Best of 2024
All my favourite things from this year
Let’s Do This
Congrats on making it to the end of 2024 and thank you if you’ve ever read anything I’ve written. It’s really quite bizarre that anyone does at all.
It’s that time of the year again. Below is a massive, ginormous dump of all my favourite art I watched and read and listened to and experienced over the last twelve months.
As always, to clarify: these are all works of media that I consumed in 2024, but not necessarily released in 2024.
I’ve recently moved all my previous best-of lists to one place. You can also check each of them out individually: 2023, 2022, 2021.
Songs
Here are my favourite songs I discovered this year.
38. Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Can’t Stop
37. Big Thief - Paul
36. Timothée Chalamet - A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
35. Rocksun - Gulabachya Phula
34. Maude Latour - Lola
33. The Sutherland Brothers - Sailing (h/t AT)
32. Karan Aujla - Tauba Tauba
31. Kid Cudi - Erase Me (feat. Kanye West)
30. Djo - End of Beginning
29. MF DOOM - THAT’S THAT
28. Shaggy, Rik Rok - It Wasn’t Me
27. The Walters - Sweet Marie
26. fun. - Sight of the Sun
25. Maude LaTour - Save Me
24. The Cast of Hamilton - Alexander Hamilton
23. Sabrina Carpenter - Espresso
22. The Cast of Hamilton - The Room Where It Happens
21. Future, Metro Boomin, Kendrick Lamar - Like That
20. Pritam, Sachet Tandon, Amitabh Bhattacharya - Kudmayi
19. Leslie Odom Jr. - Wait For It
18. Steve Lacy - Bad Habit
17. Kendrick Lamar - Meet the Grahams
16. Childish Gambino - Lithonia
15. Mk.gee - I Want
14. Billie Eilish - BIRDS OF A FEATHER
13. Jonathan Groff - You’ll Be Back
12. The Cast of Hamilton - It’s Quiet Uptown
11. Vampire Weekend - Hope
10. Shaggy, Rayvon - Angel (h/t AD)
09. The Cast of Hamilton - The Election of 1800
08. Allison Russell - Persephone
07. Charli xcx - 360
06. The Sweptaways, Anders Wendin - They Don’t Know About Us
05. Vampire Weekend - Capricorn
04. Cocteau Twins - Cherry-coloured Funk
03. The Innocence Mission - Evensong
02. Kali Uchis - Melting
01. Vampire Weekend - Mary Boone
Events
Leaving aside personal travel and some beautiful weddings, my favourite live events and shows I saw this year were:
06. Shreya Ghoshal concert (h/t AP)
05. Standup at The Comedy Cellar (h/t AR)
04. Kanan Gill’s standup show
03. Green Day concert
02. Cigarettes After Sex concert
01. Vampire Weekend concert (h/t DM, AT)
Albums
My favourite albums I listened to this year were:
(good)
06. The Black Keys - El Camino (2011) (h/t MD)
05. Coctaeu Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)
(very good)
04. The Velvet Underground, Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
03. Maude Latour - Sugar Water (2024)
(transcendent)
02. Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us (2024)
01. Lin-Manuel Miranda - Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording) (2015)
Essays
Here are the best essays and blog posts I read online this year.
Most favourite:
the metaphysics of Waffle House, MythoAmerica
Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion (h/t VB)
Book Review: Two Arms and a Head, AmandaFromBethlehem
Thoughts on Kung Fu Panda, Eric Weinstein
50 Things I Know, Sasha Chapin
The Insult, cybermonk
Also incredible:
Memories of an Enron Summer, Giuseppe Paleologo
Speed Matters, James Somers
Frank Auerbach and the unexamined life, Janan Ganesh
Heroes Suck, Here’s Why, Steve Rolston
Entry Points, Ava
Stuff I’ve Learned, cybermonk
Thick and Thin Cultures, Paul Skallas
I’ve spent a lifetime…, Adrian Chiles
Let’s Be Friends, Ryan Lizza
hometown inertia, inhale, scream
Sensitive Young Man in The Gym, worst boyfriend ever
The Cost of Apathy, Jack Raines
There’s a place for everyone, Adam Mastroianni
The male mind cannot comprehend the allure of Tony Soprano, Catherine Shannon
Obvious travel advice, Dynomight
Also very good:
Charisma as Natural as Gravity, Christopher Nolan
Clock Speed, Sriram Krishnan
My Own Private India, Joel Stein
The reality of the Danish fairytale, David Heinemeier Hanson
Real Life, Kasra
Networking for Nerds, Benjamin Reinhardt
Book Review: Dominion, Drew Housman
How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?, Scott Alexander
Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI, Erik Hoel
You can’t tell people anything, Habitat Chronicles
Movies
Not including rewatches, here are my favourite movies I watched this year. Also add me on Letterboxd!
(good)
17. Burn After Reading (2008, Ethan and Joel Coen)
16. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013, Francis Lawrence)
15. Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)
(very good)
14. Hit Man (2023, Richard Linklater)
13. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
12. No Hard Feelings (2023, Gene Stupnitsky)
11. Dune: Part Two (2024, Denis Villeneuve)
10. Laapata Ladies (2024, Kiran Rao)
09. Oldboy (2003, Park Chan-wook)
08. Red Rocket (2021, Sean Baker)
(great)
07. Sir (2018, Rohena Gera)
06. Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)
05. Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022, Cooper Raiff)
(outstanding)
04. Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee) (h/t NK)
03. Riddle of Fire (2023, Weston Razooli)
02. Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven)
01. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson)
Podcasts / Audio
Here are the best podcast episodes and other audio-thingys I listened to this year:
Standup
Here are my favourite standup specials I watched this year:
YouTube
Out of the hundreds of YouTube videos I watched this year, here are my very favourite ones:
Days of Summer (h/t VJ)
How J Cole fans were when they heard the Kendrick diss on metro album
Homem caindo do céu GMOD (h/t SJ)
Books
The books I read and liked the most this year were:
(good)
06. Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland
05. MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards (h/t SJ)
04. Dune by Frank Herbert
03. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
(very good)
02. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
01. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
TV
Here are the best tv shows I watched this year.
(good / worth watching once)
09. Beef - miniseries
08. Severance - season 1
(quite good)
07. Death Note - miniseries
06. Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story - miniseries
(really good)
05. Arrested Development - season 1
04. The Wire - season 1
03. The Wire - season 2
02. Key & Peele - season 3
(outstanding)
01. Arcane - season 2
Quotes
Last but not least—the most memorable quotes I came across from any source this year that I just had to note down and share.
"She said the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience."
- Frank Herbert, Dune
"there are people who thrive and start having fun under amounts of stress that would kill you or I. there are people who play world building like their favorite strategy game. there are people who don't sleep and have less brain fog than I do on a normal day. there are people who understand every line of a million line codebase or have a pointer in their head for who to ask. there are people who are bus factor 1 at a thousand person company. there are people who answer phone calls for help at any moment of any day […] heroes are real. you shouldn't defer to or worship them but you should understand the multiagent environment you live in. many times the most effective thing you can do isn't to try and solve the problem yourself but to get a hero interested"
- Roon (@tszzl)
"The club is bumping, the ladies look good, the alcohol is flowing. There is much pain in the world but not in this room."
- drunk European guy in that old video
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."
- Alan J. Perlis
"the thing about America is that its clearly always functioning at like 10% of its power level due to the costs of freedom and yet manages to win anyway due to the incredible benefits of freedom"
- Roon (@tszzl)
"I try and tell myself it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn't matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn't matter. That's how I handle stress."
- Donald Trump, 2004
"Now this type of shit happens all the time / You gotta get yours, but fool, I gotta get mine"
- Snoop Dogg, Gin and Juice
"You can only be as interesting to someone as the questions they ask you allow you to be."
- m-unknown
"As much as I love self-depreciating (especially in these last few weeks) I factually cannot call myself a loser anymore, it just wouldn't be accurate."
- me (from my personal notes)
"And all you touch and all you see / Is all your life will ever be"
- Pink Floyd, Breathe
"Science progresses one funeral at a time."
- Max Planck
“Papua New Guinea is so violent that more than 820 languages are spoken there."
- Katherine Morayati
"working through your triggers is realizing that your lovers were just lovers, your job is just a job, your personality is just a personality, your parents were just parents. the world is simply the world. none of it was ever a big deal. none of it was ever a problem"
- @grantbels
"There is no pain in the world greater than your own."
- unknown
"...but please, have mercy on me a sinner, if i were naturally good at this i wouldn't be able to talk about it explicitly."
- @sympatheticopposition
"Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
- William James
"Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now"
- Bob Dylan, My Back Pages
"There is no penalty for asking. You can apply to the same thing 10 times and no one’s gonna get mad at you. You can advertise something on the Internet and even if 99% of people think it’s dumb, 1% might think it’s really cool. You are always doing things for the one person who will give you the yes. And often one yes is enough."
- Ava
"I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo."
- unknown
"In the absence of strong convictions about what you want from life, you will always default to wanting more money."
- Jack Raines
"What did socialists use for light before candles? Answer: Electricity."
- Alex Tabarok
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
- Walt Whitman
"i think you ultimately become whoever would have saved you that time that no one did"
- roach-works on Tumblr
"It’s ni**as dying that ain’t never died before"
- unknown (from Twitter)
"You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."
- Paul Graham on Sam Altman, 2008 (Altman was 22 at the time)
"The money never made me happy, but it never made me sad / This shit had never made a difference, but, shit, I carry the flag"
- Bladee, Lucky Luke
“Nine-tenths of politics is choosing the same scapegoat as everyone else.”
- Rene Girard
“There must be another room, somewhere down the hall, where the real meeting is happening, where the real experts are, making the real decisions. Because it can’t just be us. It can’t just be this.”
- Jake Sullivan, US National Security Advisor, 2013
"You are all just perverts who are secretly horny for the apocalypse."
- Slavoj Žižek
"If someone mentions your race or sex or ethnicity when criticizing you, you can usually assume that this is the real reason they dislike you."
- Paul Graham
"You don't seem to grasp the distinction between having a limited vocabulary and choosing to write simply. From the midwit peak, all you see is lowlands surrounding you."
- Paul Graham, replying to another Twitter user
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- Frank Herbert, Dune
"You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you."
- Lester Freamon in The Wire, written by David Simon
"You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them."
-Bill Waterson
"Good things come from going down rabbitholes. Rabbitholes have the potential to be powerful portals into worlds that you don’t yet know that you deeply care about. That you care about being a part of not just for a moment, but in a meaningful way. I'm convinced that your enduring passion lies in the rabbitholes you've been down or will go down — if you just let yourself fall."
- Anu Atluru
"It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives."
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
“A father hopes to be as extraordinary as his youngsters, in their innocence, imagine him to be, so that they need never become disillusioned with him. Perhaps some fathers accomplish that.”
- David Von Drehle
“The people I see living the best lives are central nodes in networks rather than at the top of a hierarchical pyramid.”
- Tom Morgan
"I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that's not true. There's a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: the off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it's entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they're like, eh, we wouldn't mind a little more globalization actually."
- Bono
"To record unkindness is tragedy, for the unkind word lives long after the event that caused it is forgotten."
- Elbert Hubbard
"Life wasn't single in its purpose... or even in its direction.... The simplicity of what she'd been taught wouldn't hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely in it."
- Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
"The work works on you more than you work on it."
- Alex Hormozi
“All lies and jest / Still a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest”
- Simon & Garfunkel, The Boxer
"He was beautiful. He was the point of difference. He has always been the point of difference."
- Peter Drury, commentary on Lionel Messi winning the World Cup, 2022
"Again, the medicine man arrives and sinks his flaming spear into the hearts of Real Madrid... Messi, born in the crossfire hurricane and he is jumping jack flash... You could drop a tarantula into his shorts and he'll still be cool."
- Roy Hudson, commentary on Lionel Messi's 500th goal, 2017
"You live in a world choked with ideas, where anything that rises to your consideration has necessarily won a Darwinian battle among hyper-specialized memetic replicators competing for your attention."
- Scott Alexander
"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."
- unknown
"The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."
- Colin Powell
"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours"
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
"there's something at the core of the american ideology that's only captured in happy go lucky 80s movies, which is that the noble pursuit of fun is probably one of the most productive forces in the universe and works way better than grinding away dutifully on things you hate"
- Roon (@tszzl)
“You argue and you bicker and you fight / Atheists and Catholics, Jews and Hindus argue day and night / Over what they think is true / But no one entertains the thought that maybe God does not believe in you”
- Bo Burnham, From God’s Perspective
“You pray so badly for heaven / Knowing any day might be the day that you die / But maybe life on earth could be heaven / Doesn't just the thought of it make it worth a try?”
- Bo Burnham, From God’s Perspective
"All you can take with you is that which you've given away."
- quote on a portrait from It's a Wonderful Life
"The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people."
- James Baldwin
"In high school I volunteered for a couple years at a care home for people with dementia. All anyone there ever talked about was their children (I think their spouses were mostly already dead). The ones who had children who visited were happy and the ones who didn’t weren’t. Everything I needed to know about life was revealed to me right there, though it would take me a long time to see it."
- Ava
Fin.
every year, at this exact time, i eagerly wait for this newsletter to hit my inbox
Thanks for the list. I was wondering how much time did it take you to assemble/ put it all together. I may start to save stuff as well considering how rarely I come across great art and culture but how frequently I forgot about all of them because I didn't save.
Happy new year and I wish you keep up the great work here.