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Everyone’s making end-of-the-year lists, so I thought I’d join in on the fun. Here’s my end-of-the-year list of songs and albums. And if you want more, I’ll write one about books and TV shows/movies.   

I spend most of my days in the company of myself, so I spend a lot of time listening to music, both new and old, but here, I’ll be focusing on songs and albums released this year. I’ve long said it takes a few years for a decade’s style to reveal itself to us – much of what people consider Y2K isn’t really Y2K, it’s a mishmash of 2003-2006, and all the classic albums released in those years are turning twenty.

Since 2020 and 2021 exist in a haze and for good reason – the pandemic forced artists to postpone their albums and accompanying tours – those years didn’t feel like the 2020’s. Though 2022 and 2023 saw the return of live music, those years exist as an extension of the years before it. So, it wasn’t until last year that we started to hear the music of the 2020s.

And baby, dance music is back!

The study included 85 adults and children in Northeast Ohio with “poorly controlled asthma,” which was based on their symptoms, use of emergency medication and activity limitations. Each participant logged this information not only for one to four weeks before their gas stoves were replaced at no cost with electric induction models but also two to three months after the replacement. 

“We chose electric induction stoves because they heat up and cool down rapidly, and they are safer and easier to clean than electric coil stoves,” Sehgal wrote in his The Conversation article. While induction stoves are powered by electricity, they use an electromagnetic field to heat your cookware, whereas electric stoves rely on electricity to do so. 

Before and after the stoves were replaced, air quality monitors were used to measure nitrogen dioxide levels for seven-day periods. Nitrogen dioxide, a gaseous air pollutant emitted by gas stoves, can harm the lungs. 

The full report has not yet been published but a summary of its conclusions has been released by the Council of Europe. According to sources briefed on the report, among the in-game notices to raise potential irregularities were:

The red card shown to South Africa’s Themba Zwane in the 84th minute of his side’s tournament-opening game against Mexico.

American cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket receiving $4.8 million (£3.6m) on markets for Spain not to defeat Cape Verde in their group-stage game, which ended in a goalless draw.

The three-and-a-half-minute delay from the video assistant referee (VAR) team to disallow a goal from Spain’s Ferran Torres in its 4-0 win over Saudi Arabia.

The findings, sources say, also detailed how Polymarket opened a market on July 2 asking, “Will Folarin Balogun play against Belgium?” That was opened on the same day the U.S. forward was shown a red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last-32 stage.

In a decision likely to intensify trans-Atlantic trade tensions, European Union regulators on Thursday hit Google with a $1 billion fine for illegally undercutting competition through its dominance as a search engine.

In explaining Thursday’s fine of 890 million euros, regulators in Brussels said Google had used its position as the world’s largest search engine to unfairly boost its services in areas like shopping, travel, games and language translation. Google displayed its own services more prominently at the top of search results, while relegating competing services farther down the page, according to regulators.

The European Commission, which conducted the investigation, also concluded that the tech giant used unfair restrictions on its Google Play app store that prevent app developers from communicating with users, or conducting transactions that could reduce the fees Google can collect.

I really enjoyed Emily Wilson's translation which I first read on a flight to Italy and reread via audiobook before watching the movie. I found it to be an easy read and quite approachable. She writes in iambic pentameter (think Shakespeare) and keeps to the original's 12,000 lines.

I read Robert Fitzgerald's translation of both The Odyssey and The Aeneid in college. He uses more "flowery" language, but I enjoyed it. It's not as approachable as Wilson's, but it may be to your liking.

Robert Fagles' translation may be more well-known to people because it's pretty common in American classrooms but I didn't like the uneven meter. I feel like if you're going to translate a poem, it should still be a poem?

Nationwide, middle-school reading scores began their decline a couple of years before elementary-school scores, creating a downward trend line that has lasted nearly 15 years. Eighth-grade performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress is now one point shy of an all-time low. The number of eighth graders scoring “below basic” is the highest ever recorded. Among Mississippi eighth graders, the drop in reading scores began a few years after the nation as a whole, but the curve was even steeper, losing three points between 2017 and 2022 and remaining flat in 2024.

Theoretically, a class of third graders who excel on the reading standardized test would turn into a class of eighth graders who not only excel on that test but also apply those skills to the world around them, and then into a group of adults who are literate in a way that has nothing to do with tests at all. That’s not happening. A 2022 evaluation of adult literacy found that 28 percent of Americans cannot reliably compare and contrast information, paraphrase, or make basic inferences. Six years earlier, that number was 19 percent. Though the biggest drop was among adults who didn’t graduate from high school, even those with some amount of higher education got worse at reading. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts survey, meanwhile, found that less than half of adults had read a book in the past year. Experts worry these trends stem from habits that started earlier in their lives.

The loss of institutional knowledge can also be traced to Hollywood’s transition from film to digital projection that began in the late 2000s. As theaters began converting to digital projectors, which are cheaper and easier to maintain, manufacturers stopped producing film projectors and the replacement parts that go with them. Only in recent years, thanks to auteurs like Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, has interest in the format begun to rebound, even if the format remains a niche experience.

“We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film — it’s just not practical,” Gelfond said. “Can all 2,000 of our theaters be film projectors? No. There’s just not that many around. But I think we can continue to grow it.”

After reaching a near-record year at the box office in 2023, fueled by Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” Imax knew it needed to expand its fleet of 70mm film projectors ahead of “The Odyssey.” For over a year, Imax embarked on a massive effort to track down broken, abandoned and often-forgotten projectors, salvaging parts to refurbish and install additional projectors. The strenuous process also required training 60 new projectionists from scratch.

Imax says it rebuilt as many film projectors as possible in-house, but some obsolete parts made it virtually impossible to find manufacturers because the components are complex to produce and the market is too small. The effort ultimately resulted in 41 Imax 70mm locations worldwide for “The Odyssey,” up from 30 for “Oppenheimer” (a net increase of 11 after one projector was lost during the process).

Counter to Nolan’s usual ostentatiousness, the simultaneous threads of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and the crises he faced in the decade that followed the Trojan War are cut together without ceremony. Yet there’s a powerful synergistic effect: At certain times, you can feel the recollections straining toward unreliability, but never quite getting there—the non-Laestrygonians, Menelaus’ unfounded certainty as he explains the world, the whirlpool that might not have been quite so symmetrical but certainly existed in some form. (The most beautiful shot in a film full of them sees the Sirens, through mist, lounging on the rocks of their isle; it’s at once The Odyssey’s most painterly frame and the one that looks most like a 60 frames-per-second digital video.) We are not receiving scraps of necessary plot, puzzle pieces that will add up to a whole: these are character notes, comforting lies people tell themselves to make things manageable.

Most reviews of Nolan’s film note that he has rearranged things to underline the guilt Odysseus feels over the destruction of Troy, and specifically the Trojan Horse gambit that facilitated it. This is true, and of a piece with what has already come into focus as a filmography about humankind grappling with what it has wrought. But there’s something more elemental here than one man’s conscience, or even the critique of Western empire, embodied in Odysseus’s confirmation to Penelope that the spectral “people from the sea”—a looming terror Greeks have begun to fixate on, boats full of anonymous soldiers wreaking mythic levels of violence—are, in fact, he and his men. When, in that same conversation, he recounts what happened in Troy, it’s as if he witnessed an evil he did not previously know existed. It recalls the atom bomb—not the way it’s rendered in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but rather in Twin Peaks, where it’s a singular moment of rupture in the fabric that once kept the universe in balance.

Fernández became only the sixth player to be sent off in a World Cup final (and the third Argentine) and truly, nobody deserved it more. What Argentina produced here under New Jersey’s pristine summer skies was a form of anti-football, an approach of such supreme cynicism that they neglected to summon a single shot on target in more than two hours, resorting instead to trying to disrupt Spain’s momentum with cheap, late tackles.

It was an extension of how they had acted for the past six weeks, committing the most fouls of any team and backing themselves to see off every challenge through sheer belligerence. How fitting that such a crude approach should finally be crushed by Spain, the consummate technicians, and that Fernández should play the fall guy.

This is the man who, in 2024, was mired in a racism controversy when he broadcast a video on Instagram Live showing himself and Argentina team-mates singing a discriminatory chant about France’s players, mocking their African heritage and throwing in a few homophobic slurs.