Some Things I Thought About in 2025

Music in All Its Glory

I read Mood Machine, the book about Spotify, and it really reinforced how I’ve been trying to be more intentional about listening to music the past few years – only taking recommendations from humans and listening to new releases as whole albums rather than surrendering to algorithmic playlists that are undermined by the platform’s desire to underplay, and thereby underpay, real artists, and replace them with vibe-based facsimiles. 

Also NPR Music tickled my nostalgia so hard by doing a 25-year retrospective on the host’s favorite or most zeitgeisty songs of each year – exactly the same amount of time that I’ve been a conscious consumer of music. I knew, and loved, most of the songs they shared from the opening notes. I like that I keep abreast of music. As with so many things, I am a creature shaped by my father and he is very dismissive of people who let their taste in music calcify. 

One album I was really excited about this year was LUX by Rosalía. All the critics drew the inevitable Björk comparisons but honestly I’m not familiar enough with her work besides Post for that comparison to resonate with me even though intellectually it feels apt. Rosalía more so reminds me of Beyonce in that she seems like an utter perfectionist, with a firm and exacting grip on her creative vision. She injects meaning and intention into every single reference, sample, word, and inhalation. Big Virgo energy, really – I never believe in astrology except when it makes sense to me, a Virgo, who is also a control freak. 

New Athleticism 

Being a control freak has been a disadvantage in mountain biking. I’ve had to be open to letting go and being willing to fail or be buckwild or go fast just briefly, as an essential step in losing some of my fearfulness when I’m on scary trails.

Always trying to be braver

Then on the other hand, in cyclocross, even though I didn’t have a great year results-wise, it was my best year yet in terms of maturity and effort – I had several races where I was forced to try as hard as I could, with a grit and good attitude I never used to possess. I hope to keep getting better at both aspects of cycling, being brave and trying hard, in 2026. 

Abundance and the Weaponization of Liberalism

I can’t resist the *discourse* around Abundance, every liberal’s favorite or most-despised book of 2025. The discourse is more fun than the book itself, which is quite adequate. Having covered local government as a reporter for almost ten years, first in Idaho and now in Washington, it’s been interesting to see the realities of government impediments in a blue state – Washington is famously second only to California in terms of being hard to build in. 

I’ve actually heard conservative Washington elected officials say with longing that in Idaho, planners will approve a development proposal scrawled on a napkin. I’d love for the conservative county commissioners of my former Idaho home to hear that – they’ve used the exact same phrase to bemoan their own perceived government overreach and extol the lax planning policies of even more rural communities. Perhaps these napkin submittals are apocryphal. 

Napkins aside, I’ve already seen much more weaponized public process in my short time in Washington. Homeowners here couch their NIMBYism in much more culturally accepted jargon about the environment and vulnerable communities rather than only using the NIMBY 101 tropes of traffic and noise. As someone who pretty much just thinks building more housing is a good thing, it’s hard to suppress my raised eyebrows when I hear these anti-growth dog whistles. 

Still Hating Generative A.I. 

I can’t stop reading think pieces about all the ways it’s bad and destructive and deeply lame and how it’s infantalizing our population. (Here are two of my favorite grumpy reads on the topic: Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? and The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing A.I.)  

I’m afraid my complete intransigence about it might mark me as intellectually incurious – I’ve never tried using one of the LLM tools or generated a single image or video because it would make me feel unclean, and I scroll past Google’s stupid A.I. search synopses as quickly as possible. But I don't think A.I. offers anything novel. It’s just the residue of human knowledge scraped off the internet and repackaged in the most basic way possible.

I’m not sure feeling so much antipathy toward A.I. is productive and it makes me unpleasantly dogmatic in casual conversation but my god I hate it. 

Eudaimonia

I discovered this word and held it in my cupped hands like some kind of gorgeous moth. I feel intellectually and emotionally stimulated at all times. I have a deeply fulfilling job and financial stability. I have lots of great friends to do fun things with and an amazing backyard in which to do those things. I am blessed with a relationship that’s better than any fantasy, that never feels like work, with a partner who is 100% on my team and who constantly amazes me with his empathy and creativity and humor and awesomeness. It feels contradictory to the heinous reality of everything that’s happening right now, but in most ways my life couldn’t be better.

My loves