Blog

I’ve just returned from a holiday visit to my mom in Houston, with delayed blogging because her internet went out shortly after I arrived. I had a fun time, though, seeing the family and enjoying some warm weather. The winter in New York arrived early this year, and with few exceptions, the temperatures are about 5-10 degrees colder than average. That doesn’t justify climate change deniers. Any year can have exceptions.

I also managed to lose the notes from my projected blog post last week, so it will appear as soon as I reconstruct what I would have written. But now with the end of 2025 approaching, I turn my attention to my infamous New Year’s resolutions and how well I managed to keep them.

And this year, my record was…pretty good! This post is my 42nd for the year, which beats the dismal 36 I uploaded in 2024 and ties my 42 for 2023. As I look through the subject matter, I have definitely not obeyed in advance. I thank other sites critical of the regime with far more readership than mine for their courage and inspiration. I suggest you check out the Substack essays by former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, historian Heather Cox Richardson, former Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, and the ideologically diverse group of Never Trumpers writing for the Bulwark. It’s great to see that many of these writers who left day jobs with legacy media outlets are able to support themselves as independent journalists and commentators. They are definitely worth supporting through our subscriptions, especially as so many venerable media companies have pulled their punches or have become outright mouthpieces for the regime. (Looking at you, CBS, and to the extent that BBC relies on CBS as its partner for U.S. news coverage, it’s become a problem for viewers abroad and people in the U.S. who were hoping for alternatives.)

I also managed to start some new writing and translation projects, something I was unable to do in 2024. I’m still waiting to hear if the translations — one for a picture book, the other for a middle grade novel — will get the go-ahead. My own writing project is nonfiction, a kind of companion to Torch. I wasn’t feeling the middle grade historical fiction project that I mentioned a year ago, which was the most likely reason I barely wrote anything in the notebook I had dedicated to it. Essentially, the historical novel felt like a nostalgia piece, fun for me to think about but not something that would feel relevant or appeal to kids today. The nonfiction, on the other hand, is very relevant.

It’s a new experience to have fulfilled my previous year’s resolutions, and I’m so disoriented that I haven’t come up with new ones for 2026. Maybe stay the course? Make more progress on the nonfiction project. Spend more time studying German — I was socially promoted to the second year of classes — because I may need to examine documents in German for the new project.

I hope you all have a happy and healthy New Year!