My 2024 in review

Subjects discussed: Every month, and how it went down

It was a long year. I suppose it was a good enough year, personally, though the war on Gaza and the re-election of Donald Trump provided plenty of doubts about the present and future. But like last year, I paid attention and I kept track—and before 2024 formally draws to a close, I wanted to share some words about my year in culture, and a few things that made an impact on me, whether they were released in 2024 or not.

One note: The date in parentheses is the day I associate with it. Sometimes, it’s the day I finished a thing; other times, it’s just the most representative day.

JANUARY

Adrienne Lenker - Bright Future (January 11)

A while back, Jen and I saw Big Thief perform at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, and I remember being so powerfully turned off by what felt like an oppressively self-serious atmosphere, how it seemed like the fans and band alike were trying to collectively wring profundity out of the evening without much success. I say “felt” and “seemed” because this was, obviously, was a lot of projection—I was probably tired, and sometimes you take that out on people you don’t know. But it’s true that despite their acclaim, I hadn’t connected much with Big Thief. That changed this year, when I was assigned to profile Lenker for the New York Times, and spent a few months digging deeper inside her records and history for a piece that, ultimately, I was very happy with.

What I’m admitting here is perhaps funny, but it’s true: For the most part, I end up liking the art of people I profile just a little bit more, not because I want these people to like me (perish the thought) but because I spend so much time with their life and work that eventually I come around to their point of view. It’s the closest I get to my experience of listening to music in high school, when my internet connection was terrible, and so instead of illegally torrenting records like my peers I often paid for them with the money from my part-time job. (Remember all of that?) Because I’d spent $15, I’d wear out every CD over and over, and become familiar with every single track, even the duds.

Taste and quality play their part, of course, and this time Lenker’s music really did click with me, and while I am just one person who talked to her for awhile, I found her to be rewardingly sincere and thoughtful in a way that reinforced the sincerity and thoughtfulness of her record. Watching her perform “Free Treasure” at a private show during the reporting process, I had that spark of recognition—as her fingers flitted gently over the strings, and her voice was unvarnished and true—that this song is just how I feel about my wife. “Time and attention,” as Lenker sings, is one component of love—and certainly, every piece of art can benefit when the audience has both to spare.

The Iron Claw (January 20)

The tragedy of the Von Erichs has haunted me ever since I became curious about wrestling lore, so the announcement of a splashy A24 biopic starring potentially underrated actor Zac Efron in an allegedly career-defining role seemed categorically interesting. I saw this on the coldest day of 2024, with my buddy Sam—another wrestling fan—who, unhelpfully, showed up right as the lights went down, depriving me of my favorite pre-movie activity: yapping. Don’t do this to your friends.

Both of us disliked the movie, sadly, and the issue remains that it’s just really difficult to communicate to non-wrestling fans why pro wrestling itself is interesting. I can barely explain, and I’ve tried. I imagine this is how architecture enthusiasts who disliked The Brutalist were feeling: No, no! I believe The Iron Claw pulled its punches out of respect to the surviving Von Erich brother, Kevin—its weird smudging of wrestling history also made for a worse movie, which is why I think larger audiences never really checked in despite all of the promotion and critical attention. The Wrestler is the last great piece of popular fiction about a pro wrestler, and I sort of believe it’ll stay that way forever. Afterwards, to shake off the disappointment, I purchased a book and read it at dinner by myself.

Minnesota Timberwolves d. Brooklyn Nets (January 25)

The unfortunate truth about sitting close at a sporting event: It’s that much better than the nosebleeds. Isle and I decided to splurge on better-than-usual tickets to see the Timberwolves (an exciting team) play the Nets (a stupid team). The week of the game, I got sick and wasn’t sure if I could make it; then, right as I recovered, Isle got sick and couldn’t make it. I was hellbent on using these tickets, rather than groping about for a refund, so Jen came with instead.

For some reason, I decided to take a mild edible. This was a bad idea. I was still shaking off the flu, and you don’t realize how loud a sporting event is until loudness is the last thing you want. The Barclays Center is so consistently noisy—at every moment, a dance troupe is going off or a mascot is firing t-shirts into the crowd, and the action never breaks. While I was trying to keep it cool, I looked around at the thousands of people in attendance and was struck by a terrible thought: Nobody here reads books. Maybe true, maybe not—either way, humbling to have a negative marijuana experience in my elder millennial age. Anthony Edwards was awesome to watch, though—it’s startling to look at a basketball court and realize one guy is faster and stronger than all of the other fast and strong guys. That must feel great!

FEBRUARY

Reacher (season 2) (February 10)

Reacher is one of a trillion television shows about vigilantes who are respectable and awesome, but what I like about this one is the protagonist’s antisocial affect—Alan Ritchson plays former military investigator Jack Reacher as extremely literal, and so fussy in his rituals that “is Reacher autistic” returns dozens of curious Reddit threads. On the record, no, but in the intro note to the first Reacher novel, author/creator Lee Child himself describes Reacher as “almost autistic,” so you decide. There is too much TV, and a lot of it is allegedly good, but I’m a man of simple pleasures: I like a propulsive whodunit with cracking camaraderie and straightforward payoffs. Reacher is the type of show where, when Reacher tells a bad guy, “I’m going to throw you off a helicopter,” you understand there is a 1000000000% chance that the bad guy is getting thrown off a helicopter at some point. It respects your time, you know?

Karla Suarez - Havana Year Zero (February 17)

Here is how I described Suarez’s novel for The Millions, in a post about my year in reading: “a disarming, sexy, and lightly meandering (said positively) novel about piecing together a mystery in order to improve your life, and failing.” I bought it randomly after browsing the aisles at The Strand, before I was due to meet some friends; a handwritten note from the prior owner had been left inside, which I always take as a sign. It took me a while to finish. Not to inappropriately go in on Suarez or her translator, who I know nothing about, but so many things tripped me up: it was 60 pages too long, the prose was a little too workmanlike every now and then, the plot kept going in circles, every character was mixed up with each other and the relationships were hard to track.

And yet: I liked it. I really liked it, in fact; the translation has this dreamy, desperate tone that placed me entirely inside Suarez’s version of Havana. None of the imperfections were enough to make me put it down, and I preferred it to many other technically perfect books I read that possessed a fraction of the spirit. I tried to feed this feeling back into my critical and creative practice, and be more honest when something was—or wasn’t—clicking for me on a gut level. I suppose it’s possible I’m getting soft, and my standards are low, and I’m giving so-so stuff a pass out of misguided decency—but I don’t think so, and even if that’s in fact the case, it’s my time and my dollar, not yours.

Resident Evil 7 (February 26)

I have, unfortunately, turned into that which I’ve always disdained: a man who plays video games in front of a beautiful and intelligent woman. Listen, okay, sometimes you and your partner are just hanging out, and you want to do different things, and you also don’t want to be in different rooms. She reads a book, I play a game; it works out fine. Also, I use headphones.

Sometimes, what I’m playing even catches her attention. Resident Evil 7: biohazard came out a while ago, but I only got to it this year, and it stood out because the game’s fundamental premise—where you, the player, attempt to escape a family of diseased and horrific inbreds in the rural South—is just a solid ripoff of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I don’t think video games are art—they’re more like well-made action figures—but aping one of the most iconic horror movies of all-time is not a bad way to give your game some sheen. Jen, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre stan through and through, didn’t mind.

MARCH

Percival Everett - James (March 1)

Writing is the least “feel-good” thing ever, so pardon me for enjoying a feel-good story, but: Watching Percival Everett receive his flowers, so to speak, was particularly delightful when James ended up being one of the year’s most celebrated novels. Erasure is canon in some circles—including mine—but many of his other novels have landed for the heads only. This baffled me, upon digging into books like So Much Blue and The Trees and Dr. No and Assumption and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (to name a few) because they’re so funny and smart and fun to read. James followed a crest of interest in his work due to the film American Fiction, and maybe because its premise—a retelling of Huck Finn through the eyes of the slave Jim—was novel, and easy to summarize. I thought James was very very good on first read, but the second go-through convinced me that it’s a crowning achievement in Everett’s bibliography—the type of book that benefits from being preceded by 20+ other books.

I read 20+ years of interviews and reviews of Everett, in order to prepare for an interview that never totally came to fruition. Here’s one quote among many that I set aside, a worldview that I don’t necessarily want to agree with but which sometimes feels very true: “Social injustice is not going to go away, so if you hate social injustice and love complaining about it, then this is the world for you.”

Dune: Part Two (March 9)

Something I appreciate about my mother is that she’s game to see every movie, because she respects the cinema. We have a long tradition of seeing a family-unfriendly film whenever I’m in town, like the time we went to Let the Right One In (the original!) on Christmas Eve or the time I convinced her to watch Videodrome. In March, I flew home to celebrate her birthday, and during a slow day the three of us—me, my mom, and her boyfriend—went to see Dune: Part Two, despite my being the only one who’d watched the first installment.

I thought about how to frame this. The lore of Dune is what’s kept me from fully enjoying the franchise, despite its profusion of qualities—authentic sci-fi action, subversion of familiar tropes, Oscar Isaac—I typically enjoy, and we were about to walk into the lore-heavy sequel. Standing in the lobby, I got it down to a tight three: “The skinny white boy is the would-be savior of this desert planet, the Fremen are the good guys and the Harkonnens are the bad guys, and also everything is a metaphor for colonialism and oil.” It’s important to play translator—we’re all coming from somewhere different, you know? They liked it, as did I.

Barry Lyndon (dir. Stanley Kubrick) (March 23)

At some point in our relationship, Jen and I started buying physical media — partly to reject the streaming economy, partly because it’s nice to own stuff you love. In particular, we’ll sometimes purchase a Blu-Ray of an “epic movie,” something 3+ hours that really deserves our attention on first watch. Barry Lyndon is one of the first movies I ever put on my old-school Netflix queue, way back in the day, but for some reason I just never got around to it. Well, nearly 20 years later there was a Criterion sale, and on a slow weekend we discovered Barry Lyndon was as wonderful as advertised. What a joy, really, that one is always capable of experiencing one of the best movies or books or albums (or whatever) that was ever made, on some random ass Saturday. Now we own this thing, and can revisit it whenever we want without worrying that we’re subscribed to the right service. I would recommend investing in your own personal film library.

APRIL

Dragon’s Dogma 2 (April 1)

Non-gamers don’t quite know this, but video games are better than they ever have been; IMO they are the one medium that inarguably improves as time goes on, where early iterations are often inferior to the latest model. This is a problem, inasmuch as video games are more addictive and culturally dominant than ever, so a conscientious gamer like me can’t help but worry about the millions of semi-formed brains mainlining this digital heroin at the expense of books or conversations. On the other hand: Wow, I love video games.

More and more, the challenge is to try something I’ve never played before, rather than default to familiar pleasures. Dragon’s Dogma 2, a fantasy game where you save a realm from a dragon—stop me if you’ve heard that one before—offered an intriguing wrinkle: Many modern games have gigantic maps, but DD2 forced you to walk every inch without being able to magically teleport between locations, as most modern games allow you to do. It’s like if you were on page 300 of a book, and in order to look something up on page 150, you had to manually re-read each page until you worked your way back. This made my time with DD2 unusually intentional—I spent hours tracing the same paths past the same locations, really familiarizing myself with this lush and lively world. Eventually I got bored of walking between the same two towns, and stopped playing — but months later, these walks do stick with me, an attempt to wrench the gamer’s frequently passive experience into something more engaged.

Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee (March 12)

Earlier this year, my friend Mariah asked for an album recommendation after admitting she doesn’t much keep up with new music; because her favorite band is the Replacements, I suggested the Cindy Lee record, which does not sound like the Replacements but does fall under the broad umbrella of “good rock music.” Close enough. Diamond Jubilee reminds me of why Mark said Physical Graffiti was Led Zeppelin’s best album: “The previous two albums were awesome, but each had just eight songs; Physical Graffiti has 15. It's math—when you are talking about songs from this period of the band, that makes it roughly twice as good.” I played Diamond Jubilee when I wanted to lose myself in a travelogue through underground rock history, this swirl of hooks and riffs and melodies that I could not distinguish by title but loved as a complete experience. The artist known as Cindy Lee did nearly no press, and the album was unavailable to be streamed for most of the year, and these anti-promotion efforts made Diamond Jubilee feel like a secret you needed to track down, even as it ended up being Pitchfork’s #1 album of the year. Another mantra for 2025: Hunt something down, then keep it to yourself.

X-Men ‘97 (April 19)

My novel, See Friendship, is about a writer given cause to interrogate his memory, but while I’m not immune to nostalgia I try not to be overly sentimental. Not everything about “back in the day” was better, it’s just that I was younger and didn’t have to worry about paying rent. I do not long for a return to this period; I find adulthood to be exciting, more or less, even when it depresses me. I don’t think I’m saying anything original or new here. But it does surprise and embarrass me that “my childhood” has remained such a strong component of millennial culture, even as we’ve hit our 40s. (Not yet for me, but I’m getting closer.) More and more, the reusage of familiar concepts is not part of some principled artistic pursuit, but fodder for a cheap pop of “Hey, I know that.”

As someone who grew up watching the X-Men cartoon from the ’90s, and who occasionally dips back into the comic books when they seem interesting, I would be the theoretical audience for the cartoon’s acclaimed Disney+ revival. Out of curiosity, I checked it out, and found the tone so strange—not quite a children’s show, yet obviously a children’s show because… it’s a cartoon about the X-Men? I suppose I was sort of horrified to see how much positive attention the show received, given its transparent appeal to the past. It’s right there in the name: X-Men ‘97, tunneling backwards in time to an era when the weekend cartoon slate was fresh, your mom made you treats, and your biggest issue was homework. I’m incapable of believing that reaching so frequently for childhood pleasures is a substitute for self-care, or whatever. Sorry to sound like a crank. I just worry sometimes, even though there’s obviously bigger things to worry about.

MAY

Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino) (May 10)

Tennis is partly my favorite sport because of its crazy-making potential: because the players compete one on one, without on-court coaching or “teams,” most players develop some cocktail of neuroses that spill over whenever something is wrong in a match. To love a tennis player is to understand them psychologically; I loved the Scottish player Andy Murray because when a match was breaking down, he’d start sarcastically yelling at himself and I’d think, Damn, I’ve been there.

Ergo a pop movie based around a tennis love triangle was always going to catch my attention, but Challengers delivered on its premise because of its strong lead performances (particularly Josh O’Connor, perfect as a swaggering and louche journeyman) and soapy plotting. Modern tennis isn’t undergoing a “crisis” or anything, but there’s an identity shift underway now that Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are retired, Novak Djokovic is the grizzled old veteran, and a new crop of players are trying to make their mark. Challengers hit theaters with perfect timing, right before Spanish phenom Carlos Alcaraz won his first French Open, and you could tell the players were all a bit surprised to be made cool by a piece of pop culture. Ten minutes into our screening, when the music was hot and the tennis was ripping, I leaned over to Jen and whispered, “This is the greatest movie of all-time.” I was joking, mostly, but this was the second best new movie I watched in 2024.

Neil Young live at Forest Hills stadium (May 14)

The first time I saw Neil Young perform was in college, on the Chrome Dreams tour, where he bisected his show into an acoustic and electric set and made such squalid, sick noise in the latter that I resolved to eventually see him again. To me, Neil is the premier torchbearer for the expressive potential of the guitar. To feint at an argument I don’t want to spend much time justifying, there’s a through line that leads from him to Thurston Moore and Kevin Shields, then to Jeff Tweedy and MJ Lenderman, and makes me think “hey, maybe rock n’ roll will never die.”

Fifteen years later, Jen and I went all-in on “nice” tickets to his Forest Hills show because we’re capable of doing math, and I don’t know how much longer he and Crazy Horse will be touring. The setlist was perfect, to my ears; if I made a personal playlist of “favorite Neil songs,” I estimate he hit about 70% of it. These songs have such sound and fury, even in his later years, and I felt inspired by how one can pursue and refine a craft over the course of many decades. It rained the whole show, and one woman spent most of the night shaking ass to every song, even the acoustic ones. At one point, the speakers went in-and-out due to technical difficulties, but the band kept ripping without missing a beat, extending “Hey Hey, My My” past its runtime and creating a hallucinogenic experience where the sound would be loud, then soft, then loud, then soft, then loud again. It’s an image I still recall: Neil and the Horse, framed by darkness and never quitting.

Gary Indiana - Do Everything in the Dark / I Can Give You Everything But Love (May 31)

My father’s brother has lived in Amsterdam for several decades, since emigrating as a young man; telling people “I’m visiting family in Europe” sounds very glamorous, which I don’t mind, even as I know it’s just hanging out with one Chicagoan and his wonderful Dutch wife, my aunt. I love the city, and would like to go as much as I can. Instead, I’ve been there three times in the last 16 years. Well, so it goes, but in the spring Jen and I were able to take a long vacation, and we spent nine days doing nothing but walking around and eating.

One book I read was Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana’s fictionalized account of his pre-9/11 NYC milieu, after the glory days of the downtown arts scene but before the city became financialized past an inch of recognition. The book is pretty cynical, and bleak in its depictions of how his friends turned out. Throughout the text, but Indiana directly admits to feelings of failure and despair about how he’d spent his life, even as that life is now idolized by many of my peers. Granted, in the foreword he acknowledges he wouldn’t write this book as an older and possibly better man. But in these pages, and in the pages of his memoir I Can Give You Everything But Love (which ended up being the final book I finished in 2024), he talks about his world like a bubble that still never managed to prevent the real world from seeping in—a heavily selective utopia, and barely utopian. I thought about Indiana a lot while wondering why it is I even read, watch, and analyze—hopefully not just to hear the sound of my own brain. I won’t be so gauche as to call him an “inspiration,” but no other writer I read this year made me think about everything with the same intensity.

JUNE

The Bikeriders (dir. Jeff Nichols) (June 23)

In an impulsive decision, Jen and I decided to sign up for Regal Unlimited, the monthly movie subscription that pays for itself after one ticket. We live in Brooklyn but are a short subway ride away from the closest Manhattan Regal , which means we can literally go from home-to-theater in 20 minutes if we hit the train right away. The goal was to become completionists about the summer slate of movies, to see basically everything that prompted one of us to go, “Huh…” during the trailers. We saw the Russell Crowe exorcism flick The Exorcism (a separate movie from Russell Crowe exorcism flick The Pope’s Exorcist). We saw the Kevin Costner Western passion project/boondoggle Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1. We saw the goofy Hunter Schaefer arthouse vehicle Cuckoo. I have fond memories of all these movies, truly. A long list of pictures you’d catch on cable and go, Hey, not bad.

Perhaps the best of these Letterboxd 3-to-3.5 star offerings was The Bikeriders, a homosocial retelling of ‘50s motorcycle gangs that understood something very basic about the movies: When your lead star is as handsome as Austin Butler, make him look cool and blow him up on the screen. I’m a sucker for movies about Chicago as it used to be, and it was great delight to watch character specialists like Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, and Norman Reedus throw on their best accents and vamp it up. It was the second movie we saw with the subscription, and justified the spirit of the endeavor: Whether at the theater or elsewhere, if it looks even a little interesting, just go.

The Bear (June 28)

Speaking of Chicago: I put off The Bear for as long as I could, but became curious after seeing—a few too many times, but it was good marketing—the clip where Cousin Richie sings along to “Love Story.” The first two seasons were very entertaining, and it’s always nice when, after experiencing most of a piece of pop culture through environmental osmosis, it manages to justify much the hype. I was less keen on the third season, which felt underwritten and narratively revanchist; I don’t need forward motion from my televised entertainment, necessarily, but I do need more story than “our most charismatic characters banter with each other,” which may as well be an episode of The Great British Baking Show. Still, seasons 1 and 2 are worthwhile; even a scene filmed at Alice’s, my favorite karaoke bar in the city, captured the environment with respect. The Bear is a vision of white ethnic Chicago that is not true to my own experience, but it’s better than the suburbs—although, as I think about it now, the creator of the show actually is from the suburbs. Well, I don’t want to think about it too much.

In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar-Wai) (June 29)

Last thing about where I’m from, I think. As someone born in Chicago who now lives in New York City, I’ve spent most of my life in the two cities which are used most by the right as evidence that urban life is failing and crime is up. Well, I love it here. I’ve never felt like New York is the only place I could live, but it’s the place I love living the most, and the day we’re priced out of the housing market and are forced to move will be a disappointing one.

One example: My little cousin visited at the end of June, and we took her out for a perfect day that unfolded more-or-less spontaneously. We ate at Superiority Burger; we thrifted in the area; we spent a few hours at the Strand; then, we poked into an IFC Center screening of In the Mood For Love, which she’d never seen. The air conditioning was broken in the main theater, which felt like a billion degrees, just like Wong Kar-Wai’s steamy vision of Hong Kong. It’s a simple thing, I know, but what a delight, walking off the street into one of the greatest movies of the 21st century. We almost went to a party afterwards, but she was tuckered and my phone was dead so we just called it a day. I’ll take as many of those days as I can get.

JULY

Seven Samurai (dir. Akira Kurosawa) (July 13)

Film Forum ran an Akira Kurosawa series this summer, and on the opening day of Seven Samurai, Billy and I showed up about about a half hour before the movie began. We were second in line, which allowed us to secure some wonderful seats, and I watched with delight as a group of six or seven guys entered the theater right as the lights went down, and were force to split up in order to find their place. I know some people struggle with executive function, but the inaugural screening of the most popular movie of one of the acclaimed directors of all-time—you’ve got to plan better, if you want to sit with the bros. I shouldn’t take pleasure in other people’s bad choices, but I’m a Virgo; I live my life in order to avoid such situations.

My phone was buzzing right before the movie ended, and when the lights went up, I checked my screen and immediately turned to Billy: “Trump got shot.” In the lobby, we spent a little time on our phones, then walked to a nearby Italian restaurant. The rhythm of the conversation for the next hour and a half was like this: “Yeah, Toshiro Mifune always breaks my heart… man, what the fuck is going to happen?” It did kind of seem like the election was settled, that evening. The substitution of Kamala Harris onto the ballot would provide some ultimately false hope, but it’s a night that Billy and I will share forever: walking around the West Village in a daze, our thoughts divided between Kurosawa’s portrayal of these doomed, noble men and the tragic state of our tragic country. Funny to think that the assassination attempt ended up mattering practically nil, in the scope of things.

Last Summer (dir. Catherine Breillat) (July 28)

The tensest movie I saw this year was not Longlegs or Trap or Speak No Evil or The First Omen but Last Summer, Breillat’s film about a middle-aged woman who has a sexually explicit affair with her teenage stepson. There are scenes shot under such clandestine circumstances, filmed at sexy angles that seem to expose their lovemaking in plain sight, that one is constantly thinking: Surely this is the moment everyone learns this lady is fucking her teenage stepson??? Ah!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! No spoilers, but be careful you who watch it with. It was also the best new movie I saw in 2024.

Revealing the cover of See Friendship (July 30)

My novel See Friendship is out on March 4, 2025. Kirkus, in its review, called it a “frequently funny meditation on memory and loss,” featuring characters “totally of their time.” Some other nice things people have said in recent weeks:

“Jeremy Gordon has written The Savage Detectives for the post-Facebook era. Wonderfully funny and astonishingly intelligent, See Friendship explores that painful impact of shame and secrecy as well as the slipperiness of memory. Gordon is a brilliant observer of a media industry, and with tremendous subtlety, he traces the effects of that industry from broad social currents down into the granularity of a single human life. A stunning first novel.” — Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans and Filthy Animals

"See Friendship is a lot like the internet—a dishy, highly addictive portal into the human psyche. Jeremy Gordon has written a tender debut about the enduring pull of adolescent friendships, how we grieve in the digital age, and the ever-shifting role of the writer in society. If America truly is 'on its way out,' as a barfly in the novel’s opening argues, I’m grateful we have Gordon to make sense of the wreckage." — Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy

"A wry, insightful debut about friendship and the Internet, ambition and embarrassment, and how well we can ever know one another." — Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

"See Friendship perfectly captures grief in an era when our digital pasts make even the dead feel heartbreakingly present. With a propulsive voice and an intimate charm, Gordon explores love and memory and what is lost when we air them to an audience." — Lydia Fitzpatrick, author of Nights All Night Long

“Witty and gentle, large-hearted and urbane, Gordon’s book simultaneously brings back and burnishes lost time in the same way hearing that album you loved best when you were seventeen does – the one that soundtracked your first love, the one you still know every word to. Sounding all the right notes, See Friendship is a wonderful debut.” — Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue

In July, I got to launch the cover, which triggered a wave of positive feedback—I mean, look how nice that is. Sometimes covers are bad, but in this case I couldn’t be happier. Announcement of my book events are forthcoming, and I apologize in advance for how promo-centric this newsletter may become in the next few months—like the makers of Reacher, I will attempt to respect your time.

Also, please: preorder the book here / email me if you are a “member of the media” who would like to do something with it.

AUGUST

Trap (dir. M. Night Shyamalan) (August 3)

I’m not interested in talking to anyone who thinks Trap is “bad”—upon rewatching over Christmas break, I was even more impressed by Shyamalan’s meticulous direction and Josh Hartnett’s insanely well-calibrated performance in the lead role. There’s a funny thing with the music, too, where Lady Raven and her pals (Kid Cudi as queer rap pioneer The Thinker, Russ as the soft-spoken crooner Parker Wayne) are so bland in sound and style that the movie delivers some unintentional commentary about the hollow center of the modern pop machine, where the songs are trite and the instrumentation dull and yet the fans care so much because this is just how people live now. “Lady Raven comes off as weirdly unemotional”—well, yes!

I say “unintentional” because Lady Raven is Shyamalan’s real-life daughter who is also an aspiring pop star—one far less popular than her cinematic counterpart—so I don’t think the director was trying to wink an eye about how his daughter’s music is bad. But that’s the joy of art, you know, these oddly poignant resonances that transcend intention. This was the best movie we saw with the Regal pass, in the summer.

Army of Shadows (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville) (August 13, August 16)

My favorite movie I saw in 2024 altogether, though, was Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, which screened at Film Forum for several weeks. Upon seeing it with Billy and some other friends, I liked it so much that I went back three days later with Jen, and liked it even more upon having familiarity with how Melville sets up every beat and character. The movie is about a group of Resistance fighters in Vichy France, people who were normal citizens before the occupation but are now conscripted into spycraft and skullduggery. Their intentions are noble, yet Melville paints their efforts as sort of pointless. It’s never quite clear what their missions are, what good they’re doing, if anything makes a difference. Most of the characters end up dead. Everyone is living desperately. Yet they also don’t really have a choice, the movie suggests—their need to push back is as ingrained as their need to breathe air. It’s the mirror reverse of The Conformist, which was possibly the best movie I saw in 2023, where a man makes endless compromises in order to get along, and ends up losing his soul.

Bret Easton Ellis - The Shards (August 14)

I exist in the exact milieu where people are always talking about their theories of art, how they approach each medium and what they seek from it, and the older I get the more I think: Well, it depends. Sometimes I’m looking for this; other times, I’m looking for that; not every experience need be the same and I always appreciate diversity in my consumption. A type of book I tend to like is a micro-genre I call “more book,” when an author locks in on their tone, and sustains a plot for several hundred pages on the strength of that tone, which may be circuitous and meandering yet achieves a weirdly hypnotic effect the longer you spend with this voice. I know he’s not popular these days, but Haruki Murakami’s best work achieves this. A Little Life achieves this. “The Part About the Crimes” in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 achieves this. If it doesn’t make sense, well: In my defense, I just made this up. But I know it when I see it.

I’d never really seriously checked out Bret Easton Ellis’s fiction. I know his Twitter, obviously, but American Psycho bounced off me, and his reputation as doyen of the monied Angeleno class never turned me on. Earlier this year, my friend Megan mentioned that she’d also never been an Ellis fan, either, but that The Shards blew her away. Not long after, I came across a cheap copy in my local used bookstore, and decided to go for it. It ended up being one of the best books I read all year, this masterful and immersive autofictional murder mystery that spends several hundred pages setting up all its elements before an explosive climax. Reviews of The Shards seemed to be mixed, and I get it—it’s provocative, and sloppy in parts, but holistically the book added up to a moving whole, or at least I was moved. I went back to read Ellis’s breakout novel Less Than Zero, whose genesis is somewhat part of The Shards, and didn’t care much for it—and that was another revelation, this proof that writers may always transcend their youthful buzz and eventually knock out a genuine banger.

SEPTEMBER

Watching Taylor Fritz at the U.S. Open (September 3)

One of my favorite experiences in sports is watching an underachieving player “put it together.” Something clicks, their mental game catches up with their physical ability, and all of a sudden they’re—to use a technical term—kicking ass. I have sympathy for the situation, I suppose. Professional athletes are subjected to so much scrutiny, maybe more so than artists (which is a little goofy, if you think about it). Every week, commentators and fans speculate on whether some 22-year-old is living up to their potential—and judge them harshly for not meeting expectations. Maybe I was wasting my potential at 22, but SportsCenter didn’t run segments where a bunch of rich guys in suits called me a loser.

Taylor Fritz is a tall, handsome man from Southern California who has long been earmarked as a future tennis star; his development has come in spurts, though, and many times I’ve watched his matches and just thought, “It seems like you should be better.” Then, magically, he seemed to put it together in 2024, where he started winning more, and became the first American male to make the U.S. Open final in nearly 20 years. The U.S. Open is wonderful because 1) it takes place where I live 2) the New York crowd is appropriately rowdy, and really happy to throw their support behind a player who’s peaking. Fritz won some epic matches—my favorite is when he smacked down perennial villain Alexander Zverev—and though he got totally smoked in the final, I walked away thinking he should be making finals for years to come.

The War on Drugs live at Forest Hills stadium (September 13)

Free tip to anyone who needs it: As a couple, it’s important to have date nights. Friends are important, but monogamous partnership is about getting deeper with one another. Sorry to be a little trad about it, but I like hanging out with my wife—sue me. Speaking of which:

That’s right. Anyway: A wonderful publicist hooked up Jen and me with tickets to see the War on Drugs at Forest Hills, right where we saw Neil Young, and it was a similar experience. Some people say The War on Drugs are “dad rock,” a catch-all term for “guitar music enjoyed by uncool older people,” but I think we’d all be better off by forgetting the labels. It’s 2024—reject categorization, and embrace yourself. The Drugs, as their fans call them, are the perfect synthesis of momentum and feeling; their best songs feel like sprinting with the breeze in your hair, or maybe you’re the breeze moving towards the sprinters. Like their spiritual forefather Bruce Springsteen, they wring meaning from a group of recurring concepts and sensations: darkness, dreaming, the ocean. Music to get lost in, without feeling stuck in place. Afterwards, we walked to a nearby Latin American restaurant and I drank a margarita the size of my head—perfect night.

Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) (September 29)

I can’t say if Megalopolis is “good”—I really can’t, which means it’s possibly not. However, I do know that seeing it on the big screen was unlike any other theatrical experience I had in 2024—that I was awed and overwhelmed by the imagery and ideas, even as I couldn’t be sure what they added up to. I appreciate when a movie demands that I get on its wavelength, rather than the other way around. In his Criterion Closet appearance, Coppola compared the spirit of Megalopolis to Jacques Tati’s Playtime, which Jen and I have tickets to see on New Year’s Day. Possibly one is better than the other, but maybe they come from the same place—two directors willing to risk it all, to no reward and much ridicule.

OCTOBER

Metal Gear Solid (October 3)

Modern gamers have on-demand access to so many video games, not just those of the present but those of the past. Sometimes, I’ll download a game from my childhood, only to discover that it’s now basically unplayable: The mechanics are out-of-date, the story is embarrassing, the graphics are prohibitively ugly. Sometimes, you can’t go home again.

But playing the original Metal Gear Solid—not a remastered edition, but the game exactly as I first played it as a tween—was a fascinating and rewarding experience. The gameplay does hold up—and the story, with its focus on the military-industrial complex and post-Cold War geopolitical landscape, is shockingly adult, even as the narrative is filled with typical video game nonsense (like a cybernetic ninja who’s also the adopted brother of—well, it’s worth explaining). I had a newfound flicker of appreciation for encountering this game at a young age; it wasn’t all slop, it turns out. I think all video games should force their players to really think about the military-industrial complex and the post-Cold War geopolitical landscape.

Industry (October 6)

I had not watched the first two seasons of Industry, and still have not—it doesn’t matter. Dropping into the third season with no context besides what I prodded Jen to explain was a wonderful experience, and my pointed rebuke of “catching up.” I’m not going to watch two seasons of television just so I can watch another season of television. Get real. This is another mantra for 2025: to pick it up as I go along, rather than insisting on full awareness.

Lancelot du Lac / The Devil, Probably (dir. Robert Bresson) (October 14)

Jen was out of town for work, and I woke up the morning she left with a terrible case of cat allergies, so I decided to get out of the house and spend most of my day at Film Forum. They were showing a Robert Bresson retrospective, and I calculated that I could essentially book a double feature with no layover by seeing these particular movies in a row. Lancelot du Lac, his austere take on the Arthurian mythos, was wonderfully bleak; The Devil, Probably, his story about existential French teens coming to terms with the failures of society, was depressingly bleak. I fell asleep in both movies, but only a little.

The better experience, though, was when the lights went up on The Devil, Probably, and I ran right into my younger coworker Elise, also there by herself; it turns out we had the same idea. A few months before, I’d prodded her to start going to Film Forum and seeing whatever happened to be playing—and now, here she was. I felt, strongly, that I had accomplished something good in this world, if I could inspire someone to spend their day off at the movies.

NOVEMBER

Un reve plus long que la nuit (dir. Niki de Saint Phalle) (November 5)

Election night, for the rest of my life, may be a miserable affair; I’d prefer to take a sleeping pill and sleep until morning, which I may explore next time. This year, Jen and I conjured a plan: We would see the only narrative film made by the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, and then we would get dinner, all while trying to avoid looking at our phones. Well, that failed around the time we sat down for our meal, and already it was looking like Kamala was cooked. In retrospect, the electoral outcome made the film—about a young girl who’s magically forced into adulthood, and learns immediately that the world is controlled by industrialists and rapists—that much more poignant. I don’t have more to say about what happened that hasn’t been covered in articles, and posts—as one man, approaching the future, I continue to work on shedding my naivete while attempting to remain as gentle as I can. Let’s see how that goes.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (dir. Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer) (November 8)

In the immediate wake of the election, I didn’t feel like doing much of anything; Jen and I canceled our plans and were prepared to huddle up for as long as felt necessary. But my friend Matthew texted me that he was thinking about making a last-minute trip to NYC, and asked if we could put him up. Hosting him ended up being the right decision. Jen made dinner, I whipped out the vodka, and we just had a long night of shooting the shit that felt deeply necessary. Of course it was important to see our friends, and avoid falling down the rabbit hole. Late in the evening, we decided to throw on the Lonely Island’s satire of modern pop stardom, a movie that never fails to make me laugh, and it felt so relieving to unselfconsciously crack up, given the seriousness of the week. You can’t ignore reality, but community and communal catharsis—it matters, now more than ever.

Conclave (dir. Edward Berger) (November 15)

As I write this post, I realize it was a movie-heavy year, and it was a book-heavy year. In particular, I went to the theater a lot, and sitting in the darkness is similar to concentrating on a text: It’s you, your thoughts, and what you make of this attempt to show you someone else’s world. Conclave is a bitchier, more Catholic version of a reality TV show—so they say—but I was surprised by how moved I was by Ralph Fiennes’ performance, his quiet strength in this unlikely scenario, his ongoing doubts about his faith. Watching this play out, I thought, for the first time: I understand why someone would convert to Catholicism. In retrospect, I don’t know what the fuck I was talking about, but such is the power of the movies. I hope it sweeps the Oscars.

DECEMBER

Sunset Boulevard (dir. Jamie Lloyd) (December 8)

I thought it would be “funny” to see the Broadway adaptation of one of my favorite movies ever. Lesson learned: Never commit to the bit. I’ve been learning this lesson for my entire life, and yet I still need to internalize it. We left at intermission, and went to a restaurant where what we presumed was a jazz band instead broke out into Uncle Kracker’s “Follow Me” while a group of people in Santa hats slow danced. This was more moving to experience than the play.

Floating Points - Cascade (December 11)

Right before the holidays, my friend Aaron had a birthday party up in Hudson, near where he lives. Jen wasn’t feeling well, so I took the Amtrak up north by myself, and had a lovely afternoon in a cozy bar that I’ve described as “the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks, but nice.” On the way back, I was not not drunk, and felt like Don Draper as we whooshed back to the city in total darkness. The whole time, I listened to the latest album from the electronic producer Floating Points, and felt like I was one with the train. A weirdly meaningful experience, enveloping myself in those sounds at that speed. Again, I’d been drinking, but I was momentarily convinced to move upstate if it meant having a similar experience in the future. In the light of day, I concede this is probably not a good reason to move to the suburbs.

Here (dir. Robert Zemeckis) (December 20)

Watching the trailers, I was convinced Here would be bad, and was shocked to discover it was not. Zemeckis has his flaws: My buddy Eric called Here “a conceptual turd with AI spectacle replacing depth or emotion, a Natural History Museum exhibit through a Kennedy Liberal's view of white US modernity,” none of which is technically inaccurate. But I was surprisingly moved by its depiction of the passing years, and what any one person’s life may amount to. And the visual concept is genuinely impressive, a masterwork of storyboarding that demands its actors perform like they’re on the stage, rather than the screen.

I think a lot about death—who doesn’t?—and at the end of the year, looking ahead to the future, I only want to make choices that I can stand by, that will hopefully not fill me with regret in the future. I think I’m doing better than the protagonists of Here, and that’s enough for now.

A couple of final thoughts:

• Please preorder my book: You will like it, I guarantee. And if you don’t, I’m sorry.

• The best thing I ate this year was a piece of pickled herring at a famous Amsterdam eatery whose name I don’t remember

• If you made it to the end, I love you