The 2025 Megachat!
BIGGER (more people), BETTER (debatable)
Welcome to Email Dot Com, a newsletter that began as a monthly thing before quickly becoming extremely intermittent as I got caught up with editing my debut novel OBSERVER, out next October from Ecco. I’m making myself get used to promoting it, how do we feel. Last year, I used this block quote to highlight some freelance work I was proud of. I will recapitulate that here, here, here, and here. At Defector, where I write most frequently, I endeavored to prioritize interviews, which I think I was successful at, while also trying to write more for new places. Blah blah blah, I had fun even as this year felt evil. Follow me on IG and/or Letterboxd for more consistent being-online.
Well, wasn’t that fun? “That” could mean the entire year or one specific portion of it, up to you. “Fun” could be sincere or ironic, also up to you. I have very little to say about 2025 as a whole. Time goes on and I find that broad retrospectives take a while to percolate into anything coherent or even accurate. Suffice it to say, 2025 felt at once crowded, dizzying, and long. The longest year in a while, but perhaps you feel differently.
Recently, I was dwelling on the idea of emotional severity as an indicator of seriousness. Which is to say, I thought about griping that 2025 was an even shittier year than the last as a means of communicating that I too understand how bad the world is. But to give ground to a completely bleak point of view feels not only self-serving, but false. I smiled and laughed so much this year precisely because I felt an immense, expansive love for and from so many people committed to making the world at large, and the much smaller worlds we share, better. This doesn’t stop bullets or crumble regimes, but it’s the sort of thing that makes that idea feel not only possible but participatory, actionable.
Last year’s Megachat was a lot of fun and this year’s is even better, with repeat offenders and new blood to shake things up. Same as before, I asked the following contributors for a song, book, and/or image, new or old, that resonated with them in 2025.
Open this newsletter in the app or in a separate window because this definitely won’t fit in an email.
Without further ado!
(Presented in alphabetical order by last name.)
Next of Kin by Gabrielle Hamilton. I love Blood, Bones & Butter and Dirt’s design newsletter is in part named after Hamilton’s restaurant Prune. Although there is some great food writing in this memoir, it’s primarily a painful excavation of family trauma and the stories we tell ourselves about childhood. If every family is its own world, every sibling relationship is a weather system within it. The pain of looking at some of these dynamics directly can be overwhelming and Hamilton does not shy away from it. A stark reminder of how many adults are just unhealed children with expense accounts.
Nicholas first introduced me to the band Tennis a decade ago. This year, they released their last album, Face Down in the Garden. It sounds exactly like all their other work. I played the second track on the way to the opening night of their final tour. I played the album again over the summer when I wanted to mourn how fast things change.
This year I began reading Karl Ove Knausgaard's new series, starting with The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity. These novels are preoccupied with death and with the question of what it would mean for death to come to an end; I found them a provocation and a solace in a year suffused with both personal and social grief, as well as the mixture of horror and pity with which I regard the increasingly pathetic immortality projects of our deranged ruling class. That class's depravity was illustrated unforgettably in the images that will forever define 2025 for me, published by Congress from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein: the birthday book, page after page of cross-partisan revelry in monstrosity. I remember looking through these winking confessions replaying and replaying in my head the question posed to the narrator of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." by his V.A. representative: "Son, don't you understand, now?"
Monica Barrett:
I kept trying to think of an image to really encapsulate how this year felt for me, and tonight I watched Safe for the first time, and oh my god. Just the most intense feeling of dread…
I had this thought during the movie: The milk in Frankenstein (2025) wishes it was the milk in Safe.
I wasn't going to be predictable and give you a Charli song, but I think it goes so perfectly. Oh well!
Lonesome Dove (the bandwagon exists for a reason!) and The Left Hand of Darkness (if there isn’t a bandwagon there should be). I’ve been traveling a lot this year—and that’s saying a lot, since I travel a lot every year. Fittingly, each novel is its own travel narrative. I ended up places I did not expect while reading these. Yes, I shed some tears. Anyway, greetings, all, from Namibia. Seeking recs on books where people stay in one place.
this is my image/video of the year because this is the year where I recommitted myself to my writing practice. for years, I’d been making excuses for why I could not write regularly, but with the help of Ragdale, The Artist’s Way, & the Shearing Fellowship, I’ve adopted a “no, do it right now” attitude that has me at the desk daily. regrettably, I am still not enrolled at the Everest College.
Book: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - the phenomenon encapsulated 2025 publishing for me: editors’ ‘what about the white men’ hand-wringing; film agents asking for “bro soaps;” skittishness around the new turning focus on the old. But also, I read it, and: Lonesome Dove was great!!
Music: Rosalía, Björk, Yves Tumor’s Berghain. Very “what’s happening!!” at every moment - very 2025.
Image: Janky Lafufus
Book: Technically a play, but 2025 was the year I got Hamlet pilled. What can I say, I love a problematic male character.
Song: 2025 was also the year I performed “I’m Your Man” by Leonard Cohen at Dino’s Lounge, a Las Vegas karaoke institution. It went well!*
Image: A real low point for me was the month-long period when I ate like Bryan Johnson, aka that guy who wants to live forever, and started texting unsolicited images of me with my tasteless green slop to friends.
*I was in a full blackout
A book is The Loves of My Life by Edmund Wilson.
A song is “New Threats From the Soul” by Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band.
An image is a Great Blue Heron in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
This excerpt: “Perhaps we could bear in mind the words of David W. Griffith, one of the great pioneers of the seventh art. He once said: ‘What the modern movie lacks is beauty, the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.’ His reference to the wind cannot but remind us of a passage from John’s Gospel. ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’ (3:8).” - Encounter With The World Of Cinema, Address By His Holiness Pope Leo XIV
This image:
a book: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, a longtime favorite from which I borrowed a passage that was read aloud at my wedding
a song: “Short King,” by Alex Cameron, which I was lucky enough to see live and made me laugh so much
an image: the first picture I have with my cat Bandit the morning after we adopted him
Box Hill, by Adam Mars-Jones, is the book I pushed on people most this year. Exquisitely smart about desire, submission, and repression, plus the US edition is subtitled A Story of Low Self-Esteem—what more could you want? Catch me first in line for Pillion in 2026.
Song: “Our World” by Snowpoet - a London jazz duo. Beautiful vocals. Amazing instruments. It’s completely intentional and no frills. The whole album “Heartstrings” is full of feeling.
Book: Antigonick by Anne Carson.
Photo: a fabulous creature I found at the Springs Preserve.
Book: The Virgin Suicides
Song: Saâda Bonaire - You Could be More as You Are
Image: the final shot of It Was Just an Accident, which is not available online.
This frog in my cousin’s bathroom hit me because we both spent a lot of time getting ready for something and then had trouble seizing the moment at hand.
“Summerboy” by Lady Gaga
Cornelius: The Merry Life of a Wretched Dog by Marc Torices
Book: There are two books that I read twice in 2025: Dracula by Bram Stoker and a little debut novel called Observer by the author of this very newsletter. I think about both basically every day, and probably will continue to do so for a long time to come.
Music: The first four tracks of Mayhem.
Image:
Here is my beautiful image:
And here is my song:
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf. A pleasure and a gift to be able to read this for the first time this year, right before I ran into a publicist at a party who let me know one of Kraf's never-before-published-novels would be printed in 2026. This cult classic of a sort is fun because it asks: What if taking medication actually makes us less of who we are? The story itself has a very shallow plot arc, if you can say there is one at all—I mean shallow here not in the sense that the character or the morality is shallow but that the arc itself barely rises before it falls. Nevertheless, we are entertained all the same because our protagonist is just so very enraptured: a deluded performance artist performing for nobody but herself.
image: The closing credits to Warfare feature photos of the cast side by side with their real-life military counterparts. Most of the actual soldiers are extremely hideous, comically unattractive compared to the cast, which was made up entirely of Hollywood’s hottest and also most precious leading young men. But at least half of the faces are blurred. Whether this is for legal reasons or preferences is unknown - maybe the soldiers are still active, maybe who they really are is classified. In any case, we are not allowed to know what they really look like. I happen to think Warfare should be played nonstop in all government buildings, and behind every podium that our government officials speak from, but I’m not really sure what I would do with the information of what these soldiers look like. I know who they are, after all; I know they’re my taxes and my leaders and education and my healthcare and my housing and my roads. But in a year where the image of masked psychopaths roaming courthouses and schools and streets to kidnap people became commonplace, I have started to wonder how much hiding your face can really accomplish. Since I don’t think our leaders will ever get around to demanding they unmask, I think it might be more important for the rest of us to simply make sure they can still feel our hatred through these flimsy disguises. If they want to be nothing, just specks of pitiful human failure, that’s fine, they’ve already done that. We don’t have to know who they are to stop them. It’s more important - and I think they know this, and I think this makes them very mad - that we exist than that they do.
- My year in songs, kind of chronologically: “Let Me Roll It” - Wings. And then “10 Percs” - Dave Blunts. Finally, “Townies” - Wednesday. Through it all, “Enchanted” - Taylor Swift.
- I read a lot of “cozy lit” this fall in order to write a piece about it. After a particularly bad binge, I picked up I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, translated by Jack Hargreaves, the perfect antidote to cheap escapism because it’s all about living and working in the cruel real world. Earlier in the year I was floored by another labor memoir: Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler, who worked a temp job at an Amazon fulfillment center. These made me feel upset and so alive. Look, right now: they’re killing us.
- I can’t believe my Balatro phase happened THIS YEAR.
Nicholas Russell (me):
Book: Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
Song: “Summer Sickness” by Big Girl
Image:
Book: Nicholas Triolo, The Way Around
Song: The entire catalog of Billy Joel, specifically as experienced through the documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes (2025).
Image: Three grizzly bears swimming toward you, Montana, September 2025.
song: “Impossible Germany” by Wilco
image:
movie: Universal Language, a beautiful film by Matthew Rankin
A book: Immemorial by Lauren Markham. I keep returning to it! Everyone get more scared NOW!
A song: It's gotta be “Dopamine” by Robyn, but also maybe even more, the remix of the song by Jamie XX. End of the year banger, feels like a hug from Mother.
An image: I tried the Sephora Cyro Rubber Face Mask and became addicted to the horrors....very Eyes Without a Face (the movie, not the song). Am I Sephorapilled? Am I Sephoramaxxing? bye bye 2025.
Book: Recently when I feel sad, I read a poem from this 15th century comedy book, The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant. It’s impossible to feel anything but joy when you read Sebastian absolutely going off on fools “Jabbering in the Choir,” “Wanting to Know All Regions,” or “Not Preparing for Death.”
Song: peasantcore metal or somber Canadian fisherman’s song
Image: I was looking for an animation reference of going down a waterslide and Google’s AI overview really pulled through
