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Welcome to Dead Week. This is the final Friday newsletter of 2025! Here are the 10 things I thought were worth sharing:
“It’s the end of the year and people are making their year endless” has to be one of the best transcription errors ever. (What I said was “making their year-end lists.”)
The blooper made me think of Patricia Lockwood: “If the AI can have accidents, if it is subject to errata, then it can create poetry, which is also a kind of glitch in what we know.”
Why do we make lists, anyways? Here’s what Umberto Eco said: “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
My friend Alan Jacobs wrote a few years ago about why he doesn’t do an end-of-year list. It occurred to me this week that I spend all year making lists! This year I made one big list of 10 in the form of a book, and then 51 lists of 10 every Friday in this newsletter. (This is the 52nd.) I’m tired of making lists!
When I’m reading year-end lists, I try to keep in mind what film critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote 15 years ago: “[T]he end of a critic’s, or a moviegoer’s, list is where the oddball magic really happens. The movies here are the stragglers, the drifters, the hobos that not all of society loves. These are movies that may have been kicked off the list, put back on and kicked off again – they don’t ask for easy membership in any club. These are movies that may have reached us in ways we can’t quite parse, even after we’ve spent hours or days thinking and/or writing about them. If all top-10 lists are subjective (and all are, no matter how pompous some critics may be in presenting their choices), the tail end of the average list is truly the untamed wilderness, the place for inexplicable passions, for wooliness, for massive quantities of “What the f—itude?”
Speaking of movies, I had a downright delightful conversation with filmmaker Penny Lane that I think you all would enjoy. One of the things we talked about is how often art with a sense of humor gets overlooked when critics make their lists. (Penny said that if she made a year-end list, The Naked Gun would be at the top.) We also talked about why kids are the best at art:
As Penny wrote afterwards, “One of the most important things in art is that it’s understood to be an act of communication and communion between two souls, two humans. This is something that I think gets lost a lot in artists’ fear of being replaced by AI.”“If one of the ways we mark time is by the deaths of famous people, I wonder how true that will still be as monoculture crumbles. I also wonder… whether good people are dying faster than new people are becoming good.” Matt Thomas on TCM Remembers 2025.
Joan Rivers used to joke about reading the obituaries, “That’s how I meet new men.” I read obituaries to meet people I should’ve known about years ago, like Betty Reid Soskin, who, after several lives worth of adventures, retired at 100 as the oldest National Park Service Ranger.