What did you encounter this year that truly moved you?
Last fall, I ran a half marathon through New York City with 200 strangers. Two hundred crazies in running shorts treating the streets like our personal track. A local running club organized it the night before the NYC Marathon for everyone who didn't get in. We met near 125th with no course markings or finish line. Just a handful of checkpoints and
... See moreSeeing Helen Pashgian at The Getty. It’s raining in Los Angeles and I’m crying at the museum. Uncommon for me, but apparently not so uncommon for this installation. I wandered in by accident, but once I was there, I couldn’t tell you how long I stayed, in awe of what was unfolding in front of me. A great Light and Space artwork, Pashgian’s
... See moreAttending Derrick Gee's 'Radio Hour' in Berlin.
Derrick Gee is a music critic, who hosts IRL 'radio hours': a mix between a listening session, live podcast and talk show. There were 100 or so of us sitting in this cozy, large auditorium in complete silence, listening to a playlist of songs curated by Derrick, interspersed with spoken word essays
... See moreIn 2025 I fell in love with the techno producer Polygonia's Dream Horizons album: wide-ranging, intensely spatial electronic music that drifts in and out of consciousnessness like a dream. I read two novels that reaffirmed the importance of humor, lightheartedness, and sincerity in the pursuit of one's values: Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi's Mirages of the
... See more... See moreLast year I found my great grandma’s old diaries, they ranged from the moment she met my great grandpa until they got married, which was 16 years being together without a ring—from 1911 to 1927. As you may imagine, my great grandpa wasn’t the best man, he brought much pain to her and my family, but reading about it made me infinitely grateful for
The little kid I'm watching as I write this: crouched under his dad's legs—a man three times his size—trying to lift him up for a piggy back ride; Lonesome Dove; that Lily Allen album; the end of a relationship, the start of another; teenagers jumping from Monhegan’s dock into the wharf to send off the ferry; watching two pigeons kiss on the subway
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One of my favorite essays of the year was this one from the inimitable Mills Baker —an homage to his late mother: My mother could be reduced only to the scale of climate: you could not call her the sun or the rain or an ice storm or a hurricane, and nothing anyone has calculated or computed would generate accurate predictions about her. I think it’s fair to say that no one ever knew her, which made many want to. [...] Like me, she was very good in a crisis and very bad on a typical weekday; I believe it was she who introduced me to Walker Percy, even taking me to Covington to see where he lived, and he was well-aware of this reality: “It is easier to survive a category five hurricane than it is to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.” My mother was defeated by Wednesdays. — Jasmine Sun, writer
2025 began with 22 friends and colleagues losing their homes in the LA fires. After the initial shock, what stayed with me most and moved me the most was how people responded: the generosity, the creativity and then the resilience. I watched them all make something livable, and even beautiful, out of a terrible situation and it reminded me that all
... See moreAndrew Garfield Wants to Crack Open Your Heart
youtube.comThis is the year I learned that love and loss come together, and that our greatest pains are the path to deeper love. A couple of days before the year ended, my friend Ophelia sent me this episode of Modern Love with Andrew Garfield, in which he reads Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss. It was bizarrely good timing, like a summary of what had been on my mind, expressed beautifully. — Lola Wajskop, Asylum VC