New year. One year.

Well, here we are, 2025. “Happy New Year” doesn’t quite fit the mood, but we’ve all got to be on guard against despair, so wishing you all one anyway. This post doesn’t just coincide with another joint trip around the sun. January 2025 marks my first full year off Substack and here on my current platform, beehiiv. If you’ve forgotten or never heard the reasons I left (in short, Substack kept boosting and profiting off of Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and other assorted bigots while screwing over its other writers), you can read them here.¹ In any case, I thought this would be a good time to take stock of where this newsletter—and me, your newsletterer—were up to in the year since.

For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty of newsletter platforms, it’s hard to do a one-to-one comparison between my subscriber lists on beehiiv and Substack. I’ve purged my list a few times to get rid of bots, inactive emails, and people who didn’t know they’d signed up for my newsletter. Substack’s so-called “network effect” relies on what Casey Newton calls dark patterns, such as spammy, pre-selected pop-up windows. What I can say is that, from my point of view, the size of my engaged reader base has continued growing, and most importantly the paying base. If you’re a newsletter writer who is currently on Substack, I’d advise you to get out. You can use my partner link at beehiiv for a discount on hosting fees:

All right, so let’s look at the year that was. 2024 started in the middle of a presidential campaign, a global environmental catastrophe, a continuing pandemic, wars, protests, an ongoing collapse in Haiti, and a genocide in Gaza. Hopes weren’t particularly high coming in, and that pessimism seems to have been warranted. But there were still some highlights along the way. For instance:

I caught a senator in a lie

Remember this one? In March, Republicans tapped Senator Katie Britt of Alabama — then considered a front-runner as Trump’s eventual VP pick — to give the official response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address. She answered the call with a diatribe filmed in what appeared to be a kitchen on a low-budget Hallmark movie set. The centerpiece of the speech was a harrowing story about a woman she’d met “in the Del Rio sector of Texas” who had been “sex trafficked by the cartels" thanks, she implied, to Biden’s border policies. It took me just a few minutes of research to catch the lies: the woman she met, Karla Jacinto Romero, was a well-known activist she’d heard speak on a panel. The sexual exploitation in question had happened decades earlier in central Mexico under the administrations of George W. Bush and Vicente Fox. The real story had nothing to do with immigration, Biden, the border, nor any cartels.

I broke the story in a TikTok post that would amass 2.2 million views. I found myself being interviewed on CNN and MSNBC. Saturday Night Live rewrote its cold open for Scarlett Johansson to incorporate it. Whatever hopes there had been for a Trump-Britt ticket vanished, like whatever food had previously been prepared in the Uncanny Valley kitchen in which Britt’s remarks were taped. But one person did end up going to the White House as a result …

I went to the White House

Somehow, in April, I found myself at the White House, in a private event with the president and a bunch of comedians and influencers. And somehow I found myself face to face with him — okay, I know how, I walked up to and started interviewing him about Gaza and the campus protests. Look, when you invite a journalist to an event with the president of the United States, in an election year no less, you’ve got to be ready for him to start asking questions, right? Well, Biden wasn’t. While his answers were more energetic and coherent than I might have expected given the raft of reporting about his mental state at the time, he also seemed to lose his temper — at one point threatening (half-jokingly, I think) to throw the iPhone on which I was recording him. That interaction then ended up landing me on the front page of the New York Times, and starting the second news cycle in which I accidentally played a part. In short order that would be forgotten though, when …

Someone tried to off Donald Trump

Giving the Republican nominee a chance to bring out his inner Francisco Franco:

Biden blew the debate and dropped out of the race

Turned out the coherent, hyper-aggressive Biden I met in the Blue Room disappeared after dinnertime.

Kamala Harris inherited a genocide and a fracturing coalition

I’d seen the clash between liberal administrators and leftist protesters in May …

… and didn’t manage either very well

Which is not to say that U.S.-Israel policy or Gaza played a decisive role in the campaign. Much more important were …

Media myopia about Trump

… and Trump’s fearmongering about immigrants

The most egregious example of which targeted a community I care about:

And speaking of the perle des antilles …

The situation in Haiti managed to get even worse

The hostages did not come home

And Israel’s killing and war crimes accelerated in Gaza … and the West Bank and Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and …

And now we’re in for whatever’s next.

Thanks again for reading, sharing, and supporting my newsletter. Whatever this year brings, let’s make it as good as we can, for each other and ourselves.

1  Substack is still doing it, by the way.