As the New Year approaches you can almost feel the global sense of relief felt by leaving 2020 behind. It was truly a difficult year that met us head-on with unique challenges, tested our resiliency, and stole both people and traditions we hold dear. The theme of uncertainty was woven into every aspect of our lives - school, work, healthcare, activism - few things were spared.

It is difficult to predict what lies ahead - but one thing is certain - we have the creativity, vision, and power to create the just, fair, and sustainable communities we desire. This truth should illuminate the path we choose in 2021.

In response to crippling economic uncertainty - mutual aid groups cropped up across the nation and continue to offer support and locate resources.

Legal protections offered to racial injustice wore thin and the veil of community police protection was torn away by Black Lives Matter protests paired with a demand to defund (and ultimately restructure) a system that perpetuates racism, poverty, and violence.

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass. That’s the way most of us feel about 2020.

In Yearly Departed, the hated year gets a funnier and slightly more thoughtful sendoff. A group of female comics deliver a series of “eulogies” that reveal feelings ranging from relief to regret—relief that 2020 is over and regret over some of the things it and its pandemic stole from us.

Tiffany Haddish leads off with one of the funnier bits, a mournful farewell to casual sex. “Casual sex was my rock,” she says tearfully, remembering how much comfort it brought her when, for example, she had a bad night at the comedy club. She adds that the loss is even harder when she goes out in public and realizes how sexy men are when they’re wearing masks and standing 6 feet away.   

Natasha Rothwell invokes the Black Lives Matter movement when she satirically (and probably prematurely) mourns the loss of TV cop shows. Given all that’s happened, she says, it’s just too hard to believe dramas in which the police actually solve crimes and treat everybody equally.

Before Antony Blinken can become Secretary of State, Senators must approve. And before that, they must ask questions. Here are some suggestions for what they should ask.

1. Second to the war on Iraq, which of the disasters you’ve helped facilitate do you most regret, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, or something else? And what have you learned that would improve your record going forward?

2. You once supported dividing Iraq into three nations. I’ve asked an Iraqi friend to draw up a plan to divide the United States up into three nations. Without yet seeing the plan, what is your initial reaction, and which state do you most hope to not end up with?

3. The trend from the Bush years to the Obama years to the Trump years is now one of moving away from ground wars in favor of air wars. This often means more killing, more injuring, more making people homeless, but an even higher percentage of that suffering on the non-U.S. side. How would you defend this trend if you were teaching children about morality?

Vermont’s only prison for women is, by all accounts, a ghastly place. The facility was never intended to be a prison. The facility was never intended to house women. Built as a men’s detention center in the 1970s, the facility is inadequate to provide what any reasonable person would consider adequate health and safety conditions for as many as 160 incarcerated women.

The Vermont women’s prison, formally known as the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility (CRCF) in South Burlington, came into being in August 2011 as a political effort to reduce the state budget pushed by then Governor Peter Shumlin, a military-industrial Democrat who also supported basing the nuclear-capable F-35 in Winooski. Shumlin pushed both projects with grand promises of benefits that have yet to be fulfilled.

The ultimate argument to save our species can be made by a single symphony. The tortured genius who wrote it had been going stone-cold deaf for nigh on two decades.

It could’ve been no other way.

Beethoven’s 250th birthday (December 16th) has sparked a global eruption of shock and awe.

Amidst the ghastly demise of our deranged Caligula, the adulation for Ludwig edges into outright worship.

And rightly so. Each of Beethoven’s nine symphonies is a major masterpiece. His concertos, sonatas, overtures, rondos, quartets, and more are nearly all uniquely immense.

The fugues he wrote at the end of his life are complex, demanding, indecipherable … either centuries ahead of their time, or channeled — Jimi Hendrix style — from some other planet.