For an indeterminate number of years I’ve wrapped up each year not with a “best of” list but a slightly different way of taking account: thinking about the art, ideas, and internet that stuck with me most from the previous 12 months. I call it my “most resonant” list. Here’s 2025.
I’m going to start immediately by cheating and invoking an idea I first came across before 2025, but thought about a lot this year: Andrew Garfield’s notion that grief is unexpressed love. One surprising thing for me about experiencing acute grief for the first time this year was a sense of gratitude—the extent of my devastation made clear to me that I loved my person even more than I’d previously comprehended, which was a lot. What luck, and what a privilege, to find someone to love that much for as long as I was able to love her.
I’d never read much historical romance before this year. What I’d encountered in the past wasn’t to my taste, or was frankly just bad. But in 2025 I learned of two authors, Meredith Duran and Lisa Kleypas, who write genuinely excellent books in this genre. Working my way through their oeuvres helped me through some rough patches in this difficult year. The titles and covers of their books are in a style specific to the genre that I personally find cringe-inducing (probably some internalized misogyny there), but in my opinion the actual substance of the books is great. If I worked in publishing I would commission a sharp illustrator like Olimpia Zagnoli to make new cover designs for both of these authors’ best books, reissue them with new titles, and watch the money roll in as a new demographic discovers excellently wrought historical romance. (I have clearly thought about this too much. Take this free idea, publishing people!) Start with Duran’s Duke of Shadows and Kleypas’ Ravenels series.
The two movies that stuck with me most were Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. I once heard Ryan Coogler respond to an overly-deep question about Black Panther by saying he was just trying to make a movie he’d want to see, and damn, he is so good at it. The best way I can explain Sentimental Value is that if you took 10 people to see it, each of them might feel it was written for them in one way or another.
I also really loved the James Gunn Superman this year, and its heart-piercing-in-these-times depiction of the most truly American superhero: the immigrant trying to do the right thing, starting with insisting that every life has value. A scene of Superman flying down to rescue a squirrel before it gets crushed is the skeleton key to that whole moral universe. The dog was also really good.
The book I read this year that stuck with me most was Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which follows the life of a house in western Massachusetts through a few centuries of existence. It’s a masterpiece of form and voice, and a reminder to consider the past lives you’re surrounded by every day—as well as the life of the land beneath your feet.
The internet that stuck with me most this year was the facilitation of in-person organizing against the fascist regime in America (which is maybe not fun but is the truth). I appreciated Indivisible, the Mamdani campaign (especially new tactics like the scavenger hunt, an experiment in the kinds of community-building we need), and lots of ingenious anti-ICE organizing across the country.
Two cultural properties that were surprise juggernaut hits made me feel optimistic about art, and the people making it, for the first time in a while. It’s a miracle that K-Pop Demon Hunters and Heated Rivalry ever got made—and got made with the specific, winning choices that no profit-minded industry executives could have thought to dictate in a million years. Here’s to everyone making the exact niche thing they want to exist, largely as they envisioned it existing, and seeing it touch tons of people. You are living the dream and we’re all better off for it.
The plum you’re going to eat next summer doesn't exist yet; its potential lives inside a tree you'll never see in an orchard you'll never see, will be touched by a certain number of water droplets before it reaches you, by certain angles of light, by a finite amount of bugs and dust motes and hands you'll never know. The plum you are going to eat next summer will gather sugar, gather mass, will harden at its center so it can soften toward your mouth. The plum you're going to eat next summer doesn't know you exist. The plum you are going to eat next summer is growing just for you.
