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All the movies, podcasts, books, albums, and TV that made us feel a little more human this year.

The cover for Cutting for Stone, the album art for Esther Perel's podcast, and a poster for the HBO show Somebody Somewhere.

Anna Lind-Guzik, Founder

Best Thing I Read: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. It was my first time reading Verghese, and I've added him alongside Chekhov to my mental list of favorite writers who are also doctors. It's an epic novel mostly set in a hospital in Addis Ababa, with unforgettable characters and a stunning historical backdrop. The bodily detail can be gruesome at times, but the characters' humanity is what sticks with you.

Best Thing I Watched: When I want to cry-laugh and feel things, I watch Somebody Somewhere, created by Bridget Everett. It's a quiet show set in rural Kansas about chosen family, grief, and vulnerability. The series just ended on HBO, but I hope it gets picked up by another network for more seasons because it's a beautifully moving story with characters that feel so real, and aren't like any you'll find elsewhere on TV.

Best Thing I Listened To: I went deep on relationship podcasts this year, and *ugh* they were genuinely helpful with personal growth. Because I'm a nerd, I looked for academics and practitioners to teach me, and the top two I turned to were Reimagining Love with Dr. Alexandra Solomon and my longtime fave, Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel

A poster for the TV Show "Tell Me Lies" with a closeup of a woman's face, the album art for Shaboozey's "Where I've Been, Isn't Where I'm Going," and the cover for Zora Neale Hurston's "You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays."

Kovie Biakolo, Contributing Editor

The Best Book I Read: You Don't Know Us Negroes And Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston has been one of my favorite reads this year, even though I'm not quite done with it yet. It's an essay collection that covers almost every facet of Black American folk culture from church and church going to dance to the politics of race and gender, showing Hurston as every bit of the all-rounder she truly was. Reading it with 2024 eyes, Hurston's writing easily allows you to place yourself in the time and landscape of the early 20th century she wrote in, but there's an authenticity and love to her writing about culture that transcends time.

The Best Thing I Watched: Tell Me Lies Season 2 is an amazing feat, considering it is only eight episodes and the second season has come two years after the first. For a show that jumps timelines between present day and the past lives of Millennial college students, it traverses a lot of serious issues, from sexual and emotional abuse to grief to murder. But if it sounds so serious you couldn't possibly enjoy it, you'd be wrong, because almost every episode manages to keep you on your toes and keep you invested in the outcome of a story largely depicting a bunch of deeply flawed—or really terrible—people.

The Best Thing I Listened To: I've listened to Shaboozey's "A Bar Song" on repeat a lot, so I have to give it a shout-out along with the album, Where I've Been, Isn't Where I'm Going, which I think is doing interesting things in genre-bending country, similar to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter. Along with these, I have to give a nod to Esther Perel's podcast, which is among the best out there, teasing out contemporary platonic and romantic relationships matters from sex to grief to family, unpacking a lot of taboo topics with clarity and empathy. 

The movie poster for "I Saw the TV Glow," featuring a child sitting in front of a glowing pink TV set; the album art for I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy; and the cover for Mating by Norman Rush.

Marissa Lorusso, Newsletter Editor

Best Book I Read: Mating by Norman Rush. A friend recommended this 1991 National Book Award-winning novel to me with such enthusiasm earlier this year that I couldn't resist. It tells the story of two Americans in Botswana—a woman who's in graduate school and a man who's an anthropologist and is trying to start a matriarchal society in the desert. They fall in love, work alongside each other, argue about politics and gender and history—it all makes for a long, immersive, heartfelt, and genuinely unique novel.

Best Thing I Watched: I Saw The TV Glow. Even if you only interpret it as an allegory for the fear, isolation, and regret that can sprout up when we ignore serious questions about our gender identity, I Saw The TV Glow is a deeply moving film in a league of its own. But then there's everything else the film tackles, too, right on its surface: life in the suburbs, the way our tastes shape our identities (and vice-versa), pivotal teenage friendships. Together, these themes and subtexts all add up to a brilliant and strange viewing experience I kept close to my heart all year. (Plus its soundtrack, filled with original songs by an impressive slate of indie-rock luminaries, is pitch-perfect.)

Best Thing I Listened To: I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy. The punk band, led by Marisa Dabice, has been churning out an impressive blend of confrontational rock, gauzy guitars, and razor-sharp pop melodies for several records. But their latest is an impressive level-up, filled with moments of iridescent beauty alongside the kind of righteous rage I needed to sustain me this year.

The album art for NPR's Code Switch, the Netflix poster for K-drama "Chicken Nugget," and the bright purple book cover for Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store by Paola Velez

Kiera Wright-Ruiz, Social Media Manager

Best Book I Read: My favorite book this year is Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store by Paola Velez. Paola is such a force in the kitchen. Her imaginative recipes like thick'em (an ultra thick cookie) and plantain sticky buns (!!!) make me ecstatic to preheat the oven.

Best Thing I Watched: I LOVED Netflix's Chicken Nugget. In this K-drama, a woman steps into a machine and accidentally transforms into a chicken nugget. It's absurd, funny, and, oddly, moving.

Best Thing I Listened To: Whenever I listen to NPR's Code Switch, the episodes tend to linger and give me something to chew on for days or even months afterward. Their episode from January called "Taylor Swift and the era of the 'girl'" is something I keep revisiting. It's about those who get to embrace girlhood and those who don't.

Gina Mei, Executive Editor

Best Book I Read: As I've already sung the praises of Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario, which was easily my most haunting read of the year (and perhaps my life), I'll choose The Future of War Crimes Justice by Chris Stephen as another equally depressing 2024 favorite. I found it to be a super digestible and straightforward look at the history of war crimes justice, and all the reasons (mostly bureaucratic, all utterly enraging) that so few war criminals have ever been tried for their crimes, let alone convicted. For something lighter, My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman was an enjoyably strange, genre-bending book that even got me out of a writing slump. For something in-between, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney seems to have become her most divisive book to date—but personally, I thought it was her best.

Best Thing I Watched: My film/TV consumption this year skewed very international, and with movies, often independent, which led me to a lot of what one Letterboxd user dubbed "freaky movies for freaks"—appropriately, in their review of 2022's Babysitter. Directed by and co-starring Monia Chokri, the film is strange and horny and feminist to its core, as much a playful skewering of casual misogyny as it is a psychedelic fairytale about exhausted motherhood. Combined with an utterly delightful performance from Nadia Tereszkiewicz as Amy (the titular babysitter), and a perfect one-and-a-half hour run time (bring back movies that aren't exclusively 3-plus hours), it's also a total technicolor feast, worth a watch just for the visuals alone.

As far as TV goes, I've started dabbling in more K-dramas this year, and ended up watching Netflix's The 8 Show, which drew a lot of comparisons to Squid Game when it first came out. I'm here to tell you: The 8 Show is much, much darker, and far more violent, and somehow, an even more scathing critique of the power that money affords and denies us.

Best Thing I Listened To: "Don't Forget Me" by Maggie Rogers was one of my most-listened to songs of the year, and has not once failed to make me feel something when I listen to it. But overall, I didn't listen to as much new music this year—although Faye Webster's new album Underdressed at the Symphony was a notable exception, and is filled with gentle tunes perfect for basking in all your sparkling melancholy.

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A grid image of various books, movie and TV posters, and album covers, on a light green background.

The Best Things We Consumed in 2024

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(For you to add to your 2024 TBR pile.)

Book cover for Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Before reading this novel, I’d somehow missed that Shakespeare had a child named Hamnet, who died of the plague in 1596 at the age of eleven, four years before Hamlet was written. Seems relevant! Only the bare bones are known about Shakespeare's wife, Agnes/Anne, and their kids, and Hamnet is O'Farrell's lyrical recreation of their 16th century family life in Stratford-upon-Avon. The storytelling is so vivid and captivating, you won’t miss their most famous relation.

Anna Lind-Guzik

The Guest by Emma Cline

Like everyone else in New York, I flew through The Guest when it came out last summer. A story about a woman in her 20s after she's been kicked out of her boyfriend’s house in the Hamptons, she pleases her way through strangers’ homes, grasping onto the life that she once had. She was in no way a relatable character—but it was fascinating to me how this woman could so easily sell a narrative and transform herself into what various people want.

Victoria Rosselli

Book cover for The Guest by Emma Cline.

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow

My favorite book this year was How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow. It’s a story about women friendships, the heartbreak of breaking up with those close friends, and Kyoto. Throughout the book, Leow weaves their personal experiences, like of being a tour guide and making jam from a thriving persimmon tree, as metaphors on loss and the joy of finding yourself despite it. I have never read a book that so beautifully put the feelings of losing a female friend on a page (including the painful grieving process). Every word felt refreshing and I kept repeating to myself, “This is me.” But as much as it’s about friends, it’s equally about Japan. With every page, I yearned to explore Kyoto and soak up everything it has to offer, even if my heart breaks a little in the process.

Kiera Wright-Ruiz

Shy by Max Porter

If you are interested in how identity and childhood shape our experiences of the world, you will love Max Porter's Shy, a novel that begins with its young protagonist leaving a boarding school for troubled boys in the middle of the night and heading for the river with a backpack full of rocks. What I loved is that Porter continuously disrupted my expectations of what would come next. The author—who holds a masters degree in feminism and performance art—writes about boyhood, toxic masculinity, and the existential crisis of growing up in today's gendered world in a way that incited an emotional and visceral reaction in me, offering the flip side of my own experience growing up as a girl in the US. It made me question and look at things with a new light; and the ending was so cinematic and powerful that I cried in public reading it!

Elyssa Dole

Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones

I hate to say it, but it's much rarer these days that a book really knocks my socks off. I blame myself for this. My attention span has waned, my burnout has deepened—both things that have made it harder for me to really sink myself into a good book. This was not the case with Easy Beauty. It was kismet: Entirely by chance, I started reading it while in Italy, where a large portion of the memoir takes place, making it an especially vivid read. But even if I'd been in the middle of the Pacific, I would have devoured this gorgeous memoir. Chloé Cooper Jones' writing is just sumptuous; her memoir equal parts sharp, tender, brutal, and funny. A breathtaking exploration of "otherness," and how each of us is complicit in upholding it, even as the "othered"; but likewise how we might be able to push back and subvert the narratives given to us.

Gina Mei

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A tiled grid of books: The Guest by Emma Cline, Shy by Max Porter, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, and Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper-Jones.

The Best Books We Read in 2023