Many of my friends in DC, and myself included, have been viewing the start of this year with dread. We feel powerless in the face of the new administration. Eight years ago, everyone was knitting pink hats and preparing for a massive demonstration on the day before Inauguration Day. This year, we are instead booking weekend trips to get the hell out of here.

These aren’t all 2024 releases, just books I happened to read this year that I liked. I know I am missing a few here but it’s the end of the year and I am weary.

As of today, our second daughter has been alive on this planet for five weeks. I’ve been on parental leave that whole time, and it has really flown by. Having a kid at the end of the year is really disorienting, since time already feels more compressed than usual with all the holidays packed into the final quarter of the American calendar.

But it’s also a bit boring, since most of our time has been spent at home, overseeing the baby’s three main activities (sleeping, eating, pooping). Today, against my better judgment (meaning that of my wife), I ventured with our baby out into the Great Unknown to shop for a new e-bike at REI.

I made my first website when I was in middle school. My family had just gotten AOL, and I was thrilled. The internet was huge that year. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were hanging out and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, along with all my friends. AIM was the killer app, but I was more taken with another feature: each AOL user was allotted 2 megabytes of hosted webspace. The “Personal Publisher” software they provided to build your site was total garbage—I remember that by default, any <img> inside of an anchor tag had a thick border that looked clunky. But you could also edit your page’s source code directly. Suddenly I had the same power to build pages that any professional “web designer” did. The bar was not high then, and I was full of eighth-grade hubris.