I've been compiling my favorite songs at the end of each year since 2005. It's a lot of work, but the final playlist marks time beautifully. When I hit play, it's instant nostalgia.

All I’ll say, if I’ve learned anything from my time in tech and the past two months living a more analog life: hope isn’t online, it’s offline, with real people in actual communities.

The modern world according to Naomi Klein.

One of the many problems with masking is that oftentimes you’re only hiding from yourself.

That’s Christmas in the real world, y’all, a scabby, grief-struck mess of realities all blurred together set to pretty lights and complex expressions of affection.

Nostalgia is always tinted with a degree of sadness, an awareness that every memory holds complexities and contradictions.

Over the past month, Trump has nominated a series of sketchy characters, several of them with long track records of #MeToo worthy accusations — RFK Jr, Pete Hegseth, and of course, the one and only Matt Gaetz.

It’s easy to steal the silverware when you’re invited to the dinner party. 

We can’t seem to hold two truths simultaneously.

Listen, this is nothing new. What we deem right and wrong, the way we mistake villains for heroes. How we dehumanize those whose struggles are so public. As our culture continues to darken, so too do the lines between who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s a martyr and who’s a criminal.

It’s almost as if a confident handsome wealthy man can get away with murder in this country. Go figure.

Perhaps our favorite anti-hero shows of the past 25 years didn’t just create our tendency to side with questionable characters, it predicted and reflected the direction we were already headed.

I know now that they, too, inherited their pain, never knew what they didn’t know and instead did whatever they could do to survive. Sometimes all we can do is simply just survive.

Damn, this is all too tough to ask for an empath. To use mass suffering, self-inflicted or not, as a punishment? To root for another’s pain as means to finally learn a lesson? Damn, y’all. How did we get here?

Now, the anti-Woke movement led by those least likely to understand the concept of “Woke” is once again in power, thus making life more and more dangerous for tens of millions of Americans.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote one of these music essays and actually mentioned the song at all. I don’t know about you, but I could use a positive affirmation anthem to get me through these darker days. So let’s leave it to Kendrick to hit us with exactly what we need, when we need it.

America, a metaphor. An epitaph. A eulogy.

Art Bell, George Carlin, and Anthony Bourdain are all dead.
And so is empathy.

Live long enough the losses build up around you, friends gone too young. The way we come to terms with how the world never quite resettles after the loss of a parent, even a complicated one — especially a complicated one.

That’s the other thing about anxiety. It’s always rooted in something unresolved, something looming, something feared. It’s your body telling you to pay attention.