2026

2026-01-03

i’ve never been a fan of new years’ resolutions. there are a lot of reasons for this, but as i admitted to a friend once, it’s really because i don’t think that i will ever follow through on them. but why not? i think i view new years’ resolutions, subconsciously, as a sort of disciplinary contract. i have to exercise. i have to cook. i have to read. i have to journal. i am also maybe averse to the idea of commitment itself: consistency is difficult for me, after all.

but i have begun to think a little differently about action, through the lens of discernment, refinement. to paraphrase rachel pollack, we mistake doing things for action. what if what we do is preordained, and action is the decisions and discernments we make about the world around us? i don’t really know how to do that, if i’m going to be honest with you, dear reader. i think a lot of my decisions come from conflicting impulses: one seeks comfort, one seeks to spill out her soul. and well, that’s not very comfortable.

as i write this there’s a lot to hope about this year. politically, the left seems resurgent, with a mayor in new york city¹ that seems to be the cook that can, this time, throw all of the political left—with all its myriad political differences—into the melting pot. i feel this enthusiasm within my friends, if not somewhat tampered. like with obama in 2008, we all wish to hope, but this time we hope a bit more cautiously.

speaking of a throwback to the noughts, remeber Gotham, the font? i had just learned today that Tobias Frere-Jones has a retrospective on his blog about this font that had such an influence in the graphic design world for so long.² this history describes the font as stemming foremost from frere-jones’ deep interest in the history of new york city, through the lens of its public typography.

not to be too nostalgic, because the era of gotham was a monoculture of its own—the blog post speaks of an Amerocentric, NYC-centric era of graphic design shaped by big magazines and the influence of the Pentagram studio in particular. but at least it was interesting to look at! today’s most influential typographical trendsetters in silicon valley seem insistent to converge on variations of the same derivative anonymous neo-grotesque sans-serif. and don’t you dare to stray away from black-on-white. so many ways to dress up the same thing: the typographical equivalent of a Sweetgreen bowl. ah, well.

i want to cook for myself more. i realize it’s the act of preparing my own food that is ultimately what i need to get used to first, so if it’s frozen dinners or premade stuff, it’s still good to practice that ritual. then the harder stuff gets easier, over time. i am maybe a bit jealous because i feel like collectively, with the internet, we have all been getting better at cooking, but i kind of missed out on all of that. i have been getting better, at my own pace.

have you seen pluribus? i feel like everyone has been talking about it. i won’t say much about it, in case you haven’t, but the protagonist is in my opinion not very likeable. but that’s the point, right? why should that matter?!

in “some notes on mediated time,” an essay by Zadie Smith published in her recent book, dead and alive, she makes this point about television:

[…] all the moral panic was concentrated on the content and not on the form. […] Everybody was so worried about what was on television, but nobody thought much about the form of TV itself—other than the odd semiotician. The seamlessness, the sharp cuts, the fades in and out, the rewinding and forward-winding, the storification of every element of life from the most personal to the world historical. Everything came to a neat resolution. Everything had a story.

and perhaps, everyone was likeable. a character might be a terrible person, but you are still expected to cheer for them because they are ultimately likeable.

but that’s not very human. what if it’s true that you are not liked in your social milieu? i don’t think we want to think about that. (as it happens, this is the key insight driving the proliferation of social media, a thing Zadie Smith also discusses.) yet it is a very human thing to dislike, to face difficulty, to be difficult, to be hard to like sometimes. my therapist once told me that i can’t control whether or not people like me, but i can maybe be the type of person that i would like. this was useful advice, but i must have subconsciously been doing that already, drawing from the character traits of the people i admired on the TV shows i was watching. the truly difficult work, i think, was bridging the gap between being like the “likeable” figures i saw on TV and being like… for the lack of a better word… me.