25 from '25

The best yet?

2025 was a dramatic one. It brought me some of the lowest lows of the last decade, with the first half of the year consumed by my dog’s extreme behavioral issues and ultimate euthanasia. But somehow, on the whole, it feels like my best year since 2021, my year in Indonesia. In ‘25, I started the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had, I escaped New York to some genuinely beautiful places (Colorado, Santa Fe twice, Turkey & Georgia), I finished 9+1, and I felt increasingly at home in my little Brooklyn studio.

If anything, life felt so full this year as to defy reflection, the packed calendar and back-to-back itineraries overwhelming my memory. I’d like to take more pit stops in 2026 - allow new memories a chance to put down roots - but for now, I’m grateful for such a banner year and a chance this holiday to look back.

1. Highest moment

   1. Descending Mt. Yale in the August morning sunshine while listening to the LOTR soundtrack, Ariana dancing on ahead.

      

2. Lowest moment

   1. Quite a few related to the entire Voodoo saga; it’s hard to pick a single low. You can read about all of them here

      

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3. Favorite film

   1. One Battle After Another. I went into this with high expectations yet zero idea what the film was about. I continue to like not knowing what a film is about beforehand. OBAA is hilarious and very hard to predict. You feel like you’re watching a canon movie as you sit there, which is how a lot of PTA movies feel.

4. Favorite documentary

   1. The Dating Game. Three men from rural China move to Chongqing for a week to work with Hao, a dating coach who applies Andrew Tate Thought to the Chinese urban dating scene. Hao’s wife is also a dating coach and thinks he’s full of shit and doesn’t understand women in the slightest. So much fascinating stuff here about the legacy of One Child Policy, rural/urban divides, AI boyfriend addiction, and how women and men misunderstand each other. I was tickled to watch this and meet the director, Violet Du Feng. Modern dating is a tragicomedy and this film nails it.

5. Favorite non-fiction book

   1. Breakneck by Dan Wang. If you follow China closely, you probably already know a lot of this stuff, but I thought this was a solid intro to what separates and unites China and the US. The lawyer vs. engineer society dichotomy might oversimplify things, but it also explains a ton.

6. Favorite fiction book

   1. Lonesome Dove. Some books are so good they feel like memories. That’s LD to a tee. Infinitely readable and plays out many of life’s most important lessons over its sprawling cattle drive.

      

7. Favorite quote

   1. “The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.” - Gus McCrae, Lonesome Dove.

8. Biggest regret

   1. I didn’t see Oasis in New Jersey, despite the invitation from my friend Oliver. It was a weeknight, it was far away in Jersey, yada yada boohoo. Instead I wistfully listened to live recordings of Champagne Supernova for weeks, banging my head against the ceramic in the shower.

9. Opposite of biggest regret: favorite bucket list checkbox

   1. Seeing Göbeklitepe, the world’s oldest man-made monument, a mystical ruin in north Mesopotamia. Kudos to those guys for building something that lasted, not just going into B2B SaaS.

   2. Honorable mention: I climbed my first fourteener! Mt. Princeton was kinda terrible - not that pretty, the threat of lightning the whole time, and mild altitude sickness. But I followed it up with Mt. Yale, my favorite moment from the whole year. And then followed it up with another and another. Anyway, follow me on 14ers.com.

10. Greatest culinary moment

    1. Trying Ali Nazik for the first time in Antep, Turkey’s food capital.

11. Favorite aesthetic

    1. Xpiritualism. I like 2000s kitsch, I like things that make me nostalgic for old Xbox games, and I like things that ChatGPT seems to be bad at recreating.

       

12. Favorite new skill

    1. This year I took up pencil sketching, which I briefly wrote about here. I am still not good at it, but my “circles” are asymptotically approaching real circles, and my first attempts at bird sketches are recognizably avian, which is really satisfying to see.

13. Favorite song

    1. Every Grain of Sand, but the Emmylou Harris version, not the OG Bob Dylan. I love how these lyrics weave between doubt and hope, despair and assurance.

14. Favorite article of clothing

    1. This is Basic Brooklyn Boy™ but I did indeed buy a Carhartt this year. It was sitting in the back of Ruby Blues in Salida and, like an old dog at the adoption center, wagged its tail when it saw me. It hails from November 2000 and is the only pre-9/11 — hell, pre-Bush v. Gore — article that I own, and I wear it with pride. Someday, maybe, I’ll do a job that actually calls for a jacket this rugged.

15. Favorite artist

    1. James Turrell. I’m sad that I never came across him ‘til I turned 30, but boy am I happy to have wandered into his exhibits at Mass MOCA, especially Perfectly Clear, which made my rods & cones feel like they were getting shot through a particle accelerator.

16. Favorite show

    1. This was a competitive year. I saw Paul McCartney for the second time, I saw Vulfpeck at MSG, I saw Béla Fleck at Beacon Theater. But the gold goes to LCD Soundsystem at Knockdown Center. A small dose of psychedelics did some lifting here in making this show feel infinite, but man “I Can Change” live felt like peeking under the hood of some great industrial machine. It’s hard to explain. This show also convinced me that millennials are the perfect crowd in 2025: old enough to realize their mortality and thus put away their phones and dance, which they’re still young enough to do.

       

17. Most important lesson

    1. Everybody else’s version of you matters. You might feel like they don’t get you, the “real” you, but that’s a failure of communication above anything else. And when you die, it’s their version that lives on anyway, so which one carries more weight? The implication here is we should care what other people think of us, which is not the same as caring whether they like us.

18. Favorite subway line

    1. The A. The A is reliable except on weekends. It brings me to fun places like West Village and UWS but also necessary places like Moynihan and JFK. It carried me to basically every 9+1 Central Park race this year. I love need you, A.

19. Most beautiful newly-encountered building

    1. The Museum at Eldridge Street, a restored synagogue in Lower East Side.

20. Biggest climb

    1. White Rock Mountain in the Ozarks. This was Day 3 of my 4-day solo bikepacking journey through north and central Arkansas, which I still need to write about. This 15-mile climb slaps bikers in the face with its double-false-start.¹ I ate an entire package of Haribo Zing Sour Streamers - my only comfort - and fought tooth and nail to make it to the summit campground, where microwave pizza and Mug Root Beer felt Michelin-worthy.

       

       A nice picture from that bike trip but not from the trials and tribulations of White Rock Mountain.

21. Most cinematic moment

    1. Wandering away from the group at Mosquito Bay in Vieques, coming across a school of jumping fish who lit up in bioluminescent blue as they flew through the air.

22. Favorite stranger

    1. Gary, who I’ve written about a lot and who seems to be taking a break til mid Jan. Hope he’s getting a good rest because I need beans.

       

       Gary and his shack!

23. Favorite animal

    1. Tilly, our ranch dog in Salida, who moonlit as my emotional support animal in the wake of Voodoo. I still miss our daily frisbee sessions.

    2. Honorable mentions to all of the feral dogs who lead Ariana and me up to Gergeti Church in Kazbegi, who felt more guardian angel than animal.

    

    iirc we named this one Gandalf.

24. Closest I felt to the power of God

    1. Our first attempt at climbing Mt. Sherman, our final 14er. About half a mile before the saddle it started to hail on us, and about 30 feet below the saddle lightning clapped right above our heads. I have what I think is a healthy fear of lightning given that it kills people on 14ers, so we turned around.² This was probably the only time this year I felt flirty with death.

25. Favorite new town

    1. Salida, Colorado, our home for all of August. I miss the ranch and its four horses, I miss our gracious hosts who gave us fruit, I miss evening mountain bike rides and rodeos and saddling up in our Nissan Titan to climb up the worst roads on the planet towards 14er trailheads.

1. Two big climbs followed by equal descents, meaning you start from Square 1 thrice.

2. We came back and finished Sherman the next day under blue skies, so all’s well that ends well.