A Few Good Things
No matter how bad things get, artists and intellectuals will continue making work that gets us through the moment and makes us feel more connected to the world and each other. In the face of dangerous mediocrity being celebrated in our capital this week, one of my goals for now and for the forseeable future is to celebrate recent, past, and ongoing excellence.
Here is my first list for 2025:
One of Them Days, directed by Lawrence Lamont, screenplay by Syreeta Singleton
A perfect comedy: funny, well-paced, with a deeply satisfying ending. Keke Palmer and SZA star as Dreux and Alyssa, roommates and best friends who have less than twelve hours to recover their rent money—taken by Alyssa’s boyfriend—or be evicted from their apartment. The action is madcap, the motivations genuine, Palmer’s and SZA’s acting elastic and big-hearted. The countdown keeps things moving, but so does the character development; this is not a typical plot-driven buddy comedy. Even minor characters here feel tended to by Singleton’s excellent script. (Katt Williams is especially charming as a down-on-his-luck Tiresias named Lucky who will not let you mess up your life with a Payday loan.) I haven’t smiled so much in a theater in years—and not just because I rarely go out to the movies anymore.
The Stacks Podcast, hosted by Traci Thomas
France and the UK are still literary enough to have actual television shows devoted to conversations about books—reading them, writing them, loving them, and hating them. In the U.S., The Stacks is the closest we have to that level of literary glorification. I love a number of other bookish podcasts, but The Stacks gives us something unique: incisive deep dives into not just the craft of writing but the joys and struggles and necessity of reading. Traci connects the books selected for the show to the moment we’re in, the moments we’ve been in, the lives we might face in the future. And she is always honest about her assessment of a book, something many writers don’t feel at liberty to be in such a competitive publishing market. Her guests are engaging and open, and she invites inquiry and disagreement in a way that is fun, warm, and instructive.
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated from German by Shaun Whiteside, New Directions
First published in 1963, The Wall is the first novel I finished in 2025, and I’ll be thinking about it and rereading it for years to come. A woman visiting family in the Austrian Alps wakes up one morning to find she has been cut off from civilization by an invisible wall that has killed every human on the other side of it. She learns to live off the land, in the company of a sweet dog, several cats, and a beguiling cow named Bella. Sometimes described as sci-fi, sometimes as dystopian, this book is more rooted in the natural world than sci-fi usually is, with an almost utopian quality to the narrator’s days. It’s the perfect allegory for right now, a story to honor women’s desire for space and independence in the face of constant threats to our bodily autonomy. While the narrator is at the mercy of the elements and severed from loved ones and her former self, she forges a deep connection with her animals, with nature, and with her own mind; her days are as beautiful and peaceful as they are exhausting and terrifying. A cousin to this novel is the equally eerie and inspiring I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, which I wrote about last year.