A Fast Year-in-Review

I won't turn this into a clip show

I promise, before the year is out, you’ll get more original work from me right here. I’m planning my annual tradition, the year in reading, and I’ve got a piece percolating on why a certain few media outlets have found success in this challenging era. I have plenty planned for the new year. In the meantime, I wanted to feature three larger essays I published this year and felt a degree of pride in, especially since they were on three divergent topics. The glory of Substack is that I don’t have to be wed to a news cycle or a particular publication’s whim. If I like it and you like it, it happens, and I’ve found some of the best responses came from the unlikeliest of pieces. I’ve called Substack one of the only ameliorative tech innovations of my writing career because it has allowed me to reach a new audience and kept me, and many others, from chasing clicks and other shallow incentives. The thought out stuff performs the best. The antic, clickbait 2010s era of digital journalism has thankfully almost passed. I am grateful to be on the other side.

Many of you have become readers of mine in the last few weeks and months. First, welcome aboard! You may have missed the following. If you’ve got a little time over the holiday break to dig into my longer work, have at it.

Did This Writer Find the Zodiac Killer? (2/9)

My exploration of a writer’s quest to find the Zodiac killer, as well as a rumination on the California myth and midcentury violence.

Mass society did not invent the serial killer—a term that did not come into vogue until the 1980s—but mass society, with its radios and televisions and bodies converging in finite spaces, made him what what he is, what we understand him to be. Today, the most notorious and sadistic remain as famous as athletes and entertainers, gods of their own twisted underworlds. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Son of Sam. The Zodiac Killer, whom police never found. All bubbled up in the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when the dark currents that course through the culture today were first gaining ground and ruining lives. They killed until they were stopped or, in the case of Zodiac, they killed until they receded into history. The police-state, in a world before ubiquitous computer networks and forensic mastery, could only do so much.

The Jews and Italians Against Liberalism. (6/8)

I wrote on Jonathan Rieder’s classic 1970s study of Canarsie, once a white working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, and explored how the book would come to explain the rise of Reagan and even Donald Trump. In the wake of the Republican wave that swamped New York in November, Rieder’s book took on yet another dimension for me.

“They feel the pressure, like everything is fading away,” one local explained. “It’s all in danger: the house you always wanted is in danger, the kids are in danger, the neighborhood is in danger. It’s all slipping away.”

All decades contain traces of what came before: trends, theories, longings. Time is never evenly divided or erased, and those without memory inevitably find themselves, at some point in adulthood, echoing the dead. If certain periods feel startling new, they never quite are, and more often than not there is the low-running realization that the events of the present are imitations what was and what, a pundit might hope, was not supposed to be again. For the observant making their way through 2022, the third year of an uneasy and confounding and deeply tragic decade—the pandemic ebbs; the pandemic lives—it can feel that history is the monster in the attic, readying to trod down the stairs. It’s hungry and must be fed.

The Surf Was Up. (9/21)

I wrote 8,000 some-odd words on my obsession with the Beach Boys, which began in earnest this year. I tried to wrestle with their brilliant, haunting, and troubled legacy, and why they remain, to me, the great American band.

The Beach Boys never broke up. They slogged through the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s. They have existed long enough to produce forgettable, awful music. They still tour. You can see Mike Love at the Civic Center Auditorium in Amarillo, Texas on Friday. Brian tours separately with his own backing, thanks to a legal arrangement made in the 1990s. If, in the public imagination, tragedy hangs over the Beatles—John murdered in 1980, George dead from cancer in 2001—the Beach Boys remain the more star-crossed enterprise, darkness trailing any hint of sunshine. They were, for a time, inextricably bound up with Charles Manson. Dennis, the drummer and middle brother, drowned to death at 39 after years of alcohol and drug abuse. Carl, the youngest brother and de facto leader after the 1960s, succumbed to lung cancer in 1998, at the age of 51. Brian is the last Wilson living. He has struggled, very publicly, with mental illness. In the 1970s, when he had retreated from the world in a haze of cocaine and alcohol, his body swollen beyond 300 pounds, few would have believed he would live to see 50, let alone 80. An unscrupulous, abusive psychologist once held him captive, even demanding producing credits on his solo albums.

Brian, like Paul, is a postwar icon floating through 2020s life, but he wears his damage plainly. His interviews still have a shellshocked quality. Like any man of retirement age, he cannot sing like he once did, yet there is some percentage of the fan base that will always take quiet offense.