Best of 2025 (so far)

Books

  • Elle Reeve, Black Pill, 2024 (Non-Fiction: Reeve explores the emergence and evolution of extremist digital movements, examining how fringe ideologies migrated from obscure corners of the internet to the forefront of public discourse. Through vivid accounts of events, such as violent attacks and conspiratorial movements like QAnon, the book uncovers the unsettling ways these ideas have permeated both virtual and real-world spaces. Yet, as Reeve argues, the momentum of these ideologies persists, reshaping societal undercurrents in increasingly insidious ways.) Recommended.

  • Scott Turow, Presumed Guilty, 2025 (Fiction: As a former trial lawyer with more than twenty cases to verdict, I found Presumed Guilty to be one of the most authentic portrayals of courtroom procedure in contemporary fiction. Turow extends his narrative well beyond legal strategy, crafting characters whose complexities rival those in the finest literary fiction—an achievement possible only for a writer who has both lived fully and observed human behavior with honesty and empathy.) Recommended

  • Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea, 2024 (Non-Fiction: Though typically not a fan of historical fiction, Sides's chronicle of Captain Cook's last voyage—woven from a variety of archival sources—demonstrates a narrative flair that underscores the expedition's broader significance, infusing drama and discovery into each page.)

  • Miranda July, All Fours, 2024 (Non-fiction: All Fours is not a book I would easily recommend, though I am oddly glad to have read it. Its narrator is self-involved, plaintive, and morally unmoored — the sort of person I instinctively avoid. And yet, she feels disarmingly real. Her interior monologue offers an unfiltered glimpse into the mind of — though she resists the idea of gender — someone who clearly understands her condition as particular to women nearing middle age. She is hard to like, but she reveals a truth: we want what we want, our thoughts can be cruel, and sometimes the only fitting response to unwelcome change is to scream into the night...)

Movies

Series

Music

Videos and Channels

Articles

  • Jerome Groupman, “Why Hasn’t Medical Science Cured Chronic Headaches?,” The New Yorker, August 11, 2025

  • Nick Paumgarten, “A Fan’s Notes on the Spectacle of Super Bowl Week,” The New Yorker, March 3, 2025 (“The Super Bowl may well be the last great vestige of the monoculture: it’s the pop event that most Americans, whatever their beliefs, circumstances, or motivations, can gather around. It’s hard to think of anything that comes close, unless you count Christmas. Like Christmas, it is by no means immune to the culture wars, but its popularity seems to be….”)

Poems

  • Sasha Debevec-McKenney, “What Am I Afraid Of?,” The New Yorker, March 3, 2025 (“…The doctor told me there are two kinds of people: unhealthy people who refuse to get help, and healthy people who always think they’re dying.….”)

Twitter

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Websites

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