Year in Review: 2025
Continuing my year-end tradition, here are a few (mainly cultural) highlights from the past 12 months:
Cultural Outings: Summer trip to NYC with the kids — nothing like it. Smalls Jazz Club, The High Line, Little Island, Ellis Island, Bryant Park, “A Century of the New Yorker” at the New York Public Library, ”Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at The Whitney, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” at The Met. Here in STL, my wife’s exhibition “Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation + a few trips to hear the St. Louis Symphony, including at the newly renovated Powell Hall.
Reading — Fiction: The best novel I read this year was one I’d had on the list forever: “Middlemarch” by George Eliot. Everyone was right. Others I enjoyed: “James” by Percival Everett; “The MANIAC” by Benjamin Labatut; “Vera, or Faith” by Gary Shteyngart”; “The Emperor of Gladness” by Ocean Vuong; “Assembly” by Natasha Brown; “Perfection” by Vincenzo Latronico; and “The Summer Layoff” by Matt Bucher.
Reading — Nonfiction
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Affairs: “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad and Zadie Smith’s “Dead and Alive: Essays,” two of the most incisive books I read in 2025.
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Design & Visual Arts: “The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History” by Maggie Gram; “Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible” by Sophie Lovell; “A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design” by Matt Owens; “Diane Arbus: In the Beginning” by Jeff L. Rosenheim; “The Use of Photography” by Annie Ernaux; “Q&A” by Adrian Tomine; “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop” by Vikki Tobak.
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On the Job: “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent” by Robert A. Caro; “All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art” by Orlando Whitfield; “I Regret Almost Everything” by Keith McNally; “Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service” by Michael Lewis; “Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance” by Atul Gawande; “Why I Cook” by Tom Colicchio; Richard P. Rumelt’s “The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists” and “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters” (one passage).
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On the Media: “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” by Graydon Carter; “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America" by Michael M. Grynbaum; “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live” by Susan Morrison.
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Technology: “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI” by John Warner; “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company” by Patrick McGee; “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” by Keach Hagey; “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” by Sarah Wynn-Williams; “Source Code: My Beginnings” by Bill Gates.
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The Rest: “The Revolutionary Genius of Plants” by Stefano Mancuso; “A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck” by Sophie Elmhirst; “All That Happiness Is: Some Words on What Matters” by Adam Gopnik; “My Life in Middlemarch” by Rebecca Mead; “The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success” by Susan Dominus.
Movies: “A Real Pain”; “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; ”Sentimental Value”; “All We Imagine as Light”; “Nickel Boys”; “Sorry, Baby”; ”The New Yorker at 100”; “Perfect Days”; “Black Bag”; “Away We Go”; “The Brutalist”; “The Martian”; “F1.” + A bonus rewatch of Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” with the kids.
TV: The four-episode “Adolescence” was unforgettable — made with extraordinary humanity and skill. Others I enjoyed: “Task”; “Mare of Easttown”; “Eastern Gate”; “The Lowdown”; “Righteous Gemstones” (all seasons); “Ludwig”; “A Man on the Inside.” The Conan O’Brien/Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize show had some fantastic guest segments. As always, the latest “Great British Bake Off” season was a family fav.
Podcast Episodes: The Rewatchables on “High Fidelity” and “Kicking and Screaming”; Dissect’s “The Most GENIUS Number Bars in Rap History”; and You’ll Hear It’s “Why Jazz Musicians Love Hip Hop.”
Music: Enjoyed new records from Jeff Tweedy, Ben Kweller, Wednesday, Earl Sweatshirt, Clipse, and Lucy Daucus, as well as the newly released “Nick Drake: The Making of Five Leaves Left.”
To close, with well wishes for the coming new year, here’s one of a few versions of “Saturday Sun” from that Nick Drake box set of unaccompanied demos, studio outtakes, and previously unheard songs.