2025 has come and gone.

This year's ingredients.

Photo by weston m. July 4th Fireworks. Lakeville, MN, USA. Published on October 1, 2019. SONY, SLT-A65V. Free to use under the Unsplash License.

The older I get, the more I’ve come to cherish New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as a holiday in their own right. In my late teens and twenties, New Year’s was mostly a party, a loud punctuation mark at the end of the calendar, something to survive rather than sit with. Midnight mattered more than morning, and reflection could wait.

These days, it’s the opposite. I’ve grown to love the quieter electricity of the year’s end and the way reflection hangs in the air. New Year’s Day, especially, feels like a pause that the world actually honors. There are no demands and no particular urgency, just a collective exhale and a chance to take stock.

(Generative AI)

Looking back on this year of writing, I’m struck by how much I enjoyed following specific ideas wherever they led. Watching arguments stretch, bend, and occasionally outgrow their early assumptions is one of the quiet joys of doing this work. Seeing thoughts mature over time, sometimes against my own expectations, feels like proof of growth, not just productivity.

With that in mind, here are my five favorite pieces of 2025 in no particular order:

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This year of writing began on January 6. I hadn’t written anything since June of 2024, and the last piece I published warned that Trump could very well become president again. And then he did.

What followed was not outrage, but a long, quiet disappointment. Months of watching centrist hand-wringing and leftward circular firing squads do the right’s work for it, of watching energy drain out of young people, minorities, and broadly pro-democracy spaces, not necessarily through repression, but through exhaustion. The right didn’t just advance but enabled, while the rest of us argued over tone, purity, and process.

Silence, in that moment, felt more honest than noise.

In that same vein, I felt it was essential to clarify later in the year that I am not opposed to moderation, nor blind to its historical utility. Moderation has often been a strategy. Centrism, however, has become a posture. One that persists regardless of context, regardless of what justice demands in a given moment, and regardless of anyone’s need to save a political “center” that has so obviously failed and expired.

As the year went on, I became more direct about what I see as the fundamental constraint on democratic momentum. It isn’t only revanchist forces pushing backward. It is also a strain of centrism, especially in punditry and professional politics, which exists primarily to tone-police, to avoid naming harm, and to soothe a suburban fantasy of electoral politics that may never have lived in the first place. In doing so, it asks historically marginalized communities to absorb damage quietly for the sake of an imagined stability that keeps receding into the distance.

As I watched Gold Diggers of 1933, I felt haunted by its closing moments when Joan Blondell belts out the heartbreak of a lost generation. Americans whipped into a democratic frenzy during the First World War, cheered on with flags and promises, only to be discarded by the lingering forces of the robber baron age once the bill came due. An America with no social floor and no safety net…not even for its veterans.

The sequence is devastating: soldiers paraded into war, then funneled back into Depression-era breadlines. It lands like a dagger, especially when watched from the present. The old Gilded Age impulses have returned, emboldened by a political center all too eager to demagogue the New Deal and its heirs, while championing lower taxes, deregulation, and the systematic breaking of people’s ability to speak up for themselves through labor and collective power.

One could ask how this happened. How a political and intellectual class, supposedly steeped in history, supposedly aware of why early-20th-century progressives and New Deal patchwork policies existed in the first place, allowed the same failures to be reheated and served again.

But even for intellectuals, the answer is depressingly simple: the greenback talks. Access follows, and memory, like solidarity, becomes optional.

I adored Fantastic Four: First Steps this year, mainly because of its deliberate 1960s aesthetic, and the way that aesthetic quietly invites us to interrogate how we idealize specific eras by sanding down their roughest edges.

The film gives us a 1960s without a visible civil rights struggle, a world of near-perfect cohesion among governments and institutions. It’s plainly an alternate reality, one indelibly reshaped by the emergence of the first family of comics and their extraordinary abilities. In this world, technological optimism actually delivers: space exploration advances rapidly enough for the team to confront Galactus before the world eater ever reaches Earth.

It’s fantasy, but the satisfying kind, utopian without apology. And for me, it also scratched a historical itch. The scenery, the production design, and the confidence of the future on display all sparked questions about what we choose to remember, what we choose to forget, and why certain decades get embalmed as golden (or silver) ages.

I enjoyed it so much that I saw it in IMAX twice. And honestly, what makes you happy, right?

This was the piece where I finally stopped pretending that Trump was the story.

For years, I had studied American conservatism in academic settings by reading its thinkers, its strategists, and its mythmakers with the distance scholarship demands. Writing this forced me to confront something I had long understood intellectually but struggled to name plainly in public: Trumpism wasn’t a rupture. It was an exposure. The soil had been prepared long before he arrived.

In this essay, I traced how both historians and contemporary pundits helped sanitize that history and how race was consistently treated as a secondary factor rather than the engine of reactionary politics. Revisiting figures like Alan Brinkley and Julian Zelizer made clear how “recovering” conservatism as a respectable tradition often slid into laundering its racial and economic violence. Watching that same instinct repeat itself in modern commentary, especially after Obama’s election and again after January 6, felt less like a coincidence and more like pattern recognition.

What ultimately pushed this piece into existence was frustration with nostalgia masquerading as strategy. Too many voices I once respected seemed more interested in restoring a fantasy of a reasonable center than in reckoning with the structures that made Trump possible in the first place. Writing this was my way of saying: democracy doesn’t fail because people yell too loudly. It fails when denial becomes polite, credentialed, and professionally rewarded.

This wasn’t an easy piece to write, but it clarified a lot for me. It helped sharpen my sense of what I’m actually arguing for in this space: fewer comforting myths, more honest narrators, and a politics that starts by naming the harm instead of managing its optics.

My favorite part of this essay is the way I braid together the Pleasure Island sequence from Pinocchio with the very real Pleasure Island that once existed at Walt Disney World. What began as a moral warning, a nightmarish parable about indulgence, transformation, and consequence, was eventually repackaged as a nightlife district, a playground for young adults and grown-ups looking to party once the kids were asleep.

There’s something darkly comic about that transformation. This attraction thrived in 1990s America, a moment flush with confidence and consumption, yet quietly drifting away from the cautionary tales that once shaped a generation forced to reckon with poverty, war, and the collapse of older global systems of power, exchange, and restraint. The lesson wasn’t erased; instead, it was inverted. The danger was no longer becoming a donkey. The danger was forgetting why the story existed in the first place.

In The Fragmentation of Black America, I tried to think honestly about something many conversations around race quietly avoid, which is the assumption that Black America still experiences the country as a single, coherent political and social bloc. Tracing a line from Du Bois and Booker T. Washington through the Civil Rights Movement and into the present, the essay wrestles with how class stratification, deindustrialization, privatization, and backlash have reshaped Black life into vastly different lived realities, and sometimes so different that they barely recognize each other.

What began as an intellectual inquiry gradually became personal. Writing this forced me to confront how the victories of the mid-20th century created real opportunity for some, while leaving others exposed to a harsher, more punitive America dressed up in the language of colorblindness and choice. The solidarity forged under open segregation gave way to fragmentation under de facto segregation, credentialism, and a political economy that rewards escape over repair.

This was also the piece where I let myself question frameworks I once held more tightly, especially the assumption that the tools of the 20th century are sufficient for the crises of the 21st. Debates over charter schools, public investment, political realignment, and even the uncomfortable pull of reactionary politics among a small segment of Black voters are treated here not as moral failures but as symptoms of a system that has narrowed the pathways to stability and dignity.

More than anything, this essay reflects a shift in my own thinking. It acknowledges the tension between survival and solidarity, between systemic reform and immediate material need. It sits with the grief of inherited struggle and the anger of promises broken. It’s not to romanticize division, but to name it honestly.

If many of my pieces this year argue that nostalgia is not a strategy, this one asks an even harder question: what happens when the old maps no longer describe the terrain, and unity itself becomes a luxury unevenly distributed?

This one started as a nerdy question on a long walk: what did Disney feel like to parents who grew up in Depression scarcity when they watched their kids absorb Disney in the glossy, rising-confidence 1950s? That question became a doorway into something bigger about how cultural memory gets passed down, softened, edited, and sometimes weaponized. So I put myself in that living room and watched the very first Disneyland TV episode from October 27, 1954, not as trivia, but as a historical artifact: a broadcast designed to fund a theme park, yes, but also to sell a particular emotional version of America back to itself.

Rewatching it, I found a nostalgia machine at full power, something technically dazzling, psychologically soothing, and narratively safe, even when it wasn’t. Frontierland and Adventureland flatten history into myth, sidestep real-world violence and anti-colonial struggle, and turn complexity into spectacle at a comfortable distance. Tomorrowland beams with sincere wonder, while Song of the South sits there like a ghost in the frame, reminding you that the same cultural comfort can also be a cultural anesthesia. The essay is ultimately about that double-edged blade: nostalgia can heal and connect as it also calcifies, erases, and becomes the emotional fuel for backlash. In other words, Disney isn’t just entertainment here; it’s a mirror, a myth factory, and a warning label that is brightly lit, catchy, and easy to ignore until you realize it’s still humming underneath our politics today.

This was the piece where I tried to strip the 1960s of its soft glow and look directly at what powered the era beneath the slogans and soundtrack. The Underbelly of the 1960s isn’t about nostalgia or reverence. It’s about violence as the state’s reflex when idealism threatens the myth. I wrote it while watching contemporary protests unfold, struck by how familiar the choreography felt: crowds demanding dignity, power responding with batons, gas, prisons, and sermons about order.

The essay traces how the decade we often remember for progress was also defined by its repression: the lynchings, the bombings, the police riots, the assassinations, and the war in Vietnam. It was the steady realization that American democracy had a breaking point, and it was usually enforced with force. From Emmett Till to Chicago ’68 to Kent State, the through-line is unsettling and straightforward: the state reveals its true character when challenged by multiracial, youth-driven movements that refuse to be patient. The violence was instructional.

The final section, the prayer, was the hardest to write. It reflects where this year pushed me emotionally as much as intellectually: toward the idea that survival sometimes requires distance from the center of American politics, not out of cynicism, but out of clarity. This piece is less an argument than a reckoning, an attempt to honor the people who believed fiercely in this country, were brutalized for it, and still found ways to preserve what was sacred when the nation could not.

This was the piece where I stopped treating Baltimore as something that needed explaining or apologizing for, and started treating it as a thesis. I wrote it while thinking about borderlands, not just geographic ones, but cultural and psychological fault lines. Baltimore, my hometown, sits squarely in that tension: North and South, industry and extraction, pride and abandonment. The city becomes a way to discuss America’s unresolved identity without reducing it to red-blue clichés.

What I wanted to capture here is how much of American prestige is built on pretending borders don’t exist, while quietly enforcing them everywhere. Baltimore refuses that fiction. It carries slavery differently than the Deep South, capitalism differently than the Northeast, and ambition differently than D.C. or New York. It’s never been allowed the comfort of myth, only contradiction. That makes it easy to mock and also easy to miss what it reveals.

This essay is, in some ways, a love letter.

Not a sentimental one, but an honest one. It argues that the “in-between” isn’t a failure of identity but a clearer version of it. Baltimore doesn’t need to choose a side because it is the fault line. And maybe that’s the point: America makes the most sense when you stop trying to smooth over its cracks and start listening to the places that live inside them.