I can’t remember where I saw the recommendation, but I decided to try The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff and found it a riveting read. Heavy, of course, but also very illuminating about how quickly and widely the September 11 attacks rippled beyond downtown Manhattan, affecting a lot of people in different ways and different places almost all at once.
I was about to turn 14 at the time. I saw the footage like everyone else and understood it to be a significant event, but I couldn’t have known all the details of the day that the book brings to life all these decades later.
For that reason I’m very grateful to Graff for this monumental work of oral history, which captures the kaleidoscopic nature of the crisis by weaving testimonies from the myriad people affected by the attacks, including:
people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon who managed to evacuate after the planes crashed (and even some who somehow survived the subsequent collapses)
firefighters and first responders at Ground Zero
people desperately waiting to find out whether their loved ones had survived
transcripts of calls and voicemails from passengers of the hijacked planes
air traffic controllers managing the unprecedented grounding of all aircraft across the United States
fighter pilots ordered to intercept Flight 93 and take it down by any means necessary, including crashing into it midair
Dick Cheney and White House staffers managing the crisis from an underground bunker
Congressional representatives and staffers scrambling away from the Capitol with reports of more hijacked airplanes on the way
Staffers with President Bush in Florida when they got news of the attacks, then on Air Force One as they flew between military bases before heading back to D.C.
One recurring motif that really stuck out to me was how often life or death came down to sheer luck, both good and bad.
One man had to leave his desk high up in the World Trade Center to retrieve a guest in the lobby, which allowed him to escape after the crash and avoid certain death. Another woman was standing at the copier instead of her desk when a plane struck and thus survived when all her other office mates nearby perished. And one firefighter fleeing one of the collapsing Twin Towers alongside a colleague turned one way and lived, while his colleague turned the other way and didn’t.
Call it luck or something else—we’re all a split-second away from death, often without knowing it. The Only Plane in the Sky honors those who were unlucky that day, and serves as a sobering reminder for the rest of us about the fragility of life and the extraordinary bravery of ordinary people.
In what amounts to a positively glacial pace, I finally managed to fill up the small pocket Moleskine notebook I’ve been carrying around for seven years:
It was given to me by my friend Jason, an artist who founded Geocommunetrics and gave it this unique cover design:
It was tucked in my backpack for most of that time and proved useful here and there for personal and professional notes, checklists, and all the other miscellany these small yet mighty tools are good for.
Why so long though? As much as I’d love to be a dedicated notebook person, I’m just more prone to using Apple Notes and other digital notetaking methods because my phone is always with me or nearby. Plus the ability to keyword search. Keeping a notebook and pencil within the same vicinity, accessibility, and consistency feels like a heavier lift—not to mention handwriting being a more time-consuming than quickly tapping things out.
I say this as someone who deeply believes in analog tech and the preservation of tangibility, whether through typewriters or vinyl or indeed paper. I also understand all the psychological benefits of journaling and handwriting, and every time I look back at what I do manage to get down on paper I’m grateful for having that in my own historical record. But that hasn’t been quite enough for me to get over the cognitive hump of making it a daily practice.
People who use paper consistently while also having a digital job: how do you do it? What methods have you found useful and why?
This week we said goodbye to our washing machine, which according to its serial number was manufactured nearly 35 years ago in September 1990. For context: Goodfellas had just released in theaters, Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, and I’d just turned three years old. Time flies.
Its sudden demise has made for a challenging five days without being able to do laundry, but I can’t be mad given how it chugged along far past its expected lifespan. Like its matching dryer (which knock on wood continues to chug along), the washer was the oldest of our home’s old-guard appliances that we’ve been replacing since moving in nearly six years ago. No doubt the new appliances are more energy efficient and all that, but they’re not built to last like these beastly machines of old.
Farewell, you wonderful old Building & Loan Maytag.
Not Xwitter. I already stopped using the platform but only recently did the full delete. Grateful to the new ownership for making it easy to kick the habit after 15 years.
Not Goodreads. Did the full delete of my Goodreads account as well. This might seem counterintuitive for a librarian and bookish person, but over the last few years I noticed myself using it less and less and didn’t feel the need to keep up with its archaic UI as Amazon lets it slowly die.
Letterboxd. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to use and keep up with what’s happening on Letterboxd among my fellow movie freaks. I’d say it’s the only good social network these days.
Not a random Google Sheets app script. Related to all this book- and movie-logging stuff, I’d been using a random Google App Script for my logbook in Google Sheets that I found online so I could include multiple tags for each book or movie. But I discovered recently that Google (finally!) added native support for multi-select dropdowns and thus was happy to ditch the script.
Though I usually do a Top 10 with some honorable mentions, once this year’s list of honorable mentions creeped past 10 movies I figured why not just do a full top 20? The more movies the merrier.
Here are the 2024 dramas, documentaries, dystopias, debuts, and other delights I dug.
A funny and sometimes wistful sci-fi remix of When Harry Met Sally that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Zosia Mamet and Aristotle Athari are a winning pair and fun hang as the will-they-won’t-they leads.
19. Peacock
Echoing the deliciously deadpan humor of Force Majeure, this debut feature from German filmmaker Bernhard Wenger follows a man so talented at blending into the fictions of his work that when his personal life begins to suffer, his ensuing existential crisis has him questioning his entire reality. It’s a darkly absurd and deliberately paced dramedy that serves as a wake-up call to people pleasers everywhere.
18. Mom & Dad’s Nipple Factory
A really nice discovery thanks to the chance to interview the director Justin Johnson. Spotlighting Johnson’s parents and the secretive prosthetic nipple business they started after his mom’s breast cancer diagnosis, this documentary also reckons with his conservative Christian upbringing in Wisconsin and subsequent religious deconstruction in a wholesome and humane way. Really nice portrait of family, faith, and life’s contradictions.
17. The Greatest Night in Pop
I’d heard “We Are the World” like everyone else, and knew vaguely that it was sung by famous musicians. But until watching this documentary I had no idea about its background or the logistics of making it happen, let alone the insane star wattage it harnessed in one room. Fascinating to watch the dynamics play out among these very different artists and personalities during an all-nighter for the ages.
16. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
We told our six year old we were going to watch the new Wallace & Gromit movie. “I don’t want to,” he said, “they are far too silly.” We still watched it, and guess who was laughing and totally locked in the whole time? Me, that’s who. And also our six year old. Anyway, any Aardman joint should automatically win Best Picture given how insanely difficult it is to make any stop-motion animated feature film, let alone a great one.
15. Conclave
How Edward Berger turned ecclesiastical proceedings into a pulpy, beautifully shot mystery thriller better than it has rights to be shows just how powerful cinema is as an art form. And watching Ralph Fiennes play a character who’s basically the opposite of his role as Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel shows just how compelling powerful actors can be.
14. Rebel Ridge
Jeremy Saulnier knows how to make a damn thriller. In this latest pot-boiler, a former Marine has his bag of cash unjustly seized by local police, instigating his one-man revenge plot where with every slight escalation and provocation the stakes get higher and your heart beats faster. Civil asset forfeiture reform now!
13. Dìdi
I like the Google summary of this: “an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love his mom.” As someone who was only a few years older than Dìdi was in the movie, I found much of this both very relatable (hello AIM and MySpace Top 8 and Motion City Soundtrack needle-drops) and also painful to realize how much I saw my own 13-year-old self in Dìdi’s adolescent angst.
12. September 5
A worthy ancestor of Spotlight in how it dramatizes a real-life moment of media ethics and production colliding with a dark chapter in history, in this case the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. For me the tactility of the period technology—analog phones, walkie-talkies, film cameras, buttons and knobs, typewriters, hand-lettered TV chyrons—made this even better and more thrilling than it would have been if set during our current digital era.
11. Challengers
I rather flippantly called this “your typical sports movie featuring a throuple of sweaty, smirking scumbags swirling into a sadomasochistic, psychosexual spiral.” Which I think is accurate but also doesn’t make clear how fun and funny this movie is in spite of (or rather because of) that. If tennis is a relationship, as Zendaya’s Tashi claims in the movie, then this tennis/relationship movie is worth the commitment.
10. My Old Ass
How many boxes did this check for me? Let me count: ☑ Earnest, bittersweet coming-of-age dramedy ☑ Light magical realism ☑ Frequency and Arrival homage ☑ Includes Little Women motif ☑ Birkenstocks-wearing character named Chad Can’t wait to see what star Maisy Stella and writer-director Megan Park do next.
9. Here
To paraphrase Doc Brown, the critics crapping on this Robert Zemeckis adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel (one of the best books of the 2010s) just weren’t thinking fourth-dimensionally. We live in time, people! You can’t fathom how much has happened throughout human history and prehistory on the very patch of earth you’re standing on now because it’s awesomely unknowable! The movie lovingly portrays the book’s intra-panel time-jumping, its timeless themes of life and death and love and loss, and its deft intertwining of the everyday and eternal—all while rocking an Alan Silvestri score that goes right for the jugular. And I’m here for that.
8. Dune: Part Two
I couldn’t see Dune in theaters so I was happy to be able to see this one on a big screen. It’s a sequel that very much stands on its own as a stunningly rendered experience while simultaneously bearing structural burdens that middle sequels often have. Still, anytime I can see big, weird, tactile, religion-infused spectacle like this is a good time for me.
7. Good One
In stark contrast to the bombast of Dune: Part Two, India Donaldson’s debut feature about a teenaged girl on a hiking trip with her dad and his friend thrives in the smallest gestures and pauses and looks—in what’s said and left unsaid. It’s Reichardt-core to the core: quietly portentous, nature-drenched, and oh so gently damning of parental obtusity.
6. Saturday Night
It’s hard not to be impressed by how Jason Reitman pulled off depicting in real time the 90 minutes before the first episode of SNL in 1975, complete with spot-on portrayals of the original cast and other figures. In that way it’s like the groovy ‘70s love child of Steve Jobs and Birdman. (It’s also a fascinating double feature with September 5, the other 2024 film set backstage of a seismic mid-‘70s television event.) More fables about the beautifully chaotic process of making art, please and thank you!
5. Civil War
One criterion for making my best-of lists is being something I just couldn’t shake. That’s definitely true for Alex Garland’s latest, which depicts a United States embroiled in a violent civil war and a crew of journalists trying to interview the embattled president. I find the criticism about the ideological vagueness of the different political factions to be beside the point—what matters is how different individuals choose to engage with the turmoil, from a young photojournalist compelled to capture frontline combat to a store employee blithely dismissing the conflict altogether. Let’s hope this doesn’t become more prescient than it already is.
4. Nickel Boys
Sure-handed, tough-minded, clear-eyed, and full-hearted, RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel takes cinema’s power as an empathy machine to the extreme with its first-person POV perspective, strapping us along for a turbulent yet touching ride along with two friends weathering life at a Florida boarding school. I found this to be in accidental conversation with the next movie on this list, both being searing 2024 films that dramatize the triumphs and travails of mid-20th century Black life.
3. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
As a lover of history and jazz, this documentary spotlighting famous ‘50s jazz musicians and their role in the Cold War geopolitics surrounding Congo’s push for independence bebopped me right on the nose. It plays out much like a jazz track, with different people trading solos and the frequent context-setting intertitles like punchy drum riffs and an ensemble of colorful characters making the whole thing sing. As sharp and smooth as a Miles Davis solo, and a revelation for the documentary form.
2. Anora
From Tangerine (a favorite of 2015) to The Florida Project (my #1 of 2017) to Red Rocket (a favorite of 2022) and now this Palme d’Or-winning tale of a Brooklyn sex worker’s misadventures with a Russian oligarch’s son, Sean Baker has become American cinema’s most reliable anthropologist of the restless strivers and scrappy survivors at society’s margins. How this turns from high-flying Cinderella story to shambolic chase movie to gut-wrenching character study feels like a crossover of Scorsese with the Dardenne brothers, but also a continuation of Baker’s characteristically compassionate yet clear-eyed treatment of even his most challenging characters.
1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
If Fury Road was the New Testament of George Miller’s Mad Max saga, bringing redemption to both the story’s characters and the action genre itself, then Furiosa is its Old Testament: brutal, beguiling, mercurial, and thrillingly epic. Call it a Pentateuch for a new (post-apocalyptic) age. Also really interesting to rewatch this right before another Fury Road rewatch as it provided the backstory to Furiosa’s journey and the events of Fury Road that I didn’t have the first (several) times watching it. In that way Fury Road felt more like the sequel/conclusion to Furiosa than vice versa, and made me appreciate both even more. This whole saga is a really rich text on gender, power, politics, and what we do to survive.
Still haven’t seen: Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, All We Imagine As Light, Wicked
Non-2024 movies I watched and enjoyed: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Populaire, Little Children, Green Room, The Thing
Happy 6th birthday to our firstborn! We celebrated by going out to breakfast and then bringing him bowling for the first time. He got second place with a bumper-assisted 85, while I snuck into first place with a well-timed strike at 95. While it had been about a decade since I’ve played, I also have just never been a good bowler. But that’s OK because it’s still a great thing to do for a date of any kind.
I’m happy to report that the state of one of America’s longtime third places was strong, with a bunch of retirees and families at the bowling alley on a weekday morning. Also happy to report the style and amenities were firmly stuck in 1993, including an Addams Family pinball machine:
During a recent songwriting session with my five year old (i.e. in the six minutes before he got distracted by something else), he improvised these lyrics while I strummed my guitar and took notes:
There’s a maple tree in the meadow And every winter it’s not making progress But in the spring, the tree starts growing away And once you know It’s taking so Long to grow Then you know There’s a maple tree close
Twigs in the grass And down below You might know Something slow It’s a mole. Yes it’s a mole, ohhhh What do you see under the snow? Why it’s a mole! So give it a dole It’s hard to be a mole
There are two powerful moments in Amazon Prime’s alternate-history “what if Germany and Japan won World War II” show The Man in the High Castle that I think about a lot, especially in relation to current events.
The first is in the sixth episode of season one (“Three Monkeys”). Frank, a laborer who also creates replicas of antique guns for wealthy buyers, is wracked with guilt and resentment after his sister and her kids were murdered by Japan’s secret police while he was being interrogated due to his girlfriend Juliana’s connection with the underground resistance. In distress, he goes to the home of a man named Mark, his sister’s former boss and a fellow closeted Jew who practices in secret with his kids despite Judaism being outlawed.
Mark asks Frank if he’d be OK with them doing a prayer for his sister and her kids. “Losing people is one thing,” Mark says. “Not being allowed to grieve for them, well, that’s another.” He then performs the kaddish, a Jewish mourner’s prayer for the dead, which is intercut with scenes of Juliana’s covert resistance work. In a ramshackle, candlelit apartment, hearing words he doesn’t understand but feels deep in his bones, Frank is finally able mourn his immense loss.
The other moment happens in the following episode (“Truth”), when Frank asks Mark why he chose to have kids despite the danger of being Jewish and continues to risk their lives practicing their faith. Their exchange:
MARK: I don’t plan on dying, Frank. But you can’t live your life in fear. I was back east at the end of the war, in Boston. You had to see it to believe it. Overnight, lynch mobs were murdering Jews because suddenly we were less than human. Those of us who came out in one piece, we buried service weapons underground, well-wrapped in oil, and we vowed revenge. I got a life to lead, got kids to raise. And Hitler and the Nazis—I don’t care how it looks, they won’t last. One thing I realized about my people is we got a different sense of time. These may be dark years, but we’ll survive. We always do. You’ve just got to find something to hold on to.
FRANK: Faith, you mean.
MARK: Yeah, faith.
FRANK: I don’t have any of that.
MARK: Well, what about art? You’re supposed to be an artist. Why are you making fake guns?
FRANK: Because no one wants to buy my art.
MARK: So do it for yourself. Beauty is important, Frank. It gives us hope.
FRANK: I don’t know. I don’t know where it would get me.
MARK: Yeah. Right. You don’t need anybody to keep you down because you got your own little inner fascist right there telling you what you can and cannot do. That’s how you let them win.
I wrote about The Man in the High Castle more generally after it debuted. Though I stopped watching after two seasons, these and other moments stuck with me ever since and resurfaced in my mind recently when I read Eliot Stein’s new book Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. It’s a travelogue that spotlights artisans and specialists all over the world who have continued practicing their often incredibly arduous crafts, often with great sacrifice, even as modern life has rendered them obsolete.
From the world’s last nightwatchman in Sweden to an Incan rope bridge master in Peru to a rare pasta maker in Sardinia to the makers of first-surface mirrors in India, these dedicated folks have upheld traditions passed down often within a single family for centuries or even longer. How? And why? According to Paola Abraini, the Sardinian grand master of su filindeu pasta:
It’s a matter of principle, of tradition. What I have always said is that as a custodian of this tradition that has been passed down from mother to daughter, I will respect that. My daughters know how much of an undertaking this is for me, but they know how much I love it, so as long as the good Lord gives me health and life, I will continue to make it. I remain hopeful that one of them will one day take it on, but if they can’t, then I will be sad. So many things in this world that once were no longer are.
Stein writes that Abraini’s parting message “felt like a prophecy, a pressing reminder to cherish the beautiful, gentle customs that make the world glimmer while warning us not to blink.”
Guardians in the darkness
Perhaps you can see why learning about these remarkable people brought to mind Mark in The Man in the High Castle, who continued the practices he considered meaningful despite the societal forces allayed against him. He continued to cherish the customs that made his world glimmer and lived out his assertion that beauty is important. Though the traditions documented in the book aren’t outlawed like Judaism in The Man in the High Castle, they require the same dedication to uphold—to hold fast against the entropy of modernity and relentless advance of technology that would try to make them disappear.
The book also helped me reckon with what being a custodian means, which is much more meaningful than my reductive view of it as something akin to a school janitor. Knowing the word custodian comes from the Latin for guardian gives it the weight and nobility it deserves. And here’s the thing: custodians of all kinds keep the world going. Where would we be—what would we be—without the people who handcraft pasta, take out the garbage, clean up messes, build vital bridges, and routinely perform so many more acts of preservation and maintenance and care?
We are all custodians of something or someone, whether in our families, communities, or just our own minds. We must not let the fascists in our government or our inner voice dictate what’s important. Or make us forget that art matters, and that there’s good in this world that’s worth fighting for. (Cue Samwise Gamgee’s speech in Osgiliath.)
Tend to your garden. Make your art. Do not obey in advance. Find something to hold on to and be its custodian in the darkness.
That’s one of my favorite phrases in the English language. Why? It means you’re most likely looking at the definition of a really cool adjective, and as a writer and certified word nerd I live for really cool adjectives.
A quick perusal of my Cool Words list shows 13 instances of this phenomenal phrase, including:
Brumal: of or relating to winter
Chthonic: of or relating to the underworld
Palustrine: of or relating to marshes or fen; marshy
Venatic: of or relating to hunting
I mean, come on.
You can try this with basically any word related to nature, medicine, or other topics of interest during the Scientific Revolution, when many of these words were first coined or derived from Latin/Greek.
Why write “snake-like” when you could say anguine? Or “skin-like” when cutaneous is sitting right there? And arenaceous sounds a lot cooler than “sandy”.
Most of the adjectives on my list I’ve found in the wild while reading something, but it can also work in the reverse. While writing the post about our window prism, I initially thought to describe the rainbow light as lightning-shaped but then wondered if there was a dedicated adjective for that. I searched “of or relating to lightning” and boom: fulminous (“of, relating to, or resembling thunder and lightning”) or fulgurous (“characteristic of or resembling lightning”). I didn’t end up using them but damned if I didn’t add fulgurous to the Cool Words list.
Continuing my tradition of doing a presidential postmortem for the outgoing commander-in-chief (see Bush and Obama and Trump), here are my brief and bumpy thoughts on the brief and bumpy Biden era:
In 2020 he was the only candidate who could beat Trump. Not Bernie, not Elizabeth Warren. So the fact that he won both the primary and general election was good for America.
He should not have attempted to run for reelection. We’ll never know whether anyone besides him or Harris could have beaten Trump in 2024 amidst the worldwide anti-incumbent wave, but it would have been nice to have a legit primary to find out. Ironically he did become the “bridge” leader he was considered to be, except instead of bridging towards the next generation of liberal leadership, he was just a rather rickety interlude between two sides of Trumpland.
On the personal front, the last four years have been thoroughly domestic affairs for us—trying for and having a second kid being the main focus throughout. Related to that was my choice after the 2020 election to step back from posting about politics here (as the politics tag shows), since I went into overdrive during the Trump years. I could go down the line rating Biden’s policies and accomplishments since then (👍🏻 to supporting Ukraine, exiting Afghanistan, and signing the Electoral Count Act), but that’s moot at this point.
I’ve always enjoyed taking notes on my reading—both fiction and nonfiction—mostly to track factoids and save interesting quotes for reference. For a while those notes lived in a plain text doc, then a Google Doc, then WorkFlowy. After briefly pondering setting up a dedicated subdomain for them and turning each book’s notes into their own post, I opted to just put them all on one page called Book Notes.
It’s a beast of a page, representing 130+ books and ranging from only a few bullets per book to dozens. But being text-only means it’s pretty lightweight, and I added a Table of Contents and jump links to make navigating it a little easier.
I’ve found the funnest way to experience it is by searching for keywords to see where they pop up in different contexts: try “trees” or “truth” or “books” and see where they lead you. Or just scroll at whim and enjoy the ride through my scattered yet very satisfying survey through the books that have nourished my mind and soul throughout my adult life.
If you’re looking to get more involved in your local community, there’s a quick and easy way to start doing that: read the meeting minutes.
Your city’s government, library, school board, and other institutions are required by law to post their meeting agendas, minutes, and other reports online, and I’ve found that even just skimming them is a great way to see what issues are being discussed and decided on, what different initiatives and changes are coming, and other stuff that’s often boring but also affects my everyday life—good and bad—more than national and global politics do. Don’t worry about reading every document—just know that they’re there and can help you be better informed.
My wife recently got a little solar-powered prism for our backyard window that starts rotating once it’s charged up with enough sunlight. This has given sunny mornings an extra little burst of magic with little rainbows streaming around the room, one of which I managed to capture as it dashed right next to one of the can lights:
The contrasts proved, uh, illuminating: artificial vs. natural light, smooth vs. textured, circular vs. streaked.
Ken Priebe on why A Charlie Brown Christmasworks so well:
There are so many reasons why this perennial special from 1965 shouldn’t work. It’s weird, sloppy, has no real plot, its storyline meanders all over the place, and it feels like it was edited with a chainsaw. …
And yet, this is exactly why it works, and why it endures. Because Christmas is weird. It’s sloppy. It has no real plot. Its storyline meanders all over the place. It leaves us feeling like our lives have been edited by a chainsaw and we’re on an animation cel that’s not even lined up to match our background. …
And why is everyone so mean-spirited in this special? How does that reflect the spirit of Christmas? Because it reflects what the season reveals about us. We’re “supposed to be happy, but we’re not.” We’re all rude little bastards who yell at each other, eat like pigs and only care about ourselves. …
It endures because we are part of the story. We are all that poor little tree that just needs a little love.
It would be more accurate to title this post merely “Books I Read in 2024” because man oh man did I slack on reading this year. Long gone is my 80+ per year pace (pre-kids, crucially), replaced by not even hitting double digits. There are various reasons for this, but suffice it to say I hope to significantly raise that number in 2025.
Here’s what I did read and enjoy in 2024:
BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman
A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow
Creating Back to the Future The Musical by Michael Klastorin
Fear Not!: A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies by Josh Larsen
The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson
Long Island by Colm Tóibín
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
