The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

In the final months of his presidency, Joe Biden visited Angola. He was there to tout billions in US investment in a project called the Lobito Corridor—a railway linking the country to Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo—and, in turn, land a light punch in our new cold war with China.

As I read about the visit, I had been listening repeatedly to “Red Dust” by billy woods, the idiosyncratic rapper from New York City. He may not be a household name, but woods is increasingly the face of a certain strain of hip-hop—even if he blurs his actual face in all public photos and videos.

Woods has been hailed in the Oxford American (“brilliant”), New York magazine (“a master of his craft”), and the Guardian (“the awesome mind of billy woods”), among others. As a solo artist, head of the label Backwoodz Studioz, and collaborator, woods has been working for decades. Mostly, he’s created underground, off-the-beaten-path rap. But more notoriety came in recent years—especially because of collaborations with ELUCID as Armand Hammer.

He famously grew up moving between Zimbabwe and the United States. His mother was a professor of English literature, and his father was a Marxist scholar who worked in politics. Perhaps this background is what leads his songs to hit on a dissonance that has been heavily on my mind in 2024: the difference between what the US says about the world and what the world says about itself.

As with most woods’ songs, I cannot sum up a clear meaning in “Red Dust”; it’s a menagerie. But a few lines had stuck in my head. Early on, woods raps:

Knock the plane out the sky
Spark the genocide
Let’s see who gives who a place to hide

You might be surprised (you might not!)

Woods here is referencing the 1994 killing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which ultimately led to the genocide of over 1 million people. (This year marked the 30th anniversary.) Upon first hearing the line, I was struck by the haunting parenthetical about who would aid who in a crisis (you might not!). When I was listening this year, I thought a lot about the “you.” It makes the listener complicit in the horror. You ask yourself: Where would I hide? Who would I hide? Would I be surprised in myself? In others?

In “Red Dust,” the speed at which woods moves from the global historical to the personal always stuns me. And this year, this particular gift struck me as an important one—it provided clarity as world events hit home. For how long, and for how many years, have (certain) Americans convinced themselves that history happens to other people? The consequences of this solipsism have been stunning.

In woods, I often hear the aching sadness perched as nonchalance—the barely restrained rage—of someone who knows that tragedy in textbooks happens to real people: your neighbors, your friends, and you.

As I read about Biden’s visit to Angola, woods was stuck in my head once more. As I skimmed the usual raft of clips in the mainstream press, I could not help but notice how the past relationship between the two countries was discussed. Some articles mentioned battles between the former Soviet Union and the US in Angola and the new “rivalry” with China. But I saw almost no mention of how—rather famously—the United States helped the apartheid regime of South Africa invade Angola during the 1970s.

I wouldn’t call this elision repression of a known truth or even self-censorship. Instead, it seems as if we are choosing to let the truth slip away from laziness. Our role in Angola was simply another piece of Cold War realpolitik—one of many fights, a few more foreign deaths, masses of money and arms spent sprinkled in some far-off land—which, at the end of the day, was so common it’s a bit hard to keep track of how it all happened.

After reading about Angola, I came back to his song “Cuito Cuanavale,” about a late 1980s battle in the country.

In it, Cuba fights alongside Angola against South African forces. In his writing, woods connects that warfare to Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, China’s modern push into Africa, oil, and Robert Mugabe. The most punching line for me in the song is a sigh: “History will absolve me,” woods says, maybe referencing the famous speech by Fidel Castro, followed by a half-thought: “Probably.”

Woods is the only rapper I know who writes about that part of American history. And this year, it was impossible not to see the US in that light.

It was woods I thought about while editing our coverage of the US’ role in Israel’s war in Gaza. In particular, I thought nearly every day of these lyrics to “Soft Landing”:

A single death is a tragedy, but eggs make omelets
Statistics how he look at war casualties
Killin’ is one thing, what sticks is how casually
Nonchalant, 5 in the morning, what I grew up on

I listened to woods on a long bike ride home after seeing the film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which poetically explains America’s role in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Democratic Republic of Congo. (If you’re interested, I have been following up on the film by reading The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid; it is a fantastic look at CIA meddling in the name of the Cold War.)

Put simply, this is the gift of woods. He is an obsessive, but cautious, raiser of the history many want to forget. I have continually sent around a long quote he gave in a recent interview on how random the rules of our current order can be. These few paragraphs might best explain this year—and many years to come:

Things seem like they can only be so until they’re not, you know?

My family left Zimbabwe in late 1989. In 1988—again, I was a child, but from a very political family—there was no sense in my mind that South Africa was any closer to collapsing than Israel. And within a few years apartheid rule had collapsed in South Africa. We can have a separate conversation about what came after it, but apartheid rule did indeed collapse. Majority rule came into effect, and for that to happen a lot of people died throughout the entire southern Africa region. And here we are, however many years later, and Israel is actually bigger and more powerful than it was at that time. So it just goes to show that sometimes things are not as far away as they seem, and sometimes things that seem on the verge of happening end up being far away—or they’re never going to happen. [Laughs.] Nobody knows what is under the surface.

Think of all the forces, energies, and waves of history that it took to bring about the transformation of the Republican Party into a Donald Trump cult of personality. It goes back through the Tea Party to when talk radio was dominant in the nineties. I remember going into a friend’s house, and their mom would be listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would just be droning on for hours, and I’d be like, “Is this for real?” The presentation was different from the traditional presentation of right-wing politics that I had seen up to that point. At that time Bill Clinton was president, but before that, there had been three straight terms of Republican presidencies. So all of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.

When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

In the final months of his presidency, Joe Biden visited Angola. He was there to tout billions in US investment in a project called the Lobito Corridor—a railway linking the country to Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo—and, in turn, land a light punch in our new cold war with China.

As I read about the visit, I had been listening repeatedly to “Red Dust” by billy woods, the idiosyncratic rapper from New York City. He may not be a household name, but woods is increasingly the face of a certain strain of hip-hop—even if he blurs his actual face in all public photos and videos.

Woods has been hailed in the Oxford American (“brilliant”), New York magazine (“a master of his craft”), and the Guardian (“the awesome mind of billy woods”), among others. As a solo artist, head of the label Backwoodz Studioz, and collaborator, woods has been working for decades. Mostly, he’s created underground, off-the-beaten-path rap. But more notoriety came in recent years—especially because of collaborations with ELUCID as Armand Hammer.

He famously grew up moving between Zimbabwe and the United States. His mother was a professor of English literature, and his father was a Marxist scholar who worked in politics. Perhaps this background is what leads his songs to hit on a dissonance that has been heavily on my mind in 2024: the difference between what the US says about the world and what the world says about itself.

As with most woods’ songs, I cannot sum up a clear meaning in “Red Dust”; it’s a menagerie. But a few lines had stuck in my head. Early on, woods raps:

Knock the plane out the sky
Spark the genocide
Let’s see who gives who a place to hide

You might be surprised (you might not!)

Woods here is referencing the 1994 killing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which ultimately led to the genocide of over 1 million people. (This year marked the 30th anniversary.) Upon first hearing the line, I was struck by the haunting parenthetical about who would aid who in a crisis (you might not!). When I was listening this year, I thought a lot about the “you.” It makes the listener complicit in the horror. You ask yourself: Where would I hide? Who would I hide? Would I be surprised in myself? In others?

In “Red Dust,” the speed at which woods moves from the global historical to the personal always stuns me. And this year, this particular gift struck me as an important one—it provided clarity as world events hit home. For how long, and for how many years, have (certain) Americans convinced themselves that history happens to other people? The consequences of this solipsism have been stunning.

In woods, I often hear the aching sadness perched as nonchalance—the barely restrained rage—of someone who knows that tragedy in textbooks happens to real people: your neighbors, your friends, and you.

As I read about Biden’s visit to Angola, woods was stuck in my head once more. As I skimmed the usual raft of clips in the mainstream press, I could not help but notice how the past relationship between the two countries was discussed. Some articles mentioned battles between the former Soviet Union and the US in Angola and the new “rivalry” with China. But I saw almost no mention of how—rather famously—the United States helped the apartheid regime of South Africa invade Angola during the 1970s.

I wouldn’t call this elision repression of a known truth or even self-censorship. Instead, it seems as if we are choosing to let the truth slip away from laziness. Our role in Angola was simply another piece of Cold War realpolitik—one of many fights, a few more foreign deaths, masses of money and arms spent sprinkled in some far-off land—which, at the end of the day, was so common it’s a bit hard to keep track of how it all happened.

After reading about Angola, I came back to his song “Cuito Cuanavale,” about a late 1980s battle in the country.

In it, Cuba fights alongside Angola against South African forces. In his writing, woods connects that warfare to Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, China’s modern push into Africa, oil, and Robert Mugabe. The most punching line for me in the song is a sigh: “History will absolve me,” woods says, maybe referencing the famous speech by Fidel Castro, followed by a half-thought: “Probably.”

Woods is the only rapper I know who writes about that part of American history. And this year, it was impossible not to see the US in that light.

It was woods I thought about while editing our coverage of the US’ role in Israel’s war in Gaza. In particular, I thought nearly every day of these lyrics to “Soft Landing”:

A single death is a tragedy, but eggs make omelets
Statistics how he look at war casualties
Killin’ is one thing, what sticks is how casually
Nonchalant, 5 in the morning, what I grew up on

I listened to woods on a long bike ride home after seeing the film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which poetically explains America’s role in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Democratic Republic of Congo. (If you’re interested, I have been following up on the film by reading The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid; it is a fantastic look at CIA meddling in the name of the Cold War.)

Put simply, this is the gift of woods. He is an obsessive, but cautious, raiser of the history many want to forget. I have continually sent around a long quote he gave in a recent interview on how random the rules of our current order can be. These few paragraphs might best explain this year—and many years to come:

Things seem like they can only be so until they’re not, you know?

My family left Zimbabwe in late 1989. In 1988—again, I was a child, but from a very political family—there was no sense in my mind that South Africa was any closer to collapsing than Israel. And within a few years apartheid rule had collapsed in South Africa. We can have a separate conversation about what came after it, but apartheid rule did indeed collapse. Majority rule came into effect, and for that to happen a lot of people died throughout the entire southern Africa region. And here we are, however many years later, and Israel is actually bigger and more powerful than it was at that time. So it just goes to show that sometimes things are not as far away as they seem, and sometimes things that seem on the verge of happening end up being far away—or they’re never going to happen. [Laughs.] Nobody knows what is under the surface.

Think of all the forces, energies, and waves of history that it took to bring about the transformation of the Republican Party into a Donald Trump cult of personality. It goes back through the Tea Party to when talk radio was dominant in the nineties. I remember going into a friend’s house, and their mom would be listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would just be droning on for hours, and I’d be like, “Is this for real?” The presentation was different from the traditional presentation of right-wing politics that I had seen up to that point. At that time Bill Clinton was president, but before that, there had been three straight terms of Republican presidencies. So all of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.

When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Is there any good and normal way to be on social media? It seems like a silly thing to ponder. But against the backdrop of increasingly unhealthy platforms, all the clamoring for our attention with aggressive algorithms and useless information, the question can be clarifying. What the hell are we still doing on this? Is there any hope online?

One affirmative answer could be: Amanda Petrusich.

Now, it isn’t surprising that the writing talents of a staff writer at the New Yorker extend to social media. But discovering Petrusich’s Instagram is like encountering a refuge from artifice. And after stumbling upon her account a little over a year ago—a period that saw a string of not-so-gentle moments in my own life—it’s Petrusich’s window into the private plateaus and valleys of life after her husband, Bret Stetka, suddenly died in 2022 that repeatedly hit me like a brick ever since.

The result has been, to my mind, a rare meditation on grief that avoids the typical trappings of the genre: frustrating platitudes, the insistence that it’s All! Going! To! Be! Okay! That such refreshing authenticity takes place on a platform otherwise teeming with performance makes it all the more extraordinary, each caption seemingly inviting followers to join her on the strange path of bearing it all.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by amandapetrusich (@amandapetrusich)

This applies to Pestrusich’s posts about the acute difficulties of single parenthood to all the small joys that make it that much easier to endure. The occasional martini, the thrill of a sunset after a slog of toddler illnesses, a terrific coffee mug. You see it when Petrusich expresses gratitude for community, even when loss feels everywhere. Because here is an Instagram page that isn’t trying to sell me anything; there are no buttons to smash or sponsored tote bags to purchase. None of it is excessive or performative. It’s just real stuff about hard shit, which in 2024 on Instagram is close to a miracle.

You may not know Petrusich personally. You may not even be familiar with her New Yorker criticism. But follow her on Instagram and you can’t help but root for her. So I reached out to her, the one good and honest Instagram user, about all this. Here she is below in her own words:

I can’t identify the exact moment I stumbled upon your Instagram. But I recall being immediately taken by your openness—what felt, to me, this rare invitation into private corners of grief. Can you take me through your decision process or willingness to be public about your experience?

I started seeing a trauma therapist right after Bret died, when I was still in a state of acute shock and disorientation. I would sit on his little beige couch, unshowered, in the same disgusting sweatshirt I’d been wearing for who knows how long, and he would take his glasses on and off and command me, over and over again, to grieve. At the time, I found this approach aggressive, nearly ridiculous—I was grieving! All I was fucking doing was grieving! Yet I eventually came to understand that directive—grieve—as crushingly profound. Grief is an active process and you have to participate in it with purpose and clarity. Otherwise, your body will do its best to fight the feeling off, like a virus. 

“There’s a funny kind of freedom in being blown apart. Perfection is impossible, and also far less appealing.”

The whole culture of grief, insomuch as there is a culture of grief in America, is hyper-fixated on survival, on ideas of triumph and subjugation, moving on and getting over it. I’m not sure any of those things are possible or even desirable. That way of thinking also leads to a funny kind of binary: Either you’re okay or you’re not okay. Whereas the reality of grief is that you will be both very okay and very not okay. I think maybe the way that I post on Instagram sort of speaks to that duality a little—you know, here’s a picture of a record I love, and here’s a really good martini, and here’s my kid doing something cute, and now I am sad again, and here’s another record, etc. Grief is braided into my life. That works for me—letting it in rather than pushing it out.

In the beginning, I was trying to understand my own loneliness, too. I was living in the woods with a cat and a baby, both beloved and glorious creatures, but also nonverbal, needy, mysterious—the only words my daughter knew at the time were “Mama,” “Dada,” and “wow.” I had never lived on my own before. Bret and I had recently moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley, near where I was born and brought up, but all of my closest friends were still an hour away in the city. Even before Bret died, it had felt like an unusually cloistered and quiet moment in our lives. There were random pandemic restrictions in place. We had a newborn; I was working from home. Then the person I’d spent almost every day of the last 20 years with was gone, quickly and irrevocably, as though he had fallen through a trapdoor. Instagram is not an ideal platform for earnest emoting, but it was easy and immediate and available on my phone. I wanted to be honest about what I was feeling because I was hungry for connection and because not being honest felt antithetical to the work of grief. It has also been useful for me in terms of eradicating or at least softening my own shame about feeling sad.

From afar, you seem to write and think about all of this with such remarkable ease. Personally, I really struggle to get real with my emotions when writing; I find myself constantly reverting to weird forms of self-deprecation. How do you get there? 

Gosh, that’s incredibly kind—thank you. One thing I’ve learned in my career as a critic is that art only works if it’s true. It just has to be true. Over time, I’ve come to recognize tenderness and vulnerability as things I consistently value and seek out in other people’s work, and I think that has made it a little easier for me to embrace them in my own writing, though there are definitely times where I feel sheepish or embarrassed about being so…present. But for me, losing Bret was so raw—so transformative, so terrifying, so inexplicable, so overwhelming—that I just became disinterested in anything that felt too careful or mediated or false. Because, you know, life is completely insane! I think a lot about a line from Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” a perfect song about yearning and ache and hope, where he sings, “Losing love is like a window to your heart / Everybody sees you’re blown apart.” There’s a funny kind of freedom in being blown apart. Perfection is impossible, and also far less appealing. Once you’ve lived through catastrophe, it’s easier to be, like, “Oh, who cares!” about almost everything else, including potentially embarrassing yourself.

“Losing Bret was so raw— so transformative, so terrifying, so inexplicable, so overwhelming —that I just became disinterested in anything that felt too careful or mediated or false.”

What have the responses been to your posts on grief and losing your husband?

Just extraordinary. I am assuming most people follow me because they have read my music criticism in the New Yorker, not because they know what happened to my family, but it’s been beautiful to see how many really hang in there for the other stuff, too. Grief is a universal experience, but we’re all so ill-equipped to navigate it, and especially to navigate it alone. Yet there are very few places where we can navigate it together.

I’m a magazine writer; I’m not an influencer or a therapist. I never imagined that I would be involved in any sort of public dialogue about grief. But it really helps to hold our darkest and most lonesome feelings with other people, especially in ways that maybe aren’t overly prescriptive or results-oriented. Sometimes it’s useful just to pipe up and say: “This sucks. This hurts and feels bad. If you are also in the weeds, I’m here and I get it.” I am so stupidly grateful to have connected with so many grieving people via social media, a medium we all recognize as generally toxic and fucked. I joke around that there should be a grief support program similar in structure to AA, where you get a sponsor, you work the steps, you take it one day at a time. When you need to, you go to a meeting and sit in a folding chair and drink stale coffee and eat supermarket cookies, and tell your story to people who have also gone through it. Maybe when you make it a year out—a milestone for every grieving person I know—someone hands you a little chip that you can hold in your hand. In the US, the average bereavement leave is three to five days, which is so cruel, it’s almost hilarious. I mean, that’s not even gonna get you to the funeral. Outside of a religious context, there are just not enough systems or rituals in place to help people who are unmoored and hurting.

“My daughter was only 13 months old when Bret died. Taking care of a baby alone through that early period of grief was by far the hardest thing I have ever done. It was impossible, actually. Yet it happened…I am so proud of both of us for making it through that first year.”

As a parent of a young kid myself, I have also greatly appreciated your willingness to get real about how difficult some moments can be. More so than any mom influencer, Big Little Feelings caption, etc. How has your experience with motherhood played into your writing?

For one, I am perpetually and grievously sleep-deprived, which I fear gives everything I write a kind of psychedelic quiver. Like grief, I think parenthood is an experience that makes you more open, more human, more complicated, more exposed. Those are all really good things for art. But of course, both grief and parenthood can be totally obliterating. It can make you feel like a stupid cartoon, sobbing while cramming yet another load of laundry into the machine or changing another diaper in the middle of the night.

In my experience, both motherhood and grief are also invisible burdens, a weight you carry that no one else sees. Both are exhausting. I still struggle with effectively explaining the experience of having a full-time job and also solo parenting a toddler—most people simply can’t wrap their heads around the math. I do not have any organically occurring free time. All of my free time is bought and sacrificed for. But my daughter has nonetheless made me a better writer. (It goes without saying that she has made me a better person.) It’s a cliché and wildly corny, but kids teach you so much about joy, wonder, curiosity, hope, and the comfort of sacrifice. (Having a child is certainly not the only way to learn those things—there are many other ways.) And the act of caregiving is profound and life-changing work, even if the culture does not necessarily frame it that way.

My daughter was only 13 months old when Bret died. Taking care of a baby alone through that early period of grief was by far the hardest thing I have ever done. It was impossible, actually. Yet it happened. I felt empty, devastated, ruined, lost, absent, brittle, utterly destroyed. But of course, she still needed me, and in a very primal and immediate way. I am so proud of both of us for making it through that first year.

Talking about grief and trauma tends to see a lot of clichés—and it’s one of the main reasons I’ve avoided writing about my own traumas. Have there been any models for you?

I am a huge fan of Anderson Cooper’s podcast, All There Is, and especially his conversation with Stephen Colbert (full disclosure, I was a guest on the show’s second season). Nick Cave is just remarkable on grief; his book Faith, Hope, and Carnage and also his newsletter, The Red Hand Files, are about as good as it gets when it comes to making sense of pain. My dear friend Matthew Schnipper has a book coming out soon about the loss of his son, Renzo; he wrote a piece about grief and music for the New Yorker that’s just unbelievably good. Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape and Jayson Greene’s Once More We Saw Stars are books by friends that I loved long before I suddenly understood them in a different way. It’s less explicitly about grief, and it’s not writing, but I am thoroughly and consistently moved by Tabitha Soren’s photography, which conveys a great deal about loss and ephemerality, violence, and survival.