On the new year

25 for 2025

We’re back!

Housekeeping notes: Next week, paid subscribers will get ET Leave Home, a new series of travel recommendations for different cities put together by me for you. (I’m keeping ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire, but it will now be the second paid issue of the month, not the first.)

Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India, and the wider world, early and directly to their inboxes from me. Please note that there was no new episode this week!

With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.

THE NEWS

• For the Forward, I wrote about an Isaac Bashevis Singer story called “A Piece of Advice” and acting as though you believe even when you’re full of despair. (It’s really an end of year piece, but maybe it’ll help you at the beginning, too.)

• I spoke to the Columbia Journalism Review about being a Jewish journalist—or maybe more accurately a journalist who is Jewish and writes often about Jews—in these, our terrible times.

• And on a maybe not completely unrelated note: Marc Tracy of the New York Times talked to Dylanologists about what they thought of the new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.

• I always enjoy Dream Baby Press’s Love/Hate lists and thought this one by Kacey Musgraves(!) was really good.

MY VIEWS ON…

…25 for 2025!

Normally, I do New Year’s Resolutions. But this year, at the advice of a friend (...who is my mom), I am doing things a little differently.

First, I picked a word that I want to guide me through the year. (I know this is not new! My friend Christine has been doing this for over a decade.) I thought about the Singer story referenced in the first bullet there and how it ends: “And so it is with all things. If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. So also with faith. If you are in despair, act as though you believed. Faith will come afterwards.” I thought of how that’s what I want to do this year. Not to delude myself, but to act as though things might possibly work out rather than to give into despair. I chose “affirmative” as my word.

And then I wrote out 25 goals for myself for 2025. I am not going to share them all here, because some are, in the words of Lindsay Lohan’s studio album, a little more personal (raw), but here are five:

• Finish book three.

• Go on a trip with Neil to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

• Finish Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy (I had already watched Pather Panchali and watched Aparajito as my first movie of 2025, so I am halfway through this goal!).

• Read a book for 25 minutes for fun every day.

• Imagine the best case scenario for every worst case scenario I think of.

You get the idea. It was a useful exercise to think through how I want to live this year. If it’s useful to you, maybe try your own 25 for 2025. And if not, I can’t help you.*

*This is a joke.

AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS

• From Haaretz: “The Israeli army is forcing residents of the northern Gaza Strip to move southward and preventing them from taking their personal belongings with them.”

• Also from Haaretz: “In Gaza's Jabalya, Devastation Seems to Be the IDF's End Goal, Not the Hostages.”

• From JTA: “Agnes Keleti, Holocaust survivor who won 10 Olympic gymnastics medals, dies at 103.”

• I’m reading (and liking) Kaddish dot Com. When I’m done, I’ll have read all of Nathan Englander’s books. He is, I think, the only living fiction writer besides Jhumpa Lahiri of whom I can say that.

• I had a nice moment at my parents’ apartment over vacation. We were watching old family movies, and one clip was of my naming ceremony. I listened to what my dad vowed to do for me, and to what the rabbi said: what she hoped for me as a human and as a person in relationship to others and as a Jew. And I got to think to myself that it all came true.

-ET

"Happy New Year" by Ivan David VQ is licensed under CC BY 2.0.