What's Tony Thinking

My 2024 Favorites

Favorite Experience of 2024: An amazing, almost three week trip, to Japan with Linda in October, where we passed through many portals on the journey and rose to various challenges without threat of divorce.

Favorite Book (Fiction): Jewelweed by David Rhoades. I hadn’t realized until I re-read his wonderful novel, Driftless, that it was the first of a trilogy by this deeply humane writer. The second, Jewelweed, was published in 2013. The third in the series is Painting Beyond Walls (reading it now).

Favorite Book (Non-Fiction: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Freemarket Era by Gary Gerstle. Gerstle is an American historian who teaches at U. of Cambridge (U.K.)  and looks at things in terms of epochs. To understand the upsurge of populism in the U.S. and world-wide, read this book.

Favorite Podcast: Ezra Klein Show, of course. His post-election episodes were brilliant and helpful. And here’s the money quote from his year end AMA.

“I think the biggest problem around liberal governance is it is obsessed by process, and it mistakes process for outcomes.”

Favorite Word: “Feckless.” Meaning: makes no difference, ineffective, useless. See above, re process vs. outcomes. Don’t tell me how much money we’ve spent, tell me what the real-world outcomes are.

Favorite New Substack: The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia, while music and jazz are Gioia’s primary interest and expertise, he covers a lot of other ground. I would add that I let go, for the time being, of another Substack, Heather Cox Richardon’s “Letters of An American.” I respect her, but tired of her one-sided boosterism for the Biden administration.

Favorite News Outlet: The Free Press. As Substack has become a home for homeless writers, The Free Press is a refuge for journalists who have not drunk the kool-aid and so believe the conveying facts and accurate information is more important than telling your what you should think. A bit snarky and sometimes self-congratulatory, but no one’s perfect.

Favorite Movie: Perfect Days. Directed by the German Wim Winder, it is a film set in Japan with a wonderful Japanese cast.

Favorite Netflix series: Navillera is a 12 part Korean series that tells the story of a recently retired man (with early stage Alzheimers, about which he alone knows). He decides, at his advanced age, to pursue his childhood dream of studying ballet. In the process he becomes a surrogate father to a young man who is a brilliant, if diffident, ballet prodigy.

Favorite Memory. Can’t do just one. Walking around the small Japanese town of Iwakuni with Linda. Lingering to watch elementary school children do their morning exercises to the “Sound of Music” soundtrack. Iwakuni is the ancestral home of our dear friend, David Takagi. Backpacking at Ice Lake with Colin, Levi, Laura and David Laskin and being visited at our campsite by a herd of mountain goats. The evening of the thunder and lightning storm and sudden fire on a mountain peak (later extinguished by rain) during our family rafting trip on the Salmon River in Idaho.

Favorite Column: David Brooks’s “The Shock of Faith,” his account of coming to faith and of the nature of religious faith and experience.

Favorite Politician: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, member of Congress from Washington’s Third Congressional District. She managed a second victory against a Trumpist, but “refusing to let her election be nationalized.” “All politics is local.” Remember that from Tip O’Neill?

Favorite Sermon (of mine): Coming to the Light, preached in San Miguel de Allende on March 17.

Favorite Blog (of mine): On Banter. 

Favorite Animal Photo: a little black bear visits the cabin next to ours one evening. Such a cutie!

Favorite New Restaurant:  Nolita in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, on 15th at 60th. Family owned and run Italian, comfortably elegant without exorbitant prices.

Favorite Musician, Song and Album: Margo Cilker, “Lowland Trail,” on “Valley of the Heart’s Delight.” A Northwesterner with Wallowa County connections.

A few 2024’s that are not in the “fav’s” category.

Watershed Moment of 2024: the June 27 debate between Trump and Biden. Oh crap! What now? Lord, have mercy!

What I was wrong about: I thought that Americans were ready to be done with Trump’s nastiness and braggadocio, and would say “goodbye to all that.” Wrong. Oh, and I think I was wrong about Tim Walz being “the real deal.” He began to seem as truth challenged as you know who.