It is customary at this juncture to discuss resolutions. That’s one of mine above, in pennant form, gifted to me for Christmas. And I have another, which goes something along the lines of: read more, write more, relax and make a ‘mess’. Those quotation marks are important: I don’t intend to leave the house in disarray, I mean to not be quite so uptight about adhering to self-imposed restrictions. These are everywhere in my life, from the restricted colour palette of my clothes (every item bought from one retailer), to the times at which I make coffee (08:15; 10:30; 15:00). Before heading to bed each night, I don’t just make sure the door is locked, I also check that the couch cushions are in their correct rotation. I am prone to completionism and perfectionism, which are fine only so far as they might make one happy. So, that resolution is about letting go of the need for things to align quite so neatly at all times.
Starting the new year with a new coffee from Round Hill. My first cup, as filter, tasted a little more black tea than ‘blackcurrant jelly’, but it was very enjoyable.
Back in January of 2020, I squirmed in my cinema seat throughout the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019), hooked on every tangent taken by Adam Sandler’s unravelling jeweller / gambler. Here, older brother Josh recaptures much of that same frantic energy, but it stems from a different place. Where Sandler’s Howard Ratner was increasingly fuelled by sheer desperation, Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is propelled by unflagging self belief. As things start to come unglued, that distinction makes all the difference. There’s a myopia to Mauser, and a powerful selfishness; the film catalogues numerous misfortunes rendered unto others because of his actions. And yet, some combination of script, performance and character arc make him hard not to pull for. You’re still likely to only use the edge of your seat, but you’re less likely to watch between your fingers.
Friends, as has been tradition for more than quarter of a century, I’ve rounded out my music-listening year with a rundown of the twenty records released in 2025 that brought me the most joy. If that sounds interesting to you, grab a warm drink of your choice and head this way for the full list.
Recently we took a trip to Bath, a city we’ve visited a few times in the past, but only ever for a day at a time. On this occasion we stayed over—at a cute little townhouse on North Parade—so that we had a bit more time for wandering. We found good coffee at WatchHouse1 and Coffever, browsed the shelves at the superb indie bookshop Topping & Company, enjoyed a meal at The Botanist2 and pancakes at Courtyard.
Back in June, I descended the stairs into the basement at Third Man Records in Soho and was treated to a pretty incredible set by Seattle band Deep Sea Diver. During that show, Jessica Dobson mentioned from the stage that they were due to be back in the UK in November, to play the Pitchfork Music Festival. So, I snapped up a ticket for the festival’s 8 Nov takeover of five venues in Dalston.
With each of the spots walking distance from one another, it was a case of figuring out who else I wanted to see between doors opening at 17:00 and DSD taking the stage at 21:30. I got started with Texas quartet Mamalarkey, whose 2025 LP Hex Key I’ve been enjoying. The venue at EartH, with its amphitheatre-style seating, was a slightly weird setup for a rock show, but the band made it work and looked to be having a good time.
Do y’all Shazam? I’ve had the app on my phone for fifteen-plus years at this point, and it still feels a little like magic every time it works, which it does more often than not. If you’re not familiar, it’s a simple utility for identifying a piece of music: you hit a button, Shazam turns on your microphone, listens to what’s playing around you and reports back with the name of the track, the artist and (usually) a link to Apple Music.
My primary use cases for the app fall loosely into the categories of ‘I recognise the song playing in this coffee shop, but cannot for the life of me recall the name of the artist’, or ‘what is the song playing in the background of this pivotal scene in a movie that I would be paying more attention to if I wasn’t just thinking about the music?’. If I open Shazam now, I can scroll back through the list of tracks I’ve used it to identify, and I figured it might be fun to share a few of them, along with what I can recall about where I heard them.
I regret to announce that I must formally declare reading bankruptcy. Somehow it’s come to pass, once again, that I have no fewer than six novels in some state of completion, and I’m making significant progress with none of them. Not that any of them are uninteresting, just that my attention is hopelessly divided.
In my experience, when this happens1 the best solution is to shelve all of the in-progress books (with the bookmarks still in place), and start something new. Make it something easily digestible, with the intention of speeding through it, and then you’re on solid ground—you can start stacking up completed books again in no time. (I’ve also found, over the years, that my capacity for returning to the flow of a novel-in-progress is better than I would have presumed. In most cases, even a couple of months after last having opened a given book, I can slip back into the flow of its plot, and recall its character arcs, after a chapter or two.)
And that’s at least once per year; sometimes more often.
Just opened today, the house espresso from Society: La Violeta. My first brew tasted a little woody, with perhaps a hint of tobacco. Not unpleasant, but I’ve had plenty of espresso-based drinks at Society cafes1 and have never had a cup that tasted like this. So… I should probably make some adjustments.
By my count I’ve visited four of their six locations.
I just read this article in The Athletic about Michael Jordan’s first contribution to the new season’s NBA broadcasts on NBC. It contains a detail that I found genuinely touching, tailor-made for the final shot of the some-day biopic.
Jordan said he last picked up a basketball when he attended the Ryder Cup and rented a house for the event. When the homeowner stopped by for a visit, he requested that Jordan shoot one free throw on the property’s basketball court.
“When I stepped up to shoot the free throw, it’s the most nervous I’ve been in years,” Jordan said.
“The reason being,” Jordan explained, “is those kids heard the stories from their parents about what I did 30 years ago.” He wanted to fulfill the kids’ expectations.
Jordan swished the shot.
“That made my whole week — that I was able to please that kid, not knowing if I could,” Jordan said.
I have been reading Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, Will There Ever be Another You (2025), whilst listening to live recordings of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Sometimes the vaulting call of the brass, and the bone-deep bass, feel like perfect companions to the prose: loose and balletic but also compact at the sentence level. In other places, the contrast between a passage of the music and a passage of the text is so strange it adds to the discordance of the novel.
I’m in the process of reconstituting my Apple Music library. For the first nine years of the service, I added material to my collection as it appealed to me, but rarely did anything in the way of library curation. At the start of 2025, I zeroed out the whole collection: reset everything and cleared out every single track. Until a week or so ago, I had only added 2025 releases back in, but recently I got a hankering to do some old-fashioned metadata management—a task on which I spent countless nerdy hours back in the heyday of iTunes.
My starting point for this rebuild has been to go through all of my annual lists of favourite albums, and add each release to my library. Whilst doing so, I’ve trimmed unwanted ‘bonus’ tracks from ‘deluxe’ releases, made sure that solo artists are sorted alphabetically by their surname, uploaded versions of artwork unblemished by unsightly ‘parental advisory’ badges, and corrected the track listings for records such as Deftones’ White Pony (2000) and Desaparecidos’s Read Music/Speak Spanish (2002).
Since I only have complete versions of these lists dating back to 2003, the next step is to start building out the library with records released before that point. My plan for this is to go through the list of artists who are now in my library, and consider for each whether there are releases currently missing that should be added. That feels like a decent strategy, but there will also be plenty of artists still missing of course (ie those who haven’t released a list-calibre record since 2003). To that end I see the third phase of this project as a kind of long tail approach: when the urge to listen to some Prince, Janet Jackson, Fleetwood Mac et al next arises, I’ll try to find time to sit and consider which of their releases should be included in my personal collection. It’s something of an arbitrary question, given that a near-boundless streaming library is only an extra tap away; that said, however, I’ve enjoyed re-adding and personalising the few hundred records I’ve already chosen to include.
There are few artists whose work I’ve had more contact with than Stanley Donwood. There’s a Donwood print on my bedroom wall; the cover of the notebook in which I took down initial impressions for this post features a Donwood design; heck, there’s a Donwood piece on my arm. The last of those is an element from the suite of work made by Donwood, in partnership with longtime collaborator Thom Yorke, for the artwork of Radiohead’s albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001).
Whilst my friend group in high school was certainly into The Bends (1995), we became somewhat obsessive over OK Computer (1997). And, just as evenings were spent listening in depth to the music, picking apart its nuances and textures, so were many lunch hours taken up discussing the minutiae of the artwork. We looked up words in Esperanto, copied strange symbols into the back of our Maths books, and attempted to scry the obfuscated elements layered into each page of the CD booklet.
Back in the era of cathode ray tubes—stick with me—it was necessary, from time to time, to press a little button on the face of one’s computer monitor, to discharge the magnetic field that had built up with use. This process—named after German physicist Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss—was called ‘degaussing’, and I always found it super satisfying.
Specifically, if you’d left your monitor on for quite some time, pressing the degaussing button would made a deep ‘thunk’ noise, and shake the picture into constituent layers of colour for a fraction of a second, before resolving them back together. But the thing was, you couldn’t do it too frequently. If you pushed the magic button a mere hour or so after last having done so, there was only a pitiful amount of charge to dissipate: you’d get more of a click than a thunk, and barely any noticeable picture distortion. You had to give it a while. You had to wait until you could be pretty sure that there was charge enough to be worth dissipating.1
• • •
At the start of this year, I switched my commute from bus to bicycle. My route takes me from my home on the outskirts of Oxford, into my place of work in the city. It’s a little over 5.6km, mostly alongside the River Thames, starting with a descent and ending with a climb.2 All told it takes me about 25 minutes, and having now made the journey a couple of hundred times—through winter, spring, summer and the dawning of autumn—it’s become an important part of my routine. Not only is four hours and ~55km of cycling per week better for me physically and financially when compared to ten bus journeys, I’ve come to find that the cycle commute is also significantly better for my mind.
The only mentally taxing element of commuting by bus comes in suppressing frustration: the bus was late; the traffic is bad; one’s fellow passengers have made questionable decisions regarding personal space, personal hygiene, or what might generally be considered appropriate behaviour in a shared space. On the good bus journeys—the ones where you don’t have to worry about any of that—you get to drop your brain into low gear: maybe stare out of the window, or at your phone, or listen to some music.3 The cycle commute is qualitatively different. It requires a higher baseline level of attentiveness: avoid a goose, thread between a couple of potholes, pass a jogger… if I let my mind wander as it would on the bus, there’s a chance I’d end up in the river. But the level of mental effort involved is not burdensome: as far as my own personal bandwidth goes, it seems perfectly calibrated such that it’s easy enough to handle the cognitive load of the cycle, but I have no extra capacity to (over)think/worry/obsess about anything else. It’s a gift, after a tough day at work, to have a way to effectively put it all out of mind. Combined with the physical effort—rhythmically loosening and tightening various muscle groups; no choice but to drop the shoulders; taking a bunch of deep breaths in a row—it’s hard to beat as a form of stress-relief.
I’ve come to think of it as a form of degaussing: shaking off the pent up charge with each rotation of the pedals.
Or, if you were like me, you ran around the college computer room degaussing everyone else’s monitors, just for kicks.
The same, of course, is true in the opposite direction.
At the end of each year I make a list of the twenty albums I enjoyed the most. To be eligible, a record has to be of album length (at least ~30 mins), and contain entirely—or almost entirely—new material; live albums, cover records, and compilations are ineligible. You can find an archive of these lists, dating back more than two decades, on this page.
It’s more or less autumn here in the northern hemisphere, and that has me starting to think about the runners and riders for this year’s list. If that seems a little premature—given that the finished article won’t be published until the end of December—note that this week I added a fiftieth record to my collection of records I’ve enjoyed this year. A quick glance at the 50 in contention reveals 11 near-certainties for a spot in the top 20, leaving 39 records vying for one of the nine remaining places. What’s more, there are several big name releases set to arrive in just the coming few weeks:
19 Sep: Biffy Clyro; Lola Young
26 Sep: Bright Eyes
3 Oct: Leon Vynehall; Taylor Swift
10 Oct: Jay Som
17 Oct: The Last Dinner Party
31 Oct: Florence and the Machine
Plus some I’m no doubt forgetting, and others that will come as nice surprises. If there’s anything on your radar that you think should be on mine, let me know.
This weekend I watched two movies that seemed to have a strange sibling relationship. Both were stories of ordinary men becoming entangled in criminal enterprises through no fault of their own; both were by celebrated directors; both even feature the protagonist negotiating their way through a crowd of New York baseball fans on their way to a game.
In Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025), it’s long-time collaborator Denzel Washington attempting to perform a money drop whilst surrounded by rabid, chanting Yankees fans. In Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing (2025), Austin Butler tries to elude a pursuer in a crowd of Mets fans. This weird symmetry was all the more striking to me because one of these films ended up being something of a disappointment; the other is one of the best I’ve seen this year.
As I believe is quite common for today’s fractured media landscape, in our household we select and swap streaming services on a month-by-month basis. Right now we have Netflix (for season 2 of Wednesday, and season 3 of Fisk); next month it’ll be Disney+ (for Thunderbolts* and Alien: Earth). There are, however, a couple of platforms to which I retain access year round: the first is AppleTV+, which comes as part of our Apple One package; the other is MUBI.
I’ve been evangelising for MUBI going back quite some time now, and in recent years the service has grown noticeably. They moved on from their original model of adding one film per day, each of which remained available for 30 days—now the library is larger and more stable, in line with most platforms. They’ve grown the reach of their distribution arm, with a genuine hit in the shape of Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar and Golden Globe-winning The Substance (2024). And they also moved into publishing a few years ago, with the release of Notebook Magazine.1
Today I discovered that they’ve evolved the print offering into a full publishing label: MUBI Editions. The first release, which feels like catnip to me, is a deluxe hardcover focused on the use of text and typography in cinema: Read Frame Type Film.
This growth hasn’t been without controversy. The platform’s CEO issued a statement as recently as this week regarding the company’s acceptance of investment from a venture capital firm with ties to an Israeli defence startup.
Reader, I fear that I have become ungenerous. I’m not about to plot a graph of post frequencies, but I can tell in my body that I’m sharing less freely and less frequently.
I am a recovering perfectionist, for whom the making public of anything is still a low-order miracle. The problem with perfectionism is the urge to retain, delay, refine—to judge everything unfinished because it is flawed; to harbour at all times the certainty that a thing can be improved, and is thus unworthy in its current state.
Yet I have become thoroughly convinced in middle age that the greater part of creating is in simply showing up. The difference between those who actually make things, and those who don’t, is that the former do the work and the latter only talk/think/stress about doing the work. Sure, talent exists, but it’s a seed watered by practice. And the better part of practice is failure: the habituation to imperfection. There is perhaps no more potent catalyst to the creative act than the ability to see flaws as lessons, instead of indictments. Looked at this way, it’s easy to fall back on the excuse of perfectionism, instead of taking the risk of actually making something even if it’s flawed.
