anything at all. Alienation’s the big feeling of 2024, I’d say. Surgery residency has some to do with the fatigue; most of it is the soullessness of life here. I don’t really know what people are living for, beyond themselves. A shrunken existence. (As you would say, brother ew.) The contrast between my life as a doctor here and that of a doctor in Gaza or in southern Lebanon, unravels me. Was in the jnoob a couple of weeks ago, in early December, and found it clarifying. I stood around the remains of my parents’ home and felt something like gratitude, which is absurd. Someone had planted a flag with a Husseini slogan (basically, a commitment to fighting injustice, whatever the cost). There are so many people fighting with the whole of themselves for a better world they might not live to see. I was talking to my dad the other day, I think after I learned the Israelis had shot an old woman in her home, three weeks into a ceasefire only they have violated (1,100 times as of this writing), and I said something like, “this world is awful.” He was eating pumpkin seeds and sipping tea. He looked up at me and said, no, their world is awful. Our world is not, our world is [a bunch of words that sound less floaty in Arabic]. He’s right. Our world is beautiful; may 2025 bring us closer to it.
Cuthwulf Eileen Myles: Never seen America more nakedly in support of ethnic cleansing while acting like girls I once met when I was a substitute gym teacher in Boston in the 70s. One girl would be standing there with a lit cigarette and when I said put that cigarette out the girl would pass it to the next girl and go I'm not smoking. Their defiance was to pretend it wasn't happening and that's how every little meeting with the white house press secretaries go. We’re looking into it. Israel is going to get back to us on that. Meanwhile people are being blown to shreds, kids are being shot in the heart and the head. And now go ahead, why not take Syria. The US is treating the middle east like it’s its bitch and Israel is its cocky boyfriend that can get away with anything he wants. You know what, otherwise, well not otherwise, but in the exact same time and that's the obscenity of the year I just lived, I mostly lived in Texas except when I travelled and the most marvellous place I travelled to without a doubt is Mexico. Mexico gets it. That’s just the fact. Make America Mexico again is what we say down here. I worked on a novel and my favorite public art moment was playing in Bang on a Can with Ryan Sawyer and Steve Gunn who are such marvelous brilliant musicians and friends and I spouted some poetry, some mine, some Palestinian poets, some Polish female poets whose work I had encountered while sitting in my car reading them, the night before the eclipse. We (myself and Ryan and Steve) opened for Deerhoof at Bang on a Can (and I am a huge fan of Deerhoof) and Greg Saunier really liked our sound I believe and referred to us as the Eileen Myles trio. I think we all thought that was funny. Hope so. Otherwise I began referring to myself as Cuthwulf Eileen Myles especially after Donald Trump got elected.
Maya Binyam: Began the year confused. By March I thought I had everything figured out. Life was horrible but it was easy. Someone else cooked all my meals and even did the dishes. I was supposed to be writing. Instead I got high, I got high and thought I saw my ex walk through my bedroom door. It wasn’t sad. It was actually pretty interesting. I drove away after that. I drove through the mountains, the desert, and all along the coast. My brakes needed replacing but I didn’t replace them, I kept going. Summer was coming. Summer got erased by fall. By fall, everything was upside down. On the anniversary of my cousin’s death I taught a story about a man who finds his ex-girlfriend's body in her bedroom. He bathes her in his cologne and then chain smokes cigarettes. My students didn’t understand why he did what he did. I told them he was struggling with time, that time was everywhere, and it was thickening. Attempts at clarification made life more obscure. The failure was collective but on most days it felt personal, it felt like failure was a phenomenon that had originated within me. I tried to put a positive spin on the situation. I tried to believe that failure could initiate its opposite, that it could circle back around and make life more clarifying. John Berger once wrote something like that. When I searched my library, I failed to find the quote.
Jennifer Soong: I increasingly burdened my poems with sustaining me, which naturally caused a number of complications. I lived a whole year in Colorado. Two things that were constant: my jaw pain and the effects of political violence.
Dylan Saba: To be honest, I don’t know that I have something meaningful to say here. This has been the worst year I have ever experienced personally and witnessed for the world, for all the reasons that are obvious. I expect next year to be as bad. Hopefully not worse, but who’s to say.
Nour Ammari: 12/26/2024: Another Christmas in Jordan, and once again, the celebration feels misplaced. Not even misplaced. There is no celebration. This past year has stretched on in a way that feels almost like the slow crawl of tectonic plates. Without the gift of hindsight, it could seem as though nothing has changed at all, but I know that’s not the case.
Of course, there’s a certain privilege in being able to feel that time is so drawn-out. Yes, I’ve faced my own struggles this year, but in the grand scope of suffering, my worst experiences pale in comparison to what Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Sudanese, Yemenis, Congolese—along with my queer and POC siblings—are enduring. Guilt is a paralyzing emotion, and so I refuse to allow it to keep me from acknowledging my own pain, as long as it doesn’t prevent me from contributing to the collective struggle for liberation in my own way.
That said, I can’t shake the feeling of being stuck—we all seem to be. We lift up heroes like Luigi Mangione (a highlight of 2024), the Stop Cop City movement, and the Palestinian activists on the frontlines. We uplift the resistance and necessarily support violence. But somehow, it feels as though the movement is suffocating under the weight of infighting. Every time the opportunity for true escalation arises, some of our own comrades attack. They claim that it will harm the movement, turning away from us just when we need solidarity most.
This needs to change. And honestly, I’m at a loss—because if this continues, we’ll remain stuck in this endless loop of painting our ideals in bright colors, but achieving little in the way of real change. Perhaps these acts of bravery are best carried out alone, though they would be much safer and comfortable with the support of community. Perhaps those who truly act feel a stronger sense of personal responsibility than they do loyalty to the movement. But as long as true escalation is seen as radical and not necessary by our peers, I am not sure where we go. I guess we will find out. I am sick of hearing “escalate,” though. The call to arms has lost its meaning. We either have to do it or not.
As I close out 2024, I’m left feeling like I wasn’t brave enough, that I didn’t have the strength to break away from the confines of what the broader left deems acceptable. We call for action, for escalation, but as soon as the reality of it presents itself, self-doubt creeps in, and the fear of alienating our comrades reemerges.
In 2025, I hope to be less of a coward. I hope to stand firm in my convictions and to no longer shrink in the face of risk or the fear of being judged as reckless.
Chloe Watlington: I get crazy with the commercial-free classical music station. I turn it on before I make coffee in the morning and silence it after I shut off the last light for the evening. I like to toggle the transmitter button a little so that the news or Christian radio breaks through Beethoven fugueing. I like to put on Bobby Womack’s “California Dreaming” and not turn off the commercial-free classical music station. Oooohhh yeah: doubling. The other day RZA was the host of Classical Californian night. He was telling the story of the Buddha who travelled so far to see the monks that by the time he got there he was covered in dirt. The monks said that they are sacred, that they don’t deal with muddy things or muddy people. The Buddha laughed at them. Don’t they know lotus flowers grow out of the mud? Yeah, okay, it's a story we all know, but RZA wrote a whole symphony about it called Ballet through the Mud. I recommend listening to it. That’s what I have been doing all year: balleting through the mud, reading through the mud, talking through the mud. I’m gonna stay right here in the mud, blooming like a fucking lotus flower to the moon baby. See you on the muddy side, if you want. Xoxo.
Hedi El Kholti: For me 2024 will always be the year Gary died. The way 2016 was Bill's, 2018 was Adam’s, and 2021’s was Sylvère. The ones who profoundly shaped my thinking, who made me who I am. I met Gary in early 2000s through one of my teachers, John Boskovich, who had just made a beautiful film of Gary reading Celine’s North. Our lunch at John's incredible place was not particularly pleasant but Gary had just reviewed It’s a Man’s World, a book of ‘50s garish men adventure covers I had coedited for Feral House, so we talked about that. Later Gary and I worked on Last Seen Entering the Biltmore around 2008, but we really became dear friends after I instigated at his request an art show in LA and a symposium on his work at 356 Mission in 2015 to coincide with the reissue of Resentment, the first book of the crime trilogy. Thank you Laura and Wendy for saying yes and thank you Ethan for making it so easy and pleasant. Gary fell in love with LA all over again, and later Cayal who was our assistant at the time found him an apartment. Here, we had a great time. We went to events, dinners, movies, the beach… etc. He came to Colm’s 60th birthday in Dublin and after that we went to my mother’s house in Spain. They got along beautifully. I found a photo of both of them dancing that is super special, but painful to look at.
Last September, we had a beautiful week in Los Angeles, where he stayed with me for a couple of days and later, came every day to swim, hang out, read Balzac by the pool for a project he had in Paris. We talked about our favorite character, Vautrin, who appears in various books in the series. We talked about Gombrowicz’s Diary and the novel he was working on. And as usual when he stayed here, he's grabbed whatever books and galleys that were lying around. This time it was two of our fall releases, Kevin’s Selected Amazon Reviews and Nate’s Ripcord. Gary, with Bruce, Wayne, Chris (for the French books we publish), and Christine, are my first ideal readers, the ones I’m in conversation with, with whom I want to share the books with as soon as they’re done, hoping they’ll approve. With Gary in particular it could be stressful. I wanted him to approve of what I do with the press. I was lucky that he was always very enthusiastic, but I also knew it could have gone either way. He was a pure spirit, unable to bullshit about something he didn't care for. He wrote to me about both lovingly with that intelligence of his that goes right through the heart of what matters in culture:
“I’m bowled over by Kevin’s book, which, with Hamrah’s oeuvre, really should put the practice of reviewing in a certain way out of business, his approach is so free absent the usual judgment-passing, so fluent in tagging what’s important or intriguingly unimportant about a work of art or an electronic toothbrush, and whisperingly gay at times when it’s hilarious in a fluttery, veiled way, that he knocks over a whole house of cards with the veil. I’m very energized by Nate Lippens new book. I loved the first one and also love this one. There are so many gorgeous places in it where abjection meets with resistance from a very powerful writer and someone whose will is getting him through very knotty times without losing his sense of humor, which is—apropos the Tuesday Weld anecdote—devastatingly down-to-earth. Maybe the abject side of it is its power, that behind all that happens to the narrator gets received by someone who can actually stand up to anything, who might very well ask himself, when he’s having a good time, why he’s having a good time, but isn’t going to let the question ruin the fun he’s having, or does let it ruin it, I think what’s so special about this book is that Nate catches the flow of time through an uneasy consciousness, provides an abundance of cues, routines, remembrances, and space bulletins from outside, I love the marking-up he makes of experiences without grading them, so to say, and the contents of Ripcord are so beautifully orchestrated, a little of this, a little more of that, or a little less…the balance is really miraculous, for me, anyway, as I pick up this book, or sometimes Constance’s Playboy, and read a few pages simply to remind myself, “Yes, this is world you live in, and these are some other minds that are working away at not exactly figuring it out and not necessary enduring it as some harsh condition,” but more nosing around for the invisible through-line, if this makes sense, in the seemingly aleatory, the seemingly random. I can’t say enough about how good Nate Lippens’s books are, how glad I am that you’re publishing them. (And glad that you’re publishing mine, truly, forever grateful.)”
I’ll leave you with this 2013 version of Bowie’s “Sound and Vision.” Gary loved Low. Bruce told me it was his favorite Bowie album. For us who made a home in culture: “Blue, blue, electric blue / That's the colour of my room / Where I will live / Blue, blue / Pale blinds drawn all day Nothing to do, nothing to say / Blue, blue / I will sit right down / Waiting for the gift of sound and vision / And I will sing…”
And Gary was a wonderful singer too.
Yasmina Price: No voice was in my head more than the voice of June Jordan, in fragments as litanies:
When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions. — “Report from the Bahamas, 1982”
That premonition lives alongside the monsters still being on our backs, now is their time, again. Confronted with the militarization of all things, the commercialization of all things, a state of permanent warfare that is daily and continuous and levelled against any life at all, that is predicated on totalizing disposability, a war zone that is everywhere, that is the architecture of the world we unevenly share, pretenses of democracy that are themselves the ceaseless war war war, a forever war through monopolies of coercive power and conquest and accumulation and intentionally assigned precarity.
In a way that is completely banal and a little particular, I’m not certain to have quite made it through this one. Maybe this was the worst one, disfigured by betrayal and loss.
And yet experiments in liberation endure, somewhere of everywhere elastic models of sustaining life are remembered, sometimes you break bread with friends and family and speak for hours and hours and hours, committing to an ambivalent and contradictory and necessary interdependence is worthwhile and because the commons is not a shape or a place or an end but a process a window is open.
Too much has gone to pieces and still June Jordan also wrote, in “Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love,”
There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.
Marianela D’Aprile: CHAOS!
Gabe Winant: I’m writing this within the bounds of a nap of our baby, Ermias, now five months old. Will the nap last long enough to get to the end of this paragraph, maybe start another? We’ll see—we're lucky to get past half an hour. He's named after Jeremiah (as rendered in Amharic), the prophet who warned his people that their arrogance and complacency would destroy them; who told the truth even when none would hear it. The Book of Jeremiah is likely the source of the anthem of the labor and civil rights anthem, “We Shall Not Be Moved”: “Blessed is he who trusts in the LORD, Whose trust is the LORD alone. He shall be like a tree planted by waters, Sending forth its roots by a stream: It does not sense the coming of heat, Its leaves are ever fresh; It has no care in a year of drought, It does not cease to yield fruit.”
We stopped singing him lullabies as part of sleep training, but when we still were I found that, while the traditionals of social movements like “We Shall Not Be Moved” featured heavily in my repertoire, I couldn't stop singing John Prine's “Paradise.” You might think it's called “Muhlenberg County,” as I used to: “Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County / Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay? / Well I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking / Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.” The third verse is where Prine nails the ecological point: “Well the coal company came, with the world's largest shovel / and they tortured the timber and tore up the land / they dug for their coal ‘til the land was forsaken / and wrote it all down as the progress of man.”
At first, I thought I was doing this because of the genocide in Gaza and its ramifications for academic freedom and academic labor, questions with which I’m very actively engaged. Muhlenberg College (unrelated to the county, but their namesakes were related to each other) in Pennsylvania made a landmark this year by firing Maura Finkelstein, a tenured (and Jewish) professor of anthropology for her social media posts about the genocide in Gaza. It is, I believe, the first time a tenured professor has been outright fired for Palestine solidarity, although there are previous cases that were de facto the same thing. Every time I thought about repression on campus, as I do constantly, John Prine started playing in my head. Then, months into this, I realized—it’s a song about a father and a son, and the irretrievability of a past from which they have been severed by the violence of fossil capital. Okay, he’s awake.
Rosie Stockton: This was a year I did not know when to hold em or when to fold em. When I finally walked away, I watched all of The Sopranos in my best friend’s living room. That’s a lie. I stopped when Tony didn’t stop Ralph from putting the hit on Jackie Jr. After Tracee and everything. Could not forgive him for that. It was then I retaught myself how to breathe. Where the air goes, how to make room for it. The simplest form of pleasure, turning the bottom of an exhale to an inhale. I architected solutions in time and space. I slept in a twin bed. Paid rent. Wrote in a yellow notebook on a glass desk I bought from a 12-year-old on Craigslist for 10 bucks. As I slowly loosened my grip, I studied how my palms had warped the metal. I craved soft things. Cashmere. Hojicha. 105.1. At the hands of myself, I experienced deliverance, having never before wanted to be free. Once I felt it, I sat on the floor for a very long time. I walked on a dirt road for a very long time. Everything I tried to bury I gathered back in my arms. At the opera I yelled to Romeo please just take it slow, it’s going to be okay. But still it wasn’t okay. I read Capital Vol. 1 on a dock in Maine with a broken heart. That worked. Commodities are in love with money, but the course of true love never did run smooth. Disavowing Anna, I entered my Levin era. Gardened. The scythe mowed of itself. These were blissful moments. Filled barricades with water and daisy chained chicken wire to itself. Set up tents. The cops came. Locked arms with undergrads and whoever else. Ran each day alongside the LA River, fast as I could. Felt the moon crack open the sky. Looked east until I realized I could get there by looking west too. All the poets are in Palestine. Words’ only job is to point to what isn’t. I made peace with the fact that speech hurts. It hurts my mouth, it hurts my throat. It hurts my joints, my jaw. My stamen and my pistil. Once I grieved in every dimension, the future finally ceased to exist. That was a huge accomplishment. Enough, I said to my analyst. I am cured. I know how The Sopranos ends, I don’t need to see it. He said perhaps our work is only just beginning.
Nour Annan: I knew the war was coming and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I told everyone who would listen, like a hysterical town crier, desperate for the world to acknowledge the doom growing inside of me. It arrived in September, tearing everything in its way, erasing all that we had known. As with Gaza, we helplessly watched it on our screens. We watched as the zionist army killed and displaced our kin, as they destroyed our land, burned our trees. As expected, I became even more addicted to following the news, inseparable from the screens that delivered a play-by-play of my greatest fears. When my madness heightened, I booked a plane ticket to surprise my family in Lebanon. It was November by then. When I walked into the apartment, the cat was hiding under the bed and my mother was praying. She began to cry upon seeing me, whispering thanks.
Although the drones and bombs interrupted all of our waking and sleeping hours, I felt calmer and stronger than I had in New York. A grief like this is not meant to be solitary. There were 14 of us in the Beirut apartment, and we lived out the remainder of the war together, breaking bread and bad news, smoking on the balcony, waiting for it to end. The night before the ceasefire, the skies closed in on us. I remember walking home along the corniche in a daze while people fled in all directions, piling bags and bedding onto motorcycles, running to the beach in a panic. The air smelled like gunpowder. That night, at home with my family, we heard the bombs drop all around us, the planes hovering, encircling the city, cracking the sky open. A feeling of gratitude washed over me, to be here and not there. If anything were to happen, I would be here, with them, I would die here, with them. It was 4AM when everything stopped. The sigh of relief, the tears of disbelief, the shame of resting before Gaza, the fear of what is to come when the dust finally settles. There are years that get stuck in your throat forever.
dream hampton: Ugh, what a bleak 15 months.
Eli Coplan: 2024 began for me when I missed my best friend’s birthday to help block a bridge. We (some of us here?) spent the night in jail and I got doxxed by the Post, Google results inscribed into my name like getting tattooed by the Internet, except that mine will look better with age. This was at a time in Palestine organizing that feels distant now despite having been met with no end. Art was unthinkable and I met a lot of people without learning their last names. I met Sasha in the bunker. The process was the opposite of art but we were thinking in terms of meaning and circumstance and it was, selfishly, enlivening amidst all the despair and guilt. Everyone was looking to the past for techniques to break something in the present.
The year before, I had made a sculpture of a car horn that consisted of a real car horn, connected to a DC power supply and controlled by a steering wheel mounted on the wall. The horn apparatus needed to be deployable so that I could install it on the outside of a north-facing window eight stories high on the old Whitney Independent Study Program building in TriBeCa on the morning of the opening, because permission is a gift best given retroactively. I’m convinced that it affected traffic in the surrounding area.
Perhaps auspiciously then, 2024 became for me a year of traffic, of frustrated desire and slowed movements with the occasional saccadic twitch forward. Keeping up with the present feels like running in a dream, and maybe that’s why I ended up writing about 2023 just now. Eventually I did get back to making artwork but I decided I could only do so if I didn’t take it all that seriously anymore but also made no compromises. It did sort of end up with me spinning out, brain and thumbs clogged with dopamine and I still haven’t caught up on emails or even texts now. I was lucky for the opportunity to withhold image rights from Penske’s Artforum but I wish that doing so had felt more like an achievement. It was the year I came to understand that it is, actually, traffic that controls the world. This is the first thing I’ve written all year.
Andreas Petrossiants: Currently, the NYU Department of Photography and Imaging is exhibiting a show called “BREAD • EDUCATION • FREEDOM - 50 YEARS LATER.” Approaching on Broadway, it begins with a blown-up photograph visible through the storefront windows. In a beautiful floor-to-ceiling celebration of militant urban assembly and autonomous action, the photos document the revolutionary events in 1973 Athens when “surrounding Universities went on strike and began occupying the Polytechnic in opposition to the military junta that had been plaguing the country since 1967.” It’s ironic, to put it mildly. NYU is a vehicle of investment, it’s a tool of gentrification and urbanization, it’s an arm of the surveillance and police apparatuses, it’s its own kind of junta. NYU lets the cops use the bathrooms at the library and invites them to bludgeon students and faculty in between candy crush breaks. NYU has built literal checkpoints across campus (blocking off spaces that are ostensibly open to the public), staffing them with subcontracted security guards working taxing shifts. Students active in the struggle to end the genocide in Palestine across the US and the globally have underlined the greatest myth to the contemporary neoliberal university: that it is still primarily a space for learning and collaboration rather than one of numerous technologies for the production of debt, speculation, and urban development. In December, NYU declared faculty members and students personae non grata (PNGs) for participating in a peaceful protest. May we all be unwelcome. May we all be ungrateful.
Danielle Carr: This year was a referendum on integrity. It was immensely disappointing.
Sunny Iyer: I started the year on the beach in Kerala with new friends—almost strangers—full of crab curry and fermented palm wine (toddy). I remember the distinct feeling of being on the other side of the world. I remember feeling hope that Israel would fall, that change would come. I spent the first week of the new year with my grandma, whose senility and lack of English meant I never really knew her, apart from a few scattered fond memories, like the time she visited my northern California suburb, went for a walk, got lost, and while I was driving home from high school, stoned numb blasting Black Dice, I found her crying on the sidewalk, so relieved to have been inadvertently found. In April, my mother was one day away from reaching Mount Everest base camp when we finally got a hold of “her” sherpa on LinkedIn so that he could pass along the message that my grandma died. She chose to leave her trip, something she’d been planning for years, and took a helicopter from a mountain village to Kathmandu then a flight to Kerala in time for the funeral. She still regrets making this decision. She could have said goodbye to her mother 17,500 feet above sea level, in the wind of the tallest mountain on earth. This year has been categorically defined by grief and rage; the world is all caved in. I’ve lost friends and family by way of death, political difference, misaligned schedules, geographic distance turning into sedimented emotional divergence. I’ve grown resilient in parallel to a heightened awareness of precarity. There are few things I know to be true, one of which is that all the even years of my life have been miserable, and the odd years elastic and profound, so I’m ready for this last stretch of my 20s.
Dave Tompkins: Back in May, a friend in London played “Hold Tight” by Change, listening for Luther Vandross in the refrain. The chorus found me again last week, stilled in the woods of Western N.C. and considering a tree shimmy, as ten wild hogs filed across the path. (Luckily, their snuffle ops did not include me.) The song has appeared in my head so often, in a year of people being forced to hold and carry too much, that it spilled onto Curtis Mayfield’s porch in Atlanta. A dream in a waking nightmare. Curtis was talking, maybe arguing, in a reread of the title’s multiple embraces. A hug to self? A clenched anxiety? Stay put, but wait for how long? Was help ever on the way? At one point “don’t let this moment” cuts off, as if in resistance, leaving us to it. A call to bring your people close, he said. Mr. Mayfield then waved me out of my own dream (I asked if he’d written “Song for a Future Generation”) and scoffed, “Wrong county!” The Change single often makes brief cameos in my favorite record shop (shout to Bene) which also holds my favorite book shop. (And an award-winning bathroom.) Located at 360 Van Brunt in Red Hook, the shelves in the right hand corner include Palestinian authors—literature, poetry, history, children’s books, cookbooks, all populated by Sousan Hammad. There's a worn leather chair where you sink in and listen to the records of others. Or, one time, hear two kids singing New Edition's "Is This the End?" while strumming on an acoustic guitar, off key, voices cracking themselves up. Or read Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha. Or if needed, just sit tight.
Naib Mian: If 2023 showed us possibility, the briefest glimpse of liberatory potential, a tear in a fence, a prison break; then 2024 showed us the cost. 2024 showed us that the greatest might on this earth would be unleashed by those with the greatest hubris to eradicate that possibility. Hope is to be met with bombs, and dissent is to be made untenable. But it also showed us the power of that possibility. That in the face of the greatest horrors known to man, the flame of possibility in Gaza could not be put out, and that flame could ignite a movement around the world.
This year was a reorientation. A few months into Israel’s accelerated genocide in Gaza backed by the United States, we entered the year mobilizing, organizing, reacting.
It’s astounding to reflect on it all. Hundreds of thousands in the streets around the world; uncountable ceasefire resolutions; expanding consumer and cultural boycotts; bringing streets, parades, train stations to a halt; genocide cases in international courts; targeted actions against arms manufacturers; port workers heeding calls to withhold their labor from the global transport systems that get the weapons of war into the hands of genocidaires; student encampments spreading like wildfire across the world with a unified call: disclose and divest.
And equally horrifying was the effect of it all—nothing. The bombs did not stop. The genocide did not end. The death count has not stopped rising. And the horrors we’ve borne witness to, broadcasted to us by the journalists on the ground (heroic doesn’t begin to capture what these individuals have had to weather to tell their stories), have only grown darker and more twisted. Every functioning hospital bombed, besieged, or burned; aid trucks targeted; more than 200 journalists killed; genocidal thirst expanding into Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank. We won’t forget the writing on the walls, the faces of the children. I don’t think any single piece of writing can outline it all. We’ve seen worse than the worst we could imagine, and it doesn’t stop.
But we’ve also seen resistance and resilience. The brave fighters in Lebanon who staved off Israeli expansion. The image of Sinwar fighting to his last breath. Nothing can forgive the horrors brought upon the Palestinian people that they have responded to with principled steadfastness and the struggle for life. Palestine is the blueprint for liberation.
Here at home—in the heart of empire, where the bombs are made, the checks written, the red lines erased, the green lights given—as the year progressed, as we reacted to the gravest horrors of our time, we also saw counterinsurgent forces make inroads into the movement. Forces that would see calls for material divestment channeled into the neoliberal bureaucracy of trustee committees or righteous anger channeled into electoral voting blocs for a genocidal “lesser evil.” A multiplicity of tactics is necessary for a movement, but it cannot become cover for cooptation. The horizon of liberation that we struggle toward is not ours to compromise.
To the culture workers among us—the writers, artists, filmmakers, and all of us whose labor manufactures culture and shapes minds and hearts: we must sharpen our analyses, agitate our audiences, and resist the counterinsurgent forces that use culture to maintain genocidal consent. Culture cannot exist merely for consumption; it must move us into action. It is our responsibility to disrupt any and all counterrevolutionary culture, and any alternative cannot recreate the exploitative, capitalist modes of pre-existing cultural production.
As we turn the page on another calendar year of genocide, my mind goes back to Fargo Tbakhi’s words in his “Notes on Craft” about the long-middle of revolution:
The long middle is not a condition of time; we might be nearer to the end of revolution than the beginning, we might be nearer liberation than defeat, but our experience and our actions exist within the frame we can see, the frame of the long middle. Liberation is the end…We move towards it— sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always. It is the location by which we orient our movement. We know it because it gets closer, not necessarily because it comes sooner.
We’ve mobilized, we’ve tried to raise the stakes, we’ve pulled on the levers we have access to. Yet liberation remains on the horizon. And from our position in this long struggle, we look back, we look forward, and it is impossible to say whether we’ve made any progress toward it. But such is this long middle. So what now? The struggle to continue is the one I've come up against most often, myself and with my comrades. But it's understanding the long middle that allows me to.
The long middle, then, is the affective experience of moving inside the dailiness, inside the structural and therefore constant violence that forms the machinery of genocide and greases its wheels. Yet this affective experience also is, or might be, one of a counter and opposing dailiness: the dailiness of resistance and unrelenting struggle. This counter-dailiness is modeled by Palestinians, whose struggle within the long middle takes an astonishing diversity of forms—forms of care, of tenderness, of violence, of ingenuity, resource, and survival.
The long middle is not a geography of stasis or relenting. Accepting it means bringing our bodies into a state of movement and action, into a state of daily struggle. And if we commit ourselves to that, then we also need to organize. We need to build capacity and structures of sustainability. We need to expand the movement. We need strong, healthy organizations; we need political education and discipline; we need structures of mutual support; we need to hold one another accountable; we need to recruit; we need to build tactical skills.
This constant Intifada is the path through the long middle. Intifada is a shaking off of oppression, shaking it off like a layer of dust. This is a bodily action, to shake, to convulse oneself in a constant motion of refusal, to be clean in the face of the world. We will get tired. Our muscles will tear, and then get stronger. Someone falls, we pick them up. We fall, we are lifted by others. We must continue.
We won’t know when we will reach, but we keep moving, we keep fighting, we keep struggling. Such was the reorientation of this last year. A reorientation toward the horizon. That no other direction, no other orientation, no other way of existing in this world is worthwhile or makes sense other than struggle toward liberation. We are in this for the long haul. That doesn’t mean slowing down. It means maintaining the daily struggle to speed up.
Free Palestine.
Kaveh Akbar:
Sarah Schulman: Every brutal impulse that we ever suspected or ascribed to the United States has come to the surface this year—starting with Biden’s endless influx of funds to the Israel butchering of Palestinians and ending with the election of a fascist and the shift into the new era of American Right Wing anarchy and chaos. Arts and Entertainment played a significant role in undermining Democracy by stuffing our faces with repetition and narrowing, profoundly, the tiny range of ideas available in the public realm. The deliberate descent of The New York Times into a rag has made it almost impossible for Americans to access information without digging through multiple obscure sources and trying to piece it all together. The greatest danger now is appeasement.
A.J. Daulerio: 2024 was a wonderful year, but now I second-guess that as I type this out. Was it? 2023 was difficult, but I was exhilarated by what felt like max-cap frustration and disorientation; therefore, I declared it an outstanding year, mainly because I work better from a place of scarcity and nihilism. Then, this year was month after month of wins. Many were small and surprising, but there were several that a former version of myself would have considered “lifelong dreams that had come true.” After they came true, I realized that those dreams were kinda dumb, though. Like, “Why dream so big, man??? Just live like a normal fatso beast, go to bed, and see what tomorrow brings.” Maybe that’s why I'm so tepid about 2024 now. But calling my shot—in 2025, I will try to wish less and accept the terror of it all.
Nina Renata Aron: For me, 2024 was a year of rage and grief. It was also a year in which everything seemed connected: all rages and all griefs; grammar school boys pushing each other outside my window and the death-by-missile of a Palestinian poet; Matt Gaetz’s face and the trial of 51 French rapists who thought they’d done nothing wrong; city-destroying floods and a new skirt. It is no longer necessary to pull apart the various threads. It’s all one disaster.
The marquee events were the genocide in Gaza and my father’s decline and death, two distant, seemingly unrelated nightmares that I also experienced as deeply entwined, maybe because I watched the events of October 7th unfold on CNN with my journalist dad as he opined from a wheelchair, or because I railed against the IDF every time we were together until he died.
The horrors in Gaza vanquished the last traces of my naiveté, traces I would have disavowed if someone had accused me of harboring them, but that I had to admit to myself. To be more specific: before this, I think I simply did not believe that Jewish people were capable of cruelty and brutality at this scale. I’ve been an anti-Zionist for a long time and perhaps should not have been surprised. But I was. Watching the violence unfold this year, it became clear, to my great shame, that I actually thought that an army of Jewish boys and girls not much older than my teenage son and daughter would not block aid trucks, shoot toddlers through the skull, drop bombs on refugee tents.
This year disabused me of those last pathetic shreds of exceptionalism, of faith. I heard “nice” Jewish people in my orbit defend this violence, try to explain to me, an American Jew with no family ties to Israel, why I didn’t understand. I saw the banality of evil up close in a couple milquetoast moms I know who parroted whatever bullshit headlines their hawkish husbands had scanned that week, unthinkingly, as Palestinian women screamed over the corpses of their babies on screens for all the world to see. Among so many other things, the whole idiom of Jewish motherhood lost its meaning for me this year.
Death dealt the other decisive blow to any remaining innocence I might have possessed. It brought me low and made me grateful to be alive.
I really enjoyed reading Susie Boyt, Victor Serge, Isabella Hammad, Mark Haber, Venita Blackburn, Dubravka Ugresic, Joanna Hedva, Eva Baltasar, Yuri Herrera, Olga Ravn, Helen Garner, and newsletters by Sarah McColl and Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, among others. I enjoyed listening to Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee. I enjoyed writing group and playing music and cooking and baking and being in love and hanging out with my kids and my sisters and mom and dear friends. And I enjoyed playing and watching as much soccer as possible. I’m still reporting to my dad after every game, although the one-sided conversation now makes me cry. That’s the kind of thing I’d roll my eyes at if I saw it on TV. When I pass the cluster of photos of him on the mantelpiece that even 17 years in California won’t make me call an altar, I say aloud, “I’m trying.”
Ariana Reines: I really enjoyed hanging out with kids in 2024. Kids are the best.
Maryam Tafakory: Growing up in Iran, I heard the phrase “it cannot get worse” more often than the national anthem playing in school every morning. It has been impossible to keep sane in 2024, and before all this, I thought 2022 was the last bullet my body could take before collapsing. For over a year, we’ve witnessed too many people hesitate to call what they could see with their own eyes by its name. For over a year, people have been gaslit into using any word other than what it is: genocide. 88% of all homes have been destroyed, entire families wiped out, yet many chose to stay silent. For over a year, we have faced the ugliness of how we have routinely accepted our complicity. Free Palestine.
Constance Debré: Everything went fine.
Minh Nguyen: It started as an ache in June, but by the height of summer I was in debilitating pain. Society is divided between the sick and well, and I had landed on the other side. Luckily I was in Saigon by August, where I received thorough and caring medical treatment for half of what I would have paid in the US. Before I was properly diagnosed I lived with a bad mystery. For a few weeks I contended with my mortality. Staying at a hospital near my birthplace I thought about the behavior of Pacific salmon, how when they begin to die they swim back to the streams where they were born, decomposing on the way. But I did get better, and even with the scare, I had a good personal year. I got jobs that I genuinely enjoy though that has its own problems. I rejected practicality to spread across three home cities. I became better at organizing my life on my terms, an act that when you don’t come from money can feel like cosmic revenge. These choices come at great costs, but still—it is a privilege to live on one’s terms, to even be able to try. 2025 is for remembering this often.
Melissa Febos: In early December, ice encased our Iowan trees and when the wind bent them, they knocked like an insistent visitor, hello? hello? I was glad to be home after so much traveling. I had finished a book and started another. I'd missed my wife. I missed my dog, though he was gone. I had thought I'd managed not to be hopeful about the election and immediately knew I'd failed. I called everyone I loved and rolled out my life like a map. I wanted to know what else I could do, what a middle-aged sober addict with a bad back and high-maintenance mental health hygiene could do, if there was something better than standing in a room arranging sentences, sitting and trying not to think, strengthening my core, scribbling in notebooks and talking on the phone, walking around my midwestern town, and teaching. There seemed to be some, but not a lot more. I had always talked a lot about love and also spent a lot of time avoiding it. I'd had a lot of thrill and a lot of hurt both seeking and avoiding it. Now I think there are bigger kinds of love, more walk-ins welcome varieties, more applied sorts, the ones you choose again and again. I had talked to other sober addicts and drunks every single day for 21 years and I'd keep doing that. I'd keep arranging these sentences. All the rest, too. How to walk and teach and sleep and eat and stroll the Hy-Vee with the genocide in one hand and my wallet in the other without cracking down the middle? Maybe it was just the ice cracking, not a break but a knock. Hello? Hello? Come inside, come on in.
Anna Shechtman: This year, like every year, I have devoted myself, or at least my time, to my mother. Hours of talk. I’m her correspondent from the classroom and the internet, relaying aesthetic and moral trends, tracing the political horizon as far as I can see it stretching and contracting. Some of the things I tried to explain to her in 2024 include:
A “pick me” isn't like other girls. She eats burgers and watches sports; she spends no time fantasizing about white dresses. She does or doesn’t do these things for male attention and is, essentially, a gender traitor on the heterosexual dating market. Like you! she interrupted, either bad listener or evil genius.
It meant everything to me, really, to hear that she liked my book. It’s a real page turner, she said … I mean, not every page … so I had to remind her what a compliment is.
People are upset that this is only the first time Elphaba has been played by a black woman, leading to some online fuss about whether she or the animals are the vehicle for Wicked's anti-racist allegory. Whatever, Idina Menzel was black enough, she said, running the discourse through a guillotine.
There’s no antisemitism on college campuses. This, she has had no trouble believing, as she has never equated Judaism with Zionism. But as a Jewish child of the 1960s, she doesn’t hear “from the river to the sea” as a cry for Palestinian liberation, only a call for the elimination of the state of Israel. The conversation tends to break down when I inevitably offer: And what if it were that too? …
Isabel Ling: My 2024 began with stress dreams about Streeteasy. My best friend and roommate, who I’d lived with my entire adult life, and I parted ways (amicably). She moved in with her boyfriend of many years, and I, perhaps competitively, also wanting to take an equally big next step across the threshold into adulthood, decided to live alone. I moved deeper into Brooklyn, signing a lease on an apartment I wasn’t sure I could afford. Learning how to live alone has been one thing, being lonely has been another. I talked about my new apartment a lot this year—at bars, at the park, in the pool at the Bed Stuy Y. Stories about my very crooked floors and windows that never fully closed (read: ant infestation), were an architecture for the internal discomfort I felt with this yawn of aloneness. On the other hand, it also pushed me to reach toward others. This year that looked like calling my parents more. Like listening to the student journalists over at WKCR bravely report on the NYPD raid of Hind’s Hall alone in the dark of my kitchen, but then linking with the homies at jail support. Like dancing more. In a strange twist of fate, it’s looking like I’ll have to move out of my apartment in 2025. But, ending the year, I’ve fixed my windows and gotten used to the floors, I love my space and like being alone.
Elena Saavedra Buckley: In early summer the ceiling in my apartment collapsed while a few other bad living situation events were happening simultaneously. I remember talking to my mom on the phone in the aftermath and really thinking that a chain reaction had been set off, and that I would have to move back to Albuquerque, or maybe die, though I didn’t want to. It just seemed possible. Right before all of that, I had broken up with someone whom I wanted to love but couldn’t. He wouldn’t let me, and if he had, I bet I would have realized very quickly that it wasn't right. And then, just after the ceiling, I fell in love with a new person, Chris. (He’s sick on my couch right now, actually. I kissed his head before walking to the train, where I’m writing this.) It was interesting that falling in immediate, potent love coincided with the slow resolution of my other woes, because it proved something about the many faces of fulfillment. I’ve felt precarious for years; no surprise today, when so many are dead who weren’t two years ago and when the black plastic spatula in my kitchen will kill me if I manage to avoid different threats. The safety and happiness that I found this year did not fix that precarity, did not fill knowable gaps, but instead expanded the definition of my life—I marveled at new pleasures and feared new things. Yesterday, for example, when Chris was still feeling gastrointestinally ill, I discovered a new emotion while crying both because I was sad that he was in pain and because I was laughing at his fart performance. Early in our love I sent Chris a picture of a doo-dad that I saw at a Michael’s: a wooden purple cassette that read, LIFE IS A MIXTAPE. Chris then went and found the thing at a different Michael’s and bought it for me. It really is “so true,” that new songs come along and change the old ones, and that the linearity of their order is as overwhelming as the eventual timelessness. LIFE IS A MIXTAPE sits on a shelf in my new apartment.
Jake Romm: Christmas Day walking alone in East Berlin singing Cindy Lee to myself taking pictures of trash: something about the unpresentable (“all I want is you”): unseasonable=unconscionable warmth: on the look out for some kind of shrine=oven. Crow, a friend, on a pile of rubble picking at a white rag=flag and all in the back the dormant machinery and the exposed pipes rusting in a ditch=mass grave: think of what A said about looking at Poussin that the sight=Gaza=is inescapable; I said: it caused the image to say it back. Wandered up the wrong stairs absentminded hounded out by pigs i.e. ACHTUNG state area=Gaza. Hands clasped behind back at the Old Gallery: all the soldiers in the Italian paintings hide their faces in shame and exhaustion when Christ appears; gleaming white St. Michael stabs satan with his spear and gives him the side wound of Christ, Satan’s indignant face pain borne in innocence: how could you? Gelid/saline city/people: the sun is just a semblance of memory: I mean the city=world is a tomb that deserves no light. Finished reading Mayröcker (ach) yesterday she writes 3 words in As mornings and mossgreen: “wolfish” “tumor” “scale”—right: fever sick in bed on new year’s eve, a little delirious/jealous of the fireworks lighting up Neukölln=celebration in a desperate key= sound of the bombs of the past year: rehearsal for the next.
Juliana Halpert: On a late-January lark, a college friend and I went camping, just for a night. We drove two and a half hours from LA to Los Padres National Forest, and hiked an easy mile to the giant sandstone rock formation known as Piedra Blanca. We passed some day hikers and a group of young guys sitting around, smoking bongs with their shirts off. We set up her tent in a sandy niche between several paunchy boulders, with privacy in mind. We draped our sweaty sports bras and dirty socks on knotty shrubs, we made a fire, we compared gear, we cracked up and mulled over the man I’d been seeing. Then we got bundled up and slithered into our bags to sleep pretty early, all talked out and stinking of smoke.
I woke up to my friend nudging me rather forcefully. “Do you hear that?” she asked, full of fear. The age-old camping question. It was pitch-black outside, and I could only see her silhouette. But I did hear it: voices, getting louder, all male, making idle conversation. They belonged to those young guys, and they were headed our way. My friend and I listened, bodies tensed. It was all bro-speak chatter, nonsense, jokes ricocheting in their own private lexicon. They sounded like idiots. They had no idea we were there. “Are all guys this fucking stupid when we’re not around?” I whisper-joked, despite my beating heart. Shhhhhhh, my friend said. To our relief, their voices soon trailed off. I listened to their banter until the sheer silence returned, then shivered myself back to sleep. Almost twelve months later, I can’t for the life of me remember anything those guys said—it’s incidental. But that fly-on-the-wall feeling has stayed stuck to me all year. Witnessing without tampering. Shutting the fuck up. It was pristine. We laid in wait, two secret, silent women of the sand. We were not unlike the mountain lions that, on just about any hike out here, are surely tracking your every move.
Ottessa Moshfegh: 2024 was massive; if I’d seen it coming, I might have run in the other direction. The growing pains have felt like unanesthetized surgery. Nobody close to me died, thank God. I found a few new friends in odd places in the world. I traveled a lot. I went to Spain, Italy, took the Orient Express from Venice to Paris. I turned 43 halfway through the year alone in Brighton, England for the second year in a row. I got to spend time with my nieces in Massachusetts and see my parents. I was asked to be a godmother, which moves me every time I think of it. I lost hope and found some and it ran out so I had to find more. Still looking. Sometimes I feel like my body is being bleached from the inside. I feel I'm able to love more fully than before. I feel like I understand my intention for myself better now, and it's basically to grow into something I’m not yet. I used to intend to be my optimal self. I'm willing to let that idea slowly secede. I see new ways that I’m not perfect and realize that I didn’t appreciate them before. I love the book I’ve been writing and I'm excited to go back to it. I end the year grateful for my husband, my four dogs, my home, my career, and the friends who will forgive me for disappearing from time to time. It's nice that the year is ending. I hope it ends softly.
Piper French: This past January I got an unexpected email that altered my entire year. Nine months later, I flew to the south for a hearing related to the legal case in question, where for a week I sat in court shivering as teams of lawyers debated facts from a morning that occurred decades ago, just a few months before I was born. I couldn’t stop thinking about how we only pay this much attention when something really awful happens. Then, walking back across the bridge to my hotel one afternoon in the oppressive humidity of early fall, I became preoccupied by how imbalanced it felt to scrutinize the past so closely for this one life, when scores of people were being incinerated in a given instant in Gaza and Lebanon, deaths that would never be examined, never adjudicated—deaths that would end up as little more than numbers. (And even the numbers would be in question; the spokesmen of the country that supplied the bombs, my country, would publicly dispute them as the figures of a health organization in thrall to a terrorist group.) This is obviously not an argument against due process, not that due process worked for the guy I was there to write about: All this scrutiny and he had still spent more than half his life in prison. It was simply an overwhelming feeling I had about the rules we make for life and how arbitrary and contingent they can be; about the difference between what power allows under the guise of procedure, and what power does brazenly and dares you to object.
What else: In between January and September, my relatively stable life fell apart. Following the abrupt dissolution of a very long relationship, I felt unmoored; every decision seemed cosmically pointless, which I suppose is more or less the feeling of total freedom. I got into lots of debates about what constitutes due process in this context. I also wandered around New York and Marseille by myself, listened to Street-Legal approximately one thousand times, had a small number of insane encounters, and melted one teakettle for reasons I can’t disclose here. I’m still trying to replace it.
Neeraja Murthy: This year I became a cat mom. I’ve been on notice ever since Pumpkin first stepped paw in my apartment. Every move I make in here has both of our shadows, but I can’t be annoyed because she’s morally correct about everything. I’m no longer able to eat in my own house without having something ready to feed her. It makes so much sense. Eating is a group project. When I pick up any object, she runs over excitedly and I have to let her explore it. It doesn’t matter that the object can’t do anything for her, the fun is in discovering. When I pull all nighters she checks on me constantly, meowing and demanding attention. So true bestie! Deadlines are made up, cuddling is real. I find myself indignant at tiktoks that personify their cats to laugh at how silly it would be to drop everything and chase after a laser pointer. You wish you could lock in like that! At some point this year my preference to eat alone, and be alone most of the time, disappeared. At some point my fear of texts and emails and phone calls also disappeared. Just like Pumpkin runs to the window when there’s screaming outside, I find myself instantly opening client feedback emails without holding my breath. What was ever so scary about seeing or knowing or discovering?
Elvia Wilk: This year I had a wedding and that's the hed, dek, and lede. It continues to be THE breaking story. AMA if you are interested in hearing about my husband(!?) Btw I found out that you do not need to get legally married to have a wedding and you do not have to say husband unless you feel like it.
The other best part of the year was teaching. The students were beyond, and made me care about everything (or at least somethings) again. My fall class was on PORTALS and I can send you the reading list if you want. Book-as-portal is the motif of the year, because there must be a way out of all this right?? I also finished writing my own portal novel, which you can read if you find a time-travel portal to 2026.
Speaking of no-way-out, I learned a lot about the US prison system by working with people stuck in it. Whatever I knew about prisons before, it's worse than that. And the more I know, the more obvious it is how many aspects of all life here are run by the same logic and the same companies.
Segue to: I got an enormous insurance payout after 14 months of a gruelling battle with Cigna. They just could not get enough proof that my shoulder regularly falls out of its socket. Coincidentally, they approved all of my claims on the afternoon of the exact same day that Luigi did his 7am shooting. Huh.
My personal 2024 syllabus was stacked. My favorite find was Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, which is going to be the starter pack for my class next year: LAST WOMAN ON EARTH. In order to counterbalance, I then decided to get to know some men writers who I somehow... skipped over until now. Slammed down a ton of Camus, McCarthy, Mann, and Roth. Honestly, tasted great.
In new books: Tony Tulathimutte’s supremely rejectable masterwork, well paired with a Roth binge, Emily Witt’s very important Health and Safety, which made me think I maybe CAN stay in New York, Jennifer Kabat’s extremely beautiful The Eighth Moon, which made me think I maybe CAN leave New York, the endlessly looping Solvej Balle duo (also fits in the LAST WOMAN starter pack), Robert Plunket’s Love Junkie (HAHA), Leora Fridman’s Bound Up, finally the smart-smart kink book you didn’t know you needed, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s The Hidden Globe, a book you can gift to every person in your life, Garth Greenwell’s unpleasant yet lovely Small Rain, which goes even better when paired with ummmm Luigi Mangione, Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger, which of course you must read.
As every year, I returned to Carrère; this year it was The Kingdom and The Adversary, both of which I prefer to stay up all night reading, and the Strugatsky brothers, who also deserve to be read at night. If you happen to be an insomniac who reads German: Theresia Enzensberger’s Schlafen is the genius company you need at 4am.
Top movie was hands-down Conclave. Moar pope.
Acknowledgements: Thank you to my group chats, writing group, and La Becque.
H. Sinno: There’s a movie from my childhood called Bedknobs and Broomsticks, where an “amateur witch” is made to take in three unhoused orphans fleeing the Nazi attacks on London. She then bewitches a bed with a spell she procures through a mail-scam school of sorcery. Upon thrice twisting the bedknob, or maybe thrice tapping it, the group is transported sur lit across space-time, landing in various scenarios and alternative worlds.
I find myself under something of a similar spell—the extremities of my known universe curling up like anhydrous volutes ruffling around the foot of my bed, which looks like a Tracy Emin installation, the unwashed sheets furnishing forensic evidence to my ability to eat but not cook, or even make decisions about what to eat, and thusly ordering a burger once a day for months on end, and rarely leaving my bed, but to travel to Nick’s couch and similarly rot. I went to maybe 3 or at most 4 exhibitions, read nothing, and made no remarkable observations about the world or human nature, other than that salad is now more expensive than burgers, and laying down for too long is bad for your back. I curbed my consumption, mostly out of necessity (I am unfortunately not pretty enough to make money from bed), but still bought a new set of black bed sheets (they’ve had to suffer an inordinate sum). I wake up, load instagram, read about Palestine and Lebanon till it’s time for a very late dinner, and by then the day is over, and I have once again not worked out, or washed my face. Time is not a friend.
Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun, and Jad Atoui released what I think is the best record to come out of the Arab world in some time. I won’t pretend to have a rubric other than my own fascination: it is a wartime ketamine trip sonified, and I believe it to be as close to perfect as a record can get. What it does with time is remarkable. The grid is inaudible, while the vocals stretch out syllables and phonemes in places and then turn them into rhythmic gestures in others; polyrhythms abound in the interplay of beats and synth melodics, but without the overbearing sense of a musician attempting to demonstrate a music degree. These gestures are there to articulate the temporal fissure that a war portends: war is an event that folds time such that there is always the before and the after of a war, but the war itself—the time of it, is unspeakable, because it is timeless. For the most part, we go about making music trying to turn time into sound, working around bars and measures and Ableton grids, flirting with the laws of physics trying to defy the inherent ephemerality of sound (and perhaps life), but there is something so captivatingly True about their album’s leakages across time. It is as though one is listening to music made out of time (meaning exterior to time), because its time is already over, or constantly confronted with its possible end.
I suppose the concept of time has always been a little slippery, but time under neoliberalism is now viscerally strange to me. How is it that Charli XCX’s Brat came out in mid-June? That was only 6 months ago. It feels like it’s been around for years already. How is it that the genocide is entering it’s third calendar year? How is it that this is still happening? How many Boeing whistle-blowers have died? How are we having a second Trump Presidency? How the fuck was Kamala actually the Democratic candidate? How was all of that this year? I spent my year designing and arguing about graphics for the movement for Palestine, which I’ll never be able to put in a portfolio because I haven’t “really” been a designer since 2012, and because apparently having a moral compass makes you unhireable. I got arrested twice and spent a night in jail. Time didn’t make sense then either, passing slower than a kidney stone. I haven’t spoken to most of my friends outside of the movement all year, because I’ve been in bed, and a couple of days ago I found out my friend had a 6 month old baby. That baby has been around for as long as Brat, and I had no idea. Does anyone even remember the aliens still? The pope finally gendering us correctly as faggots? For fuck’s sake this week alone Carter died, people started trying to canonize him as though him having decent politics on Palestine made everything else he did completely acceptable, which is of course a similar refrain used for Assad who finally fucked off, meanwhile the US is still doing fuck knows what in Syria funding fuck knows which Islamists, while Cowboy Carter Beyoncé is waving a giant American flag on a horse (this country’s inability to grapple with just how tacky its nationalism is never fails to amuse) and of course if you point out that she’s a propagandist and that black capitalism is still capitalism you’re an enemy online and an absolute racist.
I’ve had to move through 4 houses and just as many beds, but the bed-rotting behavior is constant. How is it already December 31 and you’ve asked for this to be submitted by today and so I’m ranting incoherently trying not to be disappointing, which is also probably a good title for my memoir, which I’ve made very little progress in writing because I was busy being in bed or organizing or organizing from bed. I know that the issues are external, and that adding one more pill to my already extensive string of morning prayer beads is not a solution to genocide, capitalism, housing insecurity, inflation, unemployment, or watching your home country get decimated by your own tax dollars, but it was either I get out of bed or I burn the bed with myself in it, and I can’t allow my mother to outlive me. It is the one thing about time that has to make sense. A couple of weeks ago I got out of bed and took my Pristiq for the first time in about 5 years. I’m late to the gym so I’m going to stop ranting now. I apologize for the typos and inefficiencies. I’m bad with time, but I love you very much.
Mary Kate O’Sullivan: Every time I have tried to write this, it ends up being a diary entry. The thing is, I actually don’t want to share anything about myself this year. Free Palestine, Free Luigi, and let every union align our contracts to expire on May 1st, 2028. Amen.
Tiana Reid: Fuck, fuck, fuck. Or, as June Jordan wrote six weeks after 9/11: “Sometimes I am the terrorist I must disarm.”
Emily LaBarge: It’s icy in London and I have to say I’m glad, relieved, refreshed (you can take the Canadian out of Canada), dragging home the last bits of groceries as the wind whips about dramatically. Colder: I want it colder! Last night after dinner with my parents we went to the pub for a nightcap and watched as two rogue foxes, one limping, ran through the empty streets of Blackheath. That one’s me, I said, but I can’t remember if it was aloud or not. Inside, a decent young pianist played a small Christmas repertoire before moving into Bublé-style jazz standards. How to sum up a year? It took me 10 months to start writing 2024 instead of 2023 and I wonder how long it will take for 2025 to settle in. Time has been different, obliterated, deranged, for so many reasons: genocide, personal loss, never enough of anything, except repeated attempts at joy, which, I’ll admit, arrives when least expected. Texting with nullities. Talking to Kate every day. David sending rare snippets of writing. Orit cooking whole cauliflowers. Finishing my book. Megan’s paintings. Tai’s voice. Loving Brian. This feels like one of those lists you make about how to be grateful when in despair and it is a little, since I, like you, live in the inescapably violent, despairing context of the world. Comrades make the bad infinity less bad and that’s perhaps enough, or what one can hope for, when can one muster hope. La lutte continue. “J’EXISTE” reads a sticker on a phone pole I pass by every day, just before the freestanding sign on the back of which someone scrawled, several months ago, MERRY CHRISTMAS. No time like the present. Elliott Smith was just playing on the radio and then Ryuichi came on: feels like a cosmic place to stop writing. Love you Sasha. Free Palestine.
Montana Simone: Every year I try to learn something that feels a little scary. In 2021, it was learning to drive stick (in an ’86 pickup, up Yosemite). In 2022, it was welding and metal fabrication, and getting work in some dream studios. In 2023, I figured out how to long-distance backpack, tackling a section of every long trail in the country within the calendar year (ok, nerd).
2024 was less of a launching pad and more of a crash site. Everything seemed meaningless in the balance with genocide, as we peered into our screens and at our selves and through our communities in Palestine, Lebanon, now Syria and Yemen, claiming and counting. All my work became counting, the bodies that didn’t get out, the food that didn’t get in, the unnamed and unwhole, unburied, unclaimed… I was scrolling and stimming away sculptures in my studio and everything came out an abacus of death.
The hostility and abuse that New York City meted out to those trying to do anything to stop the US and Israel from wiping out an entire people was also eye-opening. It was a strange year to be making a piece for a New York City park, while my friends and I were getting chased and beaten by its cops. But it was in keeping with the absolute failure of the liberal establishment (see: dead people), and the dems had no clothes, and the lords of tech assembled court around Trump.
So in 2024, I learned to organize large groups of people in ways that allowed their talents and passions to flourish, while finding ways to protect us. We succeeded and failed in many ways. We prefigured, accompanied, and felt a great deal of sadness, fear and anger that couldn’t be rationalized or taken responsibility for. As every new day broke us open, we learned to alchemize rage and sorrow into solidarity and action. I’m ending the year in burnout and preparation, grateful for the guidance of Staughton Lynd, “[…] beyond the [fear-need dilemma], imagining a transition that will not culminate in a single apocalyptic moment but rather express itself in unending creation of self-acting entities that are horizontally linked, is a source of quiet joy.”
Zac Hale: I can’t stop looking at these pictures of Victor Wembanyama playing chess in Washington Square Park. I also can’t tell if he is winning—I’m choosing not to look into it. This January we watched him lose in Memphis, two days before his twentieth birthday and four days before Ja Morant’s season ending shoulder injury.
I haven’t always loved Memphis as a city but I do now. I don’t have a lot of hope for the immediate future but I remain a pretty hopeful person in general. In February I wrote a paper about evictions that I kept having to revise because tenants kept getting more organized and winning more rights. Sometimes I think rights are something you fight to win and sometimes I think they’re something you already have and that’s why you fight. It’s the same either way unless you believe in god.
Things are incredibly bleak and there really isn't a clear counterpoint, but there are moments that break through for whatever reason. An earthquake, an eclipse. Wemby hunched over the chessboard in the rain.
Sierra Pettengill: My father died, wounded, destructive, close on the heels of my mother. The cop outside the house was unbelievably young; I couldn’t take my eyes off his wide bloom of acne. I rended my garments. In a mistral, we hiked up to the sailors church in Marseille, la Bonne Meré. The best paintings I saw this year were there, anonymous 19th century ex-votos: two nuns lined up near a cross-sectioned train crash, midnight waves breaking over a shipwreck. I hoisted a sail at the wrong time and drove us, hard, into a buoy on the Long Island Sound. I tried to hide on the bow, but let the sailor from Marseille see me cry. Everyone was talking about mourning and grief, or at least writing those words.
When did everyone start using “capacious?” I read it over and over, littered through every essay this year. It described both violences and artistic scope. It felt like a word determined to avoid setting limits. Its ubiquity made me uneasy; our writers so unable to wrap their arms around things. I collected my baby teeth from my mother’s underwear drawer. My true love fabricated a clock whose hands are made of teeth and snuck it through international customs. I filmed Super8 in a 10th century monastery in Georgia and 16mm in a pantyhose warehouse in Queens; an old man’s childhood memory hallucinated when thrown overboard in the Southern Ocean, and the fur coat my great-grandfather made on 33rd Street for my mother’s 16th birthday, respectively.
Lucy Sante: As I noted in my 2023 entry, every year outstrips the previous one for terror. 2024 was no exception. I mostly stayed away from the news, because I’m old—I turned 70 this year—and there's not a whole lot I can do, and because I need to stay healthy so that I can write the two books I have in the works. Doesn’t much matter after that. Right now we’re in an eerie historical antechamber, waiting for the start of misrule. Everybody I know is weirdly calm about it, probably for the same reason I stay away from the news. Personally it was a strange year, too. I spent a great deal of it being interviewed about my book, and it never felt repetitious to me. But even as my book did surprisingly well, my mood plunged ever farther down. As every trans person above a certain age will tell you, there’s no loneliness quite like that of being trans in a social vacuum. There’s no way to turn the clock back to when I might have been trans and also had a life. I kept thinking of Little Richard's “He Got What He Wanted (But He Lost What He Had).”
Charlie Markbreiter: 2024: it broke me, and then it broke me, and then it broke me, and then it broke me, and th—
Aria Aber: Last night I dreamt of my friend to whom I dedicated my forthcoming novel—we were stuck in a subway station with malfunctioning trains. What was this subterranean spectacle? He’s been on my thoughts for years now, he died by suicide in April 2020, thirteen days after my birthday. He was smiling in my dream, but as is always the case, he did not speak. I wept while standing in line for coffee this morning, thinking about his silence. He didn’t witness the last four and a half years, the destabilization of every country that’s close to my heart––what would he have said? I wish I could read Rachel Corrie’s letters to him: “Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.” I am thinking of my disappeared uncle, who lies with thousands of other prisoners, inside a mass grave outside Kabul. The dead were everywhere this year. The dead, and the very young: students occupying a building at Columbia and calling it Hind’s Hall. Hundreds of us, across the city, the country, even on the other continent, listening to their quivering voices on WKCR. Who do we live for? I asked myself this question every day of this year. I lost respect for many, and yet I made new, wonderful, budding friendships. I can’t really believe 2024 is ending––this was no year for me, a part of me is forever suspended somewhere inside a day of last December, hopeful that this year might be different, not worse.
Farah-Silvana Kanaan: 2024 is the year that broke me. I checked Twitter for the first time in months today. The first post in my “for you” feed said: “in 2025 we leave self-loathing behind.” I let out a half-hysterical cackle. Then I started sobbing. Softly, even though no one can hear me.
Jason Evans: Both collective and personal grief impacted my ability to function in 2024. I didn't get out as much, I barely saw any shows, I wasn't around to support friends at their openings or performances, and I fell far behind on updating This Long Century. I did read though—often orbiting around stories of sick, dying or recently lost parents: Intervals by Marianne Brooker, Divided Island by Daniela Tarazona (tr. Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn), Voyager by Nona Fernández (tr. Natasha Wimmer), Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki (tr. Allison Markin Powell), A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir (tr. by Patrick O’Brian), Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (tr. Julia Sanches), as well as the last book I read, No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Al-Hayyat, translated beautifully by Hazem Jamjoum (whose work on Ghassan Kanafani's 1972 text The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine is also essential reading). Al-Hayyat's nonlinear story is centered around Jumana, the daughter of a PLO fighter-turned-administrator, who is forced to question both her identity and her relationship with her father in the wake of his death. Like many of these books mentioned, No One Knows... is written with a language so deeply human, yet unromantic—for which I’m grateful. I gave up booze so most days I self-medicate with poetry, in 2024 new collections by Najwan Darwish, Fady Joudah, Victoria Chang, Nam Le, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Hala Alyan, Mosab Abu Toha, Don Mee Choi, Gboyega Odubanjo, Mary Ruefle, Dawn Lundy Martin, CA Conrad, Jen Fisher and Emily Hunt, served as powerful interventions to the daily fog. Of course, it is impossible to reflect on the past year without thinking about the horrors we wake up to each morning. Over 450 days have gone by as we continue to see an ongoing American funded genocide of the Palestinian people, by Israeli forces, play out in real time through images and videos on our screens. It’s hard to reckon with such heartbreak, as so much of the world closes their eyes to this violence. Sitting with this pain is itself a privileged choice, and cannot replace the actual work needed for true liberation, but maybe as Isabella Hammad writes in Recognizing the Stranger, “To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak.”
Madeleine Watts: 2024 was a year I felt like I’d sloughed off a life much the way I sloughed off another life eleven years earlier. It often seemed like too many lives to have shed. The year began on an island in the Southern Ocean after just having packed up my life in New York, in which I went for walks at night with a torch to track echidnas, and once swam beside dolphins. And then I was in London, and then I was in Berlin. I was in New York and Paris and Italy as well, and almost got ‘returned’ by a border guard in Reykjavik. I was sick to death of moving, and pleased as well that I’ve created for myself the kind of life where I’m never still. It was a year in which I didn’t write as much as I wanted, but read a lot, learning from and loving most: Maylis de Kerengal, Irene Solà, J.M. Coetzee, Ágota Kristóf, Garth Greenwell, Emmanuel Carrère, and Annie Ernaux. A year in which I cried in films I didn’t expect to cry in, and swam in bodies of water surrounded by forest, in which I often couldn’t see the outline of my own limbs. I had a lot of blood drawn and saw a lot of doctors, and teared up when one of those doctors, pressing a sonogram wand to my throat, pointed to the scar tissue and said, “there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it,” which sounds more alarming than it necessarily is. It was a year in which I waited for a novel I finished writing last year to be published next year. In October my husband and I were at dinner in Charlottenburg after the annual meeting of everyone in our building. It was five years to the day since we'd met, and I imagined what my former self would have thought, if I intercepted her walking down the Bowery and turning into 5th, and told her, “Walk into that bar and five years from now you’ll be attending a homeowners meeting, in German, and living on the other side of the Atlantic.” Would she have possibly believed me? This year was the year I unfollowed, blocked, or muted approximately half of the people who were closest to me five years ago. And a year that people were there when I needed them to be.
Ellena Basada: I want to tell you that everything that happened in 2024 was a gift. My sweet dog dying at the age of two was a gift. Breaking up with my partner and sentimentally clambering back to one another a month later was a gift. Subsequently moving to New York City together was a gift. Most of it came unbidden. A gift is something that happens. Whether it feels good or bad is irrelevant. What matters is how you receive it.
In Hinduism, there is prasad: the idea that offerings such as fruits, flowers, and incense, become sacred the instant they are given. It is not because the gods need them that they are transformed into divine objects. It’s because giving changes the relationship between the giver and the world. Receiving, I believe, is another kind of offering. We are a part of a larger cycle. Nothing stays with us forever: nothing is supposed to.
In 2024, I thought about suffering as a form of prasad. Buddhism teaches us that the first noble truth is suffering and the second is that suffering has a cause. Suffering shouldn’t be avoided—it should be heeded and cared for. Like an alarm clock chiming at 6 AM, unpleasant and necessary, suffering wakes you up to what is real beyond the other stuff of life like jobs and friendship and social media.
Yoga has helped me get closer to this abstruse concept. This year I spent deepening my practice through daily movement, breathwork, and attention to what I eat and how I treat my body. Yoga is maintenance, like sharpening a blade or cleaning a lens. But the blade and lens isn’t our physical body, necessarily, it is our individual consciousness (Atman) as it comes closer to universal consciousness (Brahman). This isn’t a measurable process—it’s something you feel, slowly, in the way you open up to experience, whatever it holds.
In the Bhagavad Gita, disguised deity Krishna tells prince Arjuna, on the precipice of battle, that action is unavoidable. Acting is the essence of life. How you act determines your being on earth and how and if you will be reincarnated. One can act with attachment, or one can act as an offering. What happens when you begin to see your health, your choices, even speaking and writing, as offerings? Not to anyone specific, but in the practice of living.
One of my biggest challenges is resisting the urge to categorize things as good or bad, but I'll try it here. It wasn’t good or bad, and it happened: Everything in 2024 was a gift. This is how gifts are. They happen and you can’t give them back.
Gifts of literature: Roberto Bolaño; Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada; Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman; Low: Notes on Art & Trash by Jaydra Johnson; Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki; The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector; Seven Stories Press’ Annie Ernaux box set.
Gifts of film: La Chimera; A Summer’s Tale; Inland Empire; An Elephant Sitting Still; Last Year at Marienbad; Woman in the Dunes; Right Now, Wrong Then; A Traveler’s Needs.
Whitney Mallett: I don’t get fomo anymore. I see pictures of things I wasn’t invited to and feel relief. 2024 was the first year, I didn’t start at a party. I stayed home while my boyfriend went to the Eagle. My mom seemed changed by her closeness to death. And then saved, a switch flipped, a return to defensive denial. My dad’s girlfriend had a baby — not his, donor-conceived. I decided I don’t need to have kids. I visited Paris for the first time. My dad’s mom died. None of us had talked to her in decades. The only memories I have is this time her cat attacked me, and on my sixth birthday a gift that made me feel glamorous and adult: Ferrero Rocher and a very small bottle of perfume. This year, I cut my hair the shortest it’s ever been. You’ve boiled your essence, a friend said.
Elisabeth Nicula: Making art this year was very stupid and also not optional. I tried to become more open to inputs and outputs, i.e. to become available to other people in an unprecedented way in order to make more sense and be useful, and for the most part that was good but it was also painful. It was bad for my ego. The end of the year has felt like a derailment. And yet I’m fine, happy. I read Ross Feld’s Guston in Time, which through essays and letters describes a perfect understanding between painter and critic, a true love relationship between them, because of how well they understood, how relieved they were to be understood. Art isn’t much of a lever or a harpoon or a big tub of water near faulty wiring. Art isn’t remotely capable enough. For all of that I think the recent and ongoing degradations upon it will backfire. The efforts to make it pointless and impossible have made of it more than it was. Every cut turns one into two who recognize each other.
Everyone says “next year will be bad” but no amount of rotations of the moon around the earth or the earth around the sun or the sun, which for our purposes floats more or less stationary, I’m not going to look it up, none of these bodies’ indistinct spinnings, none of that causes anything to happen, maybe the tides, maybe the baleful rays, but not the beginnings nor the ends. There was no single work of anything that did not get swallowed up into the pinprick center of the universe, from which the sun is propelled, the fact of how can we keep doing this while they are dying. Inasmuch as this was a period of time it was characterized by ongoingness. I started to tell people “I’m practicing ongoingness.” Three hundred and sixty five days is the time it takes for ongoingness. Like a black hole could be small but it’s massive. It’s probably going to be important to stay going. There will be a last object drawn to the center that plugs it. Cement is the substrate and concrete is the composite. We are the broken up pebbles.
Thora Siemsen: What a depressing year, my god. My resolutions for 2025:
Stay sober
Form gym and sauna routine
Keep abstaining from food derived from animals
Prioritize relationships with those who respect and truly see you
Don’t get sucked into being a caretaker
Finish paying off car by birthday
Read more than you watch things
Do more interviews again
Continue saving money
Leave the country a couple of times
Andrew Norman Wilson: This year my goal was to get rich enough to take an ambulance to a Connecticut drive-in movie theater and cam-stream a double feature of this summer’s unsung Barbenheimer — Garfield/Unfrosted. Instead, I found myself at a Crunch Fitness in an exploded pair of thirteen year old skinny jeans after months of trying to achieve a Brazilian Butt Lift look through sheer force and learned that the rewards of the ego are not enough to cure its deficits.
Molly Young: A year of: caring for loved ones; not writing much; aspiring to sturdiness; learning how not to mistake a systemic deficiency for a personal one—but how not to do the opposite, either. Read and revered many books. Here are three: Violence by Randall Collins, Us Fools by Nora Lange, Vectors by James Richardson.
Daniel Saldaña Paris: In January, there was a death—my father’s. We sat in the living room, waiting for him to die. We ate popcorn there and commented on the weather, which was always the same: rain, mist, and mud in the unpaved streets. Then he died, and there were other things—trips, anguished writing with no end, love, a genocide we all watched in disbelief. And then a wedding, in May—my own. We left town. There were many countries: the light in Naples, a Spanish-speaking bookstore in Geneva where I was offered cheese, a fox I chased while overlooking the Alps, a finished book, a rocky beach in Catalonia with an old friend who, years ago, sent me letters that taught me how to write. There was family—perhaps too much—and then Madrid, the unflinching heat, Goya’s black, the run-down apartment where I once lived—three lives ago—now jammed with objects, art, and crazy talk. A flight back home and there was a dog, meek and loyal. There was the learning of how to love a man. There was a new house—our own. Mexico City opened its center like a flower ready to be pollinated. Suddenly there were plays, friends, books, shelves, mercados, tlacoyos, flowers, and, at last, the frames hanging on the walls. Then my grandfather died by suicide at 95, leaving an oral autobiography of sorts, with the Spanish Civil War resplendent at its core. I inherited that—for all I ever get are stories and the task of making sense of them. After that, December came and brought another trip—to the South. Premonitions. The whistle of a distant train. All that.
Derek Baron: Another year, another volume of the Sefer ha-Zohar. At this rate I will finish working through the entire text by the time I am 45, and then start over at the beginning at finish for a second time when I am 57. I am told that one isn’t really supposed to study Kabbalah until one is at least 40, but I hope that these first 6 years of recklessness will be made up for by the time I am nearing 60. The question this year, and long may it be so, is about the relationship between language and place. The problem is identified in a hearsay reinterpretation of something Kafka wrote in his diary: in JB’s reconstruction of it, the idea is that Kabbalah is (or “was”) the alternative to Zionism. What Kafka wrote in his diary, on January 16 1922, was a little bit more ambiguous: “All such writing is an assault on the frontiers; if Zionism had not intervened, it might easily have developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah. There are intimations of this. Though of course it would require genius of an unimaginable kind to strike root again in the old centuries, or create the old centuries anew and not spend itself withal, but only then begin to flower forth.” Zionism here seems more like an extruding interruption of a new-old flowering-forth of a particular “secret doctrine” of writing, a flowering-forth that still remains potent, or latent, but requiring a certain kind of “genius.” A centripetal political force has arrived to freeze, for the moment, the millenary profligacy of writing. In this sense the balance between the two remains, appropriately, an open question. Last night a friend, glossing something, said evil was the attempt to completely eliminate anything blocking the path to the one; the paving of the centripetal path whose antithesis is secret, occasional writing. The task.
Another year of cloaked dazzlers, morning assassins, Syrian plums, SpaceX, positive seeing, The Substance, celestial serpent—all gossamer stars, the bitterness of partial demobilization, “her entire life was supernal,” on her way to a theater in Palestine, two separate Fredric Jameson reading groups and some minor attempts to approximate that feel of a loss of cabin pressure. G-d’s incompleteness is not a problematic condition, it’s a personality trait, so when we are told that assembly in exile is a sign of the incompleteness of the holy name, we should understand that we are on the right, centrifugal, track of flowering-forth. “8,125 winged creatures roam the world and, hearing a voice, they seize it,” Arianna Grande’s ketamine Hello Kitty Glinda, “one who contemplates the chirping of a bird—why is he called serpentine sorcerer?”, another year sitting at the River of Already, the curtain of the world that is coming, which exists, just not here. What’s called the context of any given story is itself another story, in the same way that any way you might describe a place (“Clod Village,” “On a Fertile Slope,” “Expanses”), is itself another placename. Another year of trying to write and read in a way adequate to this flowering-forth. “Who is my inmost being? Other creatures of the field.”
Jeff Alessandrelli: Just the good things, quickly, because the bad are long, long and unquick. At the beginning of 2023 I wrote a longish unpublished poetry review over a 2019 poetry collection that I would guess maybe 200 people actually skimmed through and it felt liberating. I got married. We got Rubert, our rescue greyhound from Ireland. I turned 41. I sprained my wrist skating, doing a backside 5-0 on a little ledge near my house, and resolved to start skating more. I got involved with my community college’s union. I republished my book on sex and shyness. My small press published Gabriel Palacio’s great debut collection and Jaydra Johnson’s great debut collection and a great anthology exclusively featuring work by BIPOC women and non-binary hybrid writers/artists. I enjoyed old/new records by Shannon and the Clams and Charles Mingus and Beth Gibbons and Mal Waldron and Charlie Megira and Bing and Ruth. Good books by Ryan Eckes and Srikanth Reddy and Don Mee Choi and Kendra Sullivan and Prageeta Sharma and Ernest Becker and Kieran Setiya. I thought a lot about this poem by John Gallaher.
Cosmo Bjorkenheim: “And just as the darkness got very dark, he bumped into his big fur mother and she took her little fur child home in her arms and gave him supper.”
This year I learned that sometimes you won’t act on the intuition that you should throw out your old sneakers with the worn-through soles until you step on a big hot turd.
Jenn Pelly:
Rainer Diana Hamilton: The year ended, for me, on November 13, with the closing scene of Tiago Rodrigues’s Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists at BAM, after which I clutched my friend Jamie’s arm, while, standing on Fulton street, we explained our disappointment to a solicitous pair of gay producers. The play, like so much would-be engaged art, suffers from its own timeliness: though it goes hard on its durational and often beautiful Verfremdungseffekt, an aesthetic experience for which my spots are soft, it wastes its own effort by answering the question “should we kill fascists?”—stirring the audience into a bloodlusty yes, yes, yes, begging the cast to stop twiddling their thumbs on their Portuguese skirts and get to shooting—with “well, let’s talk about it.” The play, it seems, ends only when the audience gets so tired of the titular victim’s xenophobic rant that they start booing, a pathetic way out that mostly reminded me of all of this year’s bad audience participation, including the electoral, the genocidal, the cultural, the communal.
For me, 2024 was a year of too much language. Most of it, I admit, was great: new love made me chatty and graphomanic, unending calls and letters to Ayaz in Istanbul. I started January reading Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary, and if I stick with my new, foreshortened measure of the year, I closed it out with Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena, which made me want to shut up a little, sit in silence in front of the same painting each day; Matar does not have to forget reality or history to give himself permission to, like the Christ child in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del latte, “live and live well.”
I hope, still, for a non-escapist home in words, but between the dark propaganda of the newspapers and its sad counter, the few phrases we can collectively agree to chant in protest, even the manic might tire. Meanwhile, universities try to counter the intolerable generality of generative AI just as their administrators lose the ability to use proper nouns. Last night, I read Gary Indiana’s essay in Fire Season on Barbet Schroeder’s Koko: A Talking Gorilla; Koko’s communication was meant to guarantee her personhood, and with it, a few attendant rights, like the one we all allegedly have to live, but her language acquisition did not persuade people to stop ecological disaster. Koko was big in my childhood in Terre Haute, a place Indiana names in his 2015 essay on the Boston marathon bombing as the site where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is likely to be murdered by the state, and where I learned to sign “I love you” in imitation of Koko’s message to her cat. I’ve been grateful, lately, for Indiana’s ability to be both heartfelt and damning without false hope or nihilism, and I’m waiting on someone else to learn how. 2024 was another year where the fascists lived, the good died, and we, sometimes unwisely, kept speaking.
Mark Polizzotti: Ups and downs, like every year, but not like every year. Jacky and I celebrated the thirteenth anniversary of our transatlantic (London–New York) romance. I published a book on surrealism that I don’t yet feel like throwing against the wall, and realized two projects that had long been at the top of my wish list: a new translation of André Breton’s Nadja and a collection of essays, Jump Cuts, both slated for next summer. My mother died in October. The following month, fear and vulgarity carried the day, and all around us the horror seems endless. I try my best to keep the faith, aided by friends, love, work, sunsets. Then it starts all over again.
Becca Rothfeld: Last year, 2023, my body was in revolt. I contracted two rare and characteristically difficult-to-diagnose autoimmune diseases (my third had been diagnosed surprisingly painlessly decades prior and was well under control), and it seemed to me that I had become a permanent occupant of waiting rooms. They were conspicuously temporary places, drab and beige and boring, but I had taken up residence in them for periods longer than they were designed to sustain. There I sat for hours each week, watching soap operas playing on television and idly thumbing through pamphlets on Lyme disease prevention. What I was waiting for in all the rooms specifically designated for the purpose—some alloy of health and vitality, I guess—never arrived.
I’d hoped for a reprieve this year, but I had no such luck. This time, my disease was so recognizably formidable that it required very little explanation (unlike last year’s nemeses, pernicious anemia and microscopic colitis). All I had to do to impress my acquaintances with my capacity for suffering and medical vexation was name it: thyroid cancer.
And so 2024 was another grey year, eternity and no time at all. My wretchedness and exhaustion were so authoritative that I ceased believing they could have started or stopped at any discrete point and started believing that they were endless and enormous, that I was just a small circle of feeling in a vast expanse of pain that extended far beyond me. A surgery, a series of restrictive diets that it would take scholastic flair to even understand, a procedure that made me so radioactive that I had to quarantine from my husband and dogs for a week, months of dosage adjustments to the medication that was supposed to replace my thyroid’s metabolic functions and thereby resurrect me—all of it, in effect, one long stint in a waiting room.
Waiting, I suppose, to become more than the sum of my body’s many dysfunctions. Waiting to stop waiting.
Perwana Nazif: The candle I carried all the way from Tinos, where the devoted crawl to pray, was broken into pieces upon my return. Accustomed to fragments precariously held together, I kept the candle. It lays on my shelf next to where I dream. A year of grief, continued, expanded, and adrift. Clouds of utterances: Real Fucking Commitment and To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion.
Noah Kulwin: The Long 2024 began on October 7, 2023 and will continue well past December 31, 2024. There are government scientists tasked with studying this phenomenon, but they have not yet drawn any firm conclusions about what has changed the calendar so dramatically.
That was the key finding for me these past 14 months, the primary insight of salvaged from the turd pile of the progression of time: names and dates only matter as referents for what they contain. Thermidor reaction, 2008 financial crash, etc. But the events of October 7 are not over, not done setting the pace of bloodshed that so-called “civilized world” evidently requires for its maintenance. We remain captive to the day that Israel launched its onslaught, all political assumptions and models for the future now being hitched to the continuous death frenzy started that day. What does the world look like when it’s done? What’s the price to be paid in flesh for it to be over? What will Palestine and Israel look like? Who will we be, and what will we have become for letting October 7 go on for so long? I don’t know. The day is not over.
Emily Hilliard: One day this semester when I had to miss class, I gave my students the assignment of inventing a ritual. In the discipline of folklore, a ritual is a type of performance that is patterned, has a clear beginning and ending (or performative frame), and makes a belief or value visible or tangible. It is active, can suspend reality, and indicates a change in state or status. I told my students to consider, among other aspects, “mystery and pageantry” (and felt a bit self-satisfied when I did). They invented a ritual that reverses a professor’s bad luck through student solidarity; a ritual that involved tin-foil hats, funky sweaters, knitting, and a chant to protect our class from extraterrestrial invasion; a rite of spring; and a playful initiation for incoming freshman at the college. The kids are alright.
I’m thinking today about the invented rituals that made up the arc of my days, my weeks, my year in 2024: Regular movement (as my yoga teacher says, “we move this way so we can continue to move this way”). Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings teaching Intro to Folklore (in the way that teaching can often feel like a performance). The multi-step ritual of putting out records through our small record label (two this year). Rituals to mark the seasons: the first fall apple, foraged paw paws and persimmons, berries from the college farm, cross-country skiing in the South on any trace of marginal snow. Daily jam from the Bonne Maman advent calendar in December. Planting a small vegetable garden each spring and checking on it every day until fall. Making linocut Solstice cards for friends. The escapist ritual of reading novels on the couch with a cup of tea as many weekend mornings as I can. Playing the devilish game I invented with my cat (an interspecies ritual). Our annual (8 years running, minus 2020) fall trip to Cape Cod to convene with friends on the salt marsh, dig clams and eat oysters, search for rich ladies’ cast-off treasures at the St. Joan of Arc Thrift Shop, dance while we do dishes, play our invented games of Sterling Integrity (like Balderdash but with first sentences of mid-century genre fiction) and “Body Body Butt Feet,” (Exquisite Corpse with more body and butts), mostly fail at short-sheeting each other, avoid the poison ivy on our walks as we share our experiences of joy and grief since we saw each other last fall. This is a pilgrimage ritual that enacts our love for each other through its own mini-rituals—a nesting doll of heightened experiences and patterned actions.
But this year there have been patterned, regular parts of my days that don’t quite fit the definition of a ritual: Turning on Democracy Now every morning to more horrific news of genocide in Gaza, active complicity and infuriating gaslighting by our government, idiotic political campaigns, disregard and disgust for poor and working people. This is not a suspension of reality, but reality smacking me in the face as I sit on my bed in Berea, Kentucky, putting on my socks.
Krithika Varagur: I quit my job and started psychoanalysis, not in that order.
Catherine Quan Damman: No image exists but the one in my mind, of you across the booth at the dive, the tinsel glittering for us both in the comedown, the waitress crooning Roy Orbison, transcendent. Love stays miraculous to a wretch like me. Every other aspect of the perceptible world has coarsened. Insolent, unearned in my supplication, no contest—but still each breath a knee-jerk prayer. There's the one only you know; the part I’d say aloud goes Palestine, Palestine, Palestine.
Alex Andropoulos (Able Noise): The year 2024 was an emotional and psychological roller coaster, as I expect was the case for a great number of people. On the one hand it consisted of my teen dream finally taking form, our album release an exciting prospect for the longest time, and finally a very heartwarming reality once finally out. The response was much better and livelier than expected and imagined, serving as a promise of many concerts and travels to come, as well as proof that almost three years of toil and frustration did indeed pay off. On the other hand, we have the multifaceted catastrophe which is the world, its economy, its politics and its environment racing towards a cliff, and although clearly recognised as such by many a driving force, still refusing to budge their feet from the gas pedal. The hardest thing for us to do for the album was to write lyrics, as had always been the case, though this time almost impossible. Any mention of genocide, environmental catastrophe or international political suicide felt impossible to sum in two verses, yet any lack of mention felt morally wrong and a blatant lie to ourselves and anyone listening. It is constantly on my mind, and any attempt to express it always felt trivial in front of the existential horror that it is, as there are not enough words to express the suffering of so many now and for the years to come. And beside this, the end of the relationship between myself and my life partner, due to my impossibility to see further than what’s right around the corner. Having a kid in these times seems insane. Buying a house is impossible. Not playing the music I want to play day in and day out as if cutting the umbilical cord. Coming to think of it 2024 was absolutely horrific, but at least we will get to play some gigs to some people before we reach the cliff.
Mina Tavakoli: I braised beef. Shot game. Lost time. Licked wounds. Made a big deal about being undriven. Repeatedly got in the vicinity of a serious lesson.
Nihal El Aasar: When did 2023 end and 2024 begin for 2024 to end? End of year milestones seem trivial amidst the never-ending massacres. How can I have personal resolutions and reflections as an Arab when the Middle East is being dismantled by Zionism? I don’t want to be that person—the killjoy, the prophet of doom. In fact, I would mostly consider myself a hopeful, but I guess you don’t get the leisure of being carefree as an Arab. I have always wondered what I would write about if the current state of things wasn’t as it seems. Do we get the freedom to write about trivialities? I guess not. People think that Zionism only affects the people that are living under the bombing. For sure, while they might be the main targets, they’re not the only ones. What has become of the nations in the Arab world that chose or were coerced into a false peace that brought no dividends? I found myself looking to the past and trying to analyse it, because maybe the analysis can give us a semblance of control. Joyful and ordinary moments both were mired, laden with guilt and at some times helplessness. Yet my politics and my resolve forbids me from falling into the pits of pessimism. Resistance will always find a way and I will continue to seek unity wherever I find it.
Dan Fox: These days, when I try to use heavy-duty words—words about genocide, war and other catastrophes––it feels like I am stuffing a garbage bag full of soggy dead leaves from the park, with intent to throw it at a passing presidential motorcade, hoping the leaves will hit the armoured limos and cause the occupants to break down in tears, renounce their crimes, admit they were never loved as a child, cry out for “Rosebud,” give their fortunes to the needy, beg forgiveness and ask to be dropped off at the nearest International War Crimes Tribunal.
Some hope. This age of absolutes, superlatives and bossy imperatives doesn’t help. It drains the batteries on the big words through overuse, squandered on occasions that don’t deserve them. Adding more paint doesn’t make a painting more expressive. The powerful, if we can flatter them with that word, seem to know this. They chug on the language of morality while ignoring whatever words of denunciation are driven at them, letting the accusations wheel-spin in the mud until the engine burns out. Meanwhile, cruelty rolls on.
Fanatics are brittle, insulated by fatty rinds of self-regard. They lack the nutrients which make the mind supple and give skin a healthy glow: contrition, empathy, compromise, generosity, a sense of the absurd, self-doubt, the ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously, ability to laugh, an appreciation of the little things in life. They claim to know what God thinks and eats for breakfast. They’re rarely big readers, and if they are, it’s always too much of one thing. They never demonize others with words of lightness, only those of grave seriousness. (Mockery isn’t light, it’s leaden and grey.) If you do karaoke with them, you'll find the only songs they know are in the same key of shit-flat minor.
The other day, no idea why, I was reminded that the composer Stephen Sondheim died in 2021 a few days before the artist Lawrence Weiner. Both deaths had prompted offerings of sadness, celebrity tributes, Instagram micro-brags about having once touched the holy hem of the deceased’s robes. But Sondheim was not on the Whitney Study Program curriculum and Weiner never had a Broadway hit. People who cared about one didn’t have anything to say about the other.
Whatever silos of niche interest or mutual snobbery were to blame—those people are too serious, that lot aren’t serious enough, never heard of Weiner, heard too much of Sondheim—I remember thinking this was a missed opportunity, since both artists played games with language, both were invested in the way words could be transfigured through other forms. What happens if we treat words as sculpture? How about making them into an acrostic to be sung in five-part counterpoint? It could’ve been a productive conversation. Could’ve been a way to expand registers of speech. For all I know it might even have happened. A meeting, secretly brokered by agents and gallerists, in an Upper East Side triplex with a beautiful Bechstein in the living room and a screenprint studio next to the kitchen, a balcony looking out onto Central Park, from which small figures could be seen collecting leaves in garbage bags and throwing them at passing cars. The results were never disclosed.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that for 2025 I would like a new dictionary set in a new typeface.
Wendy Lotterman: It’s December 30th and I’ve scratched my previous submission. Today I was driving across the 3rd avenue bridge and saw a billboard that read “PRIVACY IS FOR THE PEOPLE.” The ad is for a Swedish VPN service called Mullvad whose campaign strangely captures something I’ve been thinking about all year. In November I taught a workshop called “The Lyric After Liberalism” that tried to disentangle intimacy from the material history of privacy, which abets the liberal project of individuation. Privacy is indeed for the people, insofar as people signifies a collection of persons with legal personhood—separable individuals whose positive right to accumulate and insulate and withdraw from the social is also a guarantor of dispossession. Where liberalism forces an equivalence between freedom and possessive-individualism, liberation takes both the individual and property out of the equation. The other day my friend texted to ask for talking points on the democratic party in preparation for seeing family over Christmas. I generally hate election postmortems, and mine certainly isn’t any better than anyone else’s, but I’ll repeat it because it will lead me to a different point, the point I want to make. I responded that in the past several elections the party accepted so much money from wealthy donors that they’d effectively agreed to omit political economy from the platform, not only losing the trust of the working class but also making every other marker of difference appear artificially separated from class so that we are left with a mangled and defanged byproduct called identity politics. In other words, they created a cultural civil war amongst the victims of empire and capital. The thing I wanted to get to is a brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it parable within Kimberlé Crenshaw’s monumental 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” She describes a basement full of people stacked on top of each others’ shoulders from floor to ceiling, and they’re all seeking freedom, which is represented by the first floor. On the ceiling, there’s a hatch door. The ones on the top of the stack could conceivably hoist themselves up and access the first floor, leaving the rest below. For Crenshaw, who is working within a legal framework, these are the people who experience a single vector of discrimination—those who would be free “but for” one substantive difference. Though it’s not directly in the text, I think the parable implies that if the people on the bottom of the stack, the ones furthest from the hatch door, figured out how to get to the first floor, their solution would apply to the entire room. What electoral politics has taught us to see as niche special interest groups are actually the people who are best positioned to devise a plan for total liberation. The other basement parable is Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” I’ve been thinking about both of these basements as Palestine. Nova was Omelas. Except it’s not a single child, and it’s not a story about utilitarianism, it’s a story about the ones who can set us all free.
Moyra Davey: In 2024 I learn to shuffle dance via YouTube; I make a perfect saag paneer; my son unloads on me; publication of Suzanne and Louise, by Hervé Guibert (I write an introduction); reissue of Portraits in Life and Death, by Peter Hujar (I am not involved); the return of an essential drive; last days of Rosie.
Larne Abse Gogarty: Marina Vishmidt died, and that experience—the first time I experienced the death of a good friend—shaped a lot of the year. I am glad I got to see her the week before, and stroke her hair and talk to her and experience an unforgettable, deep moment of friendship with everyone else who was around her. But now I dread the inevitable increase in deaths of people I love much more acutely. Hannah Proctor’s Burnout was the book of 2024! I spent too much time reading Wikipedia pages about the fall of ancient civilisations as a weird form of self soothing. I started writing something new which is about holes, grottos, dioramas, sculpture. I would like to be able to explain this project better in 2025, and also get stronger because I ended 2024 with a bad back, and I can’t deal with the disappointment on my son’s face when I say I can’t pick him up or carry him :(
Peloloca: This year I set out to find my child self who’d been exiled since preadolescence. I knew that the only way back to that lost kid was through art (thank you therapy) so this year I returned to the art practice I’d abandoned over 2 decades ago.
Early in this pursuit I encountered another child—faceless and dispossessed—who became my guide. He was frozen in time, a perennial 10-year-old, the laws of nature did not apply to him. He was not beautiful, his head was shaped like a Handal plant, and his hair like a hedgehog’s spikes. Barefoot yet unyielding, he stood with arms clasped and his back to the world. His silence spoke truth to power; he embodied dissent.
The first piece of art I made this year was a sculptural rendition of “Handala,” the now iconic 1969 drawing of a child created by political cartoonist and prominent figure of the Palestinian liberation movement, Naji al-Ali. Handala marked Naji’s age when he was displaced from Palestine in the 1948 Nakba. An image simple enough for anyone to replicate, the drawing became a global symbol of protest over the decades, appearing across several people’s uprisings worldwide.
If a graffiti symbol embodied so much power, what could it imbue in sculptural form? This curiosity led me to build a Handala in clay. My hand-built Handala stands 2 feet tall in glazed stoneware. Since its creation this summer, the sculpture has taken on a life of its own. My Handala now leads me, he goes places and I follow. He stood in a street corner in Queens and recited his story to passersby. He visited Hind's House, a collective art space honoring Hind Rajab. He stood in solidarity with the students of Columbia University who led the encampments for Gaza. I witnessed how the form of this child instantly disarmed people, inviting them into a political discourse they'd normally shy away from. I learned how Handala offers a broader canvas—one that could tell stories of resistance and solidarity across cultures.
And while all this was unfolding, the little kid in me found a friend to hang with. Now they’re thick as thieves.
charles theonia: I traveled to another coast just because. I saw quail and chollas, and when I got back, I saw raccoons swimming from drain pipes into the unpeopled terrains of Prospect Park. The New York Liberty got their first ticker tape parade in 28 years of play. My first book can now be borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library. I caved and bought a blowdryer, and my hair thanked me. This year we lost Cecilia Gentili. I met her as a storyteller and as a patient advocate at the trans health clinic. She got us all on hormones and cracked us up. I don’t know how a new year could go about beginning without her in it. Or how we are to enter this 15th month of genocide. I have never been so devastated or so full of purpose. That’s a hard place to stay, but I’m shored up by the 250+ arts organizations and the 7k+ bookworkers that have joined the cultural boycott Israel in little more than a year (you, reading this, could add your name to theirs, if you haven’t already), and by all the writers and artists, Cecilia among them until she couldn’t be, who have brought Palestinian liberation into the center of our lives. I finished the last year and started this one with Robert Glück’s About Ed, an account of durational memorialization, written with the material of the beloved’s personal archive. He writes, “I watched the grass rise after his bare foot pressed it,” and that’s how he keeps living with grief, inhabiting a present tense that will keep going without us.
Lynne Tillman: A year isn’t succinct. There were distractions, amusements, screens of plenty, stories of emptiness. There was cosmic and comic despair. And impossibility, accompanying permanent war. There was Madness and Indifference, the sum of futility. The rapidity of viruses. The normality of torture. Lawless legislators against protest. A numbing campaign of nothing. Hopelessness and the wretched who dwell in it. Rape as weapon. Starvation as weapon. Oligarchs and the wannabes. The Dark Ages. The dead called collateral. Polio and surrender to the irrational. Deaths of friends. There were good times, of course. Of course there were. Fellowship. laughs. I depend on laughing and learning a few usually negligible things. Art, movies, reading, drinking, eating, sleeping and did some writing. Four months at home nursing my wayward nose. You know, some kind of life. Let’s just say, I was able to go on.
Greta Rainbow: Started the year in a mansion and I’m ending it in a basement. My friend who is a bit provocative told me this has been the happiest year of her life. I’m glad because I love her but I can’t share in the feeling. It was a rich year filled to the brim, with meetings and readings and kissings happening every day. I am happy to be a part of all that. (And to retreat: I stretched out like a cat in the cloud bed when it finally rained and told him, “I’m the luckiest girl who is just like a cat!”) Even when I felt ashamed of revealing myself to the world, or afraid of what the world would show me, I entered. I went incognito mode to learn “how to stop ruminating.”
There was a lot of weird death. Count the men. People talk about “all this senseless violence” and I want to scream that there’s no such thing, there is no way to kill without feeling. Oh, I’m sorry, you mean sense a different way.
In February I painted a cow.
On an afternoon in April, someone murdered my mother’s uncle while he was on a walk on a trail along a creek. Dan was a Buddhist, a New Yorker, and a friendly mystery my whole life—he remains one; the case is utterly unsolved. I got the news while flitting about the apartment before my roommate’s wedding celebration, our best friends on the couch ironing their shirts. I baked a lemon cake.
In June I inherited Dan’s Chinese gong and hung it in the window of my little office.
In July, another secret death. We jumped in the lake.
In August I typed on the top deck of the night ferry and in between sentences crossed and uncrossed my fingers, hoping that I’d return to the island, that there would be an island to return to.
In October I said no and ran into him anyway.
In November I said yes; she never made a date.
In December I read Malina. I was off-and-on annoyed until the last page, when “I” disappears through a crack in the wall and says, “It was murder.”
In December I whittled a ring.
In December we had a party. The beautiful people who filled our home spoke to me without knowing I live here and am often naked in this room. From the far other end I heard the gong ring out, its low om rippling over strange heads. The worry that no one knows became but neither do I and I do think Dan would totally support this new idea I have of inviting the dissolution of “I.”
(And I could’ve just told you: watched The Wire for the first time!)
Trisha Low: 2024. The year it is winter. Branches are broken. I am diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy, and having surgery to remove my left fallopian tube takes with it my sanity. This year I did not write, or I could not write what I meant to. I still don’t know how. Guilt comes to me in every place but church. By church I mean. Watching K-pop variety shows on Youtube. Christmas Mass with my family. Fanfiction scrolling on my phone. Glassy figures, stained vivid by the sun. Saint Lucy’s gouged eyes. NMIXX Oh Haewon. Her hair is growing. Saint Sebastian, arrows through his torso. ATEEZ Jeong Yunho and his rosary, his chrome press-on nails. Idol worship. Syd, having watched Jerome Hiler’s Cinema Before 1300 (2023), tells me that the church windows the Saints sit in might be the first instances of narrative film. Proto-celluloid. So I project. Sitting in a pew. I imagine IVE Yujin kissing her bandmate Wonyoung about how good she looked in MiuMiu at Paris fashion week. Cold cut by candlelight. NCT Haechan tied down in leather. Jesus’ wooden ribs. I count them. An ecstasy of devotion and prayer. Making the chipped red paint of His blood seem to wobble. I am not Catholic, not anymore. Still, I live the rest of the year confined to melodrama. Slipping into suffering and back in a way one might argue characterises trope. Or faith. It’s been 36 years and my life is still a lesson on how hard it is. To tell.
A thing I love about Catholicism: its rigid binaries are integral to its structure as much as they were never truly meant to hold. Everything predicated upon the abject possibility of leaking-between—sinner to saint, penance to reward, pain to pleasure, flesh to spirit. It’s why there’s so much blood. In my abdomen. Clotting in my underwear. On my laptop screen and streaking my social media feed. Pretty in a friend’s mouth. I post on fandom twitter that I want to write an apocalypse fic where Character A watches Character B die; is haunted by the image. Red spattered on his chin, pupils blotted wide, choking “I don’t want to leave you, [redacted]... I’m scared,” and it’s hot, but I immediately regret. That scene, but on the news. The line between sublimated fantasy and reality is grimmer and thinner than I ever thought possible, and yet it turns out I am that boundary’s bitch. BTS Taehyung’s photocard laying against a backdrop of rubble. This was the year my syntax became tortured. The narrative trying to compensate, but unable. Makes sense. The anaesthetic kicks in. My Cinnamoroll socked feet in obstetrician straps.
A thing I love about the Saints. Or at least I used to: that rapturous moment during their deaths where pain becomes secondary to a higher purpose. Their tragic faces of great, doomed beauty. Heat from the fire blowing in their hair. When you know the end is simply a means of making it all make sense. Not anymore. There are no reasons. I wish we didn’t have to have martyrs. On Christmas day, the light outside. The knife in my hand. Getting dull. Apple peel, curling awry. A hiss of blood on the pie dough. And yeah, I know the red between my fingers to be so many things—the perverse violence of love. The certainty of flesh in a precarious world. But it’s getting harder and harder for me to taste the blood as wine. This year, blood is just blood, oil-viscous and dusty. Growing in excess of what’s fathomable. Pain beyond its justification. Staining the dirt.
This year, the end. It doesn’t make sense. It won’t next year either. I won’t let it.
David Markus: I’m writing on December 25th, a date which this year not only marks the celebration of the birth of Christ in Roman-occupied Bethlehem but also coincides with the first day of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Always, but especially this year, these holidays are laden with geographic and symbolic significance. How could 2024 not end as it began, with thoughts of Palestine?
Sasha’s email says: “write what you feel about the past twelve months.” I feel ambivalent, in the strict sense. Feelings-wise, the year was as varied as they come. It was a year filled with hopefulness, joy, rage, dismay, and foreboding. Hopefulness because of the solidarities forged in the face of the most heinous crimes and the more ordinary forms of violence and mendacity marshaled to stifle dissent. Joy at the small victories achieved under the fluorescent lights of the institution and on picket lines that held strong through bitter cold winter days. Rage at the ongoing atrocities, their sheer depravity, and at the instrumentalization of past suffering that enables them to continue. Dismay at the newly reinforced structures of repression within and beyond educational and cultural spaces, and at the cravenness and complicity of those whom I once made the mistake of admiring. Foreboding as the year comes to a close with a few small beautiful and courageous actions, a sense, even, perhaps, of renewed purpose, but also of the magnitude of the tasks that lie ahead.
A few nights ago at a holiday gathering, I took a picture of a Christmas ornament made from a paper cut-out of Handala, the cartoon child who has come to embody the exile and resistance of the Palestinian people. Created by cartoonist Naji Al-Ali, Handala is almost invariably represented shoeless, disheveled, and turned away from the viewer, with his hands clasped behind his back. I shared the picture that I took on Instagram and with a few cherished contacts. Today, a Palestinian friend in Beirut writes to me on WhatsApp: “For you is Handala turning his back to us, or inviting us to join him and look into the distance?” The question has lingered in my mind all morning. I suspect it will stay with me into the new year.
Tracy Rosenthal: “Okay I’m gonna abandon all hope,” the meme of my year begins. You know the one, with the boxer. I am sitting with my feet up in the yellow bucket window seat of a C train, which I heard are not long for New York. This year we once again failed to stop a genocide.
I repeated certain phrases over and over and can hear them ringing around in my head. That it is lonely on Team Left Unity. That Palestine will be free. That my couch is always open. That everyone is an actionist now. That men don’t make communism under the conditions of their own choosing. That nothing outside can cure you but everything is outside.
A book tour will also make you repeat yourself: rent is a fine for a human need, rent is a monthly tribute…. Strangers send me pictures of groups of strangers holding up the object, from cities all over, and I feel like I know them. They send me dog-eared pages, annotated paragraphs, and I feel like they know me. (Sex is cool but has a crush ever quoted your book to your face?)
I have regrets: I wish I did not still want one particular apology and I wish I got to watch Trump’s brains burst across a teevee screen. I made a new friend !!!!! I finally read Infinite Jest. I wanted to feel differently, and by the end of it, I did.
I spent a lot of time on and thinking about the subway. Police shootings, vigilante murderers, the economy of the emergency exit. I never realized that with just a few tools you could redecorate a whole car. In the image of the year, the three of us are leaving the CCNY encampment where two of us had just been beat with nightsticks but then the barbershop handed us beers to drink and I had my second deli BLT of the day and we have to run down the steps to the 2 train and the train is already at the station and I’ve managed to make it into the car and I swing around to hold the doors and look behind me and both of you are grabbing the sides of the turnstile and I will always be the one and only witness to your perfectly synchronized jump.
The meme of my year ends, “Damn the enduring human spirit got hands.” Next year, I am going to ride the yellow trains until they take them away.
Ilana Zaken: 2024 began as a gaping mass grave that continues to expand and capture everything that is beautiful and good in the world. Wafa Aludaini, the bravest woman I ever knew, did not make it out of this year and even though I will live out this year and perhaps many others, carrying her name and martyrdom forward, I will not outlive this. I have been neither the grave digger nor the rubble digger nor the nurse nor the cook—at best, at best, I have scrabbled uselessly at the prison walls with my broken bleeding fingernails weeping at my impotence to end genocide to save lives. At best, at best, I have not been alone. Locked in a 2x4 cage in the back of a police van handcuffed with zip ties—at least someone else is beside me at the grave’s edge.
Katrina Forrester: In 2024 I had another baby. I got into the swing of writing another book. My pregnancy was straightforward, but all I could think about were pregnant women in Gaza, babies in Gaza, mothers and fathers and siblings in Gaza. I hadn’t really considered before how a genocide involves the unfathomable destruction of hospitals, something that seems so obvious now. I looked and I looked away; I felt crazy when I looked while others looked away. I stayed home a lot. I got to go to the sea a few beautiful times. I didn’t manage to read much for pleasure but I enjoyed listening to the Western AF channel. Since the baby arrived, I’ve lived a shadow life at night watching live performances on youtube by bands I had forgotten. During the 4am feed I made my way through every documentary about Bob Dylan (there are more than you think). I completed my tenth year with my psychoanalyst but I still can’t arrange an ending I can live with. I think a lot about births and deaths, beginnings and endings, about how we learn to live with the world, looking while looking away. I had a good birth this time around—I was lucky, I am lucky.
Laura McLean-Ferris: I missed contributing to last year’s reflections because I had recently had a baby, although I drafted something and nearly sent it, I remember now, about how I had been making up songs for the baby about cats and that they were pretty good. I thought to myself this is nonsense, don’t send it, but here we are twelve months later, and I still think that the cat songs are pretty good.
Here we are twelve months later, and now I can’t read books very much because I am always moving, which makes me feel bereft of myself, or beside myself. I remember in Mia Hansen-Løve’s film Things to Come (2016) Isabelle Huppert’s character, a philosophy professor, is always moving, moving, moving. She is looking after her dying mother, looking for a cat, becoming a grandmother, breaking up with her husband, tidying, gardening. For the entire film she is traversing, trailing. Others rest and she does not, picking her way across all kinds of rocks and sidewalks. I fear that I too will never be able to stop moving, picking things up, cleaning, walking. I fear that I will be doing this without the consolation of being Isabelle Huppert.
What I have been doing is listening to a World Radio, which I highly recommend. Mostly NTS and the World Service, where I hear in-depth reporting about global events that often get screened away in national media by local personalities and fixations. Importantly it is hearing voices and stories attached to these events that have changed my experience of the world, most recently stories from Chechnya, Gaza, Sudan, South Korea. I needed some well-edited broadcast media: it makes me feel as though my experience is less filtered by things I cannot see. Get one, it was like 30 dollars.
Angelica Jade Bastién: For most of 2024—I’d say until November—the taste of sorrow has sat at the center of my tongue. This sorrow was born from a series of ruptures I was forced to contend with or spiritually die in the process of avoiding them. A two-year relationship that curdled into emotional abuse that only ended due to my courage with getting an emergency order of protection, is perhaps the most crucial rupture. But there was also the realization, while sifting through the ashes of that relationship, that I had been running from myself and the world. This was glaring with regards to my craft. I struggled to write. My long-held approach to catharsis was to make sense of myself, the world, and history on the page. But how can you make sense of what you see around you when you can’t even see yourself clearly? I was increasingly retreating into a haze of weed smoke. Smoking incessantly every day, for hours, sometimes up to five joints in a single sitting. I would passively wonder, what was I searching for by encasing myself in such a hollow pleasure that I wasn’t even enjoying anymore. It was more so what I was running from. Reality. This year has been devastating on levels personal and global. The continued galling devastation of the Palestinian people, the quiet horrors of living in the heart of the empire, the accumulation of death, the stunning understanding that the government of the United States is not indifferent to its citizens but clamors for our exploitation to line the pockets of various corporations that continue to pillage the planet, soon rendering it uninhabitable to human life. This was the reality I ran from. But no longer. I quit smoking weed. Life is crisp. Everything feels more real and thus, more bruising. I’ve drifted down from the clouds and am planted firmly on the ground. It is more overwhelming to run from life than to face it. In 2025, I am eager to learn who I am without this dopamine crutch I’ve leaned on for five years. What will life taste like when I am present for all its complication and splendor? I am excited to be able to honestly answer that question.
Léon Dische Becker: I went through a break-up in early fall and haven’t spoken to my ex since. She blocked me everywhere—everywhere, I eventually realized, except Co-Star, an astrology app that offers daily updates on how your contacts are doing. I now could only see her—a person I’d spoken to every day for two years—through a prism of stars and algorithms, which is a bit like losing your mother to the Church of Scientology and only seeing her again in their promotional videos.
This experience didn't convince me of the power of astrology, but did feed my long-standing conspiracy theory that Co-Star pilfers its users’ data and relays it piecemeal to their contacts. The app’s daily updates about my ex’s life seemed remarkably on point, closely mimicking what I knew about the way she moved through the world. One week, it reported that she was “concocting her own household cleaning products,” “befriending someone else’s pet,” “trying to focus,” or “ blasting a Proust audio book to catch up on sleep.” These pointed observations led me to trust the app’s loftier readings. For a solid month, it insisted on the possibility of reconciliation (“You and ____ always find your way back to each other”), suggested I reach out to her (“If you feel like ____ is moving forward thoughtlessly, maybe it’s because your own feet are walking ahead of you”), only to hit me with a gut punch (“____ is obsessing over someone!”).
Fortunately, for my sanity, whenever Co-Star seemed to be on a roll, the app would say something wildly off base. For example, it has repeatedly implored me to try seducing my own sister (“take her on a romantic road trip…confess your crush.”) Thanks, I’m good. It took only a few of these slip-ups to wean me off the Co-Star app, though part of me still suspects that they were feints to distract from a secret regime of data mining.
Lucy Ives: I don’t remember a lot of 2024. This probably has something to do with having a three-year-old (now four) and a full-time job two states away from my home. At the same time, I have no doubt that I remember 2024. It’s 11:11pm on December 31st and it’s taken me ten minutes to write the previous 30-odd words. Some other things I did, in no particular order: left a careless therapist, started volunteering at a domestic violence prevention hotline, published a book, decided to marry my partner, got a professional massage for the first time, read Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time, stopped speaking to my mom again. I’ll add that I’m a person who’s prone to coincidence and uncanny encounters, and 2024 contained one of the strangest of my life: I was riding the Q train late at night on a Tuesday, thinking hard about the Marquis de Sade, whose novel Justine I was reading. Abruptly, a voice came over the intercom (I’m not making this up, as far as I know) and this voice said, forcefully, “LOOK.” The doors opened to reveal human suffering. They closed again. When I got off at my stop about five minutes later, there was a couple in parkas dancing tango very skillfully near the exit. They had no music. Nobody else seemed to care that this was happening, and I went up to the street. My heart was racing.
Naomi Falk: Outside the orbish purview of my window, time is matter, and I watch it uncontained again, passing again. Not so much out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new. I don't write a list or develop resolutions. More sloping and arching into seeing time. Wanting sundials and shadows, uncontestable external indications that something is happening, indications that small failures or joys bear no mark on our broad, big continuity. Yearning for less helplessness via knowledge. I keep publishing new books; the lifeblood. The biggest honor I could envision. And my own—very first—on the approaching horizon, a fresh experience on the other side of the sweet and sacred dance. Libraries and bookstores like lighthouses marking space across the Sound. Always somewhere to quest, The Reason to push on. Renewal of holy winter solstice, slowness, solitude, the pulse of eventual return.
Angela Garbes: It occurred to me last week that I do not know, here at the end of 2024, where a few people in my life stand politically. I’ve been low-key ill and spinning out on this ever since because I routinely fool/tell myself I have no room in my life for this kind of willful, deliberate silence. Words seem insufficient and pointless as global events and vibes are so violent and seem to accrue faster than the speed of my thoughts. I physically and psychically cannot keep up. I am certain my brain is not meant to process grief, destruction, and content on this scale—I feel it shutting down, or at least looking for an alternate, different sense-oriented place to dwell, if only for some chance at peace. In a dance class the other day emerging from a no-thoughts-pure-body moment, I screamed and the music faded out and tears and spit and sweat collected in the corners of my mouth and there were dogs barking clear as day and mine was just a feeble animal utterance in their chorus. Shit felt right. On the drive home, I remembered that the dance studio is in the same building as a doggy day care.
Sophie Abramowitz: This year I dug my heels into New York City and tried to live in public and felt so much anger at this country, a rock in my chest. And I think back to a conversation between my friend Jerome and his friends years ago, after my last class of the semester. About small meals when you’re hungry: That’s cute, but when are we eating?
I’m trying to match that creative spirit. I swam a big river this summer and a baby bear crossed my path, then my friend Red told me about the arc of my life. I’ve been thinking ever since about what (and who) I’m dedicated to. First arrest, first podcast, first second and third Michael Hurley. Diane di Prima: You can have what you ask for, ask for everything.
Emily Allan: 2024. Words fail. As always, the arbitrary Gregorian ritual still has power over me and I feel sad. It was the kind of year where the bad songs they play in the supermarket make you break down. Chasing the cringe. I hope I didn’t waste it. Today in my apartment I saw a stamp on an old envelope that said: War is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things. Sort of corny. But what else is there to say?
Anna Kornbluh: The thing about one sitting is writing works best that way, sitting once, once a day, for one stretch, and writing through whatever it is you’re trying to think. Salt breadcrumbs from the day before, or maybe the sitting is time for one new start, or maybe more rarely in a sitting you finish a thing while retaining wherewithal to begin again. The one sitting rule for this one year’s reflection is meant as a kindness, Sasha easing us in to the convened company, thought it makes this one today, December 31, frizzledly fraughter than the other 364. 2024 meant so many sittings, routine is for the fortunate, “we just want the dignity of ordinary days”—but it also meant such outrageous depredation, so many old and new technologies of war, abandon, theft. It was the heinous hanging parity of the two, good days and bad, world historical atrocities and happy home mornings, that gave this year such a nauseous all at onceness.
Talking with students, colleagues, interlocutors, friends, reporters, and strangers about a book published in the very early year winningly filled many, many of my days and nights, which became a whiplash timeline, gravitationally recurring to ideas long ago inked while reaching for new ones resistant to inscription. It was the best of possible gratifications for a writer, for people to exclaim and email over and over, “thank you for having named and explained the gnawing phenomenon I was trying to understand”—and it was the oddest of possible blocks for a writer, to keep puzzling the same jigsaw. There was a joyful, deeply reported essay about the incredible artistic achievement of the Miami Vice pilot, 40 years old in 2024, and buried in it a parenthetical: (Johnson was the only major participant not interviewed for this piece; his publicist explained, “Don politely declines all these interviews as he just won’t go backward, only forward.”). Trying to name and understand the reverse gear of that oddest block, that publicist policy rang true but not right. I donned pastel dresses. Take heart in the beautiful shows, answer the backward pull when it opens togethernesses, clutch at joy straws. The darkness cannot hold.
Er Linsker: This year I grew queerer and clearer on, from, with, the social force of queerness, transness. Sublingually, subcutaneously. From the river to the sea. At the club, femmes were practicing and are, more and more the lighter it got, gets, getting together in, as, what Fred Moten calls the mystic group, after and before Wilfred Bion’s less blurred the mystic and the group, the mystic group that was always there, that's always been here.
Blurred “out of subjectivity but into flesh” (McKenzie Wark), we found one another, until we weren’t ones, never were, practicing the ongoing mystic group that precedes subjectivity, jumping up and down for a second. And it kept getting the feeling kept getting and it kept getting the feeling and it kept getting and it kept getting the feeling kept getting and it kept getting.
Beside the club, a free clinic grew out of a call from Gaza Solidarity Encampments.
I was on the train when I learned of Yahya Sinwar’s martyrdom and the whole city started to shift, as if all that was left of New York was nightmare gray fascism. The exclusive exaltation of life, as a term, at times, this year, however horrifically understandable, upset me. Just life? Really? Scary. No sexual death drive, no différance without separability? (This year I learned more criticism of the privileging of the life drive over the death drive from Lara Lorenzo.) So I was grateful for Hannah Black's post “for black and Palestinian resistance!!!! that keeps on affirming the reality of life & death!!! ... + RIP YS.” Against whiteness’ denial of death, what Marina Vishmidt described as “human finitude seen as reactionary dogma.” When Vishmidt died in April I tried to get a manicure, I tried two different manicures over weeks, the gray of her nails in that talk. I didn't know what else to do. And then there is infinity as described by Denise Ferreira da Silva, rebellion.
Leora Fridman: I couldn’t have known the cruelties or the way I’d stretch. Hoping I only get bigger. I got worse at saying what was okay and got better at knowing who I don't have to like. What I don’t have to? I work less and earn more. I found what to say and what not to. My work is meeting the moment with heartful wisdom and I am accepting that I can offer this. Things find their place in the world, and maybe I am also a thing, that thing. Laughing so much, so loudly. Exhaustion deeper than ever before. The student uprisings taught me endlessly about bravery and steely kindness, focus, my own power in saying things clearly and my own power in stepping away from power. Different moments require different reactions. Here in Brooklyn I am more at home than I have ever been and I feel the grief in there also, elders falling away and needing to be careful not to cut them away. Everywhere I look a friend is ready to be a friend, together in this we face it. Ready for a new mystery.
Nicholas Glastonbury: The blinking of sparklers in the living room and, seven hours ahead, the glow of rockets. In every time zone on every day of 2024 a flag burns. The menace of empire. Land back and death 2 Amerika. Love will not stop at the walls of the carceral state. Cousins and colors somewhere overseas, the last of empire’s handmaidens, ready yourselves for your watery graves. Listen close and you’ll hear the death rattle of empire. Another. And another.
Black sun in your yawning sky, stop the presses and free Palestine. Fill to me the parting glass. Refuse the last word. Cast these ghouls in eternal night. I dream of a great war of justice that will turn the American soil into ashes, a feast of snakes in the garden of empire. This is no place of honor.
Nacré shimmer on the shore, this dirge of my beloved, this body breaking and entering, bleeding its longing in the summerhouse pool, my only salt my sweat. Margaret Thatcher, my worst habit: what do we owe each other, given there’s no such thing as society? We shall paint red triangles over the heads of NATO’s cheerleaders, we shall salt the earth of empire, we shall beat our swords into plowshares and study war no more. Desperate living: both die 2024, both hang like Benito from the Esso rafters, because in this our competition of unfinished stories the enemy wraps itself in red white & blue.
Desperate living: I repudiate despair, writes Baldwin, but the daily necessity for this repudiation contains its own despairing commitment.
Commitment: Repudiate despair. Commitment: Melt a hole in the bronze of empire’s effigy. Commitment: Fill its broken skull with lead. Commitment: Menace. Commitment: Refuse. Refuse more. Commitment: Hold you closer. Commitment: Revolution until victory. Commitment: The sovereignty of the future. What is Sovereignty? The shape of things to come.
Lily Puckett:
L is for long shot
Kept it loose, looked marvelous, opened readily,
eventually Collapsed,
Eventually Obtained
solace
Karim Kazemi: I think that in the first week of January—and I know for almost a fact that it was then, because New Year’s Eve had been so stultifyingly itinerant, and I remember the long, squinting, sun’s-up cab ride back to my old apartment—that I moved. It was the old apartment of a good friend, who is, I think it’s safe to say at this point, a spy. If you asked me “for whom?,” I would have only the roughest idea of what to tell you, and I wouldn’t know how to act.
“Guatemala? Nicaragua? El Salvador?” said the beautiful, beautiful woman he had moved out of that apartment to live with, in a somewhat ‘safer,’ definitely chiller part of the city. “It’s all the same shit!” I love her! She meant no disrespect to LATAM. She meant only that she loved him like crazy, no matter who was writing the checks.
When I moved in, I wondered if the walls, or the internet connection, were “bugged.” Had I behaved recklessly on certain websites, the bad ones that I would spend long hours loitering on with such drooling, diaper-baby surety that nothing I witnessed on those websites would ever come back to bite me in the butt? And not to speak of all the recklessness of all that I had BEAMED BACK OUT? Operating under the mild suspicion that someone — the Guatemalans, or the Guatemalans’ enemies — hadn’t yet caught on that their person of interest had moved out, I began to reconsider some of my longstanding online pastimes. (My mental method for imaging this kind of state surveillance cribs heavily from my mental image, which I think isn’t quite accurate, of how one ‘siphons’ gasoline from a parked car: a garden hose hooked up to my modem, and a man in a starched shirt huffing at the end of it, filling his mouth with my home broadband, and then spitting it back out into an aluminum coffee can by his feet.) Early, early in 2024, I called it quits on jacking off with anonymous, global nobodies via randomized video chat apps.
My new apartment is so big, so beautiful, so airy, located on a peaceful, pedestrians-only plaza in an otherwise stressful, crazy with commercial activity, part of town. (There is historical evidence, but not archeological evidence, that it exists on the exact spot as the palace of Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor.) It has hardwood floors that slant, bulge and pucker up at irregular intervals, transforming the simple act of walking to the bathroom into a zesty adventure, like traversing a moonlit dune. It has ultra-high ceilings that gay guys cannot resist remarking upon, almost as though by failing to do so they would run afoul of the law.
Becca Teich: (Fragments are what I have been able to produce) (“a year,” betraying its nominal wholeness or completion, is a fragment) (Fragmentation, my own, is a starting point--humbling myself to what I do not know) (and to begin, again and again, to know the places where such learning happens) (the limits and the limits surpassed, or, administered logics overturned, eviscerated) (“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety” James Baldwin) (Up late talking and experiences that, for however long and for variegated necessities, threw me off balance) (“That the full range of humanity is not reachable through safety, control, or recognition but in daring to risk” Avgi Saketopoulou) (Abraided we) (Tonguing incision) (Ease in loves) (even fewer illusions) (still, illusions) (“Avoiding reality compels the author to distort it” Ghassan Kanafani) (name a more liberal concept than dialogue) (dialogue and bureaucracy) (dialogue is bureaucracy) (“We can no longer respect the conventions that have so dramatically failed us.” Steve Salaita) (such a volume and density of rage so as to seem impossible it could not break something) (nothing broken or not enough) (“a horror show that you have to counter by any means necessary” Joy James) (Rage that should corrode the premises upon which phantasms that enact brutal realities rest) (so much is broken and so much nevertheless remains intact) (vital breaking heard, seen, not by my hand) (e.g. Merkava tank, shipping routes) (This was the year I did return to hand writing) (Can only produce chicken scratch, inadvertent surveillance evasion) (Trying to write a sentence, a paragraph) (A sentence written by a dozen or so) (“Get to the well / there formation / kin comrades lovers” Kimberly Alidio) (I say “another world is possible” and it will be another year playing catchup to these words) (This is not an expression of futility but, instead, a devotional horizon) (Cecilia!) (Return, tear basin in the Vale of Cashmere, defiant of law risks presence & expulsion) (“We are how we live” Angela Mitropoulos) (A different kind of ‘we,’ many kinds of ‘we,’ better forms of ‘we’, emerging) Palestine will be free.
Heather McCalden: A line keeps coming to me. It’s from a late 90s TV show about lawyers.
“If you think back, and replay your year. If it doesn’t bring you tears of joy or sadness, consider the year wasted.”
What I keep thinking about, what I keep replaying is actually this one line—and not the year itself, or the tears. When I try to look at 2024, my eye slides right off it. The last twelve months appear through a streak of Vaseline in which the heartaches and the victories and the shame and the losses glisten out of focus with an iridescent sheen. It’s not that they were bad, it’s not that they were good, it’s that they were both good and bad all at once, all the time, and well, what even is that? A smartass might say, “Life.” A mystic might give the same response, but your average human? The erasure of polarities seemed impossible to describe. My judgement short-circuited, making me return to things and places where I had previously experienced coherence. I detached from the current timeline, and with few swipes, a couple of taps, it became 1999, 2005, 2600 BC, 1975, 1844, 10,191 AG… but never, really 2024. I existed through 90s television, the archaic texts of saints, live recordings of jazz festivals, Deep Space Nine, Impressionist paintings, and slowly, the splinters of these cultural artifacts began to cohere and form a year of their own, a Frankenyear where a multiplicity of realities suddenly jerked to life and breathed together, on the fireball of this planet.
I know I’m not the only one to dissolve into the familiar, the past, or the (very) distant future. What else was there to do? Cry? The only thing I can speak to with any certainty are the tears, and how they were somehow the same, and somehow completely different from tears shed at any other point in time. The French phrase, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” (the more things change, the more they stay the same), seems appropriate here. Yet, it flicks at another fragment in my mind, a quote by Raymond Chandler, “The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.”
Adieu 2024.
Sarah Bachman: I bit off a lot in 2024. Good stuff. Lots of work. I frantically tried to accomplish more than I have ever endeavored in my life in the span of about eight months. It all worked out okay in the end. 2024 wasn’t one of my failing years.
Last year my resolution was “I’m not going to be afraid all the time anymore” and that definitely did not happen. I will think smaller this year. Continued existence is enough.
Monihan Monihan: Maybe it’s the holiday season punching my cynicism even deeper in the red. The banality of shopping, ‘family’™️, trivial conversation, followed by reflection on all those denied such vacuous nonsense. A nauseous pit in my abdomen that has been testing my limits for the entire year, bloated by bile as news of even more extreme weather wreaks even more havoc. The storming of another hospital where stormtroopers once again murder the ailing, kill more of the doctors and nurses caring for said ailing, force the rest of the lot to march barefoot and frostbitten across rubble on crutches to yet another makeshift tent village, only then to be blown away by abnormally inclement winter winds followed by a flood of freezing cold sea water.
Genocide and Ecocide. Like show-off salsa dancers swirling and twirling around one another, carefree, mocking those of us down on the floorboards, as they pitterpatter upon our tender flesh.
Yeah yeah. Draw back your bows, slings and arrows. I’ll freely admit it. I get these weather reports from a fucking iPhone. Come at me, you cunts. My mind is already racing southwest to cobalt, coal, and Glencore. To all the blood mineral and wealth extraction, knowing that all these storms will only get worse, how one storm begets another, how ‘severe’ will become ‘normal’, how suffering’s subjectivity is but a pain threshold. We’re all complicit on different levels, but what I want to know is why do I have this pang in my gut while all these Merry Christmas motherfuckers seem to feel nothing, nothing at all. What type of magical force field makes them impervious to misery? Why am I so weak? Why did 11-year-old me get hit with a ton of bricks when I saw Joe Strummer crying his eyes out, forehead pressed against the tv screen, floored by the carnage on the nightly news, in his ‘Radio Clash’ promo. Nobody else seemed to catch feelings from MTV music videos. What the fuck was wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I so damn sensitive all the time? Great, Ralph Tresvant ear worm…
Sure, I’m aware, painfully aware that we are all exposed to different sources and degrees of information. But can that account for the entirety of the gulf between our experiences? Can that really explain the chasm between our responses? Something tells me that if they knew exactly how many students were mowed down in that hospital, they’d care precisely the same amount as they do about the massacre at Wounded Knee.
‘Out of sight, out of mind’, ‘Other side of the world’, ‘There but for the grace of La Di Da’.
Out of sight because you’re willfully squeezing your eyes shut as tight as physics allows. And the world? The world is really fucking small, you parochial pissant. And there’s sure as hell no godly grace separating people into categories of varying degrees of abuse. Or rather, if there is, then that’s an evil piece of shit god you’re following. But sure, if you think you’re above this dog dirt by divine decree, then yes, you’re definitely out of your god damned mind.
As am I, still stumped, unable to make any sense of it. Why do so few of us see our interconnectedness, while so many have no qualms in giving less of a fuck. Could it be as simple as a garden variety of personality disorders? The heart sleeved saps, The perpetually overwhelmed ostriches, The callous navel-gazing nitwits. Are we all stuck on predetermined tracks? I hope not. I really hope not. But we’re heading at a steady clip into very dark territory and very few seem to give a rat’s ass. So yeah, fuck if I know. Only thing I’m sure of is that this gut pit is growing. And growling. Perhaps it’s a gas that will soon pass.
Ok, better listen to Colin Moulding’s “Frivolous Tonight” on repeat. Hopefully muster up some tear-repelling laughter at the absurdity of it all, how bitter-sweetly shallow we humans can be, and take some solace in the fact that as simple creatures we might one day even be able to figure ourselves out.
Wendy Eisenberg: This year I moved into a new apartment with big windows and when I write, I write beside one of them, looking at what I can see of the unfolding city. New buildings slowly rise and interrupt my desk view of Manhattan, but my bed looks over southwest, over and out at the calm of the water, the Statue of Liberty, waving faintly between buildings so scaled in height they look like they’re built on the sides of a mountain, beneath the straining tumultuous mass of wizened clouds. Halfway across the world, the cities become the clouds, droned bombed into unknowing while we sit within some shallow rising. The battles over here that have always needed to be fought begin but so quickly move from a prowl to a perp walk, shrouded in sugary publicity, while over there, things still darken and darken past what was first believed to be the deepest possible darkness, darker every holiday while we are distracted, down into something turned on itself, imploded, droned, bombed out, stripped, pulled, mishandled, all supposedly in the name of protecting something I also am.
When I look back on my own history, it seemed like there was no way I could have been protected from the violence I endured. Those things were done like the night, intimately and we were one on one on one and the whole culture supports it, seduction and sexualization like that because young girls are beautiful more than they are people. In the world history of violence is the shadowy intimate infinite yesses of maintenance, of fear of our own imagination (true seduction). We worship our caginess about what we might lose. Or, we seem to favor a more abiding, more galling loss. It's no longer true that new things are better, and everything new looks like a cutout anyway. We discount the ability for everyone else to be people. Writing, in its infinite malleability, its windy procedure, can feel like a silent angelic hum before the falling earth. If you write anything well it's because you want other people to be mysterious to you. Now, things are not just unfolding, they are folding. It hurts to see.
This year has been a year of constant public music for me. It has coincided with the worst, at least the most visible, atrocities I can remember seeing in the world, on the internet, constantly and consistently. I feel like a baby. I only want sweetness. I only want things to not have happened to me when I was so young. I want everyone to be a baby holding a flower, slowly learning how to walk. I want nothing to happen to everyone, I think, but what I really mean is I want people to learn to skateboard, I want us to use scientific developments to help us transition, to stay on earth a few years longer, to let earth have winter, to rest. I don’t want the amazing developments of pathological people to be used for things that aren’t partially frivolous. Is anything more spare and unsparing, catalyzing and unfunny, then all these flailing tyrannies?
Sadia Shirazi: 31 December 2024. I moved across three countries and two continents. I wept while I packed, while I spackled the walls of my apartment, on the tube, masked on the subway, and on the train as it ran alongside the river. In one move, my boxes were sent by ship from a rainy island to a rainforest, one of its colonial outposts. In another, they traveled on an eighteen wheeler, coast to coast.
I had moved in the first place to the rainy island, I quipped, to have a front row seat to the dissolution of the empire. I didn’t expect that in its last gasps, it would set aflame so much of the world that I love.
Like fashion trends, racial slurs from the 80s had a real comeback. ‘P*** scum, go back to where you came from’. Weeks after arriving, I heard a slur in my office. Weeks before I went back, the whole country heard it being yelled in the streets by white rioters. I read that a seven year old child shouted it, while holding her mum’s hand. It is true that afterwards, anti-racist protestors flooded the streets and some riots were quelled. With death, it is in the wake of the funeral, it is said, that the mourner needs support the most, no longer busy with arrangements, the loss starts to settle, life begins to shrink, and grief expands. When the crowds have left, I wondered, self-satisfied, having said no to racists, no to Islamophobia, when a woman wearing hijab is spat upon on the street, when a Muslim child is reported, considered at ‘risk of radicalization’ by a teacher, when a Black elder is attacked by teen-agers, there will be no crowds. Racialization is a hefty word for something that is very ordinary in our lives, it suffuses our breath, it takes our young from us, our old, our time, our work, our love, our lives really. So much is being taken from us. We aren’t even allowed to say it aloud. I worry sometimes that we won’t even say it to ourselves.
At night, crossing the street, Zoona said tearfully ‘they’re cutting our flowers, in the bloom of their youth.’ I touched her shoulder, feeling the impotence of my gesture. I wished I could have fired off a round of artillery instead.
Something in me died this past summer when I read about young Mohammad Bhar petting an attack dog as it mauled him. Allah yarhamu. The twenty-four-year-old had Down syndrome and autism and kept saying ‘khalas ya habibi’, Enough, my dear. Enough. His mother did not know how he uttered these words, he had never spoken before. I wondered how the timbre of his voice sounded. She heard him humming afterwards, stimming to soothe himself. The story gets worse. It keeps getting worse.
Hannah told me there was a story like this in Haiti too, a gentle caress, a mauling, a liberation struggle.
It is now winter and people are still starving. Babies are freezing to death. Thirst and hunger in Palestine, and in Sudan, more than half its population is starving. There is record breaking hunger in the countries perpetrating the violence, too, in America, in the UK. Children are the most vulnerable. What does it do to parents to survive their children, to feel that they could not feed or protect them?
There were other moments, too. The time the anvil in my center disappeared, short-lived but still. Seeing noses belonging to my family surprise me on unfamiliar faces on the tube. Returning to Brooklyn and the embrace of my apartment. A first trip to Glasgow with my mother. She practiced the raga for months before, I worked and reworked the sound, space, and score. We translated the dirge together, My God how brutally this home, this house, full of life, was destroyed. Everybody will ask, what are these black and blue marks from? Kis kis ko nishan rassi ke, Dikhlaey gi Zainab. Ghabraey Gi Zainab. She recited the noha twice, in a closed workshop and then as an offering to a larger assembly. I was so proud. I sent a video to my Aunt. ‘There was so much pain in her voice,’ she said, ‘May Bibi accept her recitation.’
My mother says not to be Dracula, ‘har raat de baad, din vi honda,’ so I’ll end by saying just that, after every night, the morning comes.
Soraya King: This year the world ended every day. Justice didn’t arrive, but if you were looking, the old luminary lit a way for you within the movement. Everything was bad enough to make me a Bahá’í again. I woke up on new years day and followed up with someone. I saw with my own eyes a piece of head missing from a still breathing child, saw a reanimated twitch of a face whose ear is eaten by a starving cat, saw how a young man sounds looking at his own shattered leg—the general who'd ordered it stood in frame, speaking to the camera as if for a children’s broadcast about consequences. We saw that all who refused to leave are Hamas. And all who couldn’t, and all who did. I saw all the videos and evidence and commentary you saw, too. I fell into a plush love with the new year’s followup, and then fell again more jaggedly in a sawtooth pattern, like an atrial flutter on an ECG: not good. I listened to Neutral Milk Hotel’s Anne Frank album for the first time since I was a teen with a big brother — and again, when love curdled strangely. I identified the notches of the spine and some of a hundred branches of the brachial plexus on a dead physician in a cadaver lab. More corpses than accounted, there is not enough ink in the universe. To quote a friend: “I have no interest in looking away from this.” This is not separate from us. This is coming home.
I moved twice, and once had the privilege of saying I'm coming home. This is my optimism: that more people know what cords must be cut, that we North Americans alive now do know that everything that is doing this and stopping us from stopping it has to go: fired, dismantled. Cannot care, cannot cope, not up to the task. Even after it had been a year—this new year is the second of a kind, this year has already spiraled in on itself, and knowing this ought to turn our calendars completely—anyone who bickered about incremental improvement had to be lying, had to omit. The world is well beyond it, it being ill-suited to the world we want: One full of the possibility that American intelligence can be insulted.
I can actually feel optimism perched on my crown, its slick hook burrowing tick-like into my subcortical brain, as if it’s helping me draw breath. Likes are penny slots, and yet we feel we must mark the worst we've ever seen in our lives with a crude heart, begging. We’ve literally been here, in this new year, before—on one or another side of a trump-toned great American eclipse. This year, we were living with contradiction: justice didn’t deliver, and the year was a portal to a definite future for all species. This year, we will have to keep up till the west experiences the torque it requires to turn another way. I suddenly quit a job. I also learned I want to settle down. This year we will take everything we want, because right now things don't make sense. Here is my pessimism: This will not even slow climate change. But my healing still has something to do with your healing; how the world atones for all this unfathomable damage over the next year, the next 100, will matter. Then I saw a woman burning alive on the subway in new york city and did not look away. There was a man in front of her, on the bench, watching through the open doors; he got up to fan the flames. Through him we are not even spared an “encounter with the indecency of our position.” The famous almond torte from my friends that says “Get Over It!” is still in my freezer, which is surrounded by balloons from Yalda, which I hosted alone in a new place, with people I didn't know I needed. Another friend said they hoped my heart would keep breaking into smaller and smaller pieces until it dissolves into everything. In healing, money helps, like time, medicine, food, home, free life requisites, connection: the chance that you'll hear what you need exponentially greater if you have them. Imagine no questions asked, no hoops to jump through to prove you deserve what you get, if you can even speak. Last night, after carving a phrase into backlit sand at the club and leaving a few minutes after midnight, I had a dream: my favorite teacher, a good man, was partly buried in sand or toxic sediment, dead and then alive again, but only just. We brought him into the bombed-out hospital, and as we knew the tanks were approaching, the doctor gave us each one round green pill, his parting gift: to detach before we’re truly forced to.
Sasha Frere-Jones: Each time I visited 1 Police Plaza, arrested and temporarily in the care of the NYPD, I counted how many police officers were standing still and staring at phones. The lowest count was five, the maximum thirteen. The working area outside the male holding cell is just a little bigger than the cell. The walls and surfaces are either faded lizard green (I think) or chippy brown (I am sure). Cops can approach the big counter and hand in their paperwork or just hover and scroll. It is one of the most unpleasant work environments you can find in a city. I mean not that 1 Police Plaza is some major hell but instead one of the commonest small hells: cramped, too bright, and inhuman. Our cell seemed more livable (more air), except when a comrade decided to yell at the cops (pointless) or demand food (entirely contingent on which cop was holding the big church key).
As I watched footage of police walking past a woman as she burned to death inside an open subway car, I thought not of police but the civilians filming and watching alongside them. Since so many people have become bystanders—in print, in life, in their hearts—to the attacks raining down on Gaza and Lebanon and Syria, it seems prudent to suggest they consider becoming cops. All you need to do is play Candy Crush—inaction is rewarded. (The violent SRG types are a small cohort unleashed on protesters. The bread and butter cop is a zombie.) The bystander police officer gets a sweet pension and early retirement, so look into it, maybe.
