A bunch of things I loved in 2021
Kamisaka Sekka, from A World of Things. 1909-10.
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I’ve been working on some year-end retrospective things for work lately and maybe it’s just the contrast to how darkly dramatic 2020 and especially its conclusion were, but I’ve been having a hard time sort of taking stock of the past year. I guess I’m generally skeptical of annual narratives and the weird combo of nostalgia and blame we tend to heap onto them, and it’s also possible I’m just tired and ready to take a little time off and drink some hot wine while this one winds itself down. But it does feel distinctly more difficult to try to distill some sense of what it all meant in 2021.
I was talking to my friend Doug recently and we were discussing how when things go south on us in whatever way, one of the worst aspects and something that is perhaps underestimated in its toll is that life still just kind of plods along and you have to live with the results day to day and in that sense it is all kind of dumb and boring and exhausting on top of whatever more acute harms we have to endure. This year felt kind of like that, maybe more than others. A Slate critic, building on a New York Times column from April, described 2021 as “the Great Languishing.”
Things were surely better this year than in 2020 by some set of metrics, but then again, were they really? We’ve been slogging through this long tail of the pandemic, and although many of us are far safer than we were in 2020 thanks to the vaccines, more people in the US have died this year than last. With the rise of yet another variant and failure to vaccinate countries in the Global South, it’s beginning to feel like we’re stuck—stuck back where we started. Similarly, the drumbeat of climate disaster kept going all year, heat waves, flooding, fires. (If you haven’t, be sure to check out this New York Times feature “Postcards from a World on Fire.”) Authoritarianism marches ahead, which in the US looks like Republicans continuing to slowly disassemble democracy and human rights piece by piece, and Democrats continuing to disappoint on every front in response. So we say ah holy shit this is all pretty fucked up and then we have to go to work in the morning or make the grocery list or whatever.
I periodically think about this album from the early 00s by the Pernice Brothers called The World Won’t End, but it’s a real downer of a record lyrically so you get the sense that the title is meant as more of a complaint than a reassurance. The world won’t end.
On that note, I bring you the best of 2021!
It’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine. One posi thing is that I was actually looking at last year’s end of year post and I made a list of all the tools and rituals I wanted to bring with me from the first pandemic year into this one. And a lot of those things continue to serve me pretty well, including prioritizing reading, taking a minute to acknowledge when I’m having a hard time, talking to friends and family, not working on the weekends, and other stuff. And some new things too. Here are some of them.
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Books I loved
- Year Book, by Seth Rogen
- KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, by JMR Higgs
- My Heart is a Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones
- Last Days, by Brian Evenson
- Undoing the Demos, by Wendy Brown
- The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, by Mariana Enriquez
- They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, by Hanif Abdurraqib
- I Got a Monster, by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg
- Under the Influence, by Robert H. Frank
- The Blade Between, by Sam J. Miller
- All We Can Save, ed. by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson
- No One Else is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
- Dune, by Frank Herbert
- The Will to Change, by bell hooks
- The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti
- Intimations, by Zadie Smith
Comics I loved
- The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison (reread vols. 1 and 2)
- Uzumaki, by Junji Ito
- The Cursed Hermit, by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes
- Rohner, by Max Baitinger
- Flayed Corpse and Other Stories, by Josh Simmons and friends
- The Complete Dirty Plotte, by Julie Doucet
- Sound of Falling Snow, by Maggie Umber (reread)
- Mirror Mirror 3, by Haejin Park et al
- Loud!, by Maria Llovet
- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine
- One More Year, by Simon Hanselmann
- Seeds and Stems, By Simon Hanselmann
Music I loved
- Low, Hey What
- Olivia Rodrigo, Sour
- Arooj Aftab, all, but especially Bird Under Water
- Taylor Swift, Red (Taylor’s version)
- La Femme, Paradigmes
- Kacey Musgraves, star-crossed
- Lucy Dacus, Home Video
- Tewksbury, Paths
- Indigo De Souza, Any Shape You Take
- Lido Pimienta, Miss Colombia
- Injury Reserve, By the Time I Get to Phoenix
- Slothrust, Parallel Timeline
- The Weather Station, Ignorance
- I DONT KONFORM, Sagebrush Rejects
- BADBADNOTGOOD, IV
- RADWIMPS, Your Name
- beebadoobee, Fake It Flowers
- Julien Baker, Little Oblivions
- Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee
- Noctule, Wretched Abyss
- Dry Cleaning, New Long Leg
- Waltzer, Time Traveler
- Viagra Boys, Welfare Jazz
- Kills Birds
- Drug Church, Cheer
- King Princess, all
- Suss, Night Suite, and more
Television I loved
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (yip yip)
- Broadchurch
- Brand New Cherry Flavor
- Counterpart
- Detroiters
- Emily in Paris
- Hacks
- I Think You Should Leave
- Lovecraft Country
- Loki
- Mrs. Fletcher
- Night Manager
- Wandavision
- Sex Education
- Succession
- Top of the Lake
- Insecure
- Y: The Last Man
- White Lotus
Movies I loved
- Another Round
- Atomic Blonde
- Booksmart
- Black Widow
- Holy Motors
- I’m Your Woman
- Empty Man
- Satan’s Slaves
- Nomadland
- Nobody
- Personal Shopper
- Kate
- Shiva Baby
- Night House
- Werewolves Within
- Your Name
- Weathering With You
- Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
- Rare Exports
Podcasts I loved
- Aack Cast by Jamie Loftus
- The Codcast
- The Ezra Klein Show
- Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Heavy Leather Horror Show
- Longform
- The New Yorker Radio Hour
- Resistance
- Wireless Nights
- You’re Wrong About
- Floodlines
- The Slowdown
Newsletters I loved
- Anne Helen Peterson
- Tamiko Beyer’s Starlight and Strategy
- The Overhead Wire
- Flow State
- Heated
- Hot Take
- Adam Tooze
- Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Roxane Gay
- Welcome to Hell World
Articles I loved (maybe not loved but you know what I mean)
Hundreds of companies pledged to stop cutting down forests and did not succeed, nobody wants to live in a smart city, the youngest known chief in the history of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is a climate champion, freeway expansions are still displacing people of color, Baby Tate, The Daily subjected millions of listeners to filthy lies from ExxonMobil, all COPs are bad, the seven day week is fake, more than half of police killings are mislabeled, kids will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, Republicans and industry are making it illegal for cities to pass laws that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the guitarist from Pearl Jam builds skateparks in Indian Country, Bill Gates uses his money to steer Africa toward GM seeds and industrial agriculture, young people think humanity is doomed, baby poop is full of microplastic, ghost forests on the East Coast, Jon Stewart can be such an asshole, David Sedaris can be such an asshole, Doreen St. Félix on Michael K. Williams, California’s carbon offset program is a mess, “I am worried, that’s an understatement — and I feel ill,” wells are drying up in California, the fossil fuel industry is destroying our future, climate scientists describe one awful future scenario as “Trump World,” tequila gentrification, New Hampshire’s “Fyre Fest” of overnight camps, Oscar (Zeta) Acosta never got the credit Hunter Thompson owed him, an amazing season for the Phoenix Suns, devastating flooding in Germany and Belgium, drought is making Lake Mead unrecognizable, one billion marine creatures cooked to death in their shells, “It’s a wage shortage,” roving packs of marijuana smoking teens, a deadly “redneck Rave” in Kentucky, “I feel like I’m in Hell,” “superheated pavement,” a “cataclysmic day” for fossil fuel companies, “the pandemic is just the final straw,” Stephen Graham Jones’s open letter to conventions hosting Native writers, ANOHNI on NFTs: “I think it’s shit,” 30 Boston cops each made over $300,000 last year, fare-free buses in Boston, supergentrification, the “open concept bathroom,” what Hanif Abdurraqib can’t live without, Black cartographers have long practiced “counter-mapping,” draconian laws target fossil fuel protests, ecocide should be an international crime, the biggest protest movement in US history, the pandemic erased entire categories of friendship, and finally, kill the filibuster.
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OK this is the last one for the year and will actually be the last one for a couple of weeks as I give myself some Fridays off during the holidays. I know this is always a hard time of year for a lot of us and honestly it is a hard time to be a human in general, so do whatever you have to do and get some rest and spend some time with loved ones, albeit with some added measures of caution. I’ll see you all on the flipside and we’ll do it again and there will be a lot of bad stuff but also there will be some good stuff and we will commiserate and celebrate together.
Jingle jangle
Tate