2025 Year in Review

Footnotes from
the Ragged Frontier

A year of pressing at the edges of things

Scroll
54
Posts Published
35,038
Words Written
649
Avg. Words/Post

That's roughly 117 pages of a paperback novel—or one very long letter to no one in particular.

Posting Rhythm

The Year in Motion

14
Mar
15
Apr
4
May
3
Jun
4
Jul
4
Aug
3
Sep
3
Oct
3
Nov
1
Dec
The spring burst: 29 posts in March and April alone. Then the long, contemplative summer.
The Shakespeare Project

12 Plays with Harold Bloom

This series took Bloom as sparring partner, not gospel. The posts had a genuine critical voice — defending Coriolanus as underrated, championing Emilia as Othello's true hero, finding political relevance in Richard II and Henry VI without forcing it.
"This is not a play about casual, conditional love, and it is the enormity of the love in the play that renders it so devastating... love, seen at this level of resolution, is essentially tragic." — King Lear: Just the Love

The Full Catalogue (with links):

The Merry Wives of Windsor Much Ado About Nothing Henry IV, Parts I & II As You Like It Henry V King Lear The Tempest Coriolanus Two Gentlemen of Verona Richard II Henry VI Othello
HB
"One ought never to underestimate Shakespeare."

The adopted mantra for this series, borrowed from Bloom—even when disagreeing with his thesis that Shakespeare "invented the human."
Music I Liked This Week
10
editions of the recurring series
Nashville Sound Philly Soul Folk Standards 60s French Pop Gospel Beatles Deep Cuts Minstrel Banjo Ethiopian Piano
Not random eclecticism — each post explained why something mattered: the Nashville Sound's history, Philly Soul's innovations, the problematic heritage of folk standards. A weekly music dump that deserved footnotes, and got them.
"These are songs to be listened to in grocery store parking lots on Friday nights, in cars with the windows down. Teen spirit, to the extent there is such a thing, still lives in this genre." — MILTW: New Music Edition, on Beach Bunny
Most Frequent Hat Tip
Toby
4 recommendations credited
The 2025 Superlatives

Awards Season

Most Niche Deep Dive
Counting Every Accusation of Treason in Henry VI
With GPT's help, a complete census of the 57 times characters call each other "traitor" across all three parts. The data lives in a spreadsheet now. The charge becomes so common it's practically meaningless.
— Henry VI: Just the Takeaways
Most Likely to Start a Book Club Mutiny
Recommending Strindberg
"I tried this with my book club and had a rebellion on my hands after The Father." The other two plays only solidified the suspicion that they were incorrect to cast the work aside.
— Strindberg: Just the Takeaways
Hottest Contrarian Take
Father Mapple > Ahab
"Despite his centrality to the plot, Ahab is one of the least interesting characters. The most interesting is Father Mapple (criminally underrepresented despite anchoring the best chapter)."
— Moby Dick: Just the Takeaways
Best Deployment of Continental Philosophy
Žižek's Chicken Joke
A man cured of believing he's a grain of seed returns to the hospital in panic: "There's a chicken outside!" The doctor reminds him he knows he's not a seed. "Of course you and I know that—but does the chicken know?"
— Steinbeck's Winter of Our Discontent: Just the Epistemology
Most Unexpected Genre Analysis
Road House as a Western
A mysterious outsider arrives in a lawless town. Confronts a corrupt baron. Earns the love of a beautiful woman. Learns to tame the beast within. Sam Elliott is in it. It's a Western.
— Road House: The Perfect 80's Western
Peak "I Have a Philosophy Degree" Moment
The 2,200-Word Response to Scott Sumner
Invoking Bergson's distinction between durée and temps to dismantle a Substack post about subjective time. "Sumner conflates raw lived time with retained, meaningful experience." The longest post of the year.
— On Subjective Time: A Response to Scott Sumner
Sharpest Technical Observation
Godard Treats Sound Like a Camera
"Godard treats sound like another camera: he points it at things to focus or defray our attention." On how ambient noise enables longer visual shots and sustains conversational pauses without losing the audience.
— Godard's Masculin Féminin: Just the Takeaways
Signature Lines

The Voice

"No Falstaff of the mind could ever live up to such a well-rendered Falstaff of the flesh." — Henry IV, Parts I and II
"It might seem like a movie with this many fist fights probably wouldn't have explosions. It does." — Road House: The Perfect 80's Western
"The only thing that makes baseball worth watching is that it is so unbelievably fun to discuss." — Torpedo Bats
"This isn't music for healing—it's music for surviving and moving on." — Indigo De Souza: Precipice Album Review
"At the moment of approach, we spell out its fate by calling it by name: grass, or not grass." — Thoughts on Lawn Mowing

"Pressing at the edges of things"

— The blog's tagline, and the year's guiding principle

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