17 things I loved in 2025
Love, actually, IS all around
Hi! Here’s a list of things that brought me joy this year, mostly music and books and movies, plus some chaos items. Be influenced! Revile my preferences! A little of both! It’s all fun.
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1. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
This novel didn’t come out this year, but I read it this year and loved it. It’s a lot about journaling and isolation (which sounds like it has no plot, but I promise the plot COOKS). As a huge 2025 journaler, I thought it was very insightful about the different things journaling is: it’s your memory and a historical record and a form of self-expression, and then also this time-traveling social act that lets you be friends with your past self. A lot goes on there!
Also: Sometimes I feel some vague societal pressure to “stay busy, “ but there is nothing cooler to me than how Mr. Piranesi turns his solitary free time into a deep relationship with nature and his house. I feel like he sees the world around him more clearly and lovingly than any busy person.
2. Subway tuna subs
Listen, Subway serves REAL TUNA according to their Tuna Facts page, which starts with the giant relaxing headline “Subway Tuna Lawsuit Dismissed.” Whatever the nice smooth substance is that they serve, it tastes amazing. I like to get my tuna sub to go and add my own Dijon mustard at home :) #French
3. The Yoko Ono exhibit at the MCA (Chicago-only)
Sometimes it’s hard to think of something novel to do in a day, but not for Yoko Ono. She’s like “Why don’t you nail a strand of your hair to a board!” My dad and I went and saw this Yoko exhibit over Thanksgiving, and I was so inspired by her interactive, instructions-as-artwork project. Did she pave the way for TikTok dances with her… embodied memes? Is that something? Rando Chicagoans (plural!) definitely nailed their hairs to a board before my eyes, and my dad and I played a game of chess on an all-white Yoko chess set, where you couldn’t tell one player’s pieces from the other’s. It was VERY world-peace-coded. You were clearly supposed to say, “Well why even bother to play this war game when we’re all the same?” My dad and I played normally, and when I said, “How can you tell our pieces apart?” my dad said, “I just remember.” But then, out of respect for Yoko, he orchestrated a stalemate at the end of the game. World stalemate ✌️
4. This spatula
Or sorry, I guess it’s technically a Restaurant Turner. It feels insanely good to scrape it on a cast iron, and it gets “more underneath” my eggs than a normal spatula. I don’t know what I’m saying or who I’m quoting here, but I mean this with my whole heart.
5. Rereading my old workshop letter to the MFA’s most inscrutable poet
I reread a bunch of my old workshop letters from grad school this year for no real reason, and my favorite was my thesis seminar letter to our most inscrutable poet. I am not a strong poetry reader in the best of times, and his poems specifically involved a lot of references and vocabulary I didn’t understand. I was lost. It shows. Some highlights:
“I had trouble telling why running water A was functioning differently (or if it even was different) from running water B,” I write.
What am I looking for here? It’s okay if there are 1-2 creeks and we don’t nail it down….
“This collection is named after a Spanish musical tradition,” I notice, “but we don’t get poems set clearly in Spain, or much reference to man-made music, until towards the end.”
My literal prose-writing ass: “Why isn’t there a main character in your poetry collection whose name is also the title? Have you read Piranesi?”
“Your poems are full of nature imagery, and these natural loops full eternal… [b]ut… IRL human activity is disrupting all of these cycles (except the sun) (the sun is doing OK),” I write.
Lol at me clinging to the one remotely relevant fact I know. Global warming does NOT hurt the sun. I heard it actually comes from the sun??? Have you guys heard this?
The letter is so unhelpful yet un-self-deprecating it becomes sort of HEROIC. It’s like: “Hello. I do not know, and it does not silence me. Here are my thoughts. Farewell.” Aragorn energy. But I think there’s something pro-social about openly communicating confusion, and receiving missives from the confused. More of this in 2026!
6. “Which One,” Drake and Central Cee
I listened to this joyous song about tradeoffs a lot this summer, and I have to say, I love when Drake patronizes women and pretends he’s from an island nation. I know he’s from Toronto and I just can’t care! I also love when Central Cee says “I’ve got a chopstick for your wonton.” Makes me feel like I don’t know how sex works. Or eating. Just one chopstick?
7. Sorry, Baby (HBO Max)
This movie is the funniest movie about sexual violence we may ever get. Great central friendship; great single woman x cat relationship. It’s impossible to spoil this film but I found it validating — as someone mystified by how bad ghosting feels (what is that???) — to learn that it can even strangely suck to get ghosted by your rapist. My favorite line read is “She said ‘Yum.’”
8. This one smoothie in Brooklyn
I did some detective work and I thinkkkk the smoothie is “Healing Turmeric Smoothie” at “Lively Brooklyn” in Park Slope. After I drank it, I wrote down the ingredients IN MY JOURNAL (normally reserved for feelings): hemp milk, banana, mango, turmeric, chia, cinnamon, ginger, and black pepper. This smoothie was $14 and worth at least $100. If you have these ingredients in your home please lord blend them together.
9. The Harper’s gooning article and Daniel Ortberg’s Substack about it
These two pieces of media, which I read in the order they are listed here, revealed to me that I am not the critical reader I hoped. I just felt… whatever the writer I was currently reading felt, about everything. So in the course of roughly an hour I went from “I’m so scared that strangers masturbate too hard” to “Haha remember when I was actively part of a moral panic 12 minutes ago?”
Ultimately, I think gooning is just not a good topic for journalism, or at least for Daniel Kolitz (Harper’s guy) (wow both authors are named Daniel!). Kolitz was too squeamish to verify most of his article’s claims — he just heard and repeated them. Like, when he goes to the goonparty, does he even know for sure it occurs once he leaves? No. So the story is ultimately about what people want to anonymously say about their masturbation habits, not the habits themselves. But I still enjoyed and recommend these two pieces in quick succession! An absolute rollercoaster.
10. Beth’s Dead
My coworker recommended this podcast to me and I absolutely devoured it, and paid $9 to get it faster than you normal peasants (even though I really only had to pay $4). It’s the story of two podcasters, a married couple, who shut down their very successful comedy podcast after a spooky situation with some listeners; in this show they reconstruct the events of the past and do some additional investigation in the present.
Apparently the pod has a lot of Reddit haters because it’s not 100% journalistic in its inquiries—but even though I was just hating on unverified information sentences ago, I don’t mind the lack of verification here. I do not think this is investigative journalism; it’s more of a two-author memoir about fear, and how we can get stuck in scary static beliefs about people we don’t know (for good reason!), but we also really want to trust each other! And it’s more of an animal thing than a documentation thing, in the end. When you think you’re looking for Answers you’re maybe really looking for a kind face or a certain tone of voice. This is true to my experience! Reminded me of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, in a way, with all the super zoomed-in, emotional play-by-play around Emailing. Also, I recently watched the 1994 and 2019 Little Women movies back to back and thought damn. Beth is dead in every universe!
11. Getting parented by my friends
When I visited my friend Kelsey this year, her daughter (age 2) really wanted to decide what shoes I wore one day. She kept bringing her chosen shoes over to me and placing them by my socked feet suggestively. Kelsey said something like, “We can invite Mae to wear those shoes, but it’s her decision what shoes she wears!” I now think about this a lot now in a variety of situations. We can invite, but we can’t insist! Forever relevant. I’m growing up.
12. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Netflix)
My dad and I both loved this documentary, and it’s hard to hit the middle of the Mae-Ed Venn diagram — he can’t get through even S1 of Fleabag because Fleabag (the character) is upsettingly unlikable to him (??????). This documentary is about a Norwegian guy, Mats Steen, with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He spends many years in a wheelchair, and dies at 25. The movie has two parts: his life story as observed by his family, and his life story reconstructed from World of Warcraft chats and records. It’s sort of like Piranesi, in that it’s about the life and records of a seemingly isolated person, and it makes isolation seem FULL of possibilities!
13. “Chun Swae,” Nicki Minaj ft. Swae Lee (in song and in ASL)
This is a great song to listen to when you need to feel confident and nothing else in about 3 minutes. (The Nicki promise! Also fulfilled by “Yikes.”) I saw a TikTok of a woman signing along to this song that put me in an (incredibly) MORE powerful headspace than the raw audio, and I was hooked and watched a bunch of her other videos. Then I wondered: am I just getting bamboozled by a rapidly-gesticulating woman? Idk what’s ASL. So I sent it to an ASL-fluent friend who confirmed it “looks legit,” although musical ASL is a little different from musicless ASL, and allows for more creative liberties—so not textbook, but not fake. Phew!
14. Hey Bagel (Seattle only)
This bagel place in Seattle (in a MALL?!) serves the best bagels I’ve ever had. I say this as someone who has been to New York (and famously drank a smoothie there), and eats every bagel I encounter in Chicago. I am literally considering buying a car so I can drive out and eat a Ka’ak bagel at Al Manakeesh in Bridgeview (?? where even is this).
But so far, Hey Bagel triumphs over all. Their bagels are so hot and fresh. Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. It’s frankly annoying, because they not only sell a perfect product but act like they are the first bagel purveyor on earth. If you ask for cream cheese on your bagel, they’re like, “Sorry, you must be confused… cream cheese on a bagel? Our bagels are too hot and fresh and the cream cheese will fall right off. You must rip up your bagel and dip the bits in cream cheese.”
Hmm. How come everyone else can shmear their dang bagels, guys?
But then the rip and dip method is actually super good and as of recently, cosigned by Martha Stewart. Hey Bagel: infallible!
15. Titanique
This musical asks the important question: “What if Celine Dion was in the movie Titanic, and played herself, and kinda poked her nose into everything?” The answer is hilarious and the Celine Dion character in the show is the absolute queen of self-esteem and strutting and turning a French-Canadian accent up to 11.
Here are my Titanique texts with my friend who saw it first:
After the show I listened to “A New Day Has Come” on repeat until my ears hurt. Highly rec if it’s showing in your city!
16. Who’s the Clown?, Audrey Hobert
I loved this whole album. I often interact with music as a text — which is why I like rap and Taylor Swift and also why I’m a loser (it’s not a text!!) — and Audrey makes my perverse preference fun. She’s such a weird, granular storyteller that I even respect the skips (for me), like “Wet Hair” or “Bowling alley.”
I also think her public persona is cool because she is not trying to look the hottest she can look (or she would use volumizer) (and make her hair and face colors more different). I believe she is intentionally skipping hotmaxxing to instead look the most like the person who wrote her songs—a person who craves male validation that eludes her and thinks she has “a fucked-up face” and wants to get felt up when she’s drunk at the club (“Are you even allowed to say that?!” I gasped like Mr. Gooner Journalist when I first heard it). This works in a powerful way and gives her music extra heft. It also gives her access to a special Napoleon Dynamite vibe while dancing (and she knows!).
17. O Noir (Montreal only)
This is a pitch-black restaurant in Montreal, meant to give sighted people empathy for blind people, and also employ blind people—the waiters are all blind. The purity of the darkness in the dining room is… unforgettable. You can’t see your own hand in front of your face, or your food. Without any visual cues, I felt like I was floating, and I kept saying “I feel like I’m dead,” creating a wonderful mood for my dining companion. I had ice cream for dessert, and immediately spread it all over the tablecloth. I couldn’t see the edges of the bowl and I guess I have no internal sense of how big a bowl could and couldn’t be. Going here was humbling and wonderful. When I left the world and my eyes felt brand spanking new. The food is good but beside the point.
Reader q
What places and things brought you joy this year? Did you have strong reactions of agreement or disagreement to this list?
Would love to hear your thoughts and recs! Reply to this email or leave a comment at the button. Happy hols <3