50 Wonderful Things From 2020
I've been making annual lists of 50 Wonderful Things since 2010. And I have to admit, I was not sure I was up to it this year. It's been a hard one and a lonely one, even though I had the blessings of dear friends, a job I could do remotely, and a dog who apparently never gets tired of me. As I point out every year, this is not the actual best things of the year, or it would be full of doctors and nurses and activists and delivery drivers and so forth. It would be the family and friends who held me up and checked on me and had a cocktail with me on Zoom. This list is instead some favorite things, things that brought happiness or enlightenment or that stunned feeling of recognition that someone's art sees something in you.
It was a weird year, culturally. There was a lot of Netflix; more than usual, because of all the things they picked up. There was very little reading or new music for me, because I found myself so restless that it was hard to settle down and simply read or listen. I thought about just skipping the idea that I could ever combine the word "wonderful" with the four digits "2020."
But while this list is an act of curation and an effort to boost what I loved every year, it's also my biggest annual fountain of gratitude. And I've never been more grateful for the people who kept going, and for the people whose work arrived at the right moment, and for the things that made me feel human and seen. And much of that was art and entertainment. Arts organizations, the film and television industries, live performance spaces, artists and the people they work with — all have had extraordinarily difficult times this year; all will need our support to recover. Meanwhile, what the heck — let's be grateful.
1. is in a number of ways as it unspools the story of a woman's sexual assault and its aftermath. But in the finale, it breaks with its own form in a
