Welcome to our holiday series, Best of The Free Press—your essential guide to all the stories you need to read before the year’s end. Each day this week (except Sunday, that’s for Things Worth Remembering), a different Free Presser will celebrate a handful of illuminating, challenging, or just plain delightful stories we ran this year, and explain why it’s time to revisit them. First up, Suzy Weiss selects the pieces—and the podcast—that reminded us, in the midst of a chaotic year, that there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful.
This year had no shortage of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news. There were the assassination attempts, the actual assassination, the brutal election, the collapsing of so many institutions into groupthink, antisemitism, willful blindness, or chaos. I could go on.
But if you were able to dodge the carved-up bullets, turn up your headphones to drown out the protesters’ bullhorns, and squint through the drone swarms, there were moments of genuine optimism and faith. In other words, if you were able to avoid the maw, this was the year of the White Pill.
In internet parlance, taking the Red Pill means realizing that the mainstream—the media, the expert class—is often wrong or misleading, while the Blue Pill equates to remaining blissfully ignorant. There’s also a Black Pill, which means giving into nihilism and despair. And then, the White Pill. Alana Newhouse, the editor in chief of Tablet magazine, described those who take it as people who “look at the challenges of our day and feel instinctively that moments of change can be moments of possibility.”
“Their feelings and actions are rooted in hope,” she added.
Working at The Free Press, I’m lucky to have met many, many different kinds of people this year—business owners, porn stars, porn owners, business stars, art dealers, singers, babies—and it’s always easy to tell if they’ve taken the White Pill or the Black. The priest who took time out of his day to bless our editorial meeting last week? White Pill. The well-heeled investment-banker friend who told me he thinks that freedom of the press is overrated and that the president should be chosen from a pool of high-IQ individuals? Black Pill. Two brothers I know who moved into apartments down the block from each other once their parents moved overseas? White Pill. Sleeping with 100 men in a day? Black Pill.
Taking the White Pill doesn’t mean being happy all the time. Au contraire. It means staring down the barrel of the bad news—whether it be, as you’ll read below, a canceled Taylor Swift concert, or the collapse of the neoliberal order—and deciding to do something about it. It means being tolerant, confident, and willing to let go of the old institutions or ideas that just don’t work anymore. The following stories were some of my favorites that we’ve run on the theme of finding embers in the ashes.
I’ve been singing the praises of America’s Hobo Laureate, Andy Hickman, ever since I read his blog post this past June about his wedding to Keturah Lamb, another consummate free spirit. Andy has been traveling, sleeping rough, living hard, for over a decade, and he’s seen the grimier underbelly of the country. But now he’s writing a series for us about whether he might be able to fall in love with America—this time with his new wife and a renewed religious outlook.
His series has given me a look into the weird, knotty, overlooked America. In one essay about Beaver Island, Michigan, Andy writes: “If any older, purer iteration of reality might be tasted, it would be fair to assume that it’d still be thriving 30 nautical miles off the coast, in the land under swirling galaxies, self-appointed kings, and surreal isolation from the comings and goings of America’s more well-traveled paths.”
Read Andy’s sweeping introductory essay here, then read about his time in Michigan and New York. And stand by for the next installment of the series—the Hickmans head west by train!—it’ll be published soon!
The philosopher Agnes Callard traveled to Vienna with her niece and sister for a Taylor Swift concert earlier this year. To say she was excited would be an understatement. Callard had studied Swift’s lyrics and made a taxonomy of the songs, which she ironed into a dress to wear to the concert. But the big night was foiled by a terrorist. Thankfully, there was no attack, but police discovered that a 19-year-old Islamist was planning to kill “as many people as possible” at the show—so it was canceled.
But the trip was not a wash. Far from it. The Swifties gathered on the streets of Vienna to make the most of their time there. “There was pain and also joy,” Callard wrote. “The energy of those three days was the energy that comes from diving into sadness, rather than avoiding it.” This is her account.
As a sworn hater of the Ivy League forever, I talk and think about those places way too much. It’s sad, really, how much I know about finals clubs and eating clubs and secret societies, considering I couldn’t even score a bed in a freshman dorm on one of the leafy Northeast campuses. I’m not proud. So when I read this piece from Eric Spitznagel, about the high schoolers whose dream colleges are in the South—Elon or University of South Carolina or Clemson—I thought, “The kids are going to be all right.” Whether to escape toxic politics, or because they’re looking for a good time, Yankee kids are being drawn to Southern colleges. To which I say, Yeehaw!
At the risk of tooting my own horn—what else are you supposed to do with your own horn, though?—I think my dispatch from Story, Wyoming, is worth your time. It’s an account of the second annual gathering of the self-proclaimed “Doomer Optimists,” an emergent coalition of conservatives, environmentalists, Luddites, and Catholics who all believe there’s something very broken with modern life, and that America is in inexorable decline. Except “maybe it’s not even collapse, maybe it’s just a transformation.” At least that’s what Ashley Fitzgerald, one of the happy-warrior leaders of the movement, told me.
At the conference, in between discussions on techno-nuclear war, I went fly-fishing, drank illegal dairy, and watched people fight over the Second Vatican Council. A few months after the conference, Donald Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run Health and Human Services for his administration. If you want to understand a little bit about the political force that binds the two of them together, read this piece.
Most parents I know hesitate to schlep their kids from Manhattan to Brooklyn. But Tim Urban, who can explain better than most what ails us, dragged his toddler from New York to Boca Chica, Texas—to make sure she was present at the launch of Elon Musk’s Starship.
“As the father to a smiley little gnome, I desperately want to shield her from the negativity that will swirl around her as she grows up,” wrote Urban in the hours after watching the launch (and incredible catch) of SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket booster with his family. “I won’t be able to do that. But what I can do is continually redirect her attention to the rocket, showing her all the ways our species is incredible.” Tim’s parenting, as well as our rejuvenated space industry, are two exciting things to keep tabs on in 2025.
Paul Kingsnorth has done the full circle, from fervent eco-activist to disillusioned novelist to Romanian Orthodox Church convert and reclusive writer living off the land in rural Ireland. Bari had been a fan for years, but it didn’t click for me until I listened to him tell his own story on Honestly. I was especially moved by Kingsnorth’s description of his religious epiphany—he said he was “stalked” by God, and was bowled over by a religious feeling during a recital at his son’s school—and of what it feels like to believe. “It doesn’t matter what humans do, and not everything is under our control. And that’s okay,” he said. “There’s always somebody holding you. That’s how it feels. And it’s rather wonderful.” I encourage anyone, religious or not, to listen to this conversation:
Beyond the Best of The Free Press, here’s what summed up my 2024. . .
Best thing I read this year: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
Best thing I watched: Conclave, directed by Edward Berger.
Best thing I heard: Joni Mitchell’s Blue album.
Best thing I bought: Technically, my mom bought it, but it’s this sweater.
Best thing I ate: Comté tart with chanterelles from Bridges, or a medium-rare porterhouse from Keens Steakhouse.
Biggest regret of the year: I wish I spent more time on my phone.
Best thing that happened: Toasting to The Free Press, under the Statue of Liberty, on a boat, during our corporate retreat.
New Year’s resolution: Get engaged.
What I am most looking forward to in 2025: Getting engaged and this new book about Lil Peep.
There is nothing like watching a spaceship blast upward and disappear into the sky. I was around 12, living in Florida when the Mercury and Gemini programs were taking place. An engineer who worked at Cape Caneveral (before Kennedy was killed and it became Cape Kennedy) took mu up to watch a launch. Later I got to see the humongous VAB (vehicle assembly building). It made a lasting impression and an image that endures in my memory to this day.
Throughout all the turmoil I have observed the image of the rocket blasting off and disappearing has been a constant reminder of what can be accomplished.
Revolutionary Road is an amazing book. Devastating. Good movie too with Leo and Kate Winslet.