A Year

Obsessions, interests, and unanswered questions

I tend to avoid top-whatever and best-of lists, as they are generally engines for a level of disappointment and competition (and advertising sales) anathema to the process of creating art. I operate on the assumption that I’m never going to be on any of them, and I probably won’t learn much new about other writers that I haven’t already learned from the Culture At Large. So a friend of mine had to text to let me know that the Chicago Review of Books had included Nothing Compares To You on their list of the best books of the year. And, duh, here’s where the rubber meets the road, because of course it made me happy to learn this. I still think lists are problematic, but I am grateful on behalf of all the brilliant writers whose work is showcased in this magical book, which is proving itself an engine for catharsis, community, and all around good vibes. Thank you Chicago Review of Books!

Running into 2026

A few months ago someone I like a lot but doesn’t know me well asked, “So how long have you been obsessed with Sinéad O’Connor?” And I was, like, what? Obsessed? I’m not obsessed with Sinéad. I am interested in her — she is a globally significant artist with a rich catalog, bracing values, and a complicated personal history. Working on Nothing Compares to You over the past two years has been a fun and rewarding project; I’ve learned a lot, made a little bit of money, and worked with two dozen incredible writers. But I’m not obsessed.

These days, though, obsession is the coin of the realm. Kids are encouraged to follow their passion; writers online gush about their compulsion to write; influencers chronicle their consumerist hauls, declaring undying fealty to lip tints and puffer coats.

(There’s some misogyny at play here of course, because where isn’t there? Nobody asks Peter Guralnick how long he’s been obsessed with the King.)

But, still. When did plain intellectual curiosity become inadequate to justify creation? Can’t the genesis of art just be the search for an answer to a question only the artist thinks to ask? I think so. I’m enrolled in a yearlong writing workshop that uses the critical response process developed by Liz Lerman — a dancer — to structure feedback. Step two of this process? The artist asks questions about the work.

Despite the Sinéad hyperfocus of this newsletter in recent months, what I’m truly interested in, as a long-term project, is dance and movement. The question I’m trying to answer, “Why, if every child instinctively bounces along to music and if millions of adults dance in class, at weddings, and in the clubs, is dance still such a marginal pursuit, the impoverished relation of both serious art and popular culture, the embarrassing purview of the girls and the gays?”

I’m working on an essay collection that orbits this and other questions. It’s getting there, but there’s much still to do. This is my project, my obsession, for 2026.

And in the name of end-of-the-year lists, here’s my catalog of obsessions, interests, and mild curiosities from the year now slipping away, with the glaring exception of the one overarching obsession on everyone’s mind, namely when will our ongoing national nightmare of idiocy and cruelty — and its international accompaniment of genocide and starvation — end, and what can we do to help it happen?

In aggressively random order:

• Sneakers that aren’t Sambas*

• Trader Joe’s “Nuts About Rosemary”mixed nuts

• Just how many tomatoes can nine plants in a tight bed yield? (Answer: Too many.)

• Classical ballet as a form of gender-affirming care for cancer patients, a loose thread in a larger essay I wrote for “Bodies of Work,” a collection on dance and health forthcoming in 2027 from West Virginia University Press.

• The effects of Seattle’s notorious Teen Dance Ordinance on the mental health of said teens (coming soon)

• Dying For Sex as a dance show

• The Union Pacific-North Metra schedule and its imperiled budget

• My ridiculous cats

• This stupid visible mending loom

• Buying tickets to expensive shows months in advance so that I have to go to them when the day comes around and I’m tired. Those box seats for Tortoise and the Chicago Philharmonic were a sweet gift from August me to November me.

• The Lilith Fair movie

• The dosa hash at Chicago’s Superkhana International, which has the nicest staff

• Shade-friendly native plants that will transform the weedy turf of our backyard into a prairie wonderland.

• The elusive location of my lost-to-cancer upper-body strength (my one allowed vain complaint**)

• Related: why is weightlifting so hot but dance is not?

• Tatiana Schlossberg’s stunning New Yorker essay, RIP

• Why is Waukegan’s lakefront so intractably terrible?

• What does it mean that my most popular post of the year was about AI and journalism, not dance or Sinéad?

• Elder care

• Finland. Hope to go there this summer.

• Jen Percy’s “Girls Play Dead.” I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so seen by a book. I hope to write more on it soon. One thought tho: in her oddly optimistic concluding chapter Percy discusses how in some non-Western cultures the pain of sexual violence can be shared and absorbed by a community. It made me wonder if, here in the West, the much-maligned confessional essay could be understood an attempt to recreate this ethic of community care.

• Yoko Ono “Music of the Mind” at the MCA. If you ever wondered just how utterly, wondrously ahead of her time Yoko was (is), this show will put the question to rest. Genuinely obsessed.

• The ever-deepening understanding that old friends are the best friends. I turn 58 next month and there is nothing that makes that better than knowing that there are people in the world who have known me for 40 years already. I love you all.

I could go on, but that’s enough for one Wednesday morning. I leave you on the cusp of a new year, with a snippet of one glorious moment from the old: Angela James singing “Jackie,” with Julie Pomerleau on improvised violin and L. Wyatt on backing vocals, at our final Sinéad event of the year. This concert, at the Hideout, December 17, raised $932 for the Illinois Commission for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. If you are looking to get your 2025 giving in under the wire, I can think of no better cause.

*One of 2025’s resolutions was to not buy any new clothes, and except for a few things I bought in Ireland (travel shopping doesn’t count!) I succeeded. But now, I find myself longing for cute sneakers, something I’ve never been into in the past.

** The other resolution this year was “stop whining.”